Hunting scenes


It seemed to me that Renoir pretended to show hunting as a cruel activity (think of the squarrel scene).
Am I right?

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

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i don't really think that renoir was trying to make hunting seem cruel, but more as a symbol that the bourgeoise treat people and things that are lesser than them as though they were, well, "game", and that they're superior in everything that they do and have complete control over them, even if that means killing them with no remorse.

that's just my take on it though.

"I have to go home."
"You are home."
--Almost Famous

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Well if that isn't a definition of cruel "alreadyheard", I don't know what is ;-)

I think this is one of the most horrifying depictions of human cruelty ever put on screen. And yes, hunting as sport! (they aren't in need of food) is one of the cruelest activities imaginable.

Wether one enjoys hunting or not, there's no denying that it's cruel to kill out of fun. If anybody disagrees, I'm sorry to say that he must have severe emotional problems.

I'm not trying to cendemn people who do hunt for a sport. It seems that many people like to kill, and don't have a problem with their cruelty (maybe accept/enjoy it as a part of their persona).


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touchè "JJ". i think becuase i grew up in the midwest and having a best friend obsessing with hunting, it never seemed to cruel to me.

"I have to go home."
"You are home."
--Almost Famous

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The scene (and indeed, the entire film) is a deeper critique of the vitiation of life found in bourgeois society. When everything is reduced to a mere instrument, a mere commodity; when everything is seen as utility, then it is that humanism - the great promise of that very epoch - dies.

As Theodor Adorno famously said "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.” It is the hunting scene in La Regle Du Jeu that most perfectly captures that sentiment on film.

We must not check reason by tradition, but contrawise, must check tradition by reason - Leo Tolstoy

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As Theodor Adorno famously said "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.” It is the hunting scene in La Regle Du Jeu that most perfectly captures that sentiment on film.
And this resonates perfectly given the context of the film.
A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.

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I grew up in farmland, and I still find it disgusting.

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There's an artificiality in the sense that they use beaters and the rabbits are driven into range. It's ritualized. And of course the game on the estate belongs to the Marquis, which is why Shumacher has to worry about catching poachers. On the other hand, the rabbits are an infestation from the point of view of agriculture, and food is grown on the estate. They don't want the rabbits poaching that. So keeping the rabbit population down -- whether hunting them with your friends or letting poachers in -- is a necessity. It's alway an uphill battle, though. The rabbits just keep multiplying and coming back. No matter how you try to order things in society, something gets away from you. What is said about the Marquis at the end (by characters who mistakenly believe he arranged for his wife's lover to be shot) is that he has "style," as manifested in his speech to his guests. The rabbit shoot is stylish too. Everybody wears the proper clothes and it's all done in the proper way. There are rules to the game.

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this scene was surely meant to be cruel. the editing really showed this as well. the shots of all the rabbits getting killed were long and showed them writhing after they had been shot. it's interesting that most people feel much more sorry for the rabbits getting shot than andre getting shot at the end.

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this scene was surely meant to be cruel. the editing really showed this as well. the shots of all the rabbits getting killed were long and showed them writhing after they had been shot. it's interesting that most people feel much more sorry for the rabbits getting shot than andre getting shot at the end.

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it's interesting that most people feel much more sorry for the rabbits getting shot than andre getting shot at the end.


I´m positive that Andre survived the shooting of the movie, but I´m not that sure about the rabbits...

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

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Maybe that's because the actor who played Andre was not actually killed and shot like the animals.

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The dazzling editing of that scene is definetely meant to show the cruelty and the nonsense of the aristocracy's habits, like hunting down everything that's not human.

Btw, I hope they weren't real killings. If not, they did a hell of a job making that seem so real.

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The editing made that a very strong scene another bonus of this film for its time.
Really though I thought that the phrase "Rules of the Game" worked in just about everything that happened in the film, the rules we place on the game of life.

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Yeah, I hope the killings weren't real : it would break my heart to know that those rabbits who lived 70 years ago were shot, instead of living fully their 2-year-long life expentancy and THEN being shot, eaten by a predator or killed by myxomatosis.

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This scene seemed to me to be an exercise in EXCESS and a premonition of the war to come (remember, it's 1939). There is, oddly enough, no feast in the film, where excess could be played up.

I think this slaughter is one of the reasons the film was so poorly received in France. They were gearing up for war, and senseless slaughter was still in their minds from the first world war. The French were ready for war, and didn't want to be reminded of the ugliness and mindlessness of it.

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Isn't that a paradox? I mean, Renoir pretended to show hunting as a cruel activity and the bourgeoise as cruel people, and the way he's chosen to show that to the audience was by shooting a lot of animals... Doesn't that make him the cruel one?

