My Duck Is Dead

A bourgeois family, who is harassed and humiliated, ruins their young maids without pay for several years.

 Les Abysses is a 1963 French film directed by Nikos Papatakis. It was entered into the 1963 Cannes Film Festival. A violent and surrealistic mixture of farce and social commentary, its story was inspired by the real-life case of the Papin sisters.

André Malraux imposed the showing of this film at the Cannes Film Festival 1963, after a public declaration of support from a large number of French intellectuals and artists, amidst a major uproar and social criticism. The followers of the Surrealism movement took the Papin sisters case as paradigm of class revolt, and a signal that a social revolution was already taking place. Romantics saw in these grisly murders the emergence of absolute Evil, like Lautréamont in `Les Chants de Maldoror'. Philosophers engaged in the socialist movement wrote passionate texts in defence of those maids, like Jean-Paul Sartre in `Le Mur', and Simone de Beauvoir in `La Force de l'âge'. Jacques Lacan, in `Écrits', will develop his first scientific essay on psicoanalysis, following the Papin criminal case. Jean Genet wrote `Les Bonnes' (English translation, `The Maids') pages that are still considered a must on the sombre aspects of humanity, and creating a sacrificial arena where death is preceded by its simulation - something that movie director elevated to the title of his film, `La Cérémonie'.