The BBFC and Animal Cruelty

[swo17]

FWIW, this interview contains Tarkovsky's take on the matter.

[Mr Sausage]

FWIW, this interview contains Tarkovsky's take on the matter.

His take is that "We did not think up any special torments, so to speak, for the horse." Unless the butcher was also planning to push it down a flight of stairs...

[colinr0380]

It's just once the deed is done it seems pretty pointless to cut the footage and pretend that it never happened. Like you say, an image is just an image.

I do kind of agree with your point TMDaines - in a strange way I suppose that at least we are shocked and distressed for that horse in Andrei Rublev (or the turtle, and other animals in Cannibal Holocaust; or that ex-circus elephant fried to show the dangers of electricity in that 1903 Thomas Edison film, Execution of an Elephant) on an individual level. Compared to all those animals who die daily and anonymously at least these animals are in a sense remembered. However that immediately becomes troublesome all over again when we realise that the only reason why we even know about the existence of these long dead animals is because someone wanted to capture the moment of their death on camera.

I should stress though that I don't really have an issue with the loopholes of the act - as long as it was monitored and going to be done anyway, and was a quick kill, I don't really have an issue with the animal killings in Haneke's films (including the horse in Time of the Wolf), although I do think that a filmmaker really needs to think hard about the decision to include footage like that in their film, not least because such imagery often totally overpowers and renders impotent the fictional material surrounding it. This is also one of the reasons that I think some of those Italian films such as Cannibal Holocaust (and especially the jaw-dropping Africa Addio which combines footage of animals being slaughtered along with humans being executed in civil wars with staged representations of the same, to disorienting effect) are simultaneously powerfully instructive and reprehensible films, as they well delineate the boundaries of the 'staged' and 'real' - or even the 'staging of reality' for particular sequences.

As suggested above with the comment about Africa Addio (really any of the Mondo films though), this whole issue of real animal cruelty goes into a grey area when documentaries are involved. This might also be the best place to bring up The Animals Film which has a BFI DVD release (one which I haven't plucked up the nerve to sit down and watch just yet!)

[Black Hat]

I don't even buy the 'it was a different time' spiel. We're not going back to the time of loincloths and wall carvings here, it's less than fifty years ago! I absolutely adore Tarkovsky's films but as Mr. Sausage said Andrei broke the full of crap meter on this one. I don't condemn Rublev because there is so much more to it than what happened to the horse but Tarkovsky the man, was at least in this instance (and plenty of others I know), an egomaniacal bastard. If anything, as the self appointed Artiste Cinema Elementales, he should have been taken to task far more than he was.

[MichaelB]

As suggested above with the comment about Africa Addio (really any of the Mondo films though), this whole issue of real animal cruelty goes into a grey area when documentaries are involved. This might also be the best place to bring up The Animals Film which has a BFI DVD release (one which I haven't plucked up the nerve to sit down and watch just yet!)

...which was passed uncut by the BBFC because the footage squarely falls into one of the Animals Act's escape clauses: that of animal cruelty that was happening regardless of the cameras' presence.

In fact, that film did become a censorship cause célèbre on its Channel Four debut, but for different reasons: the Independent Broadcasting Authority ordered the excision of a short sequence that was interpreted as an incitement to crime (presumably animal-rights terrorism).

[TMDaines]

I don't even buy the 'it was a different time' spiel. We're not going back to the time of loincloths and wall carvings here, it's less than fifty years ago!

I think you greatly underestimate cultural and societal differences. 1960s Soviet Union and 2013 America are in little way comparable. People's attitudes to animals in these parts of the world are completely different even now. You still have the archaic animal circus, which no-one even thinks twice about: "What else is a circus for?" Groups such as the RSPCA are simply non-existant or have such a limited profile. Just last year in Ukraine, the government ran a euthanasia programme to eliminate stray dogs from the streets, just to try and improve the asthetics of the country for tourists during the Euros (talk about putting lipstick on a pig). They only backed down on this after protests from foreign pressure groups and governments.

