"Spanish Bullfight" is a Lumiere film made later in the Bros' career, way after they started bringing traveling cameramen into their film business. At a minute long as always, again the title states the action. The movie takes place in an arena, showing the huge crowds come to watch the bullfighting. The main focus, though, is the bull itself which is being more taunted than fought by some toreadors, one on a horse, another standing on the ground. All they do is annoy the animal and that's it.However, it has to be said, such a scene will disturb some people EVEN THOUGH THE FOOTAGE CAPTURE IS NOTHING PARTICULARLY GORY! It is true that several early films featured cruelty to animals, such as the cockfight films, "Electrocuting an Elephant" etc. This is an addition to that genre. If such activity doesn't disturb you, than it's harmless, but if you support the PETA or are an animal lover, avoid at all costs.

The film that goes under this name on the internet (and the film reviewed here) is simply a rather poor print of a film shot in Spain in 1897 by Lumière operators. The Lumières shot several scenes of bullfights, partly because the company was itself based in the South of France where bullfighting was highly popular but also because they presented a particular photographic and cinematic challenge. The fine photography, the careful mise en scène and depth of focus, noted by other reviewers, are all typical of Lumière films. Some of their bullfighting films were very elaborate affairs, even a series of films showing the fight from the first entry of the bullfighters to the triumphant matador's final farewell to the crowd, but this particular film shot in Seville.There is however a further story to this film "A Spanish Bullfight". Supposedly such a film was submitted to the British British Board of Film Classification (the censors) in 1913 but was rejected by them with "cruelty to animals" featuring first on the list of reasons for rejecting films in the BBFC's annual report of that year. The film described by the historian of British film censorship (James C. Robertson, The Hidden Cinema) is quite clearly this Lumière film but it seems extremely improbable that it is really the one concerned.The company submitting the film, Gerrard and Company, was basically a distributor and a more probable candidate for this early French film of a bullfight is Pathé's Corrida espagnol of 1903. Why? Because 1912-1913 was the first year of Pathé's home-projector, the Pathé Kok and for both the Pathé Kok and the later and better known Pathé-Baby in 1922, Pathé dug out many of their earlier films from the 1900s.The Pathé Kok and the Pathé-Baby repertoire is interesting in telling us what films people were interested in viewing at home (or at least what Pathé thought they were interested in). These home-projectors used small reels so Pathé tended to keep them as short as possible (and produced specially abbreviated versions of longer films). A large proportion of the films offered were short educational documentaries (an area where Pathé had plenty of material to draw on) but another clearly very popular genre of film for home-viewing was the hunting film, of which there are many examples generally filmed earlier but recycled in 9.5 Pathé-Baby versions as late as the twenties. It would not be at all surprising if a 1903 film of bullfighting was similarly re-released for the Pathé Kok (known in the UK as Pathéscope) in 1913. The Pathéscope Company was formed in the UK in December 1912, just before the "French" bullfight film was submitted to the censorship board.Why would hunting and bullfight films be in demand for home-viewing and why would the BBFC show such sensitivity on the issue? I think because, in the early teens, such films had come to represent a sort of visual pornography. The hunting films rarely show scenes that are remotely adventurous or heroic. The animals shown have not the faintest glimmer of a chance against the "great white hunters", usually grotesquely pleased with themselves, who simply do the final shooting and then proudly collect the skins after the real hunters (the accompanying natives)have rendered the wretched animals powerless to escape. Often beautifully and very realistically hand-coloured, these films also concentrate a good deal attention on the skinning of the animal.Ole Olsen's Danish company, Nordisk was a pioneer of exploitation films of all kinds (they were also responsible for the first films about "white slavery", really just prostitution) had had a particular success (but also a succès de scandale) with their hunting-films in 1907-1908. Løvejagten/Lion Hunt (1907) was rumoured to have been made with lions, bought by Olsen from a zoo for the film-shoot, who were then shot for real by the actors/hunters' guns as well as by the camera. While this may simply have been a rumour started by the film-company itself (the charges of cruelty to animals were later dropped), the supposed "snuff-film" was banned by the Danish courts, smuggled out of Denmark and premièred in Sweden, becoming thereafter a brief international sensation. The company went on unrepentantly to make an equally politically incorrect sequel, Isbjørnejagten/Polar Bear Hunt, shot in Russia, in 1909.So it is quite understandable why censors at this time, especially in prudish England and the puritan US, would be rather touchy on the subject of "cruelty to animals" rather as they also were on the subject of "white slavery" (technically a forbidden subject in the US until the mid-sixties.The undoubted popularity of such hunting films is a sad reflection on human nature, which, for all our pious protests to the contrary, has, I suspect, not changed greatly since. Curiously Alfred Machin, the very fine film-maker who had made many hunting films for Pathé, turned late in life to making films with casts of live animals (an incredible labour). In one, Moi aussi j'accuse (two fragments exist), in a kind of parody of Zola's famous protest over the persecution of Dreyfus, Machin puts the famous phrase into the mouths of the chickens (in fact one writes it on a blackboard) while manically gleeful (human) cooks dance around a roasting carcass of a slaughtered chicken.Machin was a curious man (he also made the influential anti-war film Maudit soit la guerre) and it is difficult to know what side he was on. He himself had a collection of tame panthers (one, Mimir, became quite a film-star for a while), one of whom on one occasion attacked him. He recovered from the attack, but was much weakened and died of a heart attack not long afterwards. Perhaps after all there was some sort of poetic justice in that. Moi aussi, j'accuse!

Spanish Bullfight (1900) The title should tell you all you need to know in regards to the plot. This clocks in just under a minute and we see a bull go after several people in the ring trying to get at it. There's certainly nothing overly special about this film but it's worth noting that the cinematography is actually extremely good for the time that this was made. It's also worth noting that it seems the director made sure that the "performers" knew what they could and couldn't do in the frame. I say this because it seems everyone involved tries to make sure that the bull doesn't go out of the frame so this here is something that makes this film stand out.

The photography - in particular, the composition - in this early short feature is very good, but the choice of material is possibly less so. It's one of the earlier examples of the many movies that have combined technical skill with subject matter that some viewers will find uncomfortable.The movie shows about a minute or so of footage from a bullfight, and in technical terms, it is quite successful. The footage survives in surprisingly good condition, and it films the events from what seems to have been a carefully chosen vantage point. You can clearly see a portion of the crowd in the foreground, then the main action, and then, in the background, a pretty clear view of the crowd on the other side of the arena.While formal development of techniques like deep focus photography may have been a much later innovation, this is one of a number of very early films that show that even very early film-makers had the idea, without necessarily using a specific term for it, of trying to take a clear picture of both a foreground and a distant background.In its content, the movie covers a popular but somewhat inhumane activity, which lessens its entertainment value except for those who would not be bothered by it. (And indeed, some viewers would find nothing objectionable about it at all.) The footage does not, in fact, contain any particularly brutal sights, but the nature of the material being filmed would diminish for some viewers the satisfaction that otherwise could be had from the good quality technical aspects of the movie.