Speaking of disembowelment and the everyday, I recommend to you this 20 minute French documentary from 1949, though you will have to have a strong stomach to watch it, as it includes the matter of fact slaughter of a horse, a steer, several veal calves and a dozen or so sheep. In fact, the calves are decapitated in order “to keep the meat white.†The director Georges Franju says he made the film in black and white so the viewer would have a forceful “aesthetic response†rather than the convulsive physical response that color would have encouraged. The film depicts the everyday work of a couple of slaughterhouses in Paris where the work is done by hand, with very sharp knives, as though it might be 1249 instead of 1949.
I saw this film first in Michael Renov’s documentary class at USC, and though Renov himself, like most of the other faculty of the cinema program there, might make one recoil from cinema studies entirely, the film made a lasting impression on me, as a powerful and paradoxically lyrical clear-eyed look at ugliness. In that way, this short documentary might be like Elephant. “I will strike you without anger and without hate, like a butcher.†This quotation from Baudelaire underscores the film’s detachment, its refusal to “cut away†from the brutality of the butchering process. The butchers themselves are identified by name as practitioners of a long-standing craft. One of them, Henri, “can split an ox in half while the clock strikes noon.†So he does. Another is an expert with the poleax, a tool that immediately kills a horse by burying itself deep in the brain for only a second or so.
The film emphasizes the location of the slaughterhouses, their relationship to the rest of the city of Paris, the proximity to poor neighborhoods, the repetition of the work, the large numbers of animals required to supply the city. Immense quantities of blood run down the gutters; a constant fog of steam rises from the fresh meat. The film never gets close to a “thesisâ€â€”Franju says he simply wanted to document a truth, to give a situation clarity by placing it into a new unsettling context of lyricism. But, questions will nevertheless come to mind: “Who does your dirty work?†“What old brutalities sustain the complex life of a city?†“How shocking is the everyday?†“What is to distinguish spirit from meat?â€
The short documentary is included on the Criterion Collection disc of Franju’s 1960 horror-suspense film “Eyes Without a Face.†A mad scientist attempts to replace the face his daughter has lost in a horrific car accident with new faces he obtains from young women his loyal assistant-mistress finds adrift in Paris. Like the short documentary this film puts the fantastic events into an elegant, lyrical frame; the most horrific aspects gain power from being presently directly only rarely—the brief glimpses of the daughter’s destroyed face (usually she wears an almost featureless mask, very unsettling in itself) and the photographs of the failed skin grafts, showing the progressive “necrosis of the tissue.†Like the earlier documentary, the movie makes you wonder about the nature of “meatâ€â€”what’s a face, the lynchpin of identity, a couple of ounces? It’s hypnotic and creepy, with a great ending. No victim, no monsters, even the beasts aren’t innocent this time.
(Note: The American distributors of “Eyes Without a Faceâ€â€”probably having not really watched it—changed the title to “The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus†and put it on a double bill with “The Manster†a film about—from what I could tell from the trailer included on the disc—a man who grows a head on his shoulder. Part man, part monster—hence, manster, get it? I would like to find this film, especially since it seems like an important forerunner to both the Rosey Grier/Ray Milland B-movie classic The Thing with Two Heads and the great Bruce Robinson comedy How to Get Ahead in Advertising. )
For some reason, your post reminds me not of daring documentaries or eerie experimental films, but John Woo’s “Face/Off.” If I remember correctly, Travolta takes a comatose Cage’s face in order to do some dastardly work. Then, when he comes out of his coma, Cage takes Travolta’s face. No, wait. It’s vice-versa, right? Travolta is an FBI agent hoping to infiltrate the crime underworld by posing as a comatose Cage. Then…no, wait…Travolta trades film careers with Nicholas Cage. As one career tanks, the other thrives, and vice-versa.
I haven’t seen Franju’s documentary, but I have seen “Eyes Without a Face.” I wasn’t surprised to learn that Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileauin wrote the script (they co-wrote the novel “D’Entre les morts” upon which Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” is based).
Another film to consider is “Silence of the Lambs”–bringing together face/skin-stealing, criminal behavior, flesh, the slaughtering of animals, etc. By the way, face-eating seems to be a preoccupation with a professor here who does forensics. I will go no further.
If anyone is interested, this may prove useful:
http://www.oswestryschool.org.uk/decimus/flesh.htm
Devil’s Rejects also uses the face-skin stealing. Though it’s taken there from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I wouldn’t put it past Rob Zombie to be familiar with Franju. And with the movies of Rosie Grier and later work of Ray Milland.
I’m trying to document a truth right now but it ain’t working.
The French have been watching their own horror films:
Partial face transplant raises ethical concerns By Patricia Reaney
Thu Dec 1, 8:38 AM ET
The world’s first partial face transplant has given hope to people disfigured by burns or accidents but raises psychological and ethical issues for the recipient and donor family, medical experts said on Thursday.
Although face transplants have been technically possible for several years, concerns about the psychological impact, consent and the long-term risk of drugs to prevent the immune system from rejecting the new face have prevented them.
But in a ground-breaking operation on Sunday in the city of Amiens in northern France, a 38-year-old woman who had been savaged by a dog received transplanted tissue, muscles, arteries and veins from a brain-dead donor.
“It is a very exciting breakthrough but we still don’t know whether this is going to have a long-term success,” said Michael Earley, a plastic surgeon at Mater Hospital in Dublin, Ireland.
“It carries a high failure rate, if looked at in terms of other organ transplantation,” he added.
The woman, who had been left without a nose and lips following the attack last May, was said to be in an excellent state, according to the hospital.
Earley said blocked blood vessels pose a danger in the first few days after the surgery. Long-term risks includes the woman’s immune system rejecting the face.
In other organ transplants, rejection is about 10 percent in the first year after surgery and can be 30-50 percent in the next 2-5 years depending on the organ.
PSYCHOLOGICAL CONCERNS
The surgery performed by Jean-Michel Dubernard, a specialist from a hospital in Lyon who has also carried out hand transplants and Bernard Devauchelle from the Amiens hospital, was an elective, or quality of life, operation.
Unlike heart, liver and kidney transplants, it was not life-saving surgery but the woman chose to have it despite the considerable risks.
“There have been objections from psychologists who feel this is uncharted territory and we don’t know how the donor’s family and the recipient’s family will react,” said Earley, a past president of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons.
Stephen Wigmore, chair of the ethics committee of the British Transplantation Society, said computer simulations suggest the facial appearance after the transplant will be a composite of the recipient and the donor.
“For all transplant patients the acceptance that part of their body is not their own is a difficult concept,” he said.
“Another aspect is that the public interest in face transplantation will mean that it is likely that the families of the deceased donor may be exposed to images of the recipient and this is likely to present particular difficulties for them,” he added.
Dr Daniel Sokol, of Imperial College in London, raised the problem of consent.
“Ethically, the main issue is that of informed consent: Did the patient give adequately informed consent to the procedure? Did she understand the risks and implications of the transplant,” he asked, adding there is no reason to suggest she did not.
Earley said the breakthrough is likely to spur other surgical teams, particularly in Britain and the United States, to perform similar operations.
But he doubts there is going to be a rush of people seeking facial transplants, which will benefit mainly burn patients.