MOVIE REVIEW
A Camera Aimed at the Conscience
‘The Ghosts in Our Machine’ Focuses on Animal Rights
An animal raised in a farm in a scene from the film./ Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals
By DAVID DeWITT, NYTimes
Published: November 7, 2013
There’s a logic at work in the motivated, morality-jarring animal-rights documentary “The Ghosts in Our Machine”: If animals have emotions, and if we see that human actions cause them sadness, anger and fear, then we will become moved to help.
More About This Movie
The Ghosts in Our Machine
I can’t imagine anyone not feeling moved during “Ghosts”: shots of foxes at a fur farm, cowering in cages, covering one another for comfort; monkeys, holding each other, eyes tilted upward in terror; cattle trudging on misshapen hooves through their inevitable chutes to slaughter.
These animals — when they die, and they do — have lived horrible lives that are recorded by the photographer Jo-Anne McArthur in stirring pictures, so stirring that, her agency tells her in a scene perfectly timed to introduce her and her cause, they can’t be sold to commercial magazines in a PG-13 world.
Ms. McArthur is our human window to these animals, whose early deaths are the ghosts in the global economic machine, and we see her on travels to document abuse to pigs, dolphins, dogs and more. She’s invested. She’s a vegan. She’s calm and sensible, but, to some, she’ll be extreme. All this is skillfully established during early-morning spying on animal warehouses or in moments of comfort with friends and at an upstate New York sanctuary, where sheep gambol, pigs slop, and roosters high-step on kitchen counters.
“The Ghosts in Our Machine” is a compelling movie, but its argument expands without deepening. It has great empathy for its subjects, the “incredible individuals,” the “nonhuman animals,” that it records. Human animals use other species: talk about an inconvenient, rather obvious but overwhelming truth.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 13, 2013
A film review on Friday about the animal-rights documentary “The Ghosts in Our Machine” referred incorrectly to a fur farm and animal warehouses shown in the film. They are not illegal. A picture caption with the review also referred incorrectly to a farm in the film as illegal.
