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Bookmark this pageLe Sang des Bêtes (1949)
Director: Georges Franju
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Despite the grim content, this description of three abbatoirs (horses, cattle, sheep) is no vegetarian tract. What most fascinates Franju is the inflicting of violent death as a matter of banal 9-to-5 routine. We soon pick up the process: the pickaxe through the skull, the throatcutting, the steaming blood (it's winter) spilling across the stone floor, the hacking and dismembering. We become accustomed to the echoing sounds: the banging and clattering, someone off-camera singing 'La Mer'. The slaughterhouses are placed in geographical context, with Kosma's lilting waltz theme accompanying an evocation of the outskirts of post-war Paris: canals, junk markets, scrubby wasteland. It's a gift of a subject for a surrealist like Franju: an everyday nightmare, at once atrocious and outlandishly beautiful.Author: BBa
User reviews of this film
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- Technoguy said...
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Posted on Jun 04 2008 00:03
Beauty can be in ugliness,violence being the spur.The abattoir is secondary to the contextualisation of post-war Paris,markets,vacant lots,canals,kids playing.There
is a dislocation to the realism that the surrealist Franju
uncovered in his first film(documentary).The concentration is not on the slaughter,although this is efficient and the rivers of blood,but in black and white
it's just bearable when it wouldn't have been in colour. - Report as inappropriate
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