Les yeux sans visage
Eyes Without a Face
Georges Franju
1960
Many European production companies often have their eyes on the world market and as a result care was often taken to see that the films made there would be marketable. Britain worried about animal cruelty. Germans didn’t want the “mad doctor” in films. Americans were worried about sex and violence. So although the film made it through the European censors, the reviews were mixed going from praise to disgust.
Director Georges Franju studied set design, and did some work creating backdrops. He came to know Henri Langlois, a French archivist who was to become involved with film preservation, and who is often credited with having developed the idea of Auteur theory. The two were involved with film clubs and publications about film. He is better known for his work of the Cinematheque Française in 1937--France's most famous and important film archive.
He was involved with documentary film and became known for Le sang des bêtes (1949), a film that deals with a quiet “suburb” of Paris which has a slaughter house. The film looks at the kind of pleasant countryside and compares it with what is going on in the slaughter house.
Two other films were commissioned byt the government were the 1950 film En Passant par la Lorraine (Passing By the Lorraine) and Hôtel des Invalides (1951). The first film was expected to be a pro-Industrialized France showing the modernized French Industry. Franju turned it into a film showing the ugliness of the factories. His Hôtel des Invalides was to be a look inside a veteran’s hospital as a tribute to the hospital and the war museum, but Franju made an anti-war and anti-militarism film.
After this, Franju began his work of narrative films, and made in 1959 La tête contre les murs (Head Against the Wall) which is about young man committed to a mental institution for having disobeyed his uncle.
The film was followed by another “medical” film, Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face).
Franju made a few more films and then did a bit of directing for T.V. By the late 70’s he had basically retired from film making and spent his time presiding over the Cinématheque Française. He died in 1987.
Some have described his film style, a mixture of surrealism and expressionism. There is a tendency to view modern times in a way to imply that things are not good the way people think. The idea that people do not want to discuss things that are unpleasant in society and that film should in fact open that discussion (This is in a sense akin to Russian montage).There is a clear idea that science is not “pure” and has problems.
The cast includes Baroness Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein u. Frauenberg whose stage name was Valli or Alida Valli. Perhaps she is best known for her role in Carol Reed’s The Third Man although she appeared in more than 100 films. In the horror genre, she appears in Dario Arento’s
In 1962 the Americans released a dubbed and edited version called The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. It was released in a double feature with a 1959 film called The Manster – an American/Japanese production.
Unlike Les Diaboliques which is rooted in a social problems, Le Yeux sans Visage is rooted in a moral dilemma.
After the film
Sets and costumes
Photography and editing
Film opens with close up of a face in a car window. Body in back with face hidden. The body is carried in an odd manner to keep the face hidden. There is a long delay in seeing Christina's face; her face is sometimes buried in a pillow, she is photographed from the back, she is wearing the mask. There is just one shot of her fce - very fast and with a quick cut.
The operation and the lack of emotion in the operating room. Methodical and cold, Draws line on face, the the actual operation
Series of stills of Christina's face rejecting the graft.
What are the associations with eyes and "the soul"?
Laboratory equatable with dungeon or torture chamber.
The juxtaposition of the face lifting scene with all the scientific tools turns science into the horrific. In a sense, the Mad Doctor is real. This is a kind of post modernism anti Enlightenment, anti-science position.
The final shots of the woman who looks almost like an “innocent” nun indicates she is likely to be saved. Innocents can’t be killed off.
Franju said "When I shot Les Yeux sans visage I was told “No sacrilege because of the Spanish market, no nudes because of the Italian market, no blood because of the French market, and no martyred animals because of the English market. And I was supposed to be shooting a horror film!"
The film was presented at the Film Festival of Edinburgh (home of the body snatchers, Burke aand Hare), seven people reportedly fainted and the press were outraged.
English reception was “shocked” or contemptuous. Already disturbed by the Hammer Horrors and this one was “realistic” The one good review it got nearly cost the reviewer her job.
While the story is to a large degree cliché, Franju makes them more poetic. The car’s headlights along the country road in the opening scene are “made to dance” to Maurice Jarre’s waltz. (However one should be cognizant of the opening of Night of the Demon made 2 years earlier in 1957.
Eyes Without a Face is full of moral ambiguities. The “mad” doctor is trying to do something for his daughter, whose damaged face he is responsible for. He ignores the impact of his surgeries on the people on whom he operates.
Louise believes that because the doctor saved her, he can do no wrong. This motif of loyalty in the face of overwhelming evidence of evil and horror reappears in The Third Man as well, where again, it is Valli (the actress who loves Harry Lime). She can’t understand humanity only loyalty – the later being more personal than the former which transcends bounds with people one knows.
These moral ambiguities are often reflected in contrasting textures and images. Louise’s furs with Edna’s raincoat; Christiane’s white satin house coat with Edna’s white toweling; the dog collars with Louise’s choker.
OFF SCREEN SOUNDS
These are often a trope of horror films. Crickets are heard, enlarging the screen image, the thud of the body into the vault, the sound of a plane overhead.