This movie is slightly infamous for being the type of movie that makes people want to swear off meat--I can't say I relate to this reaction, as I don't understand where people think their meat came from in the first place if not from situations like this. However, Franju is a surrealist and a poet, and there are indeed methods of real horror induced here. The thing is, the movie is so much more interesting on the material level than on the thematic.
Honestly, Franju's narrative "voice", if you'd call it that, is largely ambivalent. Franju records the destruction of the animals from living beasts we recognize in fields almost every step of the way to the packaged bits we buy at a supermarket. Along the way, he notes the personalities of the people in the slaughter house and notes the proximity to the "civilized" world outside (a slightly over-done montage of set pieces and poses). Love, logic, and creativity go on while literal "whole-sale slaughter" and destruction happens right across the river. This movie shares a lot with "Nuit et Brouillard" in that respect.
However, what's more fascinating is the materiality of the beasts: the patterns left behind on their meat when the skin is stripped away, the separate parts removed, muscle, sinew, and bone. Seeing this movie is seeing organic life as almost an object with shared characteristics of furniture: frames, stuffing, and fluff. In black and white cinematography, blood runs like water, and the two are analogous to each other. Even the unconscious spasms of the dead animals become something of a physics event, an equal and opposite reaction--which can be highly disturbing at the same time as it is honestly beautiful.
--PolarisDiB
Honestly, Franju's narrative "voice", if you'd call it that, is largely ambivalent. Franju records the destruction of the animals from living beasts we recognize in fields almost every step of the way to the packaged bits we buy at a supermarket. Along the way, he notes the personalities of the people in the slaughter house and notes the proximity to the "civilized" world outside (a slightly over-done montage of set pieces and poses). Love, logic, and creativity go on while literal "whole-sale slaughter" and destruction happens right across the river. This movie shares a lot with "Nuit et Brouillard" in that respect.
However, what's more fascinating is the materiality of the beasts: the patterns left behind on their meat when the skin is stripped away, the separate parts removed, muscle, sinew, and bone. Seeing this movie is seeing organic life as almost an object with shared characteristics of furniture: frames, stuffing, and fluff. In black and white cinematography, blood runs like water, and the two are analogous to each other. Even the unconscious spasms of the dead animals become something of a physics event, an equal and opposite reaction--which can be highly disturbing at the same time as it is honestly beautiful.
--PolarisDiB