Reviews of Blood of the Beasts
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Chuck Vollers
26Feb11
Georges Franju’s 1949 slaughterhouse documentary. Perhaps even better than EYES WITHOUT A FACE, regrettably the only other Franju I’ve been able to see. I grew up on somewhat of a farm so I wasn’t shocked at all by the butchery, merely impressed by its scope and surreality. (Actually if memory serves, after my first screening of this film I felt rather peckish.) I was rather more disturbed by the glimpse into the degradation and destruction of human lives the film provides. This is how I feel all the various establishing shots connect, showing the city resting on all that blood and bone. Not for the squeamish.
Braden Vallenères
30Mar10
Before watching Blood of the Beasts, I had read about it and knew that it was a documentary about slaughterhouses in Paris. I also knew that it was quite graphic, yet very poetic and beautiful. I hesitated for a few days before I finally watched it. Yes, it was very graphic and violent, but it only shows you exactly what you would think happens in slaughterhouses. I was actually surprised by how quick and efficient the killing of animals was in Parisian slaugherhouses in 1949.
The film shows the slaughter and butchering of horses, cows, calves, and sheep in four different slaughterhouses. However, the film is far from a straight-up depiction of the activities. It is very poetic in its treatment and offers some truly astounding aesthetics. The camera lingers on the blood pouring out of slaughtered animals and into gutters, and as Franju explained in an interview included on the DVD, he intentionally chose to make this film in black and white so that the images can be viewed from an aesthetic viewpoint. If it were in colour, he says, it would just be repulsive.
One shot in the film which was particularly horrifying and enrapturing at the same time was in the sheep slaughterhouse. Franju showed workers taking sheep one at a time and laying them on a rack to slaugter them via decapitation. He then cuts to show an entire row of decapitated sheep lying on their backs along this rack. However, their bodies are still in spasm and their legs are all violently kicking in the air. Franju set his camera at the very end of the rack so that we see the row of dead, writhing sheep as if they were a kicking chorus line in a Busby Berkely film. It’s a deeply unsettling image that I couldn’t turn my eyes from.
However, the film is not devoid of politics. While it is not necessarily an animal rights film, it does touch upon these issues and forces the viewer to confront the production that results in a steak or mutton. Interestingly, it also touches upon the dangers that the workers put themselves into in their line of work.
The ultimate aim of the film was to depict a truth, however unpleasant that truth might be. In this, it is very successful. However, it goes beyond that and lends this truth a sublime beauty and macabre, poetic element that is very, very enthralling. How many other documentaries about animal processing have ever quoted Baudelaire before?