[knives]

Which shows how globalization is slowly making your argument wrong.

[swo17]

Certainly not the first two sentences of his argument though.

[peerpee]

Argue why British companies bother to release cut versions of movies when uncut is available elsewhere, but even Eureka! decided to release "The Human Centipede 2" in its cut form (although not for animal cruelty).

The first film was one of Eureka's biggest ever hits, which might explain that.

Let's not forget that the BBFC *outright banned* THC2 at first and Eureka had to appeal and fight to get an agreement on releasing it at all. It's a very interesting story.

[peerpee]

I've not seen ANDREI RUBLEV for ten years (waiting for Blu), but I can't remember the horse "being pushed". I have a vague recollection of reading that it was an accident (although, not entirely unexpected considering the circumstances). Couldn't the "spearing" of the animal in the long cut of the film be classified as a "clean kill"?

The crushing reality of the BBFC's existence is that they operate in a vacuum (the UK) and are being made a laughing stock by the availability of uncut films from the US and continental Europe – not to mention the internet.

The BBFC do not have any law enforcement powers – that is left to Trading Standards officers on local councils. A number of labels have been testing the limits of the current set-up over the last few years and it's proven to be very interesting.

My only problem with the BBFC is the compulsory nature of the VRA (1984) which forces UK labels to pay them for classification. Unfortunately for them, this is their sole source of income. The VRA is outdated and has become a massive restraint of trade liability.

[peerpee]

In fact, that film did become a censorship cause célèbre on its Channel Four debut, but for different reasons: the Independent Broadcasting Authority ordered the excision of a short sequence that was interpreted as an incitement to crime (presumably animal-rights terrorism).

Ironically, most things on Channel Four these days incite me to crime (and mental illness).

[jindianajonz]

I have a vague recollection of reading that it was an accident (although, not entirely unexpected considering the circumstances).

I remember hearing that as well. From what I recall, the horse is walking down a "staircase" that is more like scaffolding, and it gives way underneath it. Didn't this movie also have a scene where a horse is set on fire? I figured that would be raise a lot more outrage than the horse falling (though watching the fallen horse struggle to walk is heartwrenching).

EDIT: According to Wikipedia, i'm wrong on both counts:

"Most of the scenes involving cruelty toward animals were simulated. For example, during the Tatar raid of Vladimir a cow is set on fire. In reality the cow had an asbestos-covered coat and was not physically harmed; however, one scene depicts the real death of a horse. The horse falls from a flight of stairs and is then stabbed by a spear. To produce this image, Tarkovsky injured the horse by shooting it in the neck and then pushed it from the stairs, causing the animal to falter and fall down the flight of stairs. From there, the camera pans off the horse onto some soldiers to the left and then pans back right onto the horse, and we see the horse struggling to get its footing having fallen over on its back before being stabbed by the spear. The animal was then shot in the head afterward off camera."

[TMDaines]

Which shows how globalization is slowly making your argument wrong.

Sorry, but you've lost me there. Which argument? The one about morals being relative to a particular time in a particular society? Why would globalisation undermine that?

[colinr0380]

The horse obviously has had its throat cut before it is started off down the stairs. You can see the person riding it (dressed in the appropriate period garb) directing it to the ramp before jumping off it at the last moment as it starts off down. It slides down the first section of the steps, tries to back up, then slides on its blood further down the stairway until the bannister breaks and it topples off sideways onto the ground below. It stands up, the camera pans away and then back again to show the horse walking backwards before somersaulting backwards head over heels and struggling on its side until someone with a spear comes into frame to stab it.

No matter how appropriate that image is during that sequence to show the horrors of war, or however much mournful organ music is placed on top, it still wasn't worth killing an animal in that manner.

