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.

Straights of Magellan

Straights of Magellan: Selected Pans. Hollis Frampton, 1969-74.
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Edition screened: Included on Criterion Blu-ray #607 A Hollis Frampton Odyssey, released 2012. No dialogue tracks. Cumulative runtime approximately 9 minutes.

Summary: Two of the nine 1-minute films show graphic animal violence.

Frampton reserved space for 720 1-minute “Pans” in his monumental Magellan project. In 1974, Frampton released forty-nine of the short films under the title Straits of Magellan: Drafts & Fragments. The Criterion disc organizes nine of these Pans as follows:

Pan 0 and Pan 1: Pan 0 is possibly a recreation of Frampton’s (destroyed) 1964 film Clouds Like White Sheep. Pan 1 is catalogued as “Light Pull Pendulum 1/74 Eaton”

Pan 2: A scene of falling liquid from Frampton’s 1970 series States.

Pan 3 and Pan 4: Pan 3 is a hand-held run through a cornfield. Pan 4, “Maxwell’s Ghost 1/74” refers to physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

Pan 697 and Pan 698: Pan 697 “Butchering”  shows the head being cut from a dead cow that lies in the snow. Pan 698 is “Panning Buttercup 6/73 Eaton”.

Pan 699 and Pan 700: Pan 699 “Will and Frog” shows a boy holding a fishing line from which a large frog squirms and kicks in agony. Pan 700 is a New York street scene “Quad Super-Traffic 12/69”.

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