Perkins Cobb wrote:Seriously, you can choose to make emotional choices about issues like these, or intellectual ones.
Am I reading you correctly, that you are implying that valuing animal life is an emotional choice as
opposed to an intellectual one? If so, that's a very strange thing to say. I mean, most of the criticisms against the work of Peter Singer, for example - almost certainly the most renowned/notorious philosopher who favors animal rights - revolve around the notion that his brand of utilitarianism is too coldly
logical. To echo one of his points, if a being's sentience is what you're using to guide your ethical treatment of that being, where does that leave infant and severely mentally disabled humans, who may be demonstrably less sentient than several other non-human mammals?
warren oates wrote:What about art made with non-physical abuse and cruelty? Directors playing mind games with their actors, some of whom aren't really up to defending themselves against it or playing along for the good of the role? Or art made via environmental degradation?
This bothers me too, but I think in most cases these things are far more difficult to recognize on screen than animal cruelty. And usually I only hear about it by accident - if I see a scene in a film in which a character is very convincingly emotionally distraught, my first thought is always, "What a great performance," and not, "That seems too convincing, I better check to see whether the actor was emotionally traumatized."
But it is interesting when specific stories do make it out. Sometimes they're just a little off-putting: e.g., Kiarostami ripping apart that kid's favorite book to get him to cry in
Where is the Friend's House? makes Kiarostami seem like kind of a jerk; and hearing from Eddie Bracken about Preston Sturges on the set of
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek yelling and berating Betty Hutton and Diana Lynn so much that they were in tears on several occasions is certainly at odds with that not-exactly-emotionally-heavy romantic comedy. Things like that don't give me too much pause about admiring those films, but they do get me thinking about how much or how little I can trust my own perception of a film to construe what it was like on set, since neither of those situations are things I would have predicted: in the case of Sturges, the film is just too much fun to have imagined it being such an emotionally taxing experience, and in the case of Kiarostami's film, I know from seeing the footage of Henry Thomas's audition for
E.T. that some kids are just damn good at breaking into tears on cue.
A little more unnerving are things like that leaked video of David O. Russell freaking out at Lily Tomlin on the set of
I Heart Huckabees. I'm not really concerned about Tomlin, since she seems to give as good as she gets and I know she can take it, but what about the presumably blameless PA cowering in the corner and covering her head because Russell is throwing heavy objects around the room? As a filmmaker myself, I guess I find this less disturbing in regards to Russell specifically than in regards to the culture of filmmaking in general. In almost any other modern work environment, wouldn't demonstrably violent behavior like that have serious consequences? And then of course there's the sexual exploitation that still goes on behind-the-scenes of who knows how many films, and perhaps most egregious of all, the insane hours some productions require from their cast and crew, which has actually resulted in
injury and death (certainly worse than any mind games a director can play).
Environmental degradation definitely bothers me, too, though again, the scale and degree and type of harm caused is not always readily apparent on screen, as in the Iosseliani example I gave at the beginning of the thread this has now been merged with: he went to a location where trees were already being chopped down and got permission to build a village there and film in the midst of it, but it would have looked exactly the same on screen if he had found a location with a lot of trees and had them chopped down specifically for the film. Sometimes even a little background knowledge isn't helpful. I also talked earlier about a whole forest being transplanted and burned for
The Brothers Grimm, but subsequent information that I didn't have at the time revealed that the trees were actually acquired from a tree farm and were due to be used as lumber anyway (it still seems like a waste to me, but it does change things a bit).
Of course, as others have mentioned, this confusion about or ignorance of the facts is often true of animal cruelty in filmmaking as well. There's an extremely intense, highly-charged portrayal of canine abuse in the Slovenian film
Suburbs, and it's hard to imagine while watching it how it could have been faked (visually
and aurally) but the director insisted that it was all done with special effects. And then there's the infamous cat in
Satantango, which I haven't seen yet, but which I know has caused some viewers to question Bela Tarr's insistence that the animal wasn't harmed. You also don't know while watching a film what happened behind the scenes, like the tiger in Gilliam's
Munchausen that was given so much sedative it slipped into a coma, then so much adrenaline to kick it out of the coma that it went berserk and had to be tranquilized again. And it was only supposed to be used in the background of a few shots - talk about treating an animal like a prop! And that's to say nothing about the cast and crew standing around the set while an adrenaline-fueled tiger went berserk...