[Black Hat]

I think you greatly underestimate cultural and societal differences. 1960s Soviet Union and 2013 America are in little way comparable. People's attitudes to animals in these parts of the world are completely different even now.

I'm certainly aware of these differences but they have no relevance to me in this context. For these broad, however accurate, generalizations do not excuse the actions of one man. A man in Tarkovsky who was not only highly educated himself but came from a highly educated family, a man whose overriding oeuvre throughout his work displayed over and over again the harsh, barbarous nature of humanity in contrast to the innocent, peaceful tranquility of nature. Therefore I hold him and for that matter the educated class of people watching his films in those days to a higher standard than what was acceptable in society as whole. Tarkovsky knew better than to murder another living being for the sake of his art but he did it anyway because when it came to his work his ego superseded everything, even what his art was attempting to say. This choice he made in my view is perhaps the most telling insight into the man himself.

[swo17]

When I read that interview with Tarkovsky that I linked to earlier, I don't get a sense of a man who knew that it's wrong to kill/torture animals but that did it anyway because he's an egomaniac and his art is more important than life. Rather, I see a man who considered animals to serve a utilitarian purpose--some for eating, some for skins and tools, and some for art. You have every right to disagree with this idea, especially with the added benefit of living when and where you do, but it's rather unfair to hold a Russian director 50 years ago to the same standard.

[Mr Sausage]

When I read that interview with Tarkovsky that I linked to earlier, I don't get a sense of a man who knew that it's wrong to kill/torture animals but that did it anyway because he's an egomaniac and his art is more important than life. Rather, I see a man who considered animals to serve a utilitarian purpose--some for eating, some for skins and tools, and some for art. You have every right to disagree with this idea, especially with the added benefit of living when and where you do, but it's rather unfair to hold a Russian director 50 years ago to the same standard.

You talk as if we only figured out just recently that causing a living being to suffer counts as cruelty. Fifty years is not enough to make a dent in the standards of cruelty, if you want to relativize that standard at all. I don't think we ought to be paternalistic about people living fifty years ago in another country: they were perfectly capable of feeling that submitting an animal to cruel treatment was a questionable practise. No one is shackled to prevailing ethical trends, and we rightly expect artists--especially artists whose very theme is the beauty of nature and the cruelty that results from mistreating it--to transcend those very things. There is a limit to this--I don't expect an ancient Greek to feel the same way as I do about slavery for instance, or a mediaeval Florentine about homosexuality. But fifty years does not reach that limit.

Now, I hear the same arguments mobilized to excuse antisemitism in certain writers, T.S. Eliot primarily. You get told that most educated people during the early twentieth century were antisemitic, that the cultural attitudes were different, that people could hold these opinions without being particularly virulent or whatever, and we must understand that T.S. Eliot came from a very different cultural sphere. So it becomes relativised until we're comfortable with it.

Well, you're unlikely to find two more antisemitic periods and locations than Ireland and Russia in the early twentieth century, and here we have James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov, who not only weren't antisemitic, but wrote books in which antisemitism is revealed to be barbaric, ignorant, and stupid.

Joyce himself, sometime between 1916 and 1922, wrote a scene where his lead character, Bloom, watches a horse be whipped through the streets by an uncaring owner and feels a surge of sympathy for that creature's burden and a feeling that cruelty to animals isn't right. Again, early twentieth century Ireland was no less a place where one could grow up to feel that animals are utilitarian things, and Joyce wasn't even a nature-obsessed artist like Tarkovsky. So I don't have to hold Tarkovsky to my own standards if I don't want to. I can just hold him to Joyce's.

[zedz]

You talk as if we only figured out just recently that causing a living being to suffer counts as cruelty. Fifty years is not enough to make a dent in the standards of cruelty, if you want to relativize that standard at all. I don't think we ought to be paternalistic about people living fifty years ago in another country: they were perfectly capable of feeling that submitting an animal to cruel treatment was a questionable practise.

