Eyes without a Face

When critic Raymond Durgnat first wrote about the films of Georges Franju, the director’s Eyes without a Face was considered to be an ‘impossible’ item for America, with content completely unsuitable for mainstream American audiences. In 1959, films of surgery were not for public viewing. The Production Code routinely censored films that had even tiny cutaways to simulated surgery, such as brief shots in Robert Day’s 1958  Corridors of Blood.

Things that people weren’t supposed to think about, let alone watch as entertainment. 

Franju’s producer reportedly told him he had permission to run wild with his fantastic mad doctor movie, as long as he avoided nudity and blasphemy, topics disallowed in France and Italy. Franju instead fashioned a dispassionate, horrifyingly graphic tale of medical abominations. A rogue doctor conducts surgical crimes without detection. The horror happens in a handsome French chateau behind a private clinic.

Before Criterion gave Franju’s Les Yeux sans Visage its DVD debut in 2004, it was known to a very small group of dedicated horror fans. I myself had only seen 16mm prints — the edited and dubbed The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus around 1972, and the French version, at 1980’s FILMEX Horror Marathon. Both screenings were shocks to the brain. This was a work of art about Things Unthinkable.

Does Franju’s Les Yeux sans Visage still have the impact it once did?  Are we recommending ‘one of the scariest movies ever’ to a horror audience raised on entertainment focused on sadistic torture and mutilation?  A main ‘feature’ of modern TV crime shows are simulations of mutilated or half-dissected human bodies.

We think that Franju’s masterpiece is still the pinnacle of ‘medical horror,’ a normally sleazy subgenre known for downmarket sleaze. Always the fantasist, Franju pitches his show somewhere between the pulp fiction of Louis Feuillade and the reality of modern medical miracles … that can obviously used for awful purposes. Morbid thoughts run to abominable Nazi crimes, medicine misused for political purposes never ceased, as in the forced / surreptitious sterilization of women in the Third World. Evil is where you find it.

Savant has reviewed Criterion’s Eyes Without a Face on DVD and Blu-ray. We also covered a UK edition with different extras, a Tim Lucas commentary and a short subject by Georges Franju that we wanted to see ever since first reading Raymond Durgnat’s Franju book. This time out, we have a new 4K Ultra-HD encoding to enjoy. Criterion’s upgrade is icing on the ice-cold cake for this eerily beautiful, delicately brutal ‘shocker.’

Let’s start back with the basics. 

Eyes Without a Face has a screenplay by the mystery writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the source authors for H.G. Clouzot’s  Les diaboliques and Alfred Hitchcock’s  Vertigo. The bare synopsis reads like deplorable pulp trash with a misogynistic bent: a mad doctor commits surgical crimes that involve the murders of beautiful women. One must look back to the pre-Code years to find a similarly taboo horror classic: Erle C. Kenton’s  Island of Lost Souls was immediately banned in England for its theme of vivisection. In 1959, any movie about sick surgery performed on women would be accused of rotten taste.

Movies that threw in a Nazi angle went even further, trivializing the Holocaust for box office profit. In 1958, Astor pictures released a sleazy item that did just that, Richard Cunha’s  She Demons. It played to kiddie matinees.

By contrast, Eyes Without a Face has the look of ‘quality’ French cinema. Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is a celebrated plastic surgeon who runs his own private clinic. But he maintains a secret surgical lab in his basement for unorthodox experiments. Hiding in Génessier’s villa is his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), the victim of a car accident. Christiane lost most of her face; she’s recuperating from a forbidden operation to replace it with a face surgically stolen from another young woman. Christiane has a fiancé, who believes her to be dead.

Aiding Génessier in his crimes is his assistant Louise (Alida Valli), who facilitates kidnappings and corpse disposals with the clear conscience of a true believer. We hear that Louise is one of Genessier’s earlier surgical success stories. She wears a pearl necklace to hide a scar on her neck. Raymond Durgnat noted that the choker collar echoes Louise’s function as a faithful dog.

Eyes Without a Face has horror aplenty, yet requires patience for its measured, deliberate pace. Its infamous surgery scene is a shocker that becomes less important with repeated viewings. We witness the destruction of beauty with the cool precision of the professional surgeon. The human image we most identify with, the face, can be taken apart in just a couple of minutes. Génessier has no problem lifting a mask-like graft section in one piece. It is a case of organ theft, but one that obliterates one’s perceived personality, identity.

It’s not fantasy. We know people being de-humanized, victimized, all around us. 

Film festival audiences were taken by surprise in 1959 — an Edinburgh screening was noted for walkouts and heated critical outrage at Franju’s cinematic abomination.

Critic Pauline Kael reacted to the film’s bizarre poetry but couldn’t distill its essence. But subversive poetry is a central motif for director Franju. Continuing the philosophy of Louis Feuillade, Franju’s films promote the notion that the reality we know is a mask, behind which lie things we do not wish to acknowledge. All that good meat we eat is derived from the unending slaughter of animals:  Le sang des bêtes.  Not on display in a war museum are the most obvious products of war, maimed and disfigured soldiers:  Hôtel des Invalides.  a presumably pampered wife is so unhappy that she’ll resort to murder, yet the social tyranny is so entrenched that even being caught will not give her closure:  Thérèse Desqueyroux.

