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.