Spitball Army

watched Jan 6, 2018
spitballarmy’s review published on Letterboxd:

9.0
[blu-ray]

The idyllic outskirts of Paris are juxtaposed with the adjacent slaughterhouses, where horses and cattle are taken to be systematically dismembered and distributed throughout the community (for example, the narrator states, “the fatty scraps will be collected by nuns,” and we are left to wonder for what purpose – soap? candles?). The workmen go about their grotesque jobs dispassionately – even whistling – as if they were shoveling snow, or folding laundry, and then director Franju cuts to a closeup of a young couple in full lip-lock on a bridge – the same bridge, perhaps, that is then used to drive the cattle upon to their demise. The killings are accompanied by the narrator’s matter-of-fact description of the activities (“To keep veal meat white, decapitation is used to drain all blood. The dead animal still twitches, but they’re only involuntary reflexes. The heads are stamped to identify and count the cattle.”), and, in this particular scene, the flayed bodies of the calves are left laying on tables, steaming above the blood-strewn floor like slain angels.

Then, the voice-over clarifies what, perhaps, was the social-message intent of the French filmmaker, in this work created only four years after the Holocaust, as it describes lambs literally, on screen, being led to slaughter: “The others follow obediently, bleating like condemned men who sing yet know their song to be useless.”

This audacious short film really tested the limits of watchability for me, but felt both necessary and courageous. I won’t deny, though, that I did feel like Alex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE with his eyes propped open, as I forced myself to watch it.