BLOOD OF THE BEASTS

(1949) Director: Georges Franju

Available on DVD

SUMMARY:

One of France’s most important documentary filmmakers, Georges Franju established an international reputation with this poetic portrait of the slaughterhouse of La Vilette in Paris. The work of the abattoir is depicted with painful directness, in stark contrast to the calm domesticity of the surrounding Parisian suburb. In attempting "to restore to documentary reality its appearance of artifice," he created a classic postwar document whose forcefulness and poetry remain undiminished today. - Harvard Film Archive

VIDEO:

Entire film (Extremely graphic)



REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, CREDITS:

Blood of the Beasts Review from film4:
It's hard to believe that this gruelling short was made in 1949, given that some of the imagery and subject matter it portrays would be hard to stomach even by today's standards. With its documentary-esque feel, the film compares and contrasts life in idyllic, post-war Parisian suburbs with that of the average worker in one of the nearby slaughterhouses; director Franju is unstinting when it comes to details of both the human and animal suffering. As an early example of ultra-realism in cinema, this is hard to beat, although even more difficult to sit through; you'll want to take a very long shower afterwards.

NOTES:

• Franju states that he wasn't interested on the subject of slaughterhouses when he decided to make the film, but the location around the building was the Ourcq Canal allowing him to make a documentary film. Franju stated by using a documentary film format, he was able to use both locations as lyical counterpoints and "to explain it as a realist while remaining a surrealist by displacing the object in another context. In this new setting, the object rediscovers it's quality as an object".
• Blood of the Beasts was made as a black and white film as an aesthetic. Franju states "If it were in colour, it'd be repulsive...the sensation people get would be physical one."
• Overview of Georges Franju's films
• In 1937, along with Henri Langlois, Georges Franju co-founded the Cinémathèque Française, the world's first dedicated film archive, where he worked until 1949. Directors of the New Wave school — Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Roger Vadim, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast — received much of their film education by attending the collection's screenings.
• Franju is best known for his 1960 horror film, "Eyes Without a Face". Described by Pauline Kael as "perhaps the most elegant horror movie ever made"