Le sang des bêtes

Luis Buñuel was Georges Franju's favorite filmmaker. Now imagine the shocking eyeball- slicing scene of "Le Chien Andalou" (which, as you may well know, was a dead sheep's eyeball) taken to the goriest consequences: Franju takes his camera to a slaughterhouse in the outskirts of post-war Paris, and the appalling scene from Buñuel & Dali's classic feels like child's game compared to what is shown in this short documentary.

Here, we see -- in all horrifying details, truth and gore -- horses, cows, calves and sheep being matter-of-factly, bureaucratically slaughtered by dexterous butchers with axes, knives, hammers, and they don't even stop their smoking or casual whistling while doing their jobs. Among these indelible, nauseating scenes, we see an employee "caressing" a horse's head seconds before fatally puncturing its skull; the Berkeleyish "chorus line ballet" of decapitated sheep's paws; the still convulsive trunk of one decapitated, blood-drained, paw-less calf; and the gallons of steaming blood serving as an "illustration" of Charles Trenet's famous song "La Mer" ("The Sea"), heartily sung by one of the workers. In "Le Sang des Bêtes" you will see probably the most horrifyingly graphic scenes EVER filmed.

This film brings uncomfortable thoughts: on the one hand, how most of us -- consumers -- implicitly condone with this methodical, "impersonal" slaughtering of domestic, harmless creatures as long as we don't think very much about how meat, leather, soaps, etc "magically" appear at the supermarket or in a store. On the other hand, we wonder how butchers and other slaughterhouse workers manage to sublimate guilt, compassion and repulsion in a totally matter-of-fact, professional manner (they have to earn a living), proving how human beings can adapt to almost ANY circumstance (surely then-recent WW2 Nazi horror in concentration camps is very clear reference in "Le Sang...:").

"Le Sang..." features as an extra on the DVD that brings Franju's horror masterpiece "Les Yeux Sans Visage" (1959) and it's totally apropos: it's a perfectly macabre pas-de- deux. Impossible not to link the cold-hearted slaughter and skinning of the animals in "Le Sang..." with high-brow-gone-berserk surgeon Pierre Brasseur face-skinning his helpless victims with flawless craftsmanship in "Les Yeux". (Once again, the Nazi concentration camp "scientific" experiments are paralleled).

This is compulsory viewing for animal-rights activists and environmentalists. Don't even think of watching "Le Sang des Bêtes" if you're faint-hearted or after a meal; and beware you meat-eaters, this one may turn you in a vegetarian or at least make your next hamburger taste REALLY bad.

A film of great and terrible beauty.

This short 1949 film by Georges Franju - about 20 minutes or so in length is narrated by Georges Hubert and Nicole Ladmiral and was the winner of the 1950 Grand Prix International du Court Sujet.

Filmed in black and white - I doubt it could be watched by many in colour - this film weaves an effective documentary of Paris's various abattoirs out of startling yet non-contrived surrealist images. The scenes of death are presented coldly, without sentimentality but also, in my view, without lessening the suffering of the animals - an indeed the men.

George Franju had one of the strangest careers in the French cinema.His shorts were revolutionary.When he began full-length features ,as contemporary of the Nouvelle Vague,he was drastically different.All his best works ("la tête contre les murs" "les Yeux sans Visage" "Thomas L'Imposteur" even his minor films such as "Pleins Feux sur l'Assassin" and his remake of Feuillade's "Judex) have a sense of mystery you would never find in his peers' works (with the exception of some of Chabrol's ones).

"Le sang des bêtes" has not lost its strength even in 2006.It still stands as one of the best shorts ever done.It depicts horror: inside a slaughterhouse ,where the beasts suffer and man himself risks his life ,there's a world nobody had entered before Franju 's camera let us in.The pictures are sometimes so harrowing,so unbearable,you find yourself looking away.There's this sublime picture of a horse ,bowing before being shot.

The commentary is brilliant,and the two actors who say it are to be commended.

Georges Hubert uses a neuter voice,even when he describes the most terrifying of the scenes: should he depict the riverboat for sightseeing,he would not use a different tone.He makes me think of the commentary in Luis Bunuel's " Hurdes" Nicole Ladmiral,on the other hand has a warm voice ,sometimes verging on tenderness as she describes the urban lugubrious landscapes outside the slaughterhouse.Life goes one ,people fall in love,around the buildings with its sinister "steeple" which is not that of a church . Nowadays Nicole Ladmiral is forgotten:her career was short-lived and very sad.After an important part in "Journal d'un curé de Campagne ",Robert Bresson's classic, she could never find another role worthy of her talent (except for some uninteresting supporting parts on stage)and she threw herself under a train in a metro station.

An astonishing document.

A documentary shot with a surrealist aesthetic; images of unimaginable horror and violence--all perfectly real and unstaged--filmed with a languid and beautiful poetry. The images in this documentary about the slaughterhouse--the "abattoir," in the language of the narrator--are filmed with an almost cavalier, deadpan, unflinching clarity. The images of the lingering struggles of a decapitated calf; the satiny musculature exposed beneath the skin of a butchered cow, and the horrible but poetic moment when we see that the heart still beats beneath the sinews; the bored whistle of the beret-capped worker tapping the steaming spray of a horse's heart's blood; and then, the canal-concealing camera angle that shows us a barge bisecting a field of grass: "Blood of the Beasts" is a breathtaking celebration of the visual philosophy of surrealism.

"Le Sang des Bêtes" is a splendid documentary about the life and work of many workers, living just outside the Paris walls after WWII. From the vast and deserted areas that seemed to completely surround the city and its few 'modern' outskirt-constructions, Franju suddenly leads us nearer to the heart of the capital. Where the industrial compounds rise. where, at the fringe of urban and rural worlds, the cattle is being slaughtered. From the horses slaughterhouses of the Porte de Vanves to the huge Halles de la Vilette, where cows, calves and sheep are being prepared to be eaten, this short film is by no means a claim for vegetarianism. Some scenes are certainly hard to watch, but the accurate eye of the director, his tenderness towards the men (and women) doing this very hard work, is the real point here. After all, we've seen animals die before (actually after, from 'Le Cochon' of Jean Eustache and Barbet Schroeder's New Guinea documentaries, to "Benny's Video" and the morbid attraction of Benny towards the film of the cow's death. So let not your prejudices take the better, and let the film deliver its message : that he is the witness of a world not that old, and already so odd to us.