The Guardian 7/5/07 SHOCK AND AWE: The Animals Film

[Guest guest]

http://www.theanimalsfilm.com/

 

Shock and awe

 

The Animals Film, a chilling documentary about

the abuse of animals, caused shockwaves when it

was shown by Channel 4 at its launch 25 years

ago. As the movie is re-released, its maker

Victor Schonfeld relives the horrors that

inspired his work - and wonders if TV would have

the guts to show it today

 

Thursday July 5, 2007

The Guardian

 

 

It was shown 25 years ago and kicked off my

career as an angry young man of documentary

cinema. The Animals Film flouted conventional

standards of propriety and proved profoundly

unsettling. Today, for new audiences, it remains

a defiant act, offering a full immersion in the

complex relationships between humans and other

species; after viewing it, many conventions, such

as meat-eating, become difficult to return to.

 

My own immersion in the human-animal relationship

set me on the path to making it. Kibbutz Revadim,

just north of the Negev desert in Israel, may

have been suffering a muddy winter of grief after

its losses in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, but I, as

a volunteer, was revelling in the muck. I'd been

brought up in a middle-class Jewish family where

we thought twice before dirtying our hands. So

when I found myself crawling through the shit

under the turkey nest-boxes to gather stray eggs,

and enjoying it, I was astonished. The fact that

the birds were confined indoors all their lives

caused me, then an unreconstructed carnivore,

only passing disquiet.

 

I was chosen for a special assignment, in the

hatchery. The rooms were silent but for the faint

hum of machines, the air hot and humid, so that

when we levered out the huge metal trays of newly

hatched chicks from the oven-like incubators, the

yellow fluff balls chirruped cheerfully. A sea of

yellow beings jostled among broken shells.

 

The facility manager had shown me a hatch to

swivel open and finish the job. Below it were

dumpsters, several already full to the brim.

Masses of broken eggshells were heaped in there,

among them quite a number of chirruping chicks,

very much alive. This was the trash someone would

dispose of later. How, I had not been told.

Meanwhile, the new crop of broken shells was to

be tossed down there, along with the unwanted

male chicks and any females I judged too small or

weak to meet the standards of the facility.

 

I carried my first tray to the opening. Dozens of

living chicks slid into the void. The chicks I'd

pitched to the bottom of the dumpster would be

crushed or asphyxiated as others were thrown on

top of them. I went back to the hatchery chamber,

eyes searching for a human face who could

reassure me. What I'd done just now was " what was

done " , wasn't it? It was OK, wasn't it? But there

was no one present.

 

A second tray from which I'd extracted the

females was on the selection table, ready for

disposal. I yanked off my plastic gloves and

reached for one of the male chicks and lifted him

up in my bare hand. It seemed the right thing to

be merciful. Peasants ring chickens' necks, don't

they? I edged my fingers into a tight hold round

his neck, just below the little bright-eyed face

peering back at me. Then I realised I had to get

out of there. What kind of place was this? I

stood and wept.

 

I turned out to be a one-day wonder in the

hatchery job, and soon returned home. Three years

after this I determined to make a documentary for

cinemas that would make the exploitation of

animals a serious political issue. My notion was

to apply the lessons in evocative, exploratory

cinema I'd learned from masters such as Chris

Marker to unprecedented terrain. And, along with

my collaborators, that is what I set about doing,

without a penny from industry sources, eventually

producing a documentary in Britain where, at the

time, there was no precedent for the exhibition

of such a movie in cinemas.

 

The film's scope was part of its power, probing

into human uses of animals for entertainment,

sport, as pets, in food production, and in

scientific research and testing. It showed scenes

never before filmed and astonishing footage

uncovered through dogged research. Add to this

the startling ironies of unguarded interviews and

revealing extracts from government films and

newsreels, and the film offered a potent brew.

Julie Christie provided the commentary, Robert

Wyatt contributed a compelling score, and a

platoon of skilled film professionals gave their

expertise over several years.

 

" Have you seen this? " I cried to my girlfriend in

the kitchen much later. It was a Sunday morning

and I was nearly swooning over my orange juice

rereading the sentence: " I do not know when I

have been so moved by the power of the cinema as

a medium to transform the entire sensibility of

an audience. " It could have concluded a review of

a new movie by Godard or Resnais that I would

rush out to see; surely not a work by me! The day

before, we'd been woken up by a call from the

chief buyer for a new British channel to be

called Channel 4. He had tracked down my number

and declared: " I've told Jeremy Isaacs we must

have it. We should show it in our opening week. "

And now there was the rave review in the Sunday

Times - the first professional judgment of my

first film.

