Le Sang des bêtes (1949)
Directed by Georges Franju

Film Review

Georges Franju is best known for his memorably weird horror film Les Yeux sans visage (1960), to which he brought a unique aesthetic, a haunting poetic synthesis of cold realism and eccentric surrealist elements.  He did direct seven other full-length films, including the highly evocative Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962) and stunningly bizarre Judex (1963), but more interesting for an admirer of his distinctive style are the dozen or so short films he made earlier in his career, where Franju genuinely does push the envelope with regard to cinematic expression and narrative form.  Of these, the most important was his first cinematic offering Le Sang des bêtes (a.k.a. Blood of the Beasts), the first of three short films which, taken together, paint an ugly but blisteringly authentic picture of post-war France.  (The other two were En Passant par la Lorraine (1950) and Hôtel des Invalides (1951), both commissioned by the French government).

Le Sang des bêtes begins in a lowkey, oddly lyrical way, with a brief excursion around the area on the southwest perimeter of Paris where the abattoirs depicted in the film are located.  Before subjecting his audience to the horrors of the slaughterhouse, Franju dwells on the ordinariness of life in this underprivileged part of the capital.  We see children playing, young lovers kissing, people hunting for bargains in dismal street markets.  These images of harmonious banality are still fresh in our mind when the camera takes us through the gates of the abattoirs and confronts us with the routine carnage that takes place within, just so that the good folk of France can have their daily ration of meat.  Like the poor animals being led to their slaughter, we hardly have time to take in what is happening before Franju begins subjecting us to the grotesque spectacle of horses, cattle and sheep being stunned, bled and stripped of their flesh, with the cold detachment of someone filming a horticultural show.

For the next eighteen minutes (less the occasional brief respite that takes us back outside these factories of Hell smothered with blood and viscera) Le Sang des bêtes serves up a grisly montage that is almost too horrific to describe, let alone watch.  We all have a vague idea of what goes on in abattoirs, but somehow the reality of it is hard to take in, and even the film's enticing poetry doesn't quite take the edge off the horror that impinges on our retinas.  For all the film's indefinable beauty, which it owes to its alluring black-and-white photography (in colour the film would have been completely unwatchable), it is hard to resist the urge to look away or close your eyes as we witness the brutal end of the poor creatures we feed on.

Graphic though the film is, there is no sense that it is being deliberately provocative.  It is not a film that sets out to promote or decry the practice of animal slaughter.  Franju  is merely doing his job as a good documentatist, showing us what he finds without foisting his own personal feelings on us. This is not an animal rights film but one that presents, for our edification, the reality of a difficult and unpleasant trade performed by hardworking craftsmen and women for the benefit of society.  In any event, at the time the film was made, animal rights was practically a non-issue, particularly in a country as carnivorous as France.

Even though the film has no particular axe to grind, there's a fair chance that watching Le Sang des bêtes will diminish your appetite for meat.  Certainly, the sequence in which several adorable calves are decapitated and bled, their feet hacked off and heads casually tossed onto the ground whilst their limbs remain twitching wildly, is unlikely to encourage you to eat veal.  Neither is the tableau showing a long line of sheep performing some weird kind of break-dance on their backs after having had their throats cut the best advertisement for mutton.  Even offal lovers may find it hard to digest the images of vital organs and intestines that spew out of slit carcasses, before being ripped apart and laid out on tables like quivering mounds of jelly or something out of a cheap sci-fi movie.

If you are of the borderline vegetarian persuasion, watching Le Sang des bête is probably all you need to transform yourself into a committed herbivore.  After the day's butchery has been done, we are left with a brief glimpse of the sheep who have been spared, the ones who are fortunate to live through another night.  They have no idea of what the morning holds for them, and when their end comes no one will heed their cries of terror.  The feeling that envelops you in the final minutes of the film is not one of horror or disgust, but rather one of sadness and melancholy, maybe even shame.  We may not thank Franju for opening our eyes to the truth of the meat trade but we cannot fail to be moved by the way in which he does this, through a succinct piece of film art that is as wonderful as it is repulsive.

Film Synopsis

On the dreary outskirts of Paris, the city's poor live in tall tenement blocks bordered by undeveloped land which is a playground for children and a haven for lovers.  It is in this forlorn hintergarten that the capital's abattoirs are to be found, anonymous buildings which outwardly resemble factories or places of worship, and within which horses, cattle and sheep are routinely butchered to satisfy the demand for meat.  For those who toil in these slaughterhouses, surrounded by the blood and carcases of the animals they slay and strip of their flesh, the work is tough and potentially dangerous.  But they devote themselves to their art, processing the constant stream of animals that are brought up on trains from the country, without anger or hatred, so that they and their neighbours may eat...