The Rhythm of Life as an Opening to Sensation in Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes/Blood of the Beasts (1949)

This paper seeks to understand the pulse in the body and its “Open” receptiveness to the image/world as an opening to sensation in cinema. Georges Franju’s film Le Sang des bêtes (1949) provides a model for the abolition of a spectator who stands apart from the world as a unified subjectivity; the spectator is engaged in an opening to sensation. The sensorial opening in Le Sang des bêtes is derived from the shock of repeated blows, the repetition and “displacement” of body parts into segments, and the micro-movements of the nervous response that travel through the animals in the slaughterhouse.