 

By the time of the theatrical release in the UK,

we were weighing offers from every British

broadcaster. Channel 4 won our faith by agreeing

to a " no cuts restriction " in the contract.

Fortunately, it transpired, because when the

Independent Broadcasting Authority demanded major

cuts, the consent of the film-makers had to be

secured so, at our request, the cuts were

described on-air immediately before the

broadcast. The channel was inundated with viewer

responses.

 

For Swedish television's uncensored broadcast, a

national newspaper sat the country's minister of

agriculture down in front of a TV to gauge his

reaction; legislative change was soon on the

agenda.

 

Testimonies on the internet show the lasting

impact the film had, but I didn't imagine The

Animals Film would have people clamouring for its

re-release a generation later, and that the

ignorance about our exploitation of other species

would continue to be so pervasive. I would have

preferred the film not to have been so prescient

about 21st-century concerns. It pointed

prophetically to the Pandora's box of

technological manipulations. Mad cow disease and

avian flu, the exacerbation of global warming by

animal agriculture - such developments make the

enduring meaning of The Animals Film even more

relevant. And the film's revelations of the

testing of weapons of mass destruction on

animals, the scenes that conclude its

25th-anniversary edition, are as pertinent to

today's militarised world as when the secret

footage we obtained made my jaw drop as a young

man.

 

Afterwards, I went on with the career I had

intended, making films which get under the skin

and alter perceptions: about the need for a just

resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict;

about smacking children; about the damage

inflicted by ritual male circumcision. Alas, the

British networks whose public service mandates

spurred me to relocate to the country of my

father's birth are no longer agenda-setters with

documentaries. There are too many channels, and

too much of what is on offer is trivial. When

Orwell's prophetic creation Big Brother is spun

into a revenue-churning voyeuristic " joke "

unrecognised by viewers, is it surprising that

significant documentaries have little place in

this environment?

 

Many times I have demurred at suggestions I

re-release The Animals Film. I had hoped other

film-makers would take up the baton. Since the

first screening there have been some changes:

cosmetic testing on animals has been halted in

the UK; hunting with hounds has been made illegal

here; millions more people have turned

vegetarian; and the EU has taken steps to soften

a few of factory farming's harshest practices.

Yet animal suffering in agriculture and in

scientific research is even more widespread.

 

In recent years, much of the animal rights debate

has centred on illegal actions by organisations

such as the Animal Liberation Front. My original

film concluded with a raid by animal rights

activists, but I now believe these gestural

politics to be a cul-de-sac. Ironically, the

12-minute raid sequence I fought to retain on

Channel 4 in 1982 has been replaced in the

25th-anniversary version. I did this because The

Animals Film transcends tactics, and

post-September 11, the last thing we need is

another movement that has given up on reason and

persuasion.

 

Will Channel 4 transmit The Animals Film in their

25th anniversary season this autumn? It seems the

Channel 4 of today favours programmes such as its

recent Animal Farm, in which a sexily garbed

scientist/presenter gave a cry of lusty amusement

at the sight of a live embryo being cut out of a

sheep's belly for research. Will another British

network step in where Channel 4 no longer treads?

We shall see.

 

Happily, new technologies allow films to be

disseminated without the consent of traditional

gatekeepers. Just as American film-makers such as

Robert Greenwald have used the internet, I too

have been inspired to embrace the direct route

from film-maker to audience by launching the 25th

anniversary edition DVD of The Animals Film for

sale on the web.

 

I believe it remains an acutely resonant film. By

looking at the fate of animals in a

human-dominated world with an unblinking gaze, we

see how our species is capable of inflicting vast

suffering with the flimsiest of rationalisations.

The exploitation of animals is neither natural

nor inevitable, but so many of us seize on pale

excuses for it because the fundamental reason we

inflict suffering on other species goes unspoken.

As J M Coetzee put it in The Lives of Animals, we

do it because we can get away with it.

 

· The 25th anniversary edition DVD of The Animals Film is available at

theanimalsfilm.com

 

--

Kim Bartlett, Publisher of ANIMAL PEOPLE Newspaper

Postal mailing address: P.O. Box 960, Clinton WA 98236 U.S.A.

CORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS IS: <ANPEOPLE

Website: http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/