Dry Wood. Les Blank and Maureen Gosling, 1973.
😿😿😿😿
Edition screened: Included in Criterion Blu-ray set #737 Les Blank: Always for Pleasure, released 2014. English language with some clarifying English subtitles. Runtime approximately 37 minutes.
Summary: Idiotic drunken brutality to animals
Details:
1) The first minute of the film is a rooster being mis-handled and chased as part of Mardi Gras hijinks.
2) We get to see a chicken killed in real time by the one-handed neck-twirl method, 2:30-2:40. Thanks for that.
3) Brutal killing of a snapping turtle, followed, of course, by gay clowning around with its broken body, 23:40-24:15.
4) An adult pig is shot (stunned) point blank between the eyes, in front of its family, then brutally killed by teenagers with the world’s dullest knife as it twitches in agony, 24:40-25:45.
5) This pig and quite a few others are hacked up with an axe and butchered at a festive pig-hackin’ soirée, through 29:50.
6) AGAIN with the cans of Schlitz beer … while a man has a child assist in cutting off the pig’s snout with a hack saw, 30:46. I kid you not.
7) Makin’ sausage. Laughter and guts galore, along with the undeniable hilarity of inflating intestines, 32:50-34:10.
A nice follow-up to 1971’s Spend It All, Blank here offers more rumination on the serene beauty of rural Cajun life. I’m not interested in asking what the hell is wrong with these people. That’s a very complicated and unfair question that should inquire about a larger social structure of enforced poverty, racial murder and violence, poor education, and corporate exploitation of rural challenges. But I do question what is wrong with hyper-educated white brats who imitate mud-and-cracklins culture as a weekend diversion, who clumsily emulate this gory entrails-swinging method of indulging repressed sexual tendencies, and I question Criterion and our film-buying public for celebrating these films as wonderful documents of a time gone by. Go buy. bye bye.
Criterion includes a making-of documentary ironically titled A Cultural Celebration.