Ethics in Filmmaking

[HerrSchreck]

To round things out, I would just like to add that I'm much more concerned with the ethics of the people working at TV broadcast companies and especially the ones working in the news department (if you're looking for a snuff movie, just turn your TV whenever the news are on...). ?

KABOOM! Like a bomb right into the discussion. You want to talk about visuals which provoke the real death of others, just watch any White House press conference, and the passivity with which the press bypasses the implications. This is why I think the most passionate filmmakers like Tarkovsky & Eisenstein & even Franju with his sublime little slaughterhouse short use real death: because fake death never wakes anybody up to the horrors always running beneath the sanitized surface.

Only when My Lai was exposed in pictures, and the poor little naked napalmed girl come running in front of the LIFE photogs, and the South Viet general shot the handcuffed dude during Tet in VietNam, did America wake up to what it had signed up for all these years. Nothing had changed.. those pics represented biz as usual-- only thing they finally, at last understood what theyd been rah rahing. Why do you think the press is so tightly controlled viz the actions of Americans in Iraq? Why no coffin photos? To create folks who don't wanna know genuine death, cannot handle it, who contract in cold-blooded real horror at the idea of actual death, but sit idly as faux death is repeated ad nauseum to the degree whereby the acceptance of it's presence as a peripheral, common element becomes the rule. Thus no outrage while reading the sanitized paper & hearing audiovisual news & recognizing a monster when you see it. Sometimes a bit of staged, actual death is necessary in fictional film, becuase nobody is giving it to you in the real world so you may recognize it's terror, to shake the befogged human being outa their psychological cloud, to wake them up to what it is their grand patriotism is breeding in the nonfictional world. Weak stomachs exist because they are sheilded from the horrible realities of the life their own oblivious minds make by default in the rest of the Second & Third World... and they need to be shown what they are party to via their disinterest allowing their figureheads to run riot with murderous adventure.

[lovermanzig]

I forgot where I read it, but sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, Brakhage and Tarkovsky met and talked about their works (Brakhage was a fan of Tarkovsky's, and Tarkovsky was indifferent toward Brakhage's). In their conversation, Tarkovsky was flabbergasted to learn of how they make dye for film stock, such as using animal blood, and the gelatin for film itself.

I think most things are unethical, if you approach things from a Christianist puritanial point of view. Film production causes a fair amount of damage to the environment alone, and for theaters to operate, oil to burn for heat or air conditioning, etc. It's a capitalist art form.

I do question specific choices by filmmakers who use, for example, the slaughter of animals in their work, or a forest being burned to recreate a Vietnam war sequence, and so on. It's all questionable, from the apparent abuse from Dreyer to Falconetti in "Passion of Joan of Arc" to make her cry, to Kiarostami tearing up the little boy's book in "Where is Friend's House?" I'm left uneasy with every film because of the emotional ethics each raises, either by the material or happenings on a movie set, to the questionable emotional manipulations of watching any given work.

Documentary cinema, for example, gives the impression that since the action taking place on screen was happening in "real life" anyway, what's the sense of questioning its ethics. Perhaps this type of cinema is the most questionable, aside from the acknowledged or unacknowledged camera, such as the "using" point many conservatives are asking about Michael Moore for example. But if the filmmaker "uses" a specific person's emotional highs and lows for a film's purpose, it also damns the viewer and critic who watches in darkness.

This kind of purity expected of the cinema, such as unnamed director quoted at the beginning of this topic, who believes the staging of a slaughter or trees falling for the sole reason of filming is questionable, is he not still filming? Does the viewer know this from watching? It still leaves one with the impression of a staged scene, no? If filming those trees, by using gasoline on a pasture himself, is so horrific why did he keep rolling?

[Gordon]

John Landis, who was on something of a roll there with "Kentucky Fried Movie," "Animal House," and "American Werewolf," has made nothing but pure mediocrity since then, which is a testament to how much this seriously ruined his career. But to say he should've been jailed and never allowed to work again is going too far, I think. Yes, Landis was over the line, but so are a lot of directors. Illegally using those kids after hours was breaking the law, but how did he know this was going to happen? This was just a horrible, freak accident.