Like the old French aristocracy, Génessier has wealth, fame, and a grotesquely inflated opinion of himself. His patients interest him only to the degree that they will enhance his medical reputation. He’s so caught up in his genius that he’ll kill innocent victims to mend his disfigured daughter. Génessier is not doing this for his daughter, but for himself. Christiane is a symbol of a failure that must be corrected.

Some politicians can rationalize the mass killing of women and children, as part of a longer strategy of ‘national stability.’  Other powerful men will compromise human lives just for profit. What crimes might a sociopathic doctor commit?  We remember an old 60 Minutes episode about a ‘celebrity’ plastic surgeon in France who performed wonders with facial injuries. Impossibly puffed-up and self-important, the surgeon regaled the interviewer with stories of his unique talent and daring techniques. When it comes to surgery, we all want someone so skilled that our particular problem is his daily routine. The Frenchman on the old TV show behaved like a Génessier in the making.  ^*

Dreamlike poetic associations. 

Once upon a time, horror films were beautiful. Many of Franju’s images extend motifs from Jean Cocteau. The naked trees seem like skeletons. Are the lonely trains in the fog transporting souls to the next world?  Génessier’s dogs are suffering humanity, and the doves loosed by Christiane symbolize both Freedom and Madness. Christiane’s mask mimics Cocteau are in Blood of a Poet, conjuring the expected associations with mannequins. The mask erases Christiane’s emotions, leaving us with her staring eyes. Edith Scob’s delicate gestures remind us of fairy tale illustrations. She holds an odd poses, clasping her hands in ‘calm anxiety.’  A crossing gate warns the student Edna Grüber (Juliette Mayniel) that she’s on a journey sans retour. She arrives at the Génessier manse in the middle of a dark, lonely wood, a place that fairy tale heroines — and practical modern women — are told to avoid.

The film’s text encourages unconfirmed interpretations. Louise takes pride in the crimes she performs for her beloved employer. Did Génessier operate on her to correct a deformity, or to hide a former identity?  That would make her like one of the criminal women in the next year’s  Circus of Horrors, who use their repaired faces to begin new lives as circus performers?

Most of the chills in Eyes Without a Face are of ‘the worst has already happened’ variety. The downhearted fiancé doesn’t come to the rescue like Prince Charming. Part of us doesn’t want him to, considering what he’ll find. The same goes for poor Edna, making her escape scene nearly unbearable. None of these traumas are resolved, compounding the tension. Near the finale, the latest sacrificial victim Paulette (Beatrice Altariba) lies helpless, strapped to a gurney. Christiane approaches, looking like something out of a surreal nightmare.

Too extreme for kids, too artsy for the mainstream. 

Eyes Without a Face was a pariah from the start. British critics were becoming intolerant of Hammer horror, and Eyes far outpaced the carnage depicted by Terence Fisher. The show wasn’t suitable for the convential American market, either. Horror films were supposed to be just scary enough to bring in the kids, but not so rough for parents to put Saturday matinees off-limits. American-International knew this; they ran into some parental flak with the release of their violent, macabre  Black Sunday.

Franju’s movie received no U.S. release when new. Not that many family newspapers covered it. The progressive French critics were too busy promoting the New Wave. Franju was unlike any other director of the older generation, yet still part of the Old Guard that Cahiers du Cinema used as a punching bag in their manifesto-like reviews.

Horror experienced a ‘mad surgery’ vogue around 1960, that some critics say was inspired by Eyes. But the Medical Horror subgenre didn’t start with Franju. A film would have to be a blatant rip-off to be convincing: of the list below, only Jésus Franco’s thriller smacks of outright plagiarism. It’s also apparent that some ideas were just ‘in the atmosphere’ and waiting to congeal in various places.  Peeping Tom,  City of the Dead and  Psycho all came out more or less simultaneously. Although very different in approach, they share similar story structures and themes.

•  Cunha’s  She Demons January 1958
•  Cass’s  Blood of the Vampire August 1958
•  Trivas’  Die Nackte und der Satan July 1959
•  Romero and de Leon’s  Terror is a Man November 1959
•  Hayers’ Circus of Horrors April 1960
•  Majano’s  Seddok, l’erede di Satana August 1960
•  Vadim’s  … et mourir de plaisir September 1960
•  Ferroni’s  Il Mulino delle donne di pietra October 1960
•  Furie’s  Doctor Blood’s Coffin January 1961
•  Franco’s  Gritos en la noche May 1962
•  Green’s  The Brain that Wouldn’t Die August 1962
•  Leder’s  The Frozen Dead October 1966

This of course doesn’t take into account Reginald le Borg’s gothic mad surgery film  The Black Sleep from way back in June of 1956, or several Mexican ‘medical horrors’ that had been circulating for the better part of a decade, certainly in Europe if not in the States. Chano Urueta’s  El monstruo resucitado has mad surgery galore, and it was made way back in 1953.

When talking about genre films, we probably too often claim that one picture hasn’t been bettered. But we’ve seen no surgical horror picture that has more to say, or says it as well, as Eyes without a Face, and there have been plenty of attempts. The most alarming is Pedro Almodóvar’s relatively recent  The Skin I Live In. Its twisted premise makes the anatomical restructure of an entire human being seem far too easy, as if Dr. Moreau could completely re-invent a human being, changing its sex at the same time. Almodóvar’s peculiar fantasy connects with human experience, but to what intended effect we aren’t certain.