Surrealism and the slaughterhouse: art and animals in Lotar’s La Villette and Franju’s Blood of the Beasts

Abstract

In the sixth issue of Georges Bataille’s surrealist magazine Documents, published in 1929, a series of photographs by Eli Lotar documented an abattoir in the La Villette section of Paris. In text that accompanied the series, Bataille described the slaughterhouse as ‘a disturbing convergence of the mysteries of myth and the ominous grandeur typical of those places in which blood flows.’ The photographs chronicled both the banality and the horror of what took place in institutions that had removed the process of killing animals and processing their corpses from human view. Twenty years later, Georges Franju’s film Blood of the Beasts would provide its own exposure of the slaughterhouse, interspersed with quiet scenes of a Paris suburb, at the other end of the surrealist period. This project uses the two surrealist encounters with the slaughterhouse to evaluate the artistic movement’s interpretation of human society’s dependence on violence toward animals.