Screening Slaughter
A piglet held by a worker moments before being killed in a slaughterhouse in Castilla y León, Spain. December 2016. Photo: Aitor Garmendia / Tras los Muros.
My current book project is a study of documentary films from Latin America and elsewhere that contain representations of commercial animal slaughter. I propose to read these films in the historical context of the modern industrialization and concealment of livestock farming and meat processing. Over the last two centuries, slaughter and meat processing have been rendered nearly invisible to the increasing majority of the global population that resides in cities, including approximately 80% of all Latin Americans and Spaniards. Between 1960 and 2010, growth of the human population and of meat consumption per capita increased the number of land animals slaughtered worldwide by a factor of eight. The yearly total now stands at more than 70 billion.
As art historian John Berger wrote in a now classic 1977 essay, animals other than pets largely disappeared from the direct daily experience of most people in the Western world over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Deprived of what Berger calls the millennial “look between animal and man,” most people now rely on commercially mediated images for their understanding of animal lives. The systematic removal of animal farming and slaughter from the general public view has allowed consumers to ignore the mass enslavement of farmed animals in increasingly intensive “total confinement” systems that epitomize the capitalist reification and instrumentalization of natural life as a monetizable resource. Intensive industrial systems strongly prioritize productive efficiency and corporate monetary profits over the welfare of animals, human workers and affected ecosystems. When viewed in relation to the invisibilization of modern meat production and the mass immiseration of farmed animals in intensive industrial systems, my corpus of films by major documentarians acquires extraordinary significance.
The corpus I have assembled includes films by prestigious documentarians from ten countries in Europe and the Americas. My criticism of their films will distinguish two primary tendencies in the cinematic use of slaughter footage: 1) as violent taboo imagery deployed in the service of a Surrealist shock aesthetics, and 2) as figurative representation of violent political repression or capitalist exploitation of human workers. I will explore the second tendency in particular to argue that especially in Latin America and Spain, the few filmmakers who have studied and documented the process of commercial animal slaughter firsthand have been generally unwilling to acknowledge or reckon with the phenomenon of the animals’ suffering as such. They have preferred instead to deploy images of their slaughter perversely as figures for the capitalist exploitation of the men who torment and slaughter the animals.
Through my critical readings of the slaughterhouse documentaries, I intend to extricate the indexical traces of the living presence of the sacrificed animals and the audiovisual evidence of their suffering from the dated rhetorical superstructures of the various films. The films communicate ideologies that are variously nationalist, Peronist or Marxist, but also invariably anthropocentric. I will explore the oft professed indifference of the filmmakers to the animal suffering they registered, and I will critique the rhetorical manipulation of their images. I contrast this manipulation with the lasting impact of the film’s unusually violent images, which have repeatedly inspired unintended audience responses of empathy for the animal victims. I will also contrast these canonical documentaries with more recent slaughterhouse video documentaries by animal rights activists who have programmatically displaced human subjects from the center of their representations and who have affirmed that animal suffering in intensive industrial agriculture is in itself an urgent political issue with enormous environmental implications. My primary reference in this respect is to the Spanish photographer and documentarian Aitor Garmendia, whose astounding images of Mexican and Spanish slaughterhouses have won several major international awards for photojournalism.
My reading of the slaughter documentaries and my critique of the general problem of the representation of extreme violence against the bodies of non-human animals will draw from and engage debates in animal studies between welfarists and abolitionists. Whereas the former advocate only for amelioration of the conditions of subjugation imposed on factory farmed animals, I will join the abolitionists in challenging the rationale of domination that allows that subjugation to go unquestioned by carnivores in capitalist societies. To date I have published one part of my book project as an article titled “Screening Slaughter. The Repressed Politics and Troubled Aesthetics of Gabriel Serra Argüello’s La Parka (2013).” A related chapter titled “Intensive Industrial Livestock Production: Envisioning the Burden on Animals and the Environment” will appear in A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies, forthcoming in January of 2023. My book project finds its theoretical basis in animal studies, death studies, and documentary film studies, but I also draw on environmental science to frame my exploration of industrialized mass animal slaughter with respect to the ecological devastation wrought by global livestock industries.
