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Clip description
Bubby (Nicholas Hope) dresses up like his mother and ‘plays’ with the cat, which he has tied to the chair. He calls the cat ‘Bubby’ and speaks to it with the same phrases his mother (Claire Benito) uses on him. Bubby wonders where the cat came from, and why he didn’t need a gas mask if he comes from outside. His mother says the cat doesn’t breathe, then demonstrates what this means by holding Bubby in a headlock so he can’t breathe.
Curator’s notes
The first 30 minutes of the film are incredibly confronting, almost unbearable for the scenes of cruelty to both Bubby and the cat. The sense of claustrophobia is intense, and you can tell how bad the room would smell, after 35 years. The cat-tormenting scenes were all highly supervised. Despite this, there were allegations of cruelty by animal rights organisations in Italy and the UK, when the film opened there. The feral cat used in the film was eventually put down by a vet after the filming – as are most feral cats in Australia, where they are a significant threat to native fauna.
