Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers. Les Blank, 1980.
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Edition screened: Included in Criterion Blu-ray set #737 Les Blank: Always for Pleasure, released 2014. English language. Runtime approximately 50 minutes.
Summary: Carcass porn.
Details:
1) First we are shown healthy piglets with their mother, accompanied by subtitles paraphrasing ‘This Little Piggie’. Then we are shown partially prepared (blanched?) piglet carcasses with excessive detail to their intact eyes and ‘smiling’ mouths, again with cutesy subtitles declaring how yummy they is or some such crap, 9:39-11:40.
2) Similar eyeball-and-mouth gore porn during fish preparation, 39:20-39:51.
This project usually does not extend the concept of Violence to Animals to include normal food prep, normal meat cutting, etc. These scenes, however, revel smugly in the appearance of the dead faces and coerce us to identify with the earnest downhometry of it all. Not nearly as abhorrent as the jackassery of Blank’s Cajuncentric features, but few things are.
Criterion indexes two related 2014 documentaries after this title, For the Love of Garlic and Remembering Les.