The cat torture scene in this film was painful to watch, at the same time it was asthetically interesting. Overall a tough scene, starting with a moment of kindness and ending with animal abuse, nearly made me turn it off.
shareWell, it made ME stop from watching the rest of the film, no matter what praise it has gotten. Any abuse of an animal for the sake of entertainment, to me, is atrocious and immoral.
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That scene is extremely uncool and in my estimation, entirely unnecessary. And if it wasn't bad enough that cat torture and cat killing were included, it couldn't be brief. Oh no...it just HAD to go on for 20 minutes or so.
There are some things that are better when implied in films. This is one of them.
I'm glad I stumbled on this thread before watching the movie. I draw the line at the torture of any living thing for entertainment, or worse, art.
UPDATE
I spent the night researching the scene and here's something interesting I found on another forum:
MichaelB wrote:
But the omens look promising - Jonathan Romney's Film Comment on Tarr says that "the scene was faked under veterinary supervision, with agonizing howls dubbed in afterward". If Tarr can prove this - and if a professional vet was involved, there should definitely be some kind of written record - then hopefully it should sail through. Or rather trudge, but that's somehow appropriate.
I seem to recall reading somewhere (I think it was Jonathan Rosenbaum) that Tarr kept the cat afterwards as a pet.
If you actually watch the scene (I've just finished the movie and it's still fresh on my mind), the cat noises are very obviously dubbed in. They are dubbed very well, as in whenever the cat opens its mouth, there is noise, but still, the cat noises are so unnaturally mixed as to be almost certainly dubbed in. In fact, as is Tarr's usual way of working, all of the voices are dubbed in post-production.
Besides that, if you look carefully at what's happening to the cat, it's actually not THAT bad. Yes, they treat the cat kinda badly, but they never actually hurt it. It's the equivalent of choreographing a human being beat up (such as the hospital scene in Tarr's next film, Werckmeister Harmonies, which is also tough to watch). It may look harsh but no harm was actually done.
Really, let's see what we saw in the cat scene. The child rolls around on the floor, holding the cat tightly. She looks like she's choking the cat while she's rolling, but really she's just holding it tightly and the (dubbed in) cat noises make us believe its being choked. But in actuality all that's happening is a kid rolling around on the ground with a cat in hand. Then there's a scene where the cat is forcibly put into a bag made of rope. Hard to watch, but again, never actually harmed, just put into a bag against its will. Then another scene where the child pushes the cat's head into a beverage a few times. No, it obviously wasn't pleasant for the cat, but the kid never pushed the head in for anything longer than a second at a time.
So that's all we have. Those scenes are hard to watch until you look closely and realize most of it is psychological for us, due to the artificial cat noises.
Agreed.
I stumbled upon a video last night of a snake slowly eating a live frog, starting from its rear legs, slowly choking its round, fatty body to fit the snakes mouth which was 1/3 its size. It lasted 15 minutes, only the first 2 of which the frog tried to fight it's way out of the snake's mouth, then gave up and just waited petrified, with no movement but a few blinks.
This was filmed with such a powerful zoom that it looked like the action was happening right in front of me.
I watched because it's part of nature, and nature can be cruel. As cruel as human beings, if not even more so.
I don't think I'll ever have a problem with humans staging animal cruelty on screen ever again, after witnessing what animals can do to each other in the wild, for real, on a daily basis.