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10. “It Was an Atrocious Film”: Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts
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Chapter 10 “It Was an Atrocious Film” Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts Jeannette Sloniowski Blood of the Beasts (Le sang des bêtes) (1949) is one of several controversial documentaries that use exceedingly cruel and violent images to assault the spectator.1 Certainly it is one of the most emotionally grueling films imaginable . Made just after World War II, it is part of a documentary triptych that also includes En passant par la Lorraine (1950) and Hôtel des Invalides (1951). It consists of nine sequences, four of which document the slaughter of animals for the markets of Paris, and five (including the introduction) that show the suburbs that surround the slaughterhouses. The slaughterhouse sequences are shockingly graphic and have often been regarded as among the cruelest in the history of documentary. As a political/aesthetic strategy, cruelty has a long history in European society, beginning (insofar as such beginnings can be known) with early Greek tragedy. Cruelty has been used variously as an assault on the spectator to chastise, morally improve, politically outrage, and, more ambiguously , to provide pleasure and sexual arousal. The most outspoken and well-known of the spokespeople for cruelty in art is Antonin Artaud, creator of the “Theater of Cruelty.” A surrealist, like Franju himself, Artaud proposed “a theatre in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator” (“Masterpieces” 83). For Artaud, Franju, and others practicing the aesthetics of cruelty, art was to be so intense and so painful, and the spectator so engaged by it, that subjectivity itself would be temporarily (and masochistically, as I shall later explain) lost during a 160 J E A N N E T T E S L O N I O W S K I performance. Although Artaud pays lip service to the moral improvement that might result from such chastisement, his cruelty, like Franju’s, remains ambivalent and distressing. The problem of a documentary like Blood of the Beasts is that it resists easy classification as a moral statement about cruelty to animals, or humankind ’s survival at the price of the deaths of its fellow creatures, or even as an allegory about the Holocaust; the film may be all of these things, but it is not obviously any of them. Unlike Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955), to which it will be compared later in this essay, Franju’s film resolutely resists easy categorization. It would be far more comfortable for spectators to suffer the pain of Blood of the Beasts if moral reassurance or a lesson learned was a clear and comfortable position when the film had run its course. But because Franju, like Artaud and Luis Buñuel, plays between the spaces of pleasure and pain, the film sounds no morally reassuring note. Indeed, in a manner not dissimilar from Buñuel, Franju’s play at informing, in the usual bland, didactic documentary manner, is rendered ludicrously incongruous by the intense and painful emotions generated by the film. One need think only of the lecture about anopheles mosquitoes in Las Hurdes (Land without Bread, 1932) or the killing equipment in Blood of the Beasts to see the critical, ambivalent, black humor of these filmmakers. While cruelty as an aesthetic device is exceedingly powerful, it also engages many in an ethical dilemma, particularly, as in the case of Blood of the Beasts, when the moral position is not clear and also because documentary films are, generally speaking, associated with useful knowledge, ethics, and moral improvement. Peter Brook, who attempted to re-create Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty in Marat/Sade (1967), finally questioned the morality of the aesthetics of cruelty: “How passive does it make the spectator? Is this contact with our own repressions creative, therapeutic? Is there even a fascist smell in the cult of unreason? Is it a denial of the mind?” (60). Roland Barthes has also noted the ambivalence of “traumatic” images, claiming that “the traumatic photograph . . . is the photograph about which there is nothing to say; one could imagine a kind of law: the more direct the trauma, the more difficult is connotation; or again, the ‘mythological’ effect of a photograph is inversely proportional to its traumatic effect” (30–31). Barthes concludes by noting that both pro- and antiwar newspapers used shock photographs with impunity during the Vietnam War despite what one might think about the powerful, negative sentiments that should be generated by photographs of napalmed children. But as one of Artaud’s...