Animals, Film, Audiences: Regulating Cruelty and Morality through Science and Law in Interwar Britain

Abstract

In 1937 the British Parliament passed the Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act, prohibiting the exhibition and distribution of films in which suffering might have been caused to animals. “Cruel animal films,” especially those depicting violent combat, captured the nationalistic anxieties of interwar British animal protectionists, social moralists, animal behavior experts, and legislators. The act symbolically resolved their worries, all of which centered on the morality of British audiences. Attempts to regulate cruel animal films also illuminated contemporary ambiguities about representation in film. Film separated what was being filmed in production from what was shown in the film product, so that the two no longer needed to correspond, while simultaneously maintaining an illusion of direct representation. Critics thus found it difficult to pinpoint whether their concern was with “real” cruelty to animals in production or with the effects of “representations” of cruelty on audiences. Animal behavior experts reframed this problem of ambiguous representation as one they could solve: they assessed the behavior of animals in cruel animal films, using science to evaluate film’s claim of realism. This essay argues that these experts used science to manage film’s simultaneous cleavage and coupling of reality and representation and, in doing so, regulated elites’ anxieties about the degradation of British audiences.