Veranstaltung auf Englisch.

WOLF CHASES PIGS (1942), LASSIE COME HOME (1942), MY PAL WOLF (1944), FIESTA (1947), THE BRAVE BULLS (1951), THE BRAVE ONE (1956), TORERO! (1956), THE MISFITS (1960), HUD (1963), THE SANDPIPER (1965), BORN FREE (1966), PLANET OF THE APES (1968), WATERSHIP DOWN (1978). In all of these films, morally-fraught human–animal relations are important, but they share something else: the creative importance of leftist or communist-affiliated artists who would be subject to Hollywood blacklisting after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In the middle of that list there is a notable sequence of films about bullfighting. In this lecture, Robert McKay explores why blacklisted film-makers might be so interested in the bullfight, and why their portrayals of animals matter, by focussing on the most significant film in terms of this cinematic history: THE BRAVE ONE (Dir. Irving Rapper, 1956) for which Dalton Trumbo won the Oscar for best motion picture story under the pseudonym of Robert Rich, a ruse whose exposure fatally weakened the blacklist.

THE BRAVE ONE is a cinematic fable about the exploited physical and emotional labour of farming families, the objectified animal labour of blood sport performance, and the moral and aesthetic labour of leftist political resistance. A tenant-farmer’s child, Leonardo (Michel Ray) befriends a bull, Gitano (uncredited) whose mother dies in labour. After Gitano is misappropriated by the landowner’s estate manager and sent to fight in the corrida, Leonardo petitions unsuccessfully to save his life, which is eventually reprieved, at the will of a captivated public, on account of Gitano’s own bravery and forbearance. McKay will discuss THE BRAVE ONE in the context of contemporaneous politically and aesthetically resonant bullfight cinema (made in Hollywood, adjacent to it, and in the avant garde), including Orson Welles’s unfinished IT’S ALL TRUE and Shirley Clarke’s BULLFIGHT (1955). These films make up a fascinating case study of interpenetrating issues about animal ethics and political aesthetics which complicate both histories of the cinema of the blacklist and the popular cultural representation of animal protection.

The lecture will be followed by a response from Dustin Condren.

Robert McKay is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield, where he co-directs the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre. He has published widely on the politics of species in modern and contemporary literature and film. His most recent book is Anthropofugal Fictions: Literature, Species Politics and Flight from Humanity (Edinburgh UP, 2026) and he has co-edited several volumes including Animal Satire (Palgrave, 2023) and The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature (Palgrave, 2021). He is the co-editor, with Susan McHugh and John Miller, of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature.

Dustin Condren is a 2025–2026 Fulbright Professor in Germany and a visiting researcher at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF. He is an Associate Professor of Russian, affiliate faculty in Film and Media Studies, and a core member of the Romanoff Center for Russian Studies at the University of Oklahoma. His publications include the recent monograph An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film (Cornell University Press, 2024). He is also the translator into English of two book-length theoretical works by Eisenstein – Disney (2014) and The Primal Phenomenon (2017). The research project that he is pursuing at the Film University analyzes the broad corpus of Soviet films of the 1920s and 1930s to consider their employment and depiction of non-human animals.

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Eine Veranstaltung des ZeM – Brandenburgisches Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften.