Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

MusicChat It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

kekseksa 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!

Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) This is a 1900 movie that runs for 45 seconds roughly and shows us basically the events in an arena where several people go up against a bull, one of them even on a horse. I personally find bullfighting a despicable activity, so I cannot appreciate this film really. From a filmmaker's perspective, I would not call it a bad effort, but there were already moving cameras a couple years ago, so it's a bit disappointing to see this static camera still in 1900, even if it is still 115 years ago. Of course, the film is silent and black-and-white as always these days. I cannot say I recommend this movie. Even if you don't mind bullfighting, there is nothing really memorable about it in my opinion.

bob the moo I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.Like many viewers of this film when it came out, I have not actually seen a bull fight for myself and as such the "event" captured here offers interest if not moral neutrality. The capturing of the action is very clear and well framed to keep the bull in shot without moving the camera. Frustratingly as is often the case it feels like we are seeing a snippet of something rather than the "something" in its entirety but this is probably for the best. I'm sure some will dislike this for what it captures but at least nothing too brutal is shown here and indeed a lot of it is dull! Overall though, it is nice to see a static event captured that is more than a train pulling into a station, even if some modern viewers will not appreciate the actions being captured here.

Alice Liddel Inadvertently - in that I presume this film was shot for its exotic subject matter - 'Spanish Bullfight' completely deglamorises the noble art of the corrida. Filmed in stark black and white, shorn of the gaudy, brightly-coloured, gilt-edged uniforms; the sun-drenched Mediterranean arena; the vociferous, passionate crowd; the kind of godlike vantage-point that allows one to pontificate metaphysically; the whole thing is exposed as a shambolic sham.Hemingway would not have found much nobility or meaning here - all we get are a group of young cowards terrorising a poor animal, like the scorpion-baiting kids before the opening slaughter of 'The Wild Bunch'. Here is documentary doing what it so rarely does, exposing the unpalatable truth behind the glittering surface. The sight of the poor bewildered beast, alone in the frame for excruciating seconds, before what we know will be the next attack, is agonising. Luckily, he manages to lunge a few times at the thugs.