Franju cheerfully explains he secret of his lm’s opening. “In ction, fantasy is usually obtained by giving the arti cial (studio decor, etc) the appearance of real- ity. In our lms we set out to restore to documentary realism its actual quality of apparently arti cial decor. We managed it by shooting buildings from directly in front (like the Moulin de Panton) or else we chose houses with sharp pro les (at the Port du Flandre) and avoided any hint of depth… Whether in the business of the barge emerging “in” the wasteland… like a theatre at, or with those trees which look like theatre props, we were constant- ly preoccupied with expressing the plastic character of the decor, and we often wait- ed for several days for the weather to be simultaneously diffuse (misty) and dense in the sky, or else for everything to be lit up with that particular, local colour which strikes one as a freak of the sunlight…”. The violent scenes are no less sensitively observed (although the subject mat- ter is likely to pre-empt the spectator’s conscious attention).”The choice of the month of November for shooting the in- teriors was dictated by the fact that at this season of the year the animals are slaughtered by electric light, and the blood steaming in the glacial cold of the scalding bays allowed us, despite all the technical problems, to compose our im- ages…”.

This unvarying sensitivity, not simply to aesthetics, but to reality, enables a dou- ble image, analogous to that of the home- wasteland, to reappear in the heart of the violence: in Henri Agel’s words, “the or- dering of the dismemberments takes on an almost ritual character, the stunned horse falls in a curtsey, while the killers, bathed in vapours of blood, seem to of- ciate…”.

Raymond Durgnat, Franju, Studio Vista, London 1967