"The Ghosts in Our Machine" Is a Raw, Decidedly Quiet Look at the Animal Industry

Blackfish has gotten a hell of a lot of press in the past few months, and rightfully so. It is a tight and powerful documentary, one that reveals the deplorable conditions of captive entertainment orcas and their subsequent, oftentimes fatal lashings out at people, usually trainers. However, Blackfish is not the only animal movie that is worthy of your attention.

From our friends up north in Canada comes The Ghosts in Our Machine, a documentary that follows photographer Jo-Anne McArthur on her quest to document animal industries and, more generally, the human-animal relationship. McArthur has been a photographer since 1997 and has been shooting animals for almost as long. The camera is her tool of choice for advocacy because, in her own words, “text can only go so far whereas an image? It’s instant.”

Her website, We Animals, serves as an ever-expanding archive for her work. She has documented almost the entire spectrum of animal use, from the obvious—factory farming and fur—to the more obscure—bear bile farming and macaque breeding operations. The one area she has trouble accessing? The world of animal labs.

“Doors aren’t really open to me,” she said.

While McArthur chronicles animal issues through still photography, director Liz Marshall was looking to do the same, only through moving image, beginning around 2010. A vegetarian since she was eighteen years old, Marshall was already sympathetic, but what really drove her interest was the inherently challenging nature of the topic.

“I was really aware of how largely marginalized the animal rights world is,” Marshall told me. “Call me crazy, but I wanted the challenge of trying to create an accessible story about what can seem like an insurmountable topic.”

The two documentarians met through a mutual friend, Marshall’s partner, who is an animal activist herself. Over the years, McArthur included Marshall on an email list sharing her newest photos. Marshall took immediate note of her work: “I had never really met anyone before who was just solely focused on the animal issue. I found that quite admirable.”

However, it wasn’t until the project’s development started in earnest that she noticed what a great focal point McArthur could be for her film. “I quickly realized that Jo-Anne would make an accessible protagonist, like an entry-point, an anchor to ground the story in,” Marshall said. “I didn’t want it to just be an issue film. I wanted it to actually be a story. And I think having that human access point helps the audience to connect.”

McArthur had similar motives for agreeing to be in the film. “I decided long ago that I wouldn’t be an anonymous photographer,” she said, adding how she finds it helpful to "have a face, a friendly face, speaking for animals". When Liz asked her to be in what would become Ghosts, McArthur took it as an extension of the soft-mouthpiece idea.

McArthur does have a friendly, if not somber, face in Ghosts. Contrary to depictions of animal advocates in popular culture, she does not spew angry rhetoric nor does she come across as oppressively forceful. Instead, hers is a quiet, emotive power. She is very careful and considered when she speaks, both in the film and with me. She is certainly the accessible persona that Marshall sought for her film, but underneath her congenial demeanor is a seriousness that can only be acquired through consciously choosing to witness the very thing one abhors.

Ghosts occupies a curious place. It is a decidedly human, though not human-centric documentary. It is not your stereotypical animal rights film. As its name suggests, the film is instead a haunting record of the animal industry as it stood in the early 2000s. Its purpose isn’t to shock the audience with grotesque imagery, though there certainly are difficult scenes. It doesn’t instruct viewers on what to do and how to do it. Rather, it takes a cinéma vérité approach by showing us the condition of hapless animals caught in the unforgiving gears of man's treadmill. There is little to no narration. The viewer can choose what do from there.

That lack of voiceover is particularly potent in the only investigative scene in the 90-minute film, when McArthur and the film crew stealthily gain access to a fur farm in Europe. The crew finds the animals in various states of distress: some have cannibalized their cage-mates from stress, others show clear discomfort from standing on the grated floor of their battery cages, and still others suffer from open wounds that have not been tended do. It’s disquieting and painful to watch.

“Words would upstage the gravity and the importance of just simply bearing witness and being there in the integrity of the moment,” Marshall told me. “A lot of the scenes where we’re with the animals, we’re just with them. They don’t speak our language. I just wanted to be able to have the animals take up as much screen space as possible, to really give them agency in the film.”

While there is no overarching narration, brief moments of commentary by McArthur and others are sparsely scattered throughout Ghosts. At one point, McArthur describes herself as a “war photographer”. When I asked her to elaborate, she admitted it could sound self-aggrandizing, but that’s not the point.

“I’m not really trying to draw attention to me. I’m trying to draw attention to the war," she explained. "It will surprise people. What do you mean you’re a war photographer? You shoot animals. Well, exactly.”

That being said, neither the entire movie nor all of McArthur’s photos are of the war. Aspects of each hone in on the positive, represented in the film by a farm animal sanctuary and a pair of beagles rescued from a research lab. Moments like these demonstrate that neither Ghosts nor We Animals is meant to be a bleak diatribe against humanity, but rather a complex and multi-faceted depiction of our contradictory relationships with other creatures. We do bad, but we also do good. And that’s the way it is.

The film has already been released in Canada, but now Marshall is raising funds through Indiegogo for an Oscar-qualifying release in New York City and Los Angeles. As sort of a companion piece to the film, McArthur will be releasing her first book, We Animals, this winter. Much like Ghosts, it aims to show the best and worst of our interactions with animals and allows those interested to take their time with each individual’s story.

You don’t have to be an animal activist to acknowledge that something is definitely wrong with the way we treat animals. Just watching The Ghosts in Our Machine may leave even the most reluctant viewer feeling bothered. But things are looking up. If the enormous success of Blackfish is any indication, we may be more prepared than ever to cop to our complicity in the ghastlier corners of animal industry. That will be healthy for all involved.