FILM301: INTRO TO CINÉMA DU OFFAL
ANDREW TRUONG ON CULT FILMS, CULT FOOD, AND MOVIES HE NEVER WANTS TO WATCH EVER AGAIN
On a recent trip to Madrid, I went to dinner with a couple friends at Alimentacion Quiroga, a traditional Spanish restaurant. On the menu was Callos a la Madrileña, a tripe stew that also includes chorizo, morcilla (blood sausage), chunks of pig feet, and fried jamón. It’s a simple dish, with only onions, garlic, and paprika providing non-porcine flavors. My dining partners warned me that they didn’t usually like tripe, but on account of my enthusiasm, they would give it a try.
A spoonful of callos did not change their minds about tripe, and I ended up eating a majority of the plate. This was not a problem. I loved the melty texture of the tripe, chewy like squid but unctuous like beef, earned by the hours spent braising in a pot. The assorted sausages were just a bonus. I plan on making callos at home as soon as I figure out who will eat it with me.
Just as offal is off-putting to many diners while also inspiring cultlike fervor among its devotees, there is a certain kind of movie that is beloved by sickos but repellent to most viewers. This otherwise diffuse category, spanning multiple decades and genres, could be canonized as the cinéma du offal1. They offer singular visions of humanity at its most demented, usually infused with an unctuous sense of dread.
The ur-directors of offal movies have to be the weirdo Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch), particularly with late-career work like The Shrouds and Inland Empire. But this classification is not limited to body horror and off-kilter vibes. John Cassavetes was a prime practitioner of the cinéma du offal, and what his films lack in literal viscera are more than made up for with the emotional guts spilled on screen. I think of the protracted bar scene in Husbands, where three grief-stricken, beer-soaked friends cajole and insult their fellow patrons during a spontaneous singing competition. It goes on for twenty minutes, well past the point of comfort. I once watched A Woman Under the Influence with a roommate and she left the room after thirty minutes.
The intensity of the cinéma du offal, like its culinary equivalent, exists on a sliding scale. Just as you could put a plate of grilled, marinated beef heart in front of most diners without them really batting an eye, Mulholland Drive is loved widely enough to come in second place on that New York Times list of the best movies of the 21st century. On the other end of the spectrum is Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. It’s the andouillette of movies, driving away even some of offal’s most ardent adherents. (Personally I find both to be awful, pun intended.)
Other titles in the canon: In the Cut, Beau is Afraid, Mother!, Her Smell. On the grislier side of things, I Saw the Devil and Come and See should be noted for their relatively solemn explorations of human extremity. Some of these movies are critically acclaimed but largely underseen by the general public; others draw wildly varying opinions.
To borrow the name of another potential entry, these films are Totally Fucked Up, and not in a fun way. It’s important to note what films are weird but not offal. Rocky Horror and Cannibal Holocaust and Showgirls are deservedly cult classics, but too exuberantly do they display their lack of taste. That’s not what offal is about.
Why do tripe and its fellow malcontents have such a hold on us adventurous eaters? What draws degenerate cinephiles to movies that drive others away? Maybe we are just trying to be superior to the normies, impressing no one but ourselves. But I like to think that we’re in it for reasons beyond the performative. Eating organs is a way to pay respect to the whole animal, a reminder that we largely share the same parts as the cows and pigs and sheep we eat.
The cinéma du offal puts the entirety of the human experience on display, guts and all. There are times when this brings perverse pleasure. I remember cackling in delight during some of the more graphic scenes in Titane, while the rest of the audience was squealing in disgust. This is the offal experience. But not every film, and not every dish, is such a jubilant encounter.
In my mind, the apotheosis of this collection of films is Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat’s dark tale of adolescent desire. At the onset of their summer holiday, two sisters—one slim, one overweight—discuss their opposing philosophies on how they want to lose their virginities. Both are disposed of by the film’s end, in more ways than one, and under very different circumstances. The more graphic scenes are presented with a startling frankness, never veering into titillation. They are almost unbearable to witness but I couldn’t look away. It is a brilliant film that I never want to watch again. This too can be the offal experience.
Andrew Truong is a film critic and pop-up chef. Most of his writing can be found on his newsletter Buttered Popcorn, with bylines at Reverse Shot and 4R Press. He lives in New York.
