Shocking Representation

Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film

Adam Lowenstein

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9780231507189
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In this imaginative new work, Adam Lowenstein explores the ways in which a group of groundbreaking horror films engaged the haunting social conflicts left in the wake of World War II, Hiroshima, and the Vietnam War. Lowenstein centers Shocking Representation around readings of films by Georges Franju, Michael Powell, Shindo Kaneto, Wes Craven, and David Cronenberg. He shows that through allegorical representations these directors' films confronted and challenged comforting historical narratives and notions of national identity intended to soothe public anxieties in the aftermath of national traumas.

Borrowing elements from art cinema and the horror genre, these directors disrupted the boundaries between high and low cinema. Lowenstein contrasts their works, often dismissed by contemporary critics, with the films of acclaimed "New Wave" directors in France, England, Japan, and the United States. He argues that these "New Wave" films, which were embraced as both art and national cinema, often upheld conventional ideas of nation, history, gender, and class questioned by the horror films. By fusing film studies with the emerging field of trauma studies, and drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Adam Lowenstein offers a bold reassessment of the modern horror film and the idea of national cinema.

CHAPTER 1: FRANCE

HISTORY WITHOUT A FACE

Surrealism, Modernity, and the Holocaust
in the Cinema of Georges Franju

And wiping off the tears of blood that furrowed his cheeks, he turned away from the girl to hide from her the death of the Jewish people, which was written clearly, he knew, in the flesh of his face.

—André Schwarz-Bart¹

Franju does not tremble on the brink. He dives in. He leads us implacably on to the very limits of what our nerves can stand.

—Jean Cocteau²

The trouble with [director Henri-Georges] Clouzot is that he tries to knock the audience’s head off. That’s wrong; you should twist it off.

—Georges Franju³

When Georges Franju died in 1987, he felt bitterly dissatisfied with the spotty critical reception of his film career. Perhaps some of this neglect can be attributed to his allegedly volatile personality—at least one critic has described his reputation as “the Céline of conversationalists, a man of ‘torrential vehemence’ spitting out excremental expletives like a tracer-stream of olive pits.”⁴ But Franju’s shadowy presence in film history probably has more to do with a remarkably multifaceted career that resists convenient categorization into any of its individual components: cofounder (with Henri Langlois) of the Cinémathèque Française (1937), secretary-general of the Institut de Cinématographie Scientifique (1944–1954), documentarist, fiction filmmaker, Left Bank director, proto-New Wavist, and Surrealist heir. This chapter seeks to add yet another label to this unwieldy list: pioneer of the modern horror film as a mode of engagement with traumatic history.

By examining the development of an allegorical, horror-inflected aesthetic in Franju’s two most significant films, Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949) and Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960),⁵ I hope not only to shed light on a career that has not received the recognition it deserves, but to situate Franju alongside questions of modernity and national cinema in contradistinction from the contemporaneous French New Wave. I will argue that it is through a shocking, allegorical encounter with historical trauma that a synthesis of Franju’s disparate influences occurs, and that his crucial contribution to the modern horror film begins to take shape. In order to trace the formation of Franju’s aesthetic, we must first turn to Surrealism.

SURREALISM, MODERNITY, AND BLOOD OF THE BEASTS

Franju’s professional awakening to cinema occurred while under the spell of Surrealism, and the movement’s inspiration marks his entire career. Among the films Henri Langlois introduced him to when they met in 1934 were Luis Buñuel’s two Surrealist cinema milestones Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) and L’Age d’or (The Golden Age, 1930), and the very first Langlois/Franju ciné-club program was fittingly entitled “Le Cinéma Fantastique.”⁶ Franju’s work as a film archivist nurtured his deep admiration for certain early filmmakers, notably Surrealist favorites Louis Feuillade and Georges Méliès. Franju knew Méliès personally and appointed him first curator of the Cinémathèque Française in 1937. He paid tribute to him in the documentary Le Grand Méliès (1952), and did the same for Feuillade in the feature Judex (1963). At one point, Franju even planned to give a lecture with André Breton himself “on those fragments of bad films which correspond to Surrealist notions.”⁷

But what kind of Surrealism actually made its way into Franju’s film practice? Franju’s Surrealism has little to do with the popular image of Surrealism as an art movement characterized by romantic investments in psychic automatism, dreams, and liberating love. As early as 1929, Walter Benjamin was calling for the “dissection” of this “romantic dummy” version of Surrealism in order to expose what is “usable inside”: “the cult of evil as political device.”⁸

