Franju’s three first short productions were commissions and not intended as subversive. As ever, his “realist and therefore surrealist” manner is evocative of silent cinema.
Leaving Domrémy, I made my way past First World War battlefields, up a “sacred hill” [the title of a novel by Maurice Barrès set in the Lorraine], down into the steelmaking valleys to where the coal and iron-ore mines lie. It was a four-day recce.

Franju to M-M Brumagne, in Franju, Impressions et aveux, L’Âge d’Homme, 1977

[En passant par la Lorraine] has an archaeological form, beginning with traces of the region’s older strata and concluding with its contemporary forces et voix. After an array of stone Maids of Lorraine, it passes to a village fête recalling all the agreeable folklore of agricultural France. Amongst these ‘amiable views’ there are, to be sure, disquieting tones: the louring plains of Verdun, for example, whose sky is the colour, not of heroism, but of mud, and the camera’s freezing on the face of the one child who survived the massacre of Oradour, evoking certain territorial readjustments with France’s neighbour. But the film moves steadily from the mediaeval-mythic to the agricultural-folkloric until it settles on an industrial complex, which is a sinew of modern France.

Raymond Durgnat, Franju, Studio Vista, London 1967

“The most dangerous place was the wire-drawing mill”, Franju explains to M.-M. Brumagne. Freddy Buache wrote:
Workers seize an incandescent serpent and their dance bewitches the audience. A down-to-earth voiceover explains that this work requires “towering skill and precision” and that “the merest slip will lead to serious injury”. The latter comment so annoyed the mill-owners that they demanded it be suppressed. Franju, naturally, demurred.

Freddy Buache, Georges Franju, “Premier Plan”, n. 1, September 1959