A WORD FROM THE EDITOR:
This is an idea so good I wish I came up with it myself. Andrew hit the nail right on the head and out of the park with this one. Cinéma du offal! I would take that class in a heartbeat. I’ve long been a fan, but I could never find the right words for this oft-derided category of film. In my family we used to call them “Mark Movies”, after my uncle Mark, whose idea of a good time is a double feature of Eraserhead and Crash, the Cronenberg one, not the Oscar winner. Bless him. He’s probably the reason I love those films too.
I used to seek these movies out but lately I just come across them. More than a decade ago I huddled into a common room at the University of Hong Kong and pressed play on Srđan Spasojević’s A Serbian Film with a group of friends. We didn’t know exactly what we were in store for but we suspected the worst and got it. I have fond memories of that screening, both the films soundtrack and the opening scene are burned into my mind, but the rest of it? I could never fucking watch that movie again and can’t in good conscience recommend it, no matter how astute the political commentary may be. If you don’t know what it’s about, don’t look it up. Watching that movie was like the time I ordered the offal medley at Ristorante Consorzio in Torino, only to have them bring out a plate of veal brain ceviche and grilled cow vagina. We knew it was gonna be wild, but we didn’t think it was gonna be grilled cow vagina. Truthfully, that sounds a lot weirder than it actually was, I would order it again, but A Serbian Film is more fucked up than you can really imagine. I won’t utter the films most famous quote, though it rings in my head as I type this.
After years of abusing my tastebuds I’m desensitized to most extremes in film and food, but I swear to god the receptors still function. I can tell the difference between good tripe and bad. I can spy a mere provocateur in the midst of true offal connoisseurs. I live for this shit! Like Vin Diesel as Xander Cage in XXX. My tastes often veer into the trashy offal-by-way-of-hotdog territory too. Just bad for badness’ sake.
How does anyone know what they really like if they’re not willing to try it all? How do you know what you really hate if you hate anything off-kilter off top?
I get it, some movies are downright unpleasant to watch. Life is unpleasant enough already. And while I do believe unpleasantness is a viable film technique, that’s not what most people go to movies, or restaurants, for. But the chewy texture of tripe has a value too. As does the iron-rich flavor of kidney. One person’s unpleasant is another person’s cult classic. Cinéma du offal freaks like me are generally looking for something more honest than a blockbuster. Calf brain on a plate, for instance.
As it turns out, John Cassavetes’ Opening Night is screening at the Slovenian Film Archive later and I’m trying to decided if I’m in the mood for 144 minutes of offal on a Tuesday evening.2 I generally, usually, always am. My girlfriend hates me for it. Two weeks ago I made her watch Takashi Miike’s Audition, which is almost boring until you get to the torture scene. She was about to fall asleep when the piano wire came out. No more freaky Japanese movies, she said as the credits rolled. Thankfully, every country has their own version of tripe. Andrew mentioned I Saw the Devil, which is a movie I saw at TIFF in 2010 with the director Kim Jee-woon in attendance. It’s about serial killers in a way no other movie is about serial killers. It’s graphic. It’s funny, too. In the moment I was blown away, but every time I’ve tried watching it since, I’ve never gotten past the half hour mark. It’s an experience best had, enjoyed, and left to be. Kind of like the time I ate stuffed camel spleen in Marrakech.
Off the top of my head, my favorite cinéma du offal entry of the last ten years is Lynn Ramsey’s You Were Never Really Here. Even Joaquin Pheonix couldn’t make that film palatable to a general audience. Not that it’s truly abrasive, it just explores something hideous that most well-adjusted adults don’t want to reckon with. Kind of like the bitter taste of bile used in papaitan, a llocano soup containing all four stomachs of the cow3. I hear Ramsey’s new film, Die, My Love, is even more caustic than her last. It just got a D+ on Cinema Score! Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman falling apart! Psychosis! That’s prime offal material, baby. My girlfriend and I have tickets front row and center this Friday night. It’s our anniversary and this is how we’re choosing to to spend it. A year ago, on our very first date, we saw David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds and shared a plate of beef tongue carpaccio. Insufferable, I know. But even degenerate cinephiles like me enjoy a romantic comedy from time to time.
-JAKE
The French word for offal is “l’abats” but I’m riffing on the term “cinéma du look,” which was used to describe the works of Jean-Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson, and Leos Carax.
Reader, I went. It’s Gena Rowland for god sake!
A gorgeous piece on this dish is forthcoming in GUTS #1, written by Raymond Aquino Macapagal.
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following up on Jake's comment: Die, My Love is prime cinéma du offal.