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 New Land

The New Land (Nybyggarna). Jan Troell, 1972.
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Edition screened: Criterion Blu-ray #797 and packaged with The Emigrants #796, released 2016. Swedish language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 202 minutes.

Summary: Animal slaughter.

Details:
1) Robert brings home a rabbit he has caught and killed, 7:26-7:31. (Not a graphic depiction.)
2) Both The New Land and The Emigrants have occasional scenes of fish butchering and cleaning. Most are typical kitchen action, but a particularly gory scene occurs here, 25:00-25:32.
3) An ox is murdered by blows to the head, then slit open as a means to warm a freezing child, 1:19:16-2:48:25.
4) Goose slaughter and butchering, 2:47:43-2:48:25.

Many themes are explored during six-and-a-half magnificent hours of these two films. One motif, if a viewer cares to notice, is that people’s fates can mirror their treatment of animals. The Emigrants introduces the grandest presentation of this idea early in the film when young Robert is appropriately guilt-ridden for the cruel drowning of his cat. Years later he remorses that the animal suffered and wonders if he can be forgiven. No, in fact. Robert suffers the rest of his life from excruciating nerve damage and recurrently endures the cruel fate of The Fool. Most overtly at the end of The New Land, we see a goose that has been butchered by a gash to the neck, and the next scene is a human-on-human attack in which a man is shot through the neck. He falls and grasps at the plucked goose feathers to try to stop the blood that gushes from his wound.

I do not think Troell intends a strong tit-for-tat message about animal cruelty. It is more just an aspect of very good writing, to help express the larger theme of human interaction in the larger world. Early in The Emigrants Robert has a small textbook about Natural History, given to him by an elder who explained that natural history contains all the wisdom that need be known. Robert reads to his family an example passage that limply explains how water, like wine and blood, cannot be grasped in the hands because those things are “wet”. The Swedish family and friends that we follow for 60-odd years across the Atlantic Ocean and most of North America never make much progress in understanding the natural world. 

The inability to work with nature, or the lack of flexibility to rebound from the blows nature deals us all, is their recurring downfall. Sometimes the incidents are beyond the family’s control and are appropriate reminders to us all: Despite years of body-crushing labor to remove massive stones from your field, you will break your delicate wooden plow on a barely-submerged boulder. Other times their stupidity and stubbornness is their own undoing, as with the continual pregnancies despite their poverty and warnings by a doctor of the mother’s fragility.
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