Perhaps I am being a little harsh, but from what I have read regarding the disaster and I came away with the impression that the key men involved were either reckless or woefully incompetant. When a fire marshall visited the location, the two girls were hidden from sight in a trailer. Conceiving such a sequence was insane, but willfully trying to execute it - and in such a reckless manner under such strenuous conditions - was supreme foley. After the crash, the instruction was, "Leave your equipment where it is. Everyone go home. Please, everyone go home!" What, from a a major accident scene where three people have been killed? Was cocaine being used by some of the crew? There are so many questions. The best link I can give is this one:

www.crimelibrary.com/ twilight_zone

Gordon, the lizard in "Deep Red" looks fake, I'm surprised it's real.

Oh, it's real alright.

[Gordon]

Hangings, witches burnings and decapitations used to be public, right? Of course they were wrong and of course we can no longer support these actions (although they still are pretty much performed today, be it with the legal support of the state or in more secretive ways...). But what I'm trying to say is that these sort of things were very popular in their heyday and people really liked watching these macabre and inhuman things.

I think that there is a misunderstanding regarding public spectation of stake-burnings, witch-drownings and 19th and early 20th Century hangings. In regard to witch executions, people really believed that Evil was being cast back into Hell and perhaps to lesser degree, the same was felt during 'modern' state hangings in Europe. The desire to see acts of torture on 'innocent victims' is what is more disturbing and problematic, even if the incidents are staged, ie. a snuff film. There was a catharsis of sorts in witch hunting and execution, but what 'values' are present in snuff films or even in graphic recent mainstream horror films? What 'questions' are 'answered'?

I personally think that we still carry these genes somehow in us all because there are things that simply fascinate us no matter how bad and unethical they seem to be.

Not in our genes, but more likely in the Collective Unconscious, which undoubedly contains as much irrationality as Reason, just as the manifested Will in Nature does. But there seems, to me at least, that an overcoming of these irrational urges and volitions is desired deep down in the Collective Unconscious. Your use of the word "fascinate" can't be used to describe the general state of human awareness in this regard, I feel; perhaps, "transfix", "disarm", "beguile" are more appropriate terms. Incidentally, the etymology of 'fascinate' partly has its roots in the Latin, fascinus meaning a "spell" or "witchcraft". It is a disturbing aspect of humanity and I certainly have trouble articulating my feelings in this matter, but I sense that the path it leads one on will ultimately be of immense value to the individual and the corpus of human knowledge. But it has been a long, bloody path and there are many, many other paths that are worth following, some of which have no footprints.

Gordon himself admitted that he is fascinated with Death and aren't we all to some extent? We call always look away when we pass a car crash on the road but how many of us really do? Yes, it's morbid but it's also a big part of what we are.

I think that the old "car/train wreck" observation is a bad one. I for one look on with distraught concern, not morbidity... well, maybe it's a bit of both. Violence is one of Life's most ambiguous facets. The great Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt's book On Violence is one of the most powerful statements on this and is well worth reading, if anyone is interested.

- - - - -

I fully agree that Jazz is the musical genre that Cinema has the most in common with, at it's heart, especially in expressive montage editing. Film as a visual rhapsody is very interesting way of looking at the form of the medium. But the music of Beethoven, Debussy, Bartok, Penderecki, Tcahikovsky, Rachmaninov, Brahms, Grieg and many others seems to, as Nietzsche put it in The Birth of Tragedy, "burst forth from nature herself, without the mediation of the human artist," in describing the Dionysian forces in Art, especially music. Beethoven's 5th, 7th and 9th 'say' more about the nature of the universe than anything in philosophy. Rock music has aspired to such reach such transcendental vortices over its 50-year sonic adventure, but rarely has the barrier been breached in the last 30 years. Little Richard, Elvis, Eddie Cochran, the key bands of the Sixties certainly got things going, but by the early Seventies, things started to wane and the spells weren't working as much. Punk Rock briefly allowed people to get there, but it was tainted with violence and nihilism, so I'm not sure what to really make of it.

There's something brought forth in certain types of Music that be elemental, primordial, overpowering, disturbing, liberating and transformative, but all to often, it is treated trivially, or intellectually, which is just as disasterous, ie. when the opposing Appolian influences are too strong. The treatment of Music as 'just another artform' or 'entertainment' in the modern world, as if it just like video games or comic books is one of the Great Mistakes of 21st Century Man.

