Heads Up, Ears Down

This blog accurately identifies depictions of violence and cruelty toward animals in films. The purpose is to provide viewers with a reliable guide so that such depictions do not come as unwelcome surprises. Films will be accurately notated, providing a time cue for each incident along with a concise description of the scene and perhaps relevant context surrounding the incident. In order to serve as a useful reference tool, films having no depictions of violence to animals will be included, with an indication that there are no such scenes. This is confirmation that the films have been watched with the stated purpose in mind.


Note that the word depictions figures prominently in the objective. It is a travesty that discussions about cruelty in film usually are derailed by the largely unrelated assertion that no animals really were hurt (true only in some films, dependent upon many factors), and that all this concern is just over a simulation. Not the point, whether true or false. We do not smugly dismiss depictions of five-year-olds being raped because those scenes are only simulations. No, we are appalled that such images are even staged, and we are appropriately horrified that the notion now has been planted into the minds of the weak and cruel.


Depictions of violence or harm to animals are assessed in keeping with our dominant culture, with physical abuse, harmful neglect, and similar mistreatment serving as a base line. This blog does not address extended issues of animal welfare, and as such does not identify scenes of people eating meat or mules pulling plows. The goal is to itemize images that might cause a disturbance in a compassionate household.


These notes provide a heads-up but do not necessarily discourage watching a film because of depicted cruelty. Consuming a piece of art does not make you a supporter of the ideas presented. Your ethical self is created by your public rhetoric and your private actions, not by your willingness to sit through a filmed act of violence.

The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel). Volker Schlöndorff, 1979.
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Edition screened: Criterion Blu-ray #234, released 2013. German language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 163 minutes.

Summary: Killing of animals.

Details:
1) Immediately after Oskar’s excellent speech about Goethe at the conclusion of the Rasputin fantasy (35:57), the film cuts abruptly to an exterior scene with a man in the background skinning a rabbit nailed to a barn. In the middleground a group of children plays and sings around a cooking pot over a small fire. A boy enters with two frogs and announces that he caught them at the pond. The live frogs are dropped into the hot water and kept from escaping while another child urinates in the pot, 36:10-36:27.
2) A horse head is dragged from the ocean at 1:05:58, revealed as a method to catch eels. Many eels slither out of, or are pulled from, the horses mouth, ears, neck, etc., and placed in a sack. At 1:07:28 the scene cuts abruptly to the Matzerath kitchen where Alfred decapitates and cleans the eels for cooking, including images of severed heads convulsing. Over at 1:08.

The entire scene of eel harvesting and preparation is extremely gruesome, and I recommend skipping it. When the family is on the beach around 1:05 and sees a man hauling in ‘something’ … skip ahead to a few seconds after 1:08, where Alfred is serving the eel dish to Agnes. This scene is important to the remainder of the film as it establishes Agnes’s mental disorder about fish.
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