Benjamin’s metaphor of dissection seems especially well-chosen, because the iconoclastic forces within Surrealism which he identifies with a “cult of evil” trace their origins to the very real ruptured bodies of World War I. Many of the Surrealists served in the Great War, and they all lived in a postwar environment haunted by the presence of wounded survivors (numbering up to 1,100,000 in France alone).⁹ Surrealist art’s bizarre, tormented refigurations of the human body should not stand merely as abstract explorations of the unconscious; they also respond to the social presence of horribly maimed veterans.¹⁰ The Surrealists registered the bitter end of illusions of modernity as a meaningful evolution of technology—the innovations in gas, air, and artillery warfare only resulted in unprecedented mass destruction and bodily disintegration. Faith in assumptions of modernity’s progress were replaced with confusion, irony, or pessimism.¹¹ Benjamin reflects this dramatic change in worldview when he praises Surrealism’s “pessimism all along the line,” where “unlimited trust” can only be placed (sarcastically) in “I. G. Farben and the peaceful perfection of the air force.”¹² For Benjamin, Surrealism’s political value as a “cult of evil” lies in its ability to “disinfect and isolate against all moralizing dilettantism” (characteristic of left-wing bourgeois optimism and “sentiment”) through the “profane illumination” of dialectical materialism.¹³ In other words, Surrealism might be better understood as a violent, embodied assault on the social structures propping up modernity, rather than a romantic retreat within the self.

Benjamin’s support of Surrealism hinges on its potential for a “profane illumination” of modernity, but he also criticizes the movement for its failure to realize this potential. He regards Surrealism’s attraction to a romantic aesthetic of “surprise” an abandonment of any capacity for radical negativity:

The aesthetic of the painter, the poet, en état de surprise, of art as the reaction of one surprised, is enmeshed in a number of pernicious romantic prejudices…. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optics that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.¹⁴

Benjamin locates the origin of the flawed Surrealist aesthetic of surprise in Apollinaire, and sets it against a more profane aesthetic of “hatred” running through Rimbaud and Poe.¹⁵ Benjamin’s commentary seems prescient of a decisive break within Surrealism that would occur one year later when Breton denounces Georges Bataille as “wallow[ing] in impurities” and “wish[ing] only to consider in the world that which is vilest, most discouraging, and most corrupted.”¹⁶ If we imagine this split in Benjamin’s terms of surprise and hatred, then Breton would fall on the side of the former, and Bataille on the latter.¹⁷ Blood of the Beasts testifies to Franju’s investment in an “impure,” Bataillean Surrealism, and thus also to a Benjaminian dialectical optics.

Bataille, like Franju, admired Un Chien andalou. Bataille’s reaction to the film might well serve as a blueprint for the creative impulse behind Blood of the Beasts: “How then can one not see to what extent horror becomes fascinating, and how it alone is brutal enough to break everything that stifles?”¹⁸ The horror of Franju’s film is truly brutal, as it chronicles the activities of Paris slaughterhouses (located chiefly in the suburb of La Villette) in unflinching, transfixed clinical detail. Franju’s brutality seems characterized by a rage aimed at “breaking all that stifles,” of engendering a fierce new way of seeing for his audience. Franju’s frustration with the weakness of the human eye echoes Bataille’s: “It’s the bad combination, it’s the wrong synthesis, constantly made by the eye as it looks around, that stops us seeing everything as strange.”¹⁹

Franju’s mission of restoring the strange or other as primary in perception mirrors the strategy behind Bataille’s journal Documents (1929–30), which utilizes the techniques of juxtaposition and collage to decenter cultural standards of high and low, primitive and modern, known and unknown. The sixth issue of Documents (November 1929) sets critical dictionary definitions against enlarged microscopic views of crustaceans, and stills of dance numbers from Fox Follies.²⁰ Also included are Eli Lotar’s slaughterhouse photographs from La Villette, with their emphasis on dismembered limbs, blood-soaked floors, and workers busy at their craft. Lotar’s photographs seem eerily like outtakes from the film Franju would make twenty years later. In fact, the adjoining microscopic photographs are by the physician and Surrealist filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who would work with Franju at the Institut de Cinématographie Scientifique and contribute the commentary to Blood of the Beasts.²¹ Bataille’s own dictionary definition of “Abattoir” (also included in this issue) criticizes those who refuse to acknowledge the sense of the sacred in slaughterhouses, those “fine folk who have reached the point of not being able to stand their own unseemliness” and have ensured that “the slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined like a boat with cholera aboard.”²²

A haunting image from Blood of the Beasts brings to life Bataille’s metaphor of the abattoir as a cursed ship.²³ Near the documentary’s conclusion, as we make the transition between the slaughterhouse and the outlying districts of Paris that open the film, an extreme long shot lingers on a barge passing through a landscape of barren shore and gray sky. As the ship floats by slowly from left to right, we see a lone man at the bow, a clothesline with sheets rustling in the wind across the vessel’s bridge, and finally the aft with its heavy machinery that resembles artillery. This shot fades out, and the subsequent shot reveals a view of the canal that borders the abattoir and the bridge where we’ve seen the cattle and sheep cross on their way to slaughter. The second shot discloses what the first shot remarkably conceals—that the barge is traveling on water at all. Franju composes the frame in such a manner that the barge, like a ghost ship, seems to trace an unnatural path between land and sky, with no water visible. The director notes that this unsettling spectacle was very deliberately constructed:

