A Film Canon

This harrowing short depicts the workings of a Parisian abbatoir with a graphic systematicity that would be unbearable in colour but, with the aid of Marcel Fradetal's exquisite cinematography, and Franju's gift for composition, manages to abstract and aestheticise viscera into a panoply of shades, textures and shapes, albeit not sufficiently to remove a residual horror that culminates at those moments at which skin is reduced to a mere surface, peeled or folded back in a manner that anticipates Eyes Without A Face. It's this supreme vision of uncannily enlivened objects - most exquisite in the spectacle of a partially disembodied cow's heart that continues to beat - that suggests Franju's motivations are more associated with surrealism than with animal liberation, as does the wry contrast between the abbatoir and surrounding suburban sprawl. Despite being accompanied by a sympathetic, even romantic, female narration - in contrast to Franju's own, matter-of-fact descriptions of the abbatoir and its inhabitants - these bucolic, placid spaces are gradually explicated as the result of an analogous process of mechanisation, objectification and, ultimately violence, culminating with a poetic confusion between the trains transporting commuters to the city, and sheep to the abbatoir, as well as with the abbatoir chapel, which is dedicated to St. John, "patron saint of butchers", and constitutes the common denominator between the narrators, literally identified with the abbatoir walls.