And let's not forget that the legislation that prompted this entire discussion in the first place dates from the 30s.

[swo17]

Fine, you can basically eliminate the last sentence from my post above. Though a big difference between 1966 and now is that if a filmmaker today envisioned a scene like the one in Andrei Rublev, he/she would never even consider visiting a slaughterhouse to film it in the same way because such a thing would never be allowed. Whatever switch Tarkovsky had turned off that allowed him to consider killing a horse on camera as a viable option for his film seems not entirely dissimilar to me to the switch that many of us have turned off that allows us to eat meat (guilty), to hunt for sport, to wear fur, etc.

[Zot!]

He made some efforts to lessen the cruelty to the horse and the cow. So he was cognizent of animal cruelty, but had some threshold for what he considered acceptable, which was possibly societal. Obviously he is defensive about it in retrospect. While I don't care for it myself, I do agree that unless you yourself live off the grid, and eat only root vegetables, the righteous condemnation is getting a bit much.

[Mr Sausage]

Fine, you can basically eliminate the last sentence from my post above. Though a big difference between 1966 and now is that if a filmmaker today envisioned a scene like the one in Andrei Rublev, he/she would never even consider visiting a slaughterhouse to film it in the same way because such a thing would never be allowed. Whatever switch Tarkovsky had turned off that allowed him to consider killing a horse on camera as a viable option for his film seems not entirely dissimilar to me to the switch that many of us have turned off that allows us to eat meat (guilty), to hunt for sport, to wear fur, etc.

Hunting for sport, sure, but killing for food or warmth is basic to our planet. It has a fundamental purpose that killing for a movie doesn't. Surely considerations of immediate life, death, and well-being make a movie seem rather frivolous if you set them side-by-side. Here we get to the question of ego and whether someone thinks his desire to make a film is above all that.

But the moment in Andrei Rublev is not just an animal being killed, it's an animal being tormented before it is killed, and it's that point which we have to deal with and deal with honestly. People can feel however they want about the movie and Tarkovsky in general, but it's essential that we not try to make this horse's suffering less than what it plainly is. It's important that we deal with it directly and honestly, however troubling it may be, without trying to excuse it or hide from it. You can like problematic material so long as you admit that it's problematic. And the fact that some people think there isn't any problem here rankles me to no end.

None of the above is necessarily directed at you, swo.

[TMDaines]

Yes, I absolutely agree with the last two posts from Swo and Zot.

Sausage, you are aware that this horse was consumed by the slaughter house after its death? It wasn't a "wasted" carcass I don't believe. Various cultures partake in culling animals in painful manners for food. I don't see why something being killed for food makes it morally less problematic. I say that as a meat eater.

I think two good example of varying societal attitudes in the current age in regards to animal welfare would be in regards to the wearing of fur and bull fighting. Fur is considered pretty distasteful in Britain but in Eastern Europe it's entirely normal. The concept of it being barbaric or crude is given short shrift, after all we take meat and leather and use them daily. Bull fighting still has its defenders in Spain but more and more the tide is turning. Hunting for sport would be a divisive issue I'm sure. I find that far worse than what Tarvosky did, but I'm sure we have some users that perhaps partake in it.

[Mr Sausage]

Yes, I absolutely agree with the last two posts from Swo and Zot.

Sausage, you are aware that this horse was consumed by the slaughter house after its death? It wasn't a "wasted" carcass I don't believe. Various cultures partake in culling animals in painful manners for food. I don't see why something being killed for food makes it morally less problematic. I say that as a meat eater.

I think two good example of varying societal attitudes in the current age in regards to animal welfare would be in regards to the wearing of fur and bull fighting. Fur is considered pretty distasteful in Britain but in Eastern Europe it's entirely normal. The concept of it being barbaric or crude is given short shrift, after all we take meat and leather and use them daily. Bull fighting still has its defenders in Spain but more and more the tide is turning. Hunting for sport would be a divisive issue I'm sure. I find that far worse than what Tarvosky did, but I'm sure we have some users that perhaps partake in it.

