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 Creatures

The Creatures (Les créatures). Agnès Varda, 1966.

😿 😿

Edition screened: Included in Criterion Blu-ray box set The Complete Films of Agnès Varda (disc 5) released 2020. French language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 94 minutes.


Summary: Extended scene with a dead cat.


Details:

1) During the opening credits, two brief scenes of crabs and eels dumped on the floor of a small fishing boat and struggling, 4:48-4:50 ad 4:58-5:02.


2) Extended scene involving a dead black cat that appears to be a genuine stiff corpse. We see the dead cat at the front of the house at 22:25, and Michel Piccoli finally picks it up at 22:44. Piccoli carries the dead cat into town, engages in arguments about who might have killed it, and gets into a fight wherein he beats people with the stiff dead cat. Ultimately we see him roughly dump the cat into a shallow grave. All of this wraps up at 26:28.

 

I suspect the use of a dead cat as a melee weapon sounds weird. In the context of this structurally complex film, it is both weirder and less weird than my brief description suggests. The incident may or may not, in part or completely, have been a fiction Piccoli’s character was penning and/or caused by the meddling of a local evil genius with mind-control ability. 


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