Photograph: Alamy Stock Photoįrancis Ford Coppola incorporated footage of a water buffalo being hacked to death in Apocalypse Now (1979). The writer Curzio Malaparte, in a 1943 essay about Mussolini, describes a traditional Tuscan holiday entertainment in which working-class men, hands tied behind their backs, would batter cats to death with their shaven heads.īob Dylan (and doomed chicken) in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). The director cuts away from the act (thank heaven) and I like to think Sutherland didn’t really kill the cat, but the Italians do have previous form in this regard. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976) contains scenes of frogs being tortured and a terrified cat being strung up so that Donald Sutherland can crush it to death with his head. Chickens were decapitated in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Jean-Luc Godard filmed a pig having its throat cut for Weekend (1967). Andrei Tarkovsky had a horse shot in the neck and pushed down a flight of stairs in Andrei Rublev (1966). Had Von Trier really tortured that duckling, he would have been following in a long and dishonourable tradition of auteurs treating animals even more badly than they treat actresses. Half a century of watching horror movies may have accustomed me to misogynistic violence on screen (which is not to say I enjoy it), but it hasn’t inured me to the mistreatment of animals. (Regardless, the film itself sent guests scurrying for the exit during its international premiere at Cannes earlier this month). Even after Peta weighed in to confirm that Von Trier didn’t really torture a duckling (the effect was achieved “using movie magic and silicone parts”), the idea leaves me feeling queasy.
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