Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
We don't typically associate the horror genre with the French. Horror films developed mainly in America and Britain and (to a lesser extent) in Germany, but seemed in inherent contradiction with French sensibilities. Artsy films, romances, farces, talking heads, dramas – these were what the world had come to expect from French filmmakers. Clouzot's Diabolique (1955) was about the closest the French had come, prior to 1959, to a genuine horror film, though it was more of a thriller.
Jules Borkon, a French film producer, had purchased the rights to a novel by Jean Redon that would make a great horror film and Borkon thought he could use it to break through the seeming barrier of French resistance to the horror genre. What the project needed was a director who could devise a distinctly French perspective on a genre that had hitherto belonged to other nationalities. It would need to be simultaneously a horror film and an art film, with enough realism to generate fear but enough fantasy to appeal to French tastes. Borkon turned to a French director who had built a career around exploring the boundary between fantasy and reality. He turned to Georges Franju.
Historical Background: Georges Franju was a distinctive figure in French cinema. Born in 1912, he worked briefly as a young adult in an insurance company and a factory before serving in the French military in Algiers. After his discharge in 1932, he began study in set design and later worked in that capacity in Paris music halls, including Casino de Paris and the famous Folles Bergére. His first experience as a filmmaker was in a short called Le Metro for which he teamed up with Henri Langlois, thus initiating a friendship that would span several decades. The pair briefly tried their hand at a film magazine and founded a film club called Le Cercle du Cinéma. That club gave rise to the Cinématique Française in 1937, which became France's most important and prestigious film archive. Cinématique Française played a major role as an incubator for the film critics who later became the auteurs of the French New Wave. Franju, however, was less a critic than an unabashed film-buff. He became an archivist, working for the International Federation of Film Archives and, later, the Institut de Cinematographie Scientifique.
It was not until 1949 that Franju turned actively to filmmaking, initiating a series of nine documentary films that won international acclaim. Franju's documentary style was very distinctive, and in a way that is relevant to understanding his later approach to his fictional films. Franju rejected the idea that documentaries could be objective in nature. He infused his documentaries with his own worldview, which was characterized by social protest to the point of outrage. He also believed that documentaries did not need to feature strict realism. Instead, he added elements of surrealism, German expressionism, and a lyrical poeticism. The first documentary in the series, Blood of the Beasts (included on the Criterion Eyes Without a Face DVD), was a huge sensation. It showed the activities of a Paris slaughterhouse with brutal realism but with a compassion and sympathy toward both the unfortunate animals and the butchers. The images include some of the most disturbing examples of the suffering of animals ever committed to film. His second documentary effort, commissioned by the French government, was supposed to glorify the modernization of French industry, but Franju used the opportunity to highlight the pollution and squalor that accompanied unrestrained industrial development. His third documentary was ostensibly intended as a look at life inside a national veterans hospital, but Franju used it to illustrate the contrast between glorification of war through military icons and the brutal reality of disabilities and disfigurement. Franju's documentaries were thus consistently imbued with a highly developed social conscience. Franju was also constantly exploring the interface between reality and expressionism.
In 1959, Franju made a conscious decision to turn away from documentary to fictