Animal Rights and Documentaries

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with documentaries that promote animal rights by their exposing cruelty that is practised on farms, with abuse there being exacerbated by a desire to make as much profit as possible and by the culpability of the authorities. Major forms, styles and techniques are examined in eighteen films, ranging from the earliest, Franju’s 1949 Le sang des bétes to Taylor’s Milked of 2022. Films from eight countries are divided into several categories, including omnibus documentaries that bring together various aspects of rights; compendium documentaries that are concerned with different kinds of farmed animals; single issue documentaries; interviews with activists and perpetrators; those with a plant-based focus; and those concentrating on individual farmed animals. Approaches highlight the expository, observational, interactional, reflective, poetic, intersectional and interview. Furthermore, major techniques of persuasion used to get the animal rights message across are discussed. The final section looks at the importance of animal rights videos made by farm sanctuaries and members of the public.

Henry … had in fact written two books: one was a novel, while the other was a piece of nonfiction, an essay. He had taken this double approach because he felt he needed every means at his disposal to tackle his chosen subject. But fiction and nonfiction are very rarely published in the same book. That was the hitch. Tradition holds that the two must be kept apart. That is how our knowledge and impressions of life are sorted in bookstores and libraries – separate aisles, separate floors – and that is how publishers prepare their books, imagination in one package, reason in another. It’s not how writers write. A novel is not an entirely unreasonable creation, nor is an essay devoid of imagination. Nor is it how people live. People don’t so rigorously separate the imaginative from the rational in their thinking and in their actions. There are truths and there are lies – these are the transcendent categories, in books as in life. The useful division is between the fiction and nonfiction that speaks the truth and the fiction and nonfiction that utters lies.

Yann Martel—Beatrice and Virgil (2010: 6–7).