Were REAL animals killed?

The animals were REALLY killed, because of a few factors:

1 - during the 1960s animal death was not uncommon to be filmed, such classic like Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust are proof enough that even throughout the 70s this continued until animals were given rights for films etc..

2 - it's the French New Wave, almost anything goes really... so expect everything to either be real or almost real.

3 - Godard wouldn't have spent money to make fake animals be killed LOOK realistic he was much more concerned about his film in terms of the idea and the visuals.

4 - the movie although one would not guess is low-budget, WAS a low-budget movie and therefore they used what they coudl make do to make the film function, i.e. a friend's apartment, the forest, roads in the countryside, some country town and even live animals etc... to get their message across in the film.

Hope that helped.

agh. i have yet to see pink flamingos but i dont really want to after hearing wonderful things from my friends.

but ya the pig was real. who cares really. they prolly used it for food or something. that is not sad or anything. it is nature. what is said is factory farms that everyone buys meats from. the animals dont even get to live. they are hung upside down since their birth and are killed with no mercy.

at least in that shot they killed the animal quick and painless by chopping his spine off and THEN draining the blood. and the animal was probably about to be slaughtered in the farm anyways. wasnt loaded with hormones like the factory farms do. stop crying about it kids and realize it is nature. he filmed nature, so what. u should all be out there protesting against factory farms and not organic slaughters.

You're absolutely right. I read this book recently titled, 'Four Legs Bad: Animals in Film'. There was a whole chapter on the pig and the duck from WeekEnd. Apparently they were old pets of Godard's god-niece. The pig at the time of the shooting, was already a C-list actor with a failing liver from years of alcoholism. The duck was a self confessed, masochist and holocaust denier. The pig signed a contract that awarded him 40 Francs, a pound of porridge and a trust fund to be set up in his name for his less fortunate pigs. (Ronald the pig from 'Babe' is one such beneficiary of the Sir Bacon Basil Pork Scholarship). The duck was tried and found guilty of treason, blasphemy and credit card fraud and sentenced to death by beheading, to be filmed on celluloid, that future generations of his progeny may witness the punishment in store for potential trouble makers.

There is also a lengthy passage about the poor Jack Russell from The Mask. Anal rape is terrible on a dog of that size and Jim Carrey is lucky to have escaped that trial with community service and a fine.

Get a grip young-ons, if you had exposure to great grandparents from the old or 3rd world who showed you firsthand how to slit the chicken's throat or if are/were rural enough to have been farm-raised, you might have gotten the opportunity to witness slaughter for the table. Meat didn't just magically appear neat & square as filets that you see on your plate like they might from a box of Mrs Paul, McNuggets or a ballpark frank.

There simply wasn't an industry-wide consciousness to animal rights just like there wasn't one for actors smoking tobacco like chimneys on-screen at one time. That said, I'd say no animals on film before the 80s were safe, from snake skinning, birds in flight shot from the sky for hunting scenes to horse tripping in westerns. Cruelty was filmed even as recent as that jungle oxen sacrifice in Apocalypse Now.