Why Look at Farmed Animals?
With this project, I intend to contribute to cultural critique of the biocidal anthropocentrism that legitimates the globalization of intensive industrial livestock production. This form of production has been resoundingly condemned by leading environmental scientists as “degrading terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, depleting water resources, and driving climate change … reducing biodiversity and ecological resilience” (Poore and Nemecek 987). Comprehensive studies by international agencies including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations Environmental Program have proved the disproportionate and unsustainable environmental costs of intensive livestock farming and asserted the urgent need for sharp reductions in meat consumption in rich countries if climate control mitigation goals are to be met. The most progressive European governments, including those of the Netherlands and Ireland, have recently begun to incentivize reductions of dense livestock populations that generate heavy greenhouse gas emissions. Latin America is heavily implicated in these global environmental debates, as several Latin American countries rank among the world’s top exporters of both beef, now recognized as by far the most wasteful and ecologically destructive of mass-produced protein sources, and soybeans used predominantly as feed for billions of permanently confined animals in Asia and Europe.
The most recent IPCC data identify enteric emissions from Latin American livestock as the primary source of agricultural methane emissions globally (Climate Change 2022, 7-27 figure 7.8). As Brazil has surpassed rivals including Argentina and Mexico to claim the title of “the world’s slaughterhouse” (Watts) the environmental impact of the expansion of the beef and soy industries in the region has been devastating. Cattle ranching in Latin America constituted the single most important factor in the destruction of tropical forests worldwide between 1980 and 2000 (“UN Report”) and was a major factor driving a staggering 89% reduction in the wild populations of vertebrate species in South and Central America between 1970 and 2014 (Living Planet Report 7). Given that farmed animals now make up 60% of all mammal life on earth by biomass, with wild animals reduced to 4% and humans making up the other 36% (Rosane), our interactions with the species we have bred and enslaved constitutes a crucial aspect of our ecological existence on Earth. By assembling and critiquing audiovisual evidence gathered by some of the greatest film and video artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I seek to challenge the invisibility imposed on the single most intensely violent aspect of our exploitation of farmed animals and to assess the capacity of that evidence to generate bodily empathy and ethical reflection on animal suffering even when embedded in rhetorical structures that negate its inherent importance.
About the Author
Glen Close is a Professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Female Corpses in Crime Fiction. A Transatlantic Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction. A Transatlantic Discourse on Urban Violence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and La imprenta enterrada. Arlt, Baroja y el imaginario anarquista (Beatriz Viterbo, 2000).
Works Cited
Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking, Vintage Books, 1980, pp. 3-28.
Close, Glen S. “Intensive Industrial Livestock Production: Envisioning the Burden on Animals and the Environment.” A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies, edited by Luis I. Prádanos, Tamesis Books, forthcoming 2023, pp. 146-56.
---. “Screening Slaughter. The Repressed Politics and Troubled Aesthetics of Gabriel Serra Argüello’s La Parka (2013). Humanimalia, vol. 12, no. 1, fall 2020, pp. 51-94, https://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue%2023/close.html.
Garmendia, Aitor. Tras los Muros, https://traslosmuros.com/en/index.
Climate Change 2022. Mitigation of Climate Change. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/.
Living Planet Report – 2018: Aiming Higher. World Wildlife Fund, 2018, https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2018.
Poore, J. [Joseph] and T. [Thomas] Nemecek. “Reducing Food’s Environmental Impacts through Producers and Consumers,” Science, vol. 360, no. 6392, 1 June 2018, pp. 987–92, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216.
Rosane, Olivia. “Humans and Big Ag Livestock Now Account for 96 Percent of Mammal Biomass.” EcoWatch, 23 May 2018, https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html.
“UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’.” Sustainable Development Goals, 6 May 2019, https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/.
Watts, Jonathan. “We Must Not Barter the Amazon Rainforest for Burgers and Steaks.” The Guardian, 2 July 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2019/jul/02/barter-amazon-rainforest-burgers-steaks-brazil.