I’m watching Marketa Lazarova with a friend and we’re halfway through a scene that I consider to be one of the best in the world when my friend surprises me by burying her head in her hands. “I can’t watch,” she says, “I hate it when animals die on-screen.” And this surprises me again because although by now I’ve seen the film at least seven times, and seen a living mouse disappear into Mikoláš’s fist and a dead mouse emerge, I’ve never really considered the mouse as a mouse before. Without realising it, I’d always assumed that the mouse is an actor too. This, though, is clearly not the case. Animals on-screen are never acting: they are real and the fiction does not apply to them. Often, when they die, they are really dying.
***
Marketa Lazarova (1968) is a surreal and tangled nightmare of the Middle Ages. The narrative is centred around two rival families of nobles, the Kozlíks and the Lazars (each really no better than highwaymen) and follows the story of Marketa, who is abducted, abandoned and then later married, as she makes her way through this world. It’s a stretch, however, to say that the film privileges any one individual story. The director, František Vláčil, makes very few concessions to the presence of an audience and the visual narrative is determined by subjective criteria that we are given little access to. The camera ranges from the wide infinity of a snowy landscape to claustral first-person viewpoint before leaping heavenwards: Part II (Beránek boží—The Holy Lamb) opens with steep, high-angled omniscience. Narrative continuity or logic gives way to what Tom Gunning describes as a ‘wild lyricism’: something that both disorientates the viewer and gives the film much of its strange and impenetrable beauty.¹ This lyricism depends, to a great extent, on the animals that populate the film. Animals are everywhere: the mouse, the snake, wolves and hawks, the horses, rearing up with fear and surprise, the deer and the stag that Vláčil had to hustle into the shot himself, and, of course, the monk Bernard’s sheep.
Vláčil is preoccupied with animal life and uses these lives within the greater project of the film’s symbolism. They are made to represent the paganism of the older world, their fluid, untrammelled existence a neat contrast to the geometric severity of the convent to which Marketa flees; the inexorable nature of the law that the Hejtman follows. In his essay on Marketa Lazarová, Peter Hames describes how “[t]he closing door of the convent contrasts with the fleeing of a deer, the shape of the building with the disorderly flight of the birds.”² The animals are burdened with meaning, overdetermined: in many cases, they are made to carry the characters too. There’s a mouse and a dove for Marketa, whereas Mikoláš, the man who abducts her, is associated with wolves – later, he is given the quick savagery of the hawk; the taciturn majesty of a stag. (If the gendering of these associations is dated, the parallel between the treatment that both the mouse and Marketa receive is not.) When Kristián, their German captive, is separated from his lover Alexandra, his madness is figured through a white horse sinking into the marsh. The suffering of the horse – his struggle – mirrors that of Kristian.
Gunning, again: “The presence of animals and plants, the textures of stone and tree bark, of snow and marsh water, cling to us as we watch, often overriding the narrative.”³
***
A mouse scurries across the forest floor and the camera copies this small, erratic movement. Mikoláš is lying on the ground, presumably sleeping, and Marketa – his captive – is watching him from behind the slight security of a tree. We watch the scene unfold from the perspective of Drahuše, his younger sister – she’s primarily interested in Marketa, the way she looks at Mikoláš, her long clean blonde hair, and we share in this interest, too. The multiple levels of watching in this scene are unnerving: we watch Drahuše, who watches Marketa, who in turn watches Mikoláš, and this exaggeration or intensification of watching points out our voyeurism by tripling it. Both Drahuše and Marketa watch the mouse, whose delicacy and fragility make it a clear visual metaphor for Marketa, its quick, darting movements a parallel for her tentative glances. So when Mikoláš, not so asleep after all, crushes the mouse in his fist, it’s a clear response to her unspoken questioning: we know that her suffering is far from over. Yet Marketa doesn’t die – and if the story were to demand it and she were to die, the actress, Magda Vášáryová, would remain living and breathing at the end of the shoot. But the mouse dies: or, at least, I think so. A live mouse creeps into Mikoláš’s open hand and a dead mouse reappears – but there’s a cut, the trickery of the film; who can say that the mouse really dies? And if the mouse dies she dies in the black eternity of the cut, in a place that we can’t see and a time we can’t bear witness to. But there’s a body – a real body – and so somebody had to die, and does it really matter who? The unlucky mouse (or her unlucky death-double) is not the only animal to die for a movie.
In this scene the inclusion of multiple spectators problematises the act of watching for the real audience on the ‘outside’, making them aware of themselves as watchers.a For a single moment, the fiction of Marketa Lazarová trembles. In The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell writes that “movies allow the audience to be mechanically absent” and “[i]n viewing a movie my helplessness is mechanically assured” and links this to the particular ontological difficulty of film as a medium.⁴ A central idea in this passage is that this ‘helplessness’– the severing of the audience from the film, the smooth finality of a border once only maintained by mutual will – is also a renouncing of responsibility for both what is seen and one’s reactions to it. Powerlessness becomes a kind of pleasurable moral non-accountability. Elsewhere, Cavell expresses this thought in relation to tragedy and the theatre. In his essay ‘The Avoidance of Love’, he writes:
Their fate, up there, out there, is that they must act, they are in the arena in which action is ineluctable. My freedom is that I am not now in the arena. Everything which can be done is being done.⁵
To not have to intervene is a relief – to be absolved of the responsibility of having to do something to prevent or alleviate another’s suffering; to be “hidden and silent and fixed”.⁶ Cavell argues that tragedy in theatre derives from the confusion of two states: of being helpless and of withholding help. The actors on the stage in the theatre work to confirm their separateness, fixing the audience in their place. The border is a continual effort. In film, the actors really are separate and what is watched belongs to a different time and space entirely. The multiple watchers in the scene from Marketa Lazarová remind us of our nature as an audience, but in no way challenge our separateness. But the mouse does. She’s a real creature who isn’t acting, with a real death. The mouse points beyond the confines of the story by means of her literalness and in doing so, implicates us in her death. It’s the inclusion of an animal that has the power to upset the unique separateness of the filmic construct.
The nature of on-screen animals is ambiguous, troubling. They are coopted into our subjectivity, prodded into symbolism. And yet they are anathema to fiction, pushing back through the disturbing reality of their pain, the unarguable fact of their deaths. In Animals and Film, Jonathan Burt states that “the animal image is a form of rupture in the field of representation,” and later widens this claim to include our readings of it: “This split within the animal image – the artificial image that never can quite be read as artificial – is one that ruptures all readings of it.”⁷ In the second part of Marketa Lazarová, Bernard’s sheep is caught and devoured by the Kozlíks. He joins them at their campfire without realising that the animal turning slowly on the spit is his beloved companion. In the morning, when he wakes, he discovers the head of his sheep and cradles it in his arms like a baby. I’m never sure whether this scene is supposed to be comic or tragic – nevertheless, it makes me sad. It’s true that the head has to belong to someone.
