In May 2001, Torontonians were scandalized when three young Canadian artists videotaped themselves torturing and butchering a stray cat as part of a muddled commentary on the meat-processing industry. In September 2004, Torontonians were scandalized again when the Toronto International Film Festival scheduled Casuistry: The Art Of Killing A Cat, a documentary that some assumed actually was the notorious videotape. Even when director Zev Asher and the festival programmers made it clear that Casuistry is only about the incident–and doesn't contain any footage from the tape–the screening still drew tsk-tsk editorials and protests from animal-rights groups. Which raises some questions: Why not protest the newspapers that first printed the story back in 2001? Why not complain about local TV reports? When did documenting a crime become an endorsement of the crime?
Casuistry doesn't really answer any of these questions, or even raise them directly, though Asher does ponder the rationale behind the original incident. One of the complaints from the movie's protesters is that it lets cat-killing ringleader Jesse Power rationalize the slaughter, but he actually seems fairly abashed, admitting that they were all high on mushrooms when they did the deed, and that they felt awful afterward. The word "casuistry" means, roughly, "to justify the unjustifiable," and a lot of the movie has to do with justifications and assumptions, from how the legal system perceived the crime to how the media, the local citizenry, and the art world reacted. The police looked to Power's prior artwork for clues to his state of mind, and Power's preoccupation with morbidity did a lot to condemn him; meanwhile, he and his friends and supporters got death threats from people who apparently believed the only way to protect an animal that kills other animals is to kill yet another animal.
In the end, Power's video may have made too narrow a point. Had he intended to provoke in an abstract way, the resulting scandal alone would've made the project a success, but in trying to question why society approves only certain animals for slaughter, he merely reaffirmed the public's positions. Casuistry has the opposite problem. Even people who speak on Power's behalf go out of their way to condemn what he and his friends did, and everyone seems so terrified of exploiting the incident that few of them say anything substantive about its original intent. The documentary is fair-minded but vague, and disturbing only when it describes the cat-killing in gruesome detail (punctuated by close-up shots of living felines with big, accusatory eyes). It almost contains too many ironies for one documentary, including the way it was itself received. Someone should take another crack at this story. Call it The Art Of Killing A Movie.