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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Breton, “Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism,” 103–4.

2. Breton, “First Manifesto of Surrealism.”

3. Benjamin, Illuminations, 84.

4. Quoted in Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred, 42.

5. Breton, Arcanum 17, 44.

6. Breton, “Caught in the Act,” 129.

7. Quoted in Parkinson, “Emotional Fusion with the Animal Kingdom,” 265.

8. Callois, “The Praying Mantis,” 69.

9. Strom, The Animal Surreal, 26.

10. Werner Spies, Surrealism and Its Age, 13, 16–17.

11. Strom, The Animal Surreal, 31–32.

12. Roberts, “The Ecological Imperative,” 220. See also Jaguer, Les Mystères de la Chambre Noire.

13. Conley, “Surrealism, Ethnography, and the Animal-Human,” 1.

14. Spies, Surrealism and Its Age, 107. For more on Bataille, see Hussey, Inner Scar; Kendall, Georges Bataille; and Surya, Georges Bataille.

15. Bataille quoted in Strom, The Animal Surreal, 60, 144. In his later Erotism (1961), he similarly noted that ‘in the world today only animals can be treated as things. A man can do whatever he likes with them; he is accountable to no-one. He may really be aware that the beast he strikes down is not so very different from himself. But even while he admits the similarity, his furtive act of recognition is immediately contradicted by a fundamental and silent denial.’ Bataille, Erotism, 150.

16. Ades and Bradley, “Introduction,” 11–13; Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 207; Rumold, “Archeo-logies of Modernity in ‘Transition’ and ‘Documents’ 1929/30,” 49–50; and Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 178.

17. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” 550–2.

18. Warehime, “‘Vision sauvage’ and Images of Culture,” 39.

19. Leiris, “De Bataille l’impossible a l’impossible Documents,” 689.

20. Ades and Bradley, “Introduction,” 11, 14.

21. Quoted in Strom, The Animal Surreal, 126.

22. Quoted in Strom, The Animal Surreal, 127.

23. Warehime, “Vision sauvage,” 40; and “Aux abbatoirs de La Villette, 1929.”

24. Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 130–1. See also Amao, Eli Lotar et le mouvement des images.

25. Walker, “Phantom Africa,” 648–9; and Lastra, “Why Is This Absurd Picture Here?” 212.

26. Philipp, “L’approvisionnement de Paris en viande et la logistique ferroviaire,” 113–141; and Damien, “De l’horreur du sang à l’insoutenable souffrance animale,” 52–68.

27. Noys, Georges Bataille, 24.

28. Bataille refers here to William Seabrook’s The Magic Island, 1929, a travelogue of the author’s time in Haiti observing voodoo and witchcraft. It was in the tale that he first introduced the concept of zombies to the western world.

29. Bataille, “Abattoir,” 329.

30. “Aux abattoirs de La Villette, 1929”; and Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 127. See also Krauss and Livingston, L’amour Fou, 69, 175; and Bois, “Abattoir,” 43–46.

31. Fox-Film, “Fox Follies,” 344.

32. Lastra, “Why Is This Absurd Picture Here?” 192.

33. Ryder quoted in Corman and Calling, “‘Nailing Descartes to the Wall’ by Propagandhi,” 36–37, 42. Singer concurred, seeing speciesism as ‘a prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interest of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species,’ and argued that it could only be properly understood in relation to other dispossessions like sexism and racism. Singer, Animal Liberation, 7.

34. Lotar’s abattoir photographs were also reprinted in VU, L’Art vivant. Cox, “Sacrifice,” 112; Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 134–5; and Isotani, “Arts et Métiers PHOTO-Graphiques,” 99.

35. Ades, “Surrealism,” 68.

36. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 4; and Strom, The Animal Surreal, 14.

37. Cox, “Sacrifice,” 112.

38. Lusty, “Eli Lotar’s Para-urban Visions,” 87, 90.

39. Or, in the words of Dali, “Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography”; Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image, 5, 9, 162–3; and Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 11, 23, Bazin quoted in Walker, 5; Dali quoted in Walker, 21.

40. Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 88; and Isotani, “Arts et Métiers PHOTO-Graphiques,” 2, 83–84.

41. Sontag, On Photography, 51–58. See also Hall-Duncan, Photographic Surrealism; and Bate, Photography and Surrealism.

42. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 289. There is obviously much more that could be said about bureaucracy and banality and its relationship to violence, particularly through the lens established by Arendt. See, for example, Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” 17–48.

43. Roberts, Photography and Its Violations, 5, 53.

44. Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 114–5.