I waited several days, came back over a period of several weeks to get a barge going through a wasteland…. It’s therefore a very artificial way of seeing…. But I maintain that a barge which cuts a wasteland in half without being able to see the water is much more … of a barge than a barge.²⁴

When this “artificial way of seeing” is paired with the specific context of the second shot, Franju’s disorientation of the viewer takes on deeper meaning. He visually links this ghost ship not only with the abattoir, but with the bridge that connects the slaughterhouse and the market, and thus also with the passing sheep which have been described by the narrator as “condemned men” who “will not hear the gates of their prison close, nor the Paris-Villette train which pierces the pastoral night to gather the victims for tomorrow.” The voice-over narration also states that the sheep are “led by the ‘traitor’ among them, who knows the way and whose life will be spared.”

In this sense, I argue that the “barge is more than a barge” because it undermines its own everyday appearance and forces a reckoning with the disturbing historical events that haunt it: the long shadows of World War II, specifically the German Occupation and the Holocaust. Franju’s “artificial way of seeing” stunningly reminds us that the barge is impregnated with the strange and painful, with the substance of death, war, deportation, concentration camps, and “traitorous” collaborationist guilt. If Franju brings Bataille’s ship into shore, then its cargo is not finally cholera, but vision—a radically altered vision that restores unseemliness to a society ordered by the anesthetizing of historical trauma.

Siegfried Kracauer touches briefly but powerfully on the allegorical and historical dimensions of Franju’s vision in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960). The sole passage in the book’s published version that speaks explicitly about the Holocaust juxtaposes the “rows of calves’ heads” in Blood of the Beasts with “the litter of tortured human bodies” in films about Nazi concentration camps. Kracauer links these images because they both “beckon the spectator to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too dreadful to be beheld in reality.”²⁵ Kracauer includes this observation in a subsection entitled “The Head of the Medusa,” where he remarks that Perseus’s greatest feat was not the actual beheading of Medusa, but his courageous look at her reflection in his shield. In Kracauer’s reflective surface, Franju’s “way of seeing” acquires the power of a present-day reckoning with traumatic history. As Kracauer’s formulation suggests, Blood of the Beasts insists on disclosing connections between everyday life and the horrors of history. But Kracauer does not fully address the effects of displacement in this dynamic, or the temporal rift between past history and contemporary existence. For this we must return to Benjamin’s notions of allegory and dialectical optics, where the past and present collide.²⁶

Benjamin’s dialectical optics describe a profane Surrealist mode of perception that “perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.” One way in which Surrealism unmasks this dialectical face of reality, according to Benjamin, is by dwelling on “the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded.’”²⁷ Benjamin’s catalog of the outmoded captures Surrealism’s well-known affection for enigmatic objects seemingly unhinged in time: “the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, … grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them.” These outmoded objects allow “the substitution of a political” for a narrowly historicist “view of the past.”²⁸ How might we imagine the effects of such a substitution? The outmoded transforms cultural decay into political significance by “challeng[ing] this [bourgeois] culture with its own forfeited dreams, test[ing] it against its own compromised values of political emancipation, technological progress, cultural access, and the like.”²⁹ A Surrealist concentration on the outmoded aims to disturb capitalist culture’s mythic assumptions of a rationalized, evolving history (and modernity) by provoking the interpenetration of past and present. But as Benjamin intimates, the recovery of this interpenetration depends on the catalyzing force of horror (Surrealism at its most profane), and on a shocking recognition of history’s horrors within the fabric of the everyday.

Blood of the Beasts opens with a dreamlike display of the outmoded. The film does not take us immediately to the abattoir, but to the outskirts of Paris. Here we observe a kaleidoscope of wildly c...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Allegorical Moment
• Chapter 1. France: History Without a Face: Surrealism, Modernity, and the Holocaust in the Cinema of Georges Franju
• Chapter 2. Britain: “Direct Emotional Realism”: The People’s War, Classlessness, and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom
• Chapter 3. Japan: Unmasking Hiroshima: Demons, Human Beings, and Shindo Kaneto’s Onibaba
• Chapter 4. United States: “Only a Movie”: Specters of Vietnam in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left
• Chapter 5. Canada: Trauma and Nation Made Flesh: David Cronenberg and the Foundations of the Allegorical Moment
• Afterword: 9/11/01, 8/6/45, Ground Zero
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index