Excellent, a Must See

Absolutely brilliant

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This documentary was released as an additional feature on DVD of the horror-film classic "Eyes Without A Face", and in itself could be sub-classified in that genre, if only because of the blood and gore and scenes enough to give animal liberationists and the like months of sleepless nightmares. It depicts a day in the life in a Paris abattoir. Mind you, I was horrified yet transfixed at the process by which cattle and sheep are slaughtered and transformed into carcasses which form the basis of our favorite steaks, chops and casseroles, depicted in an objective manner that neither condones nor condemns the methods used in the slaughter or the workers who practice them - they go about their activities casually in a sort of "it's a dirty job but someone has to do it" manner. Franju manages to combine the essential elements of post-war Expressionism with French-style Surrealism, creating a film in which real-life scenes somehow flit through the screen in a dream-like sequence. Picturesque images like the cattle and sheep being driven along and then the next moment being shown dismembered sans heads and hooves are deliberately juxtaposed to create maximum and ultimate impact on the viewer. And to highlight the surrealistic effect even further, an abattoir worker can be heard warbling "La Mer" while streams of blood from the slaughtered beasts flow through the gutters, perhaps a symbolic reference to the waters flowing through the ocean. The documentary ends with a short narration which pretty much summarizes the gist of the film but in a pseudo-lyrical way, it represents an outsider's conception of the slaughterhouse activities, not someone who has actually witnessed the the reality of what actually goes on inside. Watch, if you can, but not on a full stomach.

A film of great and terrible beauty.This short 1949 film by Georges Franju - about 20 minutes or so in length is narrated by Georges Hubert and Nicole Ladmiral and was the winner of the 1950 Grand Prix International du Court Sujet.Filmed in black and white - I doubt it could be watched by many in colour - this film weaves an effective documentary of Paris's various abattoirs out of startling yet non-contrived surrealist images. The scenes of death are presented coldly, without sentimentality but also, in my view, without lessening the suffering of the animals - an indeed the men.

Le Sang des Bêtes is Georges Franju's second film, a grotesque 20 minute documentary detailing a normal day in a Parisian slaughterhouse. This has seriously gotta be some of the most repulsive imagery I've EVER seen captured on film - horses, sheep and cows all casually (and in extreme graphic detail) eviscerated, disemboweled and literally turned inside-out by jolly, whistling butchers.First off we see a gorgeous white stallion brought in and swiftly dispatched via a bolt-pistol to the forehead, then a peg-legged butcher cuts its throat and steaming blood gushes out in waves. As its hooves are being hacked off a narrator nonchalantly explains how they'll probably be used for "women's toiletries". Next up are the cows - no bolt-pistol for them, they just get immediately decapitated then have their limbs sawn off. Even then, the cow's torso still violently convulses. We then see a matronly woman slice open the torso's belly and manually empty its overflowing bowels into the concrete guttering that surrounds the work floor.Intercut with the slaughterhouse scenes is footage of the surrounding areas - seemingly the slums of Paris - which is narrated by a woman. About mid-way through a suitable quote from the poet Charles Baudelaire appears on screen: ''I shall strike you without anger And without hate, like a butcher'' The final slaughterhouse segment focuses on sheep, this section has some of the most surreal visuals - namely a long line of limbless / headless sheep all convulsing at once, like some kinda spastic chorus line. Wow, this is unforgettable - yet undeniably repellent - cinema indeed! 9/10

Luis Buñuel was Georges Franju's favorite filmmaker. Now imagine the shocking eyeball- slicing scene of "Le Chien Andalou" (which, as you may well know, was a dead sheep's eyeball) taken to the goriest consequences: Franju takes his camera to a slaughterhouse in the outskirts of post-war Paris, and the appalling scene from Buñuel & Dali's classic feels like child's game compared to what is shown in this short documentary. Here, we see -- in all horrifying details, truth and gore -- horses, cows, calves and sheep being matter-of-factly, bureaucratically slaughtered by dexterous butchers with axes, knives, hammers, and they don't even stop their smoking or casual whistling while doing their jobs. Among these indelible, nauseating scenes, we see an employee "caressing" a horse's head seconds before fatally puncturing its skull; the Berkeleyish "chorus line ballet" of decapitated sheep's paws; the still convulsive trunk of one decapitated, blood-drained, paw-less calf; and the gallons of steaming blood serving as an "illustration" of Charles Trenet's famous song "La Mer" ("The Sea"), heartily sung by one of the workers. In "Le Sang des Bêtes" you will see probably the most horrifyingly graphic scenes EVER filmed.This film brings uncomfortable thoughts: on the one hand, how most of us -- consumers -- implicitly condone with this methodical, "impersonal" slaughtering of domestic, harmless creatures as long as we don't think very much about how meat, leather, soaps, etc "magically" appear at the supermarket or in a store. On the other hand, we wonder how butchers and other slaughterhouse workers manage to sublimate guilt, compassion and repulsion in a totally matter-of-fact, professional manner (they have to earn a living), proving how human beings can adapt to almost ANY circumstance (surely then-recent WW2 Nazi horror in concentration camps is very clear reference in "Le Sang...:"). "Le Sang..." features as an extra on the DVD that brings Franju's horror masterpiece "Les Yeux Sans Visage" (1959) and it's totally apropos: it's a perfectly macabre pas-de- deux. Impossible not to link the cold-hearted slaughter and skinning of the animals in "Le Sang..." with high-brow-gone-berserk surgeon Pierre Brasseur face-skinning his helpless victims with flawless craftsmanship in "Les Yeux". (Once again, the Nazi concentration camp "scientific" experiments are paralleled).This is compulsory viewing for animal-rights activists and environmentalists. Don't even think of watching "Le Sang des Bêtes" if you're faint-hearted or after a meal; and beware you meat-eaters, this one may turn you in a vegetarian or at least make your next hamburger taste REALLY bad.