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Ah, somebody with a brain.

You can hope that Renoir & crew cooked and ate the animals they shot for the film. Least this way they served a natural purpose.

On the other hand, I was taking a stroll through a wild-life preserve when I saw a hunter and his two little boys (age 8-10) all carrying guns and shooting at everybody bird in sight. They shot 3 birds in a row within a minute and stepped over the carcasses. In Renoir's time it used to be the rich who shot for sport. Now it's any damn basterd with a gun.

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I was wondering, did they really kill those rabbits?
Anyone know?

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Yes!!! They killed those rabbits!! Sorry!!

This scene to me is a pre vision of the war to come (it's 1939)
They showed how the Jews were treated, to me it's that. The servants try to scare the rabbits so they could go out and for the bourgeois to killed them just like the germans with the jews it's sad very sad, cruel too. So to me, it shows how humans are cruel to each other and to the nature. And it's a great exemple or metaphore of the WW2.

"Tout ce qui monte redescend" Gab

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I wonder how much protest would be made if someone recreated that scene.

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Yeah, i am hundred percent sure that the killings were indeed real. Did you look at those animals and birds how they dropped down and died after wiggling for few seconds. There was no CGI in that age.

One of the most disturbing animal killing scenes, I've ever seen on screen, right along with Cannibal Holocaust & Men Behind The Sun.

p.s. Did anyone also notice their amazingly realistic guns in that scene. The way they seemed to cause that jerk everytime after firing, It appeared to be even more realistic than the modern day movies.

"We are the people your parents warned you about."

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They were real guns and, for the most part, firing real bullets. In an interview with Mila Parély on the now discontinued DVD from Criterion, she said that Renoir wanted her to shoot a rabbit, but she refused. There was an experienced hunter next to her to shoot the rabbit that she supposedly shot.

There's also one photo on this DVD showing the cast and crew eating outdoors, so perhaps they did have a feast of rabbit and pheasant. The rabbits that were shot were actually kept in boxes near the actors (according to Parély) and released from those boxes, which, I'm guessing increased the likelihood of them being shot and on camera when it happened.

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I too noticed that the kick of the guns was quite realistic, unlike in modern films where everybody might as well be shooting popguns.

The long hunting/killing scenes were quite intense and I agree with those who found the slaughter excessive (I'm not against hunting if you eat what you kill, though). I wondered how, in 1938-39, when the film was made, that it could so accurately foreshadow the deaths of so many in WWII, when I realized that the rabbit & pheasant hunting scenes reminded me of WWI battlefield scenes. Soldiers running across No Man's Land only to be shot by the thousands, etc.

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thank all you guys, this really is one of the most humble boards on imdb!
i just watched this movie for the first time last weekend and it still lingers in my mind.
that hunting scene was really unsettling, but beautifully edited and shot at the same time. this maybe the best movie of the 30s ive ever seen

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[deleted]

Those hunting scenes were definitely real, unfortunately.

I got the significance behind it, but as an animal lover I found it really difficult to watch. (and before anyone comes back at me, yes I am a vegetarian).

And it's rated a PG! The imdb parents guide hardly makes a mention to it.




"In this world a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain't no world, but this one"

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Definitely depicted as cruel. Just before the shooting we see the wood and its animals in a pastoral scene. Then the air is filled with gun shots and we see all the animals being shot dead. Later Andre's fall in death is referred to as though he's a game animal being shot through. The metaphor shows the cruelty of the shooting class.

A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.

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I saw nothing untoward about the hunting scene, in fact (except maybe its length compared to the rest of the film). They weren't killing inedible animals like foxes; they were shooting animals that would all be eaten (we know that because Marceau got dressed down for poaching one single rabbit). They weren't shooting innocent animals to put their heads on a wall like modern sport deerhunters do who often discard the carcass. It was all very normal -- we watch such things on Downton Abbey and think nothing of it but somehow this film made everyone upset? I don't get it. There are shots of a few rabbits twitching in the throes of death, but that's what animals do when they die -- they twitch; all that this revealed is that the shootings were real and not faked.

In sum, I'm not sure what all the fuss is about regarding the hunt scene. And I'm a person who will not re-watch Old Yeller because it will upset me, and who closes my eyes when there is any kind of blood or gore or even injury on the screen. Funny how no one gets upset when extremely graphic, gory murder and dismemberment occur on the modern screen, but the very normal hunting of edible animals (and in the case of the rabbits - edible pests who destroy crops) scene in this movie has people all upset.
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