Dionysian films, or to attempt to answer Scharphedin in regard to what 'power' in films is or might be, is harder to articulate. The effect of images on the human mind is quite different to effect that powerful music has. With powerful music, one's will is arrested, time dissolves and a form of trascendence can be achieved, but with visual images, especially moving images, it is harder to fix one's consciousness and with a film, there is also often music and this is what I was refering to as misuse of Music in Cinema, where what may well be powerful music is placed over those moving images, there is likely to be some kind of conflict. With powerful music, the subject is often moved to close his eyes and if this is the case, then those images will be negated. So, what we are dealing with is, it seems to me, a very precarious and subtle alchemy. If the process, the balances are off, then the potion will not intoxicate us fully. Robert Bresson reached for the perfect balance - his Notes on the Cinematographer points toward very interesting ideas of what Cinema could be - and many of his films have incredible power. Indeed, it seems that silence is the most underused aspect of film-scoring. Jean-Pierre Melville, especially in Army in the Shadows, showed the immense power that silence can provide to an important scene. Werner Herzog's, Every Man for Himself and God Against All has as one of its themes, the power and enigma of silence - in the form of Kaspar - in a world of hysteria masquerading as enlightened rationalism. And rationalism has no place in Art; Fellini famously said, "The visionary is the only true realist," and that is a good way of summing up Herzog and his dislike of Cinéma Vérité, in that real truth has to be intuited, dug out and illuminated, which the Cinéma Vérité films don't do, mainly due to the fact that they were already focusing on materialistic issues or egotistical personalities, though many of them are fascinating films nonetheless. Powell & Pressburger's films most certainly follow a path towards higher experience through colour and movement, and the music in their films never subsumes the imagery - The Red Shoes is definitely one of the most satisfying marriage of movement, colour and music in Cinema that also has a strong drama at its heart. The Archers have no equals. Hitchcock, in addition to being the Master of Suspicion, may also be the most successful filmmaker to marry Dionysian and Appolonian forces in his films, which are, at bottom, about the darker urges in human nature, but are presented in a precise, measured and refined way. Kubrick's work also shares this trait.

Maybe there aren't any purely Dionysian films, aside from Godfrey Reggio's films and Ron Fricke's Baraka. Any human tragedies in Cinema that are original stories, ie. are not Shakespeare adaptations are often trivial on reflection. Filmmaking in it's stoytelling forms and technical execution, is generally too controlled. Perhaps science fiction, horror and war films like The Terminator, The Exorcist, 1968 Russian 7-hour version of Tolstoy's War and Peaceetc. are positioned best to be unrestrained, exilerating, outrageous, but the start-stop-start-stop reality of editing doesn't lend itself well to a flowing of energy through the piece. But it's not all doom and gloom, this Dionysian business; Fellini's films were borne out of his unconscious and are generally unrestrained and uncompromised, for example. Censorship and socio-political moral concerns also impinge on the creative process of Cinema. Pure music (ie. without lyrics) has no concern for morality and so it can 'go' anywhere, though that didn't stop puritanical, cloth-eared weaklings from calling some of the greatest music of all time, 'obscene', for example the famous 'Classical Music Riots': Satie's Parade (1917) in which he went to jail for eight days, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) and much earlier, Berlioz 's Benvenuto Cellini in 1838. But Music can be whatever comes to Mind and the more adventurous it is, the better.

To put it another way, Cinema is generally either Judeo-Christian or secular/atheistic, but rarely PAGAN. One way or the other, there is structure, restraint, rules, or just... nothing, nihilism. The vital forces of Nature and Humanity are seldom in films that deemed to be of 'great value'.

[Kirkinson]

This kind of purity expected of the cinema, such as unnamed director quoted at the beginning of this topic...

He was named, actually: Otar Iosseliani.

It still leaves one with the impression of a staged scene, no?

No, actually. The whole film feels quite a bit more like a documentary, even in a couple scenes where somewhat surreal things are happening. But still, the point of your post is made: no matter what the filmmaker does, they are still likely engaged in some sort of act they might have to admit is unethical.

But in no way does this suggest that one shouldn't try. I do not expect "purity" of cinema. There is plenty of middle ground between complete perfection and total irresponsibility, and no artist should adopt the latter simply because they can't achieve the former.

To put it another way, I can't accept that it's okay to kill a rabbit for a scene just because I can't avoid killing bugs on my windshield when I drive to the set. I could just stay home instead, which would save bugs and oil, but if I follow that line of thinking I can only come to the conclusion that I would do the most good I could possibly do by simply killing myself. And even then I would be causing my family to chop down a tree to get the wood for my coffin or use up valuable energy to cremate my body.

