CASUISTRY: THE ART OF KILLING A CAT
(three stars)
Cat fight.
Running time: 88 minutes. Not rated (gory images). At the Two Boots Pioneer, Avenue A and Third Street, East Village.
FUR flew at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival when it was announced that “Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat” would be shown.
Sight unseen, the documentary was condemned by animal-rights activists and others as glorifying three young men who videotaped themselves hanging, disemboweling and skinning a cat, posthumously baptized Kensington.
In fact, director-writer Zev Asher’s film is a balanced examination of the incident, which caused a media stampede that blew the case out of proportion.
The dastardly act was performed in Toronto in 2001 by Jesse Power (a talented artist, it seems), Anthony Wennekers and Matthew Kaczorowski.
Asher interviews the three, as well as activists, cops, journalists, artists and “concerned citizens.”
Their comments are predictable.
“Where did they get this cat?” a sobbing female activist wonders. “Did somebody own this cat? Did I talk to this cat?”
Wennekers, whose face is hidden from the camera, makes his case: “I’ve always said there was something wrong with the way animals were being killed, and I wanted to try to do it my way – and maybe try to do it better. But it was a complete failure.”
The infamous 16-minute tape is described in sometimes sickening detail, but never shown.
We do get to see an earlier video of Power beheading a chicken that soon became family dinner.
He describes the cat killing as a protest over the murder of animals for food.
He once worked in a pig slaughterhouse and details the shocking way pigs are treated before they end up on dinner plates. (You may never again want bacon for breakfast.)
Make no mistake: “Casuistry” isn’t easy to watch. Cat lovers might be especially turned off.
But Asher had every right to make it, and you have every right to see it.
If you’re wondering, “casuistry” is the word that often appears just before “cat” in dictionaries and means “the application of general principles of ethics to specific problems of right and wrong in conduct.”