Film Review: Le Sang des Betes

Georges Franju's debut film, Le Sang des Bêtes AKA "Blood of the Beasts" – released in 1949 - remains today a fascinatingly raw and yet remarkably passive look - part science documentary and part horror movie - into the daily work inside Parisian abattoirs. Praised by critics upon its release but far from a popular success throughout Europe, this provocative black and white short has sustained its potency over the years through it’s uncompromising and still unsurpassed images of brutality. Yet expected bloodshed is not immediately splashed on the screen. For a director like Franju, who believed that it was always better to "slowly twist" the viewer's head than to brutally knock it off, there is more here to capture and to tell than merely the obvious.

The setting is a quiet suburban morning just outside of Paris. The city's often-remarkable exteriors are shot satirically, swept up by the gale of a proud and whimsical orchestra playing up a surreal fantasy of contrived kisses in the morning wind and poor children who play silently upon a hill; of discarded picture frames arranged curiously inside dirtied lots and radios sold street-side by the stack. Cars roll by. A train cleaves the skyline. Chandeliers hang outside from the worn, autumn trees: A wonderful portrait that exists for the delight of poets and lovers.

It's from this dreamland that we awake suddenly at the doors of the Abattoirs de Vaugirard, flanked by a pair of bronzed bull statues towering, almost venerable as Apis above the town square. Their visage standing as a reminder of man's primitive communion between hunter and hunted, of a time where animal—not God—was thanked for yielding daily nourishment.

As the opening scene's fanciful soundtrack deadens into the routine shanks of the Butcher's business, we are treated to a viewing of the odd, medieval-looking tools used daily at l’ abattoir.

Shot in close-up, a collection of reeds, axes, pipes and irregularly shaped knives is revealed lying neatly across a spare wooden table, displayed as inside a torture chamber and manipulated by faceless, anonymous hands. Some of the instruments retain a kind of innocence through ambiguity of design - better for plumbing rather than killing - while the blades nearby remain caked in blood and foul, completing the last gentle twist of the film's introduction to slaughter.

For Franju, the slaughterhouse becomes a gutter stage sapped of drama. Dozens of sheep are cut and emptied upon squalid gurneys, releasing torrents of blood flowing straight from their necks and into pools clouded by mud and scat upon the ground; a bloodied set upon which cow skulls are smashed and split apart repeatedly by hammer and axe and an entire horse carcass is sawed in two just as the village clock strikes noon.

In one of the film's more haunting scenes, a lovely Palomino, healthy and calm, is led from an alleyway to a secluded stable and shot in the head at point-blank range. Its body crumbles, legs tucked under—a wholly involuntary response that nevertheless appears more as performance than death, before falling face down and trembling into the muck below. Flayed skin and severed hooves are collected by a team of four to five men who perform the deed dispassionately with no room for pleasure or time to waste, while the narrator coolly explains that various parts of the animal will either be made into fertilizer or used in "ladies' toiletries."


In marked contrast to the exploitation era gross-outs that appear at the close of the century, Franju was adamant that he chose the subject of Les Sang as his first film, not because he was especially interested in the slaughterhouses themselves, but because of their proximity to the life of the canals and the lots surrounding them. In an interview for the television series Cinema de notre temps the director explained:

“As I always say, violence isn’t the end. Violence is the means…I don’t see any way to express that which is intrinsically beautiful – and all things are beautiful – other than by the truth. But the way to express it if you’re a realist – if you’re a documentary filmmaker, as I was – is by stripping the object of its frills. To express it as a surrealist but remain a realist, is by displacing the object, situating it in another context. In a new setting the object rediscovers its quality as an object.”

In this way Franju is able to hold nothing back and still compile these images - one grotesque, the other mundane - into something poetic after all. Through careful editing the film’s dainty lyricism is turned inside out. The two worlds, within and without the slaughterhouse, are revealed as not only connected but also constantly intersecting one another. The carving of bodies is urged on by the chiming of the bells, the bloodied pools of gore become reflected in the city’s dark waterways, sheep’s wool and white clouds. The smoke stacks and the wheels of fortune looming at the Ourcq canal. At every turn, the primitive goings on inside the shambles is linked together with the farcically tranquil streets where the hungry citizens stroll and machines of industry and progress glide eerily along their tracks or through unseen waters as so many artificial stage pieces. Up to now, the conveniences of modern society have merely been taken for granted, unveiled now like the white shroud of skin torn from a young calf. Here, a train is not simply a means of travel and leisure; each day it departs to “gather tomorrow’s victims.”

The film’s accompanying narration, penned by Surrealist filmmaker Jean Painleve and divided between male and female voices on screen, works in tandem with the images in frustrating violence with a scientific temper (likewise, in the English language version, blood is no longer drained, but “evacuated.”) Exposed to the knife with calm description, we come to know the grisly reality behind our daily sustenance but also the craft of these men and women who toil so arduously throughout the day, neither clean nor cruel, nor malicious nor resentful. Every face attached to a name and everyone subsisting on the gutted remains.

"I shall strike you without anger and without hate, like a butcher," intones our narrator, citing a passage from Charles Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouméno as the killing continues. It’s a different sort of poetry than we expect from the film’s opening shots of young lovers as the butcher’s hand now moves swift and controlled, his knives wielded almost artfully before our eyes. Yet even as the viewer is invited to witness the exact details of slaughter unsparingly, the picture hypnotizes rather than repulses. The dream-like disappearance of any pain throughout most of the film and the complete lack of color again emphasize the feeling of displacement and help reinforce Franju’s aim of manipulating the audience’s reaction beyond mere physical distaste. Defending his choice to film in black and white, Franju told one interviewer, “The emotion people get – at least I hope – is an aesthetic one.”

Unlike Resnais' Night and Fog, with its reminder that our fellow man is capable of committing monstrosities as ordinarily as a day's work, Franju's film directly implicates each and every member of the audience in its carnage without ever needing to hold forth on the ethics of such. The same audience that receives the pounds of flesh pulled from bone, today more thoughtlessly extracted than anything seen here. The business of shortening breaths is indeed not for the squeamish and presented here starkly and in various forms as to conjure sympathy, detachment and reflection.

Even if working through historical and National traumas as other writers have theorized. the film's focus on progress upgrades the film with each viewing to the present, pointing toward our mechanized horrors of the twentieth century, of the abattoirs and torture chambers of future wars and bloodied pits of the "food industry" where no flesh shall be spared, and many wasted in the process. Yet, it’s not about eating. It’s not even really about meat – not even the right four-letter word.
For Franju, the whole of society is linked together in a grisly chain of growth, production, accommodation and commerce. Those unfortunates on the bottom are simply grinded into fuel. The lone instance where we can hear a herd of sheep crying aloud is likened to condemned men, “who sing yet know their song to be useless.” And we are again made to doubt our own security as the train moves out from the station once more, advancing towards us as the film ends.

For all its hushed commentary in the face stolid destruction, Le Sang des Bêtes evokes in oneself the very viscera purged on screen; the reminder that we humans are more than carnivores; we're cannibals as well - The Great Beast, insatiable.

[Todd DePalma]


Blood of The Beasts is available on the Criterion Collection's DVD release of Eyes Without A Face.

type: reviews    keywords: goats, dvd, films, lhp017,   

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