45. Bataille, “The Deviations of Nature,” 53–56.

46. Warehime, “Vision sauvage,” 42; Bois, “Abattoir,” 47.

47. Bataille, “Le Gros Orteil,” 297–302; and Rumold, “Archeo-logies of Modernity,” 57.

48. Warehime, “Vision sauvage,” 42.

49. Warehime, “Vision sauvage,” 43, 45.

50. Einstein, “Rossignol,” 117–8; and Rumold, “Archeo-logies of Modernity,” 54.

51. Einstein, “André Masson, Étude Ethnologique,” 93–105.

52. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 75–76.

53. Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 10.

54. Radcliffe-Brown, “The Sociological Theory of Totemism,” 122.

55. Borneman, “Race, Ethnicity, Species, Breed,” 48.

56. Einstein, “André Masson,” 100.

57. Levi-Strauss, Totemism, 89.

58. Rumold, “Archeo-logies of Modernity,” 56.

59. Cox, “Sacrifice,” 106.

60. Beard, “Introduction,” 22–23, 37–38. As André Breton explained, ‘The magnificent discoveries of Freud offer an opportune enlightenment, a startling revelation of the depths of the abyss opened by this abandonment of logical thought and by suspicion as to the fidelity of sensorial testimony.’ Breton, “Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism,” 102.

61. Anderson, “The Beast Within,” 308–9.

62. Anderson, “Charles Bonnet’s Taxonomy and Chain of Being,” 45–58; and Sibley, Alexander Pope’s Prestige in America, 23.

63. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859.

64. Mullin, “Mirrors and Windows,” 206–7.

65. Barr, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, 61.

66. Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism.”

67. Cronin, Art for Animals, 92–93.

68. Cronin, Art for Animals, 95.

69. Rowley, “Slaughter House Reform,” 49.

70. Cartier-Bresson visited La Villette in 1932, but only one of the images he took there remains. Centre Pompidou, La Subversion des images, 260–1, 263; and Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 136.

71. Ray, La photographie n’est pas l’art.

72. Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, who used the pseudonym Wols, was a German national working predominantly in Paris. Pompidou, La Subversion des images, 262, 264–5.

73. Walker, ‘Phantom Africa,’ 649; and Pompidou, La Subversion des images, 255.

74. Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 134.

75. Richardson, ‘Surrealism and Film,’ 99.

76. Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 20; and Walker, “Phantom Africa,” 648–9.

77. Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 20.

78. See Ince, Georges Franju.

79. Desnos, “Fantômas, Les Vampires, Les Mystères de New York,” 153.

80. Breton, “First Manifesto of Surrealism.”

81. Finkelstein, The Screen in Surrealist Art and Thought, 1–3. For more on Surrealism in cinema, see Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema.

82. Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 20. See also Lowenstein, “Films Without a Face,” 37–58.

83. Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 21; and Sloniowski, “‘It Was an Atrocious Film,’” 160–175.

84. Bataille, “Abattoir,” 329; and Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 20.

85. Franju, Le Sang des bêtes.

86. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 306.

87. Including nonhuman animals in discussions of genocide and holocaust has a contentious history. While the term ‘holocaust’ was used prior to World War II — and comes from the ancient Greek holocaustos, meaning ‘to burn a dead animal’—it has come almost uniformly to be associated with the Nazi mass murder of European Jews. Kolozova, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals, 110–1. ‘Genocide’ was created specifically in reference to that mass murder but was intended to be able to broaden its scope to other instances of such killings. Both have historically been associated solely with human groups. Still, ‘the use of Holocaust analogies in the context of animal rights and environmentalism is a widespread practice,’ and one that has proven problematic for two principal reasons. Buettner, Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe, 106. First, human trauma associated with the comparative event is still lived by those who experienced it or whose ancestors experienced it, and that human ability to experience historical trauma creates an important sensitivity on one side of the comparison. Second, the use of such comparisons has been applied inconsistently, often without a considered understanding of that use. The debates surrounding such terminology are significant, but what they don’t do is situate historically the relationship of those terms to the events the terms originally described. The physical act of animal confinement and killing on an institutionalized scale happened in similar form and function to — and simultaneous to — acts against human populations in World War II that drove specific responses to eliminate such behavior.

88. See, for example, Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.

89. Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 216.

90. Franju, Les Yeux sans visage. See also Hawkins, Cutting Edge.

91. See Cahill, Zoological Surrealism.

92. Strom, The Animal Surreal, 37, 39, 41, 42, 102.

93. Garner and Okuleye, The Oxford Group and the Emergence of Animal Rights, 79–80.

94. Strom, The Animal Surreal, 8, 85.

95. Conley, Surrealist Ghostliness.

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Notes on contributors

Thomas Aiello

Thomas Aiello is a professor of history and Africana studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of more than twenty books on American history. He holds PhDs in history and anthrozoology, and he also writes about the relationship between humans and animals, in particular the role of speciesism and human supremacy in creating vulnerabilities for nonhuman animals. He serves on the board of the Animals and Society Institute, the largest animal studies think tank in the United States. Learn more at www.thomasaiellobooks.com.