User Reviews

"Who keeps or looks for animals, has to nourish them adequately, to care for them, to give them the possibility to keep themselves busy and to move around and to provide them the necessary shelter", so it stands written in the Swiss Law For The Protection Of Animals (SR 455, Art. 6). Although this passage is cited from the revision in 1978, which has been caused by the earthquake that the movie "De Grotzepuur" had triggered, the wording is still today so fuzzy that In Praxi every farmer can interpret it in his way. The biggest problem (which stands in the center of the movie) is the so-called Factory Farming or Mass Husbandry. A reckless capitalist fodder merchant convinces the old farmer Jokab Keller (Schaggi Streuli in his last role) to change his farm from a well, but not extraordinary profitable enterprise into this "modern" kind of farming. He had already to rent a big part of his farm to his sun, and still his finances are running backward. Would there not be the young animal-loving wife of the sun, the old man and his sun would have continued with their horrible abuse: The movie shows naked and dying chicken, crowded a dozen into a space that measures perhaps the space of 4 show-boxes. We see pig-mothers unable to reach their babies, separated one from the other, lying on concrete without straw and every animal muzzled (in order to prevent them to bite their ears off). Even the separation of the young wife from her husband does not change anything. The Big Change, however, comes, when the rain causes a short-circuit and hundreds of pigs agonizingly die. Then, everything starts to fall apart, the fate takes over (amongst others in the person of Walter Morath who at least twice had already played the devil). And the vengeance of the fate goes to the bitter end, to the bitter end of the old farmer, to be exact. I remember the audience's reaction to this movie in a St. Gallen cinema in 1975 when it came out. Women were crying, men were shouting one should shoot the director (the engaged American-Swiss animal protector Mark R. Rissi). Children uttered their wish to go to the next farm and liberate the animals. The movie's reaction was so strong that in only a few days several hundreds of thousands of signatures could be gathered by which the Swiss Government was forced to abolish the central points of the Animal Protection Law. The biggest food-chain, Migros, let eggs from non free-land-chicken disappear from one day to the next and massively lowered the prices for organic, vegan-fee free-land eggs). The sales for pork almost stopped for months. However, almost as disturbing as the pictures (which include Streuli taking a dying hen out of her catacomb, laying her onto a wooden trunk and separating her head and body with an ax) is the fact that this movie has the form of a Moritat (according to the dictionary: Murder Ballad, but that is nonsense), to a Moritat like, f.ex. the Mackie-Messer-Song in Bert Brecht's "Three penny's opera". This and a specific style of shooting with seems to be the dynamical counterpart of the static pictures in "populist" newspapers almost give "The Grotzepuur" a comedy-like touch.