***
Here, in Britain, our contemporary treatment of animals in film derives from the 1937 Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act, which bans the distribution or exhibiting of a film that is “organised or directed in such a way as to involve the cruel infliction of pain or terror on any animal or the cruel goading of any animal to fury”.⁸ But, as Burt points out, the initial formulation of the act was that of prohibiting “any film depicting or purporting to depict combats with or between animals, or the suffering, terror or rage of animals”.⁹ The reality of what was depicted didn’t matter – it was their suffering that was deemed neither right or correct for our eyes. And perhaps this is because they thought that in some way a danger was intrinsic to the fact of animal pain, real or simulated, something too close to a reality that we’d prefer to deny altogether – the animal suffering on which our society depends. The 2008 Second Run DVD release of Marketa Lazarova made a single three-second cut to the original footage so as to remove a shot in which a snake is stabbed. The stabbing of the snake takes place after the snake bites Adam, one of Kozlík’s many sons, in what is clear divine punishment for the incest that he has committed with his sister Alexandra. He impales the snake with his knife: it writhes and hisses with agony. In the accompanying information online, the British Board of Film Classification states that “A cut was required to remove the sight of a snake being stabbed and rearing up in pain”.¹⁰
So if animals give films symbolic density through their lives, then what is it that they give to film through their deaths? Another snake that dies in Czech film: the even unluckier one in Konec srpna v hotelu Ozon (Late August at the Hotel Ozone, 1966) whose neck is twisted until it snaps by one of the half-feral female protagonists. This post-apocalyptic film follows a band of young women led by an older, wiser woman who can still remember the world that they have lost. They are violent and unruly – this is shown primarily through their behaviour towards each other (brutish) and their behaviour towards animals (cruel, murderous). The snake is killed on camera, along with a stray dog, whose spasms and pitiful howling after being shot are too convincing to be anything other than real death throes, especially in the context of a film this old. Fish are dynamited out of a river, catapulted up into the air in eruptions of suddenly hard water. Perhaps the most disturbing scene is that of the killing of a cow: the group of women spot her grazing in a field and run towards her, guns out, knives extended, and rip into her body, tearing out her insides for the audience to see. In this film, the animals die to make a narrative point. The purposeless cruelty of the women and the obvious pleasure that they take in inflicting pain upon other living beings suggests their distance from the civilisation that the older woman values, their unsuitability to the project of starting the world anew. Animals are used to a similar end in Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small (1970): the nihilism of the escaped inmates is illustrated through the death of several chickens, the brutal slaughter of a pig, and the parading of a crucified monkey. Paul Sheehan writes, in his essay ‘Against the Image: Herzog and the Troubling Politics of the Screen Animal’, that Herzog relies on the “artless presence of animals” as a means through which to give his films an authenticity that fiction otherwise lacks, prone to what he describes as a “quasi-medieval belief in the power and truth of images”.¹¹ The literal death of the animal functions as updated filmic sacrifice and gives the film a realer than real sheen – in Marketa Lazarová, the mouse dies so that Marketa – or Magda – doesn’t have to.
Another example: although Michael Haneke has always tortured his characters, it’s only the animals that he gets to kill, really kill, without consequence. I am thinking of the fish whose asphyxiation and likely death provides the narrative climax of The Seventh Continent (1989). In this film, Anna, Georg and their calm-eyed daughter Eva destroy themselves seemingly without any reason, slowly and methodically dismantling the lives that they have led up until the time of their decision. The smashing of the fish tank and the desperate thrashing of the fish as they suffocate is the only renunciation to provoke a reaction from the central characters: Eva rushes forward, weeping and her mother restrains her. Their deaths (real) are excruciating in a way that the character’s deaths (faked) are not – this is exploited, becoming part of the emotional fabric of the film. (In an interview with the Guardian Haneke describes shooting this scene several times, reviving the fish at the end of each gasping take in a bucket of water, before stating that “by the end one or two were floating with their stomachs up. I believe they died of shock.”)¹²
***
Animal pain in film is unbearable because so much about what makes our ordinary relationship to animals bearable is dependent on not seeing. It’s December and I’m with another friend in Los Angeles: we walk through the Los Feliz neighbourhood and talk about Czechoslovakian films. He recommends that I watch Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozone but does so with qualification – he was upset both by the scenes of extreme violence against animals and by what he describes as the hypocrisy of the audience when faced with these scenes. The shooting of the dog, the disembowelment of the cow, and the twisting of the snake’s neck – these scenes shocked the most likely meat-eating audience when the film was screened at the MoMa retrospective. So how is it, we wonder, that an audience who give their tacit agreement to the limitless cruelty of the industrial meat industry can have the moral selectivity to be outraged by the particular cruelty of moments like these? Why are the rights of the consumer to accept mass animal death in pursuit of a particular taste held above the rights of the consumer to accept specific animal death in pursuit of a particular cinematic effect, narrative progression or sensory experience? In the context of our particular (presumably) moneyed and cultured audience, both are equally unnecessary. I wonder whether it’s that we can only accept a kind of dim, collective responsibility for animal suffering; a vast and impersonal slaughter mechanism in which we can pretend no individual responsibility can be seen. The framework of the film is too small; the individual choices of the director, the crew, the actors and actresses too familiar – maybe we can read too much of ourselves into them.
Our mechanical absence from the film goes some way towards exonerating us – not all the way. The on-screen animal is there for our sake, after all, in a visible and specific way that the depersonalised flesh on our plate can’t lay claim to. Does the moral outrage of the meat-eating audience when faced with the dead cow belong to the sudden shock of revelation, or is it translated rage – a dogged belief in our right not to see these things? Or even simpler: we are ethically paralysed when it comes to the semi-hidden fact of animal suffering in our day to day lives, and thus the performance of outrage when confronted with the explicit suffering of animals on screen is half-way towards absolution; the alleviation of guilt through the performance of care. In the preface to The World Viewed, Cavell describes Rousseau’s obsession with ‘seeing’ – “with our going to the theatre in order to be seen and not to be seen, with our use of tears there to excuse our blindness and coldness to the same situation in the world outside”.¹³ Animal suffering in film highlights our ethical hypocrisy, or cognitive dissonance – the extent to which we ignore other types of animal suffering. Burt points this out when he observes that “A cultural oversensitivity to the treatment of animals on screen appears to sit at odds with a culture that is also heavily dependent on animal exploitation”.¹⁴ I think about the seven times I watched Marketa Lazarová without seeing the mouse as a mouse, and then, of all the other animals that I’ve not seen but who have been there all along – in my food and clothes, in my make-up, too, and in the cheap red wine we drink that evening.
Another repetition. Bernard stumbles down a hill with the sheep’s head in his arms, his face twisted with sorrow. I watch, this time with a double pain. For the sheep that he cared about and for the sheep that really died. Cora Diamond writes, in her discussion of J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, that the protagonist is ‘wounded’¹⁵ by the knowledge of what we do to animals; for Anat Pick, using her words, the question of the animal is a “rawness of nerves”.¹⁶ The question of the animal in our era is particularly pressing, as many contemporary animal theorists observe – our screens teem with representations of animal life at the precise moment that the real world is rapidly emptying of them; as the Anthropocene hurries in the sixth mass extinction event of global life. And although the way that we treat animals on-screen has undoubtedly improved, thanks to animal cruelty laws, the improved techniques of the filmic medium, cinematographic trickery, and the intense realism of computer-generated-imagery, our relationship towards other forms of life is more difficult than ever.
***
I want to close this essay by looking at the cat-torture scene in Bela Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994) and by thinking a little about shame. In this scene, a young girl, Esti, takes out her own feelings of powerlessness on an even less powerful animal – the cat, Micur. She wrestles with the yowling, struggling cat in the attic before forcing her to drink poisoned milk. The cat stumbles around, confused and frightened, and looks back at Esti, to where she watches from against the wall, before flopping forward again, head falling into the half-drunk bowl of milk. What follows is a lengthy semi-drowning: the cat twitches her head inside the bowl and laps at the remaining liquid, already too affected by whatever it is that she’s drunk to make an effort to escape. This moment is clearly not choreographed: animals are unpredictable, cats especially so, and Tarr had no way of knowing that the cat would end her sedated stumbling face-first in the bowl of milk. But it’s perfect for his purpose. In the novel on which the film is based, Lázló Krasznahorkai’s Satantango (1985), Esti actually drowns Micur in the bowl of milk: it’s unclear whether Micur even drinks the poisoned liquid and the point seems to be that the girl’s impatience and rage skip over the distancing killing mechanism of the milk in favour of the forceful, more intimate drowning of her pet. And although Tarr states in interviews that the cat playing Micur was safe, and that a veterinarian was on-set at all times, the long, unbroken nature of the shots allows for only a minimum of fakery.¹⁷ The sound of the cat’s wails might be dubbed on in post-production, but the flattened ears and looseness of her body as Esti swings her from side to side in the wrestling scene are non-simulated, real. When her head is in the milk, I imagine Tarr and his crew on the other side of the camera, not believing their luck, prolonging the shot for as long as they can bear it.
In the novel, Esti wrestles with Micur in order to prove her power and mastery in a world where she has very little. But she kills her because she is ashamed. In ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ Jacques Derrida famously writes about the possibility of the animal looking back:
The animal … can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also – something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself – it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbour than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.¹⁸
Something like this is at play in Sátántangó. The cat looks at the girl throughout the wrestling scene in Tarr’s film but we don’t have access to what Esti is thinking, whatever it is about the cat’s gaze that prompts her sudden decision to fetch the poison and the milk. But Krasznahorkai writes that she looked into Micur’s eyes and “understood the terror, the despair that might almost make another being turn against itself; the helplessness whose last hope was to offer itself up as prey on the chance that that way it might yet escape”.¹⁹ It’s possible to read this as Esti understanding herself and her own pitiful role through the medium or reflection of the cat, but it’s also possible that she looks at Micur and understands, for a moment, what it is like to be an animal. The gaze of the cat undoes her, destroys her selfhood with a “single blow”, and she chokes with “shame and regret”.²⁰ Her sudden understanding of what it means to be an animal and what it means to be human fills her with these emotions:
…now she understood that victory too was intolerable, because the most shameful element of the desperate struggle was not that she remained on top, but that there was no chance of defeat.²¹
Esti can’t stand the idea that Micur will continue to look at her. It’s this, and her realisation that the terrified cat has defecated and urinated all over herself, that allow her to recover the fury necessary to kill Micur, thus ending the look. And the suffering of Micur, fictional, is painful, but it’s the frightened look of the real cat filling in for her that leaps through the screen and implicates us, the audience, transforming our mechanical helplessness into an active withholding of help, as the particular suffering of a particular cat for a particular film reminds us of an infinity of other, unseen pain – the suffering that takes place in our name; our uneasy, guilty nature as human.
Missouri Williams is a writer living in the Czech Republic. She is Assistant Editor of Another Gaze.
1 Tom Gunning, ‘Cinema of the Wolf: The Mystery of Marketa Lazarová’ (2013) [https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2809-cinema-of-the-wolf-the-mystery-of-marketa-lazarova]
2 Peter Hames, The Cinema of Central Europe (Wallflower Press, 2004), p. 155
3 Tom Gunning, Ibid.
4 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 25-26
5 Stanley Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love’ in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 312
6 Stanley Cavell, ibid. p. 311
7 Jonathan Burt, Animals and Film (Reaktion Books, 2002), pp. 11, 163
8 http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1012032/index.html
9 Parliamentary Papers, I, (1936‒7) as cited in Jonathan Burt, Animals and Film (Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 137
10 http://www.bbfc.co.uk/releases/marketa-lazarova-1970
11 Paul Sheehan, ‘Against the Image: Herzog and the Troubling Politics of the Screen Animal’ in SubStance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008, pp. 128, 129
12 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/nov/04/michael-haneke-amour-director-interview
13 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Harvard University Press, 1971), xxii
14 Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 14
15 Cora Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’ in Philosophy and Animal Life (Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 46
16 Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 9 17 https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2001/09/bela-tarr-interview/
18 Jacques Derrida, David Wills, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 2002), p. 380
19 László Krasznahorkai, Satantango (1985) trans. George Szirtes (Atlantic Books, 2013), p. 120
20 Ibid, pp. 120, 121
21 Ibid. p. 121
a my thinking about this scene is indebted to David Hillman’s brilliant discussion of spectatorship and Cavellian scepticism in Troilus and Cressida in ‘The Worst Case of Knowing the Other’ (2008) Philosophy and Literature, Vol 32, no. 1, pp. 74-86