You also bring up again something important that zedz and a few others pointed out: what to do if the audience can't tell the difference between a "simulated" unethical act and a "real" unethical act. I think that an ethical act is worth it regardless of what the audience believes, but zedz goes further to ask how we are supposed to judge films where we have no behind-the-scenes knowledge of the production. I.e., how would we know that the boy in Where is the Friend's House? isn't just a really gifted actor?

This is indeed a big problem. For instance, in most (if not all) older films (say 1950's and earlier) any scenes which depict horses falling were usually accomplished by tripping the horses with wire. Nowadays horses are usually trained to fall on their own, presumably in a way in which they can avoid injury, but how are we to know for sure what went on, especially in films from eras where this method was gaining popularity but was not yet in wide use?

I remember Mel Brooks talking about receiving hate mail after Blazing Saddles from people who thought that Alex Karras (Mongo) actually did punch that horse, and hard enough that the horse fell over. In fact, they had five horses on the set that could all fall on cue, and Brooks seemed a little surprised that people would think they'd actually hit a horse like that for a joke. Personally I always thought it was faked, even when I was really little: it just looks exaggerated. On the other hand, I doubted the likelihood that a human being would even be able to punch a horse hard enough to knock it over, but later on I learned that Sid Caesar claimed the scene was based on an actual experience of his in which he punched a horse so hard he knocked it unconscious. This suggests that I can't always trust my judgment.

A few other people have brought up the ethical issue of "manipulating" the audience. This is always a difficult issue. At their core, all films are manipulative. The second you make a cut, you have exercised some degree of manipulation because you have said to the audience "you are allowed to see only this much of this scene," and that is all the knowledge they are given to form an opinion. The same applies to how you frame a shot. This is something that anyone watching or making a film has to accept when they sit down to watch/make it.

But beyond that is where it gets really interesting to me: people seem to cry foul when the manipulation is obvious or heavy-handed. If manipulation is defined as an unethical act, what does this really mean? Does it mean the filmmakers whose manipulation is obvious and heavy-handed are unethical because they have gone too far with their techniques, or does it mean we tend to favor filmmakers who deceive us imperceptibly, as if deception is "okay" as long as we don't notice it? And if manipulating the audience is a bad thing, where does that leave a film like F for Fake?

[lovermanzig]

Apologies re: Otar Iosseliani.

I showed a film by Jack Chambers in a class, "The Hart of London," where a hart was bleeding to death in a slaughter house, flopping, its fur turning red from white. The students were horrified, not because the animal was killed but the reaction from the camera (which was pretty still, not flinching). I personally found the scene profoundly affecting because of how it works as cinema, perhaps to the point where I found that I forgot I was watching an animal die, but the red of its blood being so eye-opening.

I apologize for the "purity" remarks, but I get these ham-fisted remarks from students frequently, speaking of ethics in terms of sex and violence, good and bad and so on.

What I was getting at, I guess, is that it depends on how it works as cinema, specifically if the murder of an animal is staged or filmed as it dies doesn't matter so much as how the film exploits, draws attention to, and reacts to the act. How we can kill a cow to make a porterhouse but not for a scene in a film is a terrific double standard in American culture...remove the act of killing from one's field of vision and there is no killing. But the death of an animal, for example, if merely killed for the film and not eaten for example seems like shoddy logic, and a bit selfish. The same camera, however, documents an animal dying, and considering the majority of movie goers suspend belief (to the point where, say, Harrison Ford can still out-run explosions) that even if the death were documented, spliced in between staged materials, if it blends in it works.

I'm still a bit hazy in terms of, for example, the final twenty minutes of "The Brown Bunny," not because of the infamous blowjob scene itself, but what it means. Could it be the power directors have over actors? A friend of mine thought it was a feminist statement by Sevigny. But it raises so many questions about ethics in cinema that the scene itself is its own contained structure within the film, separated and compartmentalized.

I guess we do tend to favor deceptive filmmakers over the ones that leave manipulation and "bad" ethics in the open, not hidden in between cuts or underneath music and/or sound. But for filmmakers such as Todd Solondz, whose pessimism and rather unappealing view of human nature leaves open wounds, is that really the best way to raise questions?

To be continued, when not tired and a bit drunk.

[senators]

To round things out, I would just like to add that I'm much more concerned with the ethics of the people working at TV broadcast companies and especially the ones working in the news department (if you're looking for a snuff movie, just turn your TV whenever the news are on...). You can always switch to another channel but how many of you actually do that, huh?

