On Electrocuting an Elephant and Animal Death in Film

The death of the animal allows for an altering of the visual dynamic that is often inaccessible through traditional mechanisms of film, and, through harnessing and disrupting the tenuous balance between the reality of the film and the viewer, a simultaneous fascination and repulsion are induced that leave the viewer in a state of suspension. Despite its ethical questionability, this state, insofar as it punctures the viewer’s conception of the real, has been and will be used for purposes of artistic decolonization and powerful challenges to Western perceptions of film and, thus, should not be dismissed out-of-hand.

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Bound and harassed, the beast, who has been put on display for purposes of publicity from the beginning of her life, is condemned to the fate of performer. She has been accused of the murder of a spectator, a gawker, a man with a cigar who, intentionally or accidentally, gestured the burning cherry in close proximity to her flesh.

Now, she is bound and led to slaughter; she shuffles, almost shyly, in front of the leering eyes that have crawled out from Coney Island’s gangways and woodwork: the few dozen who have been granted permission to view this event in its personal, gruesome detail. Yet she resists her handlers, tugging roughly by rusty chains; she stands her ground against their slow march toward death. They, ultimately, must relocate the ghastly apparatus to the very spot where she stands. This is her final act of volition; the terminal show of her unimaginable strength is to be bound and executed on the spot that she has chosen, this patch of earth, surrounded by barren reminders of her pageantry.

And still the noose is fastened, the copper anklets snapped shut. Smoke rises from the ashen feet of the behemoth. Her limbs go rigid, and she has fallen, her arms stretched outward toward heaven.

Dry earth crumbles beneath her brilliant descent; Topsy the Elephant has given her life for the sake of the Spectacle.

The grainy and silent footage of Electrocuting an Elephant (1903)1 contains not only what is, in all likelihood, the first death recorded on film but also a poignant marker of what is inherent in film as a medium: the fascination with the spectacle, the abomination, the repugnant moment. There is a guilt and shame embedded in the gaze of an animal that, in the complexity of its emotional solicitations, simultaneously draws the viewer inward and propels them outward with equal force. Caught between these responses, they are left in stasis, returning Topsy’s tragic figure back into itself.

Jacques Derrida, seen in the nude by his cat, experienced this same discomfort. In fact, the feeling was so profound that, at a conference on human ontology, he devoted a ten-hour address to the subject of the “autobiographical animal,” utilizing the feline as the launching point for his discourse. In the typical, convoluted fashion of Derrida2, he testified that, in that moment, he sensed himself to be in the “gaze of a seer, visionary, or extra-lucid blind person. It is as if I were ashamed, therefore, naked in front of this cat, but also ashamed for being ashamed. A reflected shame, the mirror of a shame ashamed of itself, a shame that is at the same time specular, unjustifiable, and unable to be admitted to.”

This sense of reciprocal shame is echoed by other thinkers, working in a similar vein to Derrida, who describe our modern era as post-animal. They believe that while animals and their slaughter have not become any less integral to the functioning of our society, we have gradually become removed from their life and death through the rapid crawl of industrialization. While humans once lived among the beings they relied on for subsistence, those same creatures have since been largely relegated to factory farms and slaughterhouses, creating a cognitive distance between the average first-world citizen and the life of the animal. The result is a deep discomfort in the first world with confronting their death, especially on an industrial scale. Derrida designates our understanding of the animal that stems from this discomfort as the animot: a singular-plural, intentionally contradictory label that accounts for our inability to reconcile the animal as an individual with our understanding of human existence. To Derrida, animals are the warped and untenable mirror through which we define ourselves as beings, and the ways in which we have exercised our dominion over them reflects both a literal power and a figurative indignity.

From this initial reflection, he plows onward into territories of ethics, late-stage capitalism, and even an extended digression into Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. However, he, interestingly, does not touch on the medium of film: fertile soil for an analysis of the gaze and its complexities.

Many recent films, including Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), have engaged with the animal’s role in Hollywood and, through depicting fictional abuse and death, have achieved powerful critiques and commentaries on both the mistreatment of animals and the spectacle of Hollywood as a whole. Yet there exists a lesser-known thread of films, dating back to Electrocuting an Elephant, that depict the real and actual death of animals. For various purposes, and to diverse effects, filmmakers have either orchestrated deaths or have visited a place of slaughter in order that the event might be screened and rescreened: that the death of the animal might be met, repeatedly, by the human gaze.

Nope

While the intricate ethical implications of this are not the direct focus of this essay, it is indeed that very question, the ethical one, that circles back to the visual stasis of Electrocuting an Elephant. In Topsy’s case, the viewer may, very rightly, be emotionally disturbed by the murder of a beautiful and noble animal and yet still be drawn into the same image by a perverse curiosity: a desire to see what has not, and often cannot, be seen in daily life. The Edison Film Company, which produced the film and helped arrange the execution, certainly intended to capitalize on this. Thirteen days after Topsy’s death, the film was released to be shown in coin-operated kinetoscopes across the country.

This perversity is not limited to the curiosity surrounding the death of an exotic animal; herein lies a symbol of the appeal of the visual nature of film on a broader plane. The viewer of any film is, at least subconsciously, aware that their gaze is simultaneously solicited and, in the illusions of reality that are put forth on the screen, unnoticed. Insofar as they are allowed to watch with private eyes, simultaneously involved in and removed from the film, the image transfixes the viewer; on-screen action and violence provide cathartic release, romance and sex provide teasings of libidinal desires, and grief and sadness provide vicarious emotional indulgences. These dynamics allow the viewer to partake in the emotions and psychic impulses represented on the screen while remaining removed from their mental and physical consequences. This is, at its most basic level, a tenuous balance held upright by a liberal suspension of disbelief, and the on-screen death of an animal has the capacity to disrupt this: to puncture through the space of altered reality the film presents and into the real.

In short, while the appeal that lies within the film representation of the death of an animal is not wholly different from the perverse appeal of other films, its visceral reality also makes it unavoidably real to the viewer. Therefore, while the death of an animal might present an unusual source of repulsion, its capacity to induce this emotional and visual disruption have rendered it an effective, if gruesome, tool to various filmmakers.

In Western film, it has been primarily used to induce a sense of dread or horror, either for that end alone or for an extension into social critique. The obvious utility of shock value is exemplified nowhere better than in the vile Cannibal Holocaust (1985), which tells the story of a group of fraudulent documentary-makers who visit a remote tribe in the Amazon rainforest. Supposedly a commentary on journalistic ethics, its repeated and gruesome display of the butchering of live animals contributes to one of the most shocking and repugnant visual experiences in the history of organized cinema.

In an effort to critique the working conditions of an industrialized France, Le Sang des bêtes (1949), a short documentary by Georges Franju, juxtaposes domestic scenes of suburban Paris with scenes from the inside of a nearby slaughterhouse. Naturally, although the film is in black and white, in viewing it there is an immediate response of visceral repulsion. However, as lambs, cows, and horses are skinned and decapitated, there is a certain passivity and nonchalance, captured both in the narrator’s voice and on the faces of the slaughterhouse employees, which are intended to counter this instinctive movement away from the film. Therefore, through creating a layered juxtaposition, Franju is able to suspend the viewer in their own disgust: the key to an effective social critique.

In a fictional vein, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978) makes use of real slaughterhouse footage interposed with the story of a financially burdened father in the embattled Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Although the method of social critique is ostensibly similar to Franju’s documentary, Burnett primarily utilizes his juxtapositions to critique the position of African Americans in late 20th century America.

Killer of Sheep

In contrast, in Sirius Re-membered (1959), legendary filmmaker Stan Brakhage experiments with motion and reanimation as he captures the corpse of his pet dog in various stages of decomposition. As the corpse passes the point of recognizability, the increasingly oblique angles and pivots through which it is captured serve as an attempt to view his beloved pet once again; Sirius is “re-membered” through the camera and, by extension, the gaze of the viewer. While the moment of death is not represented in the film, there is still a natural repulsion at the sight of the process of decomposition. Brakhage, in confronting this with the camera, allows the viewer to peek into two traditionally private events: both the stages of his mourning and the final physical forms of his pet.

Yet some of the most interesting and complex uses of animal death have taken place in non-Western cinema: namely the Senegalese film Touki Bouki (1973) and the Malian film Yeelen (1987).

Touki Bouki, directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty, centers around a young couple, Mory and Anta, living in Dakar and dreaming of a life in France. When Mory is eventually able to steal the money to book their passage, he is forced to flee the ship due to a run-in with the police, and he is left behind in Senegal as Anta remains on the ship. Although, compared to previously discussed films, it is relatively idyllic for the vast duration of its run-time, one of its first scenes features multiple oxen being led into a building and slaughtered in graphic detail. Since the movie was restored by Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation in 2008, the colors and tones of this scene have become especially poignant, creating, in some ways, that same repulsion and fascination that are present in Electrocuting an Elephant.

Touki Bouki

Yet, Mambéty’s aims were different from the spectacle of the Edison Film Company and the social critique of Franju and Burnett; through Touki Bouki, he intended to capture and comment upon the rapid cosmopolitanization of Senegal. As Senegal passed a decade after their independence from France, there was a growing culture in the country, and among young people across Africa, of yearning for a hybridized, European lifestyle. Touki Bouki, Further, almost all films made in Africa at the time were funded by the French Bureau du Cinema, which reviewed scripts and mandated artistic conformity to the standards of the French government. Therefore, the deaths of the oxen represent a subversion of French standards of cinema, an act of artistic decolonization, and a puncture through the fantasy-filled lives of the main characters into the undeniably real event of death.

Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen also makes use of animal death (in the form of ritual sacrifice) in the efforts of artistic decolonization. The film, which centers around a Bambara legend, opens with the burning of a live chicken on an altar. Cissé, in an interview with Cahiers du Cinema, claimed that he wanted Yeelen to be “a response to an external perception, a perception by white technicians and academics, an alien perception.”3 In intertwining legend and reality, magic and realism so thoroughly, Cissé challenges the Western worldview as well as its aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. In the case of Yeelen, the sacrificial burning grounds an otherwise fantasy-laden film in firm reality, disrupting the dynamics of the gaze and utilizing the induced discomfort to force the viewer to take the film on its own terms and standards.

Yeelen

In the history of both Western and non-Western film. there lies a unique and understudied thread of violence with implications about how we understand the gaze and its complexities. The death of the animal allows for an altering of the visual dynamic that is often inaccessible through traditional mechanisms of film, and, through harnessing and disrupting the tenuous balance between the reality of the film and the viewer, a simultaneous fascination and repulsion are induced that leave the viewer in a state of suspension. Despite its ethical questionability, this state, insofar as it punctures the viewer’s conception of the real, has been and will be used for purposes of artistic decolonization and powerful challenges to Western perceptions of film and, thus, should not be dismissed out-of-hand.

As brutal and avoidable as Topsy’s murder was, perhaps its preservation on camera contains a still potent message about the nature of film and the viewer’s engagement with it.

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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.