Well, if you want to feel as Zot does that eating meat means you have no ground to find the cruel treatment of an animal before death deplorable, go ahead, you can think it if you like. I'm happy not to be so unable to make basic distinctions. And I'm not sorry that my refusal to be apathetic or ironic or self-blaming about this makes me unpopular. You can have those sentiments too. I know what cruelty is and I know my reaction to it.

Yes, I am aware the horse was consumed. Again, unless the butcher also was planning to send it down a flight of stairs, that doesn't do much for me.

[Sloper]

Fascinating discussion. I don't have anything substantial to add, but...

If you claim to feel lots of lofty emotions when watching a movie, but cannot muster even an inkling of pity and sympathy for a needless cruelty that actually went on in the world, you have to wonder if there's any real depth or importance in what you claim to feel. Certainly what you've seen and felt doesn't seem to mean a lot or to've made much of a real impression. But you get to make lofty speeches on the internet about the transcendence of art, I guess.

Okay now this is a bit wanky, but Mr S's comment here reminded me of Philip Sidney's famous poem on this very subject: this is Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 45:


Stella oft sees the very face of woe
Painted in my beclouded stormy face:
But cannot skill to pity my disgrace,
Not though thereof the cause herself she know:
Yet hearing late a fable, which did show
Of lovers never known, a grievous case,
Pity thereof gat in her breast such place
That, from that sea deriv’d, tears’ spring did flow.
Alas, if fancy drawn by imag’d things,
Though false, yet with free scope more grace doth breed
Than servant’s wrack, where new doubts honour brings;
Then think, my dear, that you in me do read
Of lovers’ ruin some sad tragedy:
I am not I, pity the tale of me.


This was the same Philip Sidney who argued, in 'The Defence of Poesy' that poetry was in some ways better than Nature, because it could conjure up an idealised, 'golden' world; and that for a poet to create an exemplary (but fictional) man was better than to actually beget such a man in real life:

'any understanding knows the skill of each artificer stands in that idea, or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet has that idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he has imagined them. Which delivering forth, also, is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air; but so far substantially it works, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency, as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him'.

What's interesting to me is that Sidney's poetry contains far more scepticism about the value and veracity of art than his prose treatise - Sonnet 45, with its mind-boggling ironies, is a good example. Many other poems in the sequence play with this tension between the idea that fiction can take us to an ideal, transcendent realm, and the idea that such a realm is really just a lie, invented for very pragmatic ends (in this case, getting laid). And even if that fictional realm is a hypocritical and immoral lie, perhaps it serves a moral purpose by exposing itself as such.

Anyway, just felt like throwing this in here; I doubt any of this would serve to excuse Tarkovsky's use of the horse. In fact, I've never seen a version of the film containing the offending passage - but for what it's worth, I did become a vegetarian for about three months after watching Marketa Lazarova.

I know it was brought up in a previous incarnation of this discussion (by Colin, I think), but what do people make of the rabbit shooting in Rules of the Game? Is it an indictment of the aristocrats' casual disregard for life, and therefore hypocritical in the same way as (but to a far lesser extent than) Tarkovsky's film; or is Renoir aware of this seeming hypocrisy, and is it in fact integral to the film's ambivalent attitude towards its characters?

[matrixschmatrix]

I read the hunting scene in Rules as an indictment not of the cruelty of actually shooting the animals as the pointlessness of the act- I never got the impression that Renoir thought killing rabbits was in of itself evil, nor that shooting them was an unconscionable way to go about it, but that the dully mechanical slaughter of them as some kind of a sport that nobody actually enjoys is revolting. As the killing does serve a purpose in making the movie, I don't see that as being hypocritical, though I don't doubt that there's self criticism there, in the same way that there's self criticism in casting himself in the film.