I would like to point out the beheadings of hostages by Muslim fundamentalists in the Iraq war that were recorded, spread over the internet and afterwards broadcasted by western media. I don't think it's been mentioned before. We've all seen the images of the hostage sitting on the floor, "wearing a blindfold and an orange jumpsuit, arms bound behind his back. Behind him stand a group of five black-clad terrorists wearing hoods and carrying weapons. One of the men reads a lengthy statement in Arabic for the camera. At the end of the statement, the terrorists lean down to hold the hostage while the man who read the statement begins to cut the hostage's throat with a knife."

This raises questions about the complicity of the media. Does the media take an active part or does it merely report? Is the broadcasting of the terrorists demands and threats justifiable? Moreover, is the broadcasting of a genuine snuff film justifiable? Doesn't this feed the process? And hence make the media guilty in the abductions and decapitations? Where does press coverage end and complicity begin?

[Gordon]

Was the actual killing of the man shown on US or UK television? I thought that it only available uncut on the Web. Showing the video is, of course playing into the hands of the terrorists - it spreads their message and spreads the Bushian terror, obviously. The man's family or friends flick over and see this shit on the tube, maybe? Yet, a man streaks at Wimbledon and his penis isn't shown; "No, no, you see that would offend our elderly audience and there might be children watching." Oh, I see; thanks.

[senators]

Was the actual killing of the man shown on US or UK television? I thought that it only available uncut on the Web.

I've seen it on a news channel in Europe. In an edited version ofcourse, but they did show parts of the actual beheading. The quality of the image was very bad and pixelated but it still had an enormous effect. It goes without saying that the news anchor warned that the footage might shock sensitive viewers. How considerate.

Anyway this has little to do with the original post since television is a whole other medium. But still...

On the ethics in film, I don't think Lars Von Trier has been mentioned. There was the infamous incident when a donkey was killed on the set of the film Manderlay. John C. Reilly left the film in protest over the scene. Von Trier decided to cut the controversial scene and all the shots of the deceased donkey.

In a letter he explains:

In the letter dated 8 December and which starts with the opening 'Dear animal
lovers', von Trier explains under which circumstances the donkey was killed. The
donkey in question was to have been killed at an abattoir in any case and the
killing was carried out in the presence of a veterinarian.
States von Trier: "I cut all the scenes showing the dead donkey out of the film. [...]
The political and social content of the film is so important that it would be sad if it
would be rejected or ignored merely by referring to the 'donkey problem'. [...] The
charge made in many of the letters of killing a donkey for entertainment is one
that I refute on the grounds that such charges can only originate from an
ignorance of my films... particularly entertaining is something surely nobody would
call them!"

[jorencain]

It was posted earlier in the thread, but the horse falling off the steps and the burning cow (was it a cow? I can't remember clearly now) in "Andrei Rublev" are always shocking. The scene makes me nervous about sharing the film with some of my more sensitive friends, and it momentarily takes me out of the film, making me think about the reality of filming that scene.

I know that it also struck a chord at the time of its release because Shostakovich makes a brief but angry comment about Tarkovsky's treatment of animals in his autobiography "Testimony".

I can't comment on the "ethics" of these types of things because it is such a personal and individual reaction to any of things are being discussed in the thread. All I know is that it seems very tricky to incorporate real, actual death into a work of fiction. It works in "In A Year Of 13 Moons" because they are at a slaughterhouse and you know that those things happen all the time. The emotional state is so heightened that it really adds something to that scene. It works less well for me in "Andrei Rublev" because, although that may happen in a Tater invasion, it is almost "too real" for the rest of the film that surrounds it.

And how about that poor chicken in "Pink Flamingos"?

[sevenarts]

In a letter he explains:

In the letter dated 8 December and which starts with the opening 'Dear animal
lovers', von Trier explains under which circumstances the donkey was killed. The
donkey in question was to have been killed at an abattoir in any case and the
killing was carried out in the presence of a veterinarian.
States von Trier: "I cut all the scenes showing the dead donkey out of the film. [...]
The political and social content of the film is so important that it would be sad if it
would be rejected or ignored merely by referring to the 'donkey problem'. [...] The
charge made in many of the letters of killing a donkey for entertainment is one
that I refute on the grounds that such charges can only originate from an
ignorance of my films... particularly entertaining is something surely nobody would
call them!"

As I've said, I do think it's troublesome to kill an animal for a film (though in this case the animal's imminent death does make it a bit moot). But I think it's funny that Von Trier refutes the charge on the grounds that his films aren't entertaining. Humor aside, it does raise the issue of whether it's ethically better to kill for art versus entertainment (I think not, and who's to decide which is which, anyway?).

[Gordon]

I must ask: Why was Von Trier killing a donkey for his film? Very few of his films appeal to me, though Europa is pretty good and Dancer in the Dark sounds interesting, but all of those Dogme films are about as far removed from what appeals to me at present.

[Gordon]

And how about that poor chicken in "Pink Flamingos"?

What about the faeces? I don't like seeing fecal abuse in films. I'm thiking of starting a campaign.

[jorencain]

Well, it wasn't yanked out of the poodle or anything. It's just in poor taste, but hardly unethical

[Gordon]

Have you forgotten Divine's climactic scene with the poodle crap?

Forgotten about it? No, I haven't forgotten about it! How could I forgotten about it? It's a shot of a... of a... y'know, a 300-pound transvestite eating dogshit! Ha-ha! Oh, I love the human race. Brilliant. Shit in movies is interesting. I saw La Grande Bouffe for the first time recently and there's a scene in that movie that had me eating the fucking carpet for about five minutes. What an outrageous movie. That's the kind of movies I would make - in between biopics of curmudgeonly philosophers, of course. Which would also contain scenes of people shitting themselves.

[oldsheperd]

Don't they kill a bunch of horses in Heaven's Gate? I can't watch that.

[Cold Bishop]

One horse. Accidentally. In fact, Ronnie Hawkins was nearly killed riding it.

[oldsheperd]

I read about the movie. There was more animal abuse allegations than a horse being accidentally blown up. Fvck Heaven's Gate. I might as well just buy Cannibal Holocaust.

[Cold Bishop]

I read about the movie. There was more animal abuse allegations than a horse being accidentally blown up. Fvck Heaven's Gate. I might as well just buy Cannibal Holocaust.

Allegations are allegations. Do you avoid Wizard of Oz for its distasteful use of munchkin suicide footage?

[triodelover]

Allegations are allegations.

And possibly more than that when they lead to out-of-court settlements and more rigorous oversight by the AHA. At any rate, the old adage "Where there's smoke..." seems appropriate.

[Cold Bishop]

There probably was. It was a fiasco of a production and a grueling shoot. I have no doubt more could have been done in the way of animal safety. But I'm not holding something against a film based on pure conjecture. This is a film obfuscated by rumors and I find it hard to believe at least some of those allegations aren't pure nonsense (and let's not pretend the AHA wouldn't have an axe to grind after being barred from the set).

All I know is what's on the screen, which, while not always pleasant, hardly suggest the level of recklessness that dogs the film. The one sore spot - the shot of what looks to be the footage of a horse being blown up - was definitely an accident, unless you believe Cimino was so megalomaniacal that he'd risk killing one of his human actors. The trip-wires are more distressing, but you'd have to boycott countless Westerns if you wanted to put your foot down.

[triodelover]

But I'm not holding something against a film based on pure conjecture.

The American Humane Association has remain steadfast in their assertions for over three decades. They supported the plaintiff in the previously mentioned settlement. And they were able to force the industry to grant them a larger oversight role based on their reports of what happened during the shooting of the film. I think that rises above "pure conjecture". None of this is to say one shouldn't see the film. But one should do so with one's eyes open, not in denial.

[jedgeco]

Notably, the citation on the Wikipedia page to the AHA leads to a 404 page; I don't know if this reflects careless Wikipedia editing or the AHA backing down on previous statements.

The facts about any animal abuse on Heaven's Gate probably lie somewhere in the grey area between conjecture and fact, and when I looked into this about a year ago, there didn't seem to be any completely unimpeachable evidence -- it happened so long ago, and any witnesses have obvious agendas. And for what it's worth, based on the allegations, any harm to animals was likely the result of stupidity rather than deliberate animal cruelty. But that's not to tell anyone what his/her conscience should permit.

[bainbridgezu]

I object to Heaven's Gate because of the alleged mistreatment of Willem Dafoe.

[willoneill]

How come no one ever raises these objections over films where stuntmen (or other cast and crew) are killed or seriously injured? What makes animals more important than people? (hint: they're not)
But seriously, I don't see a lot of people boycotting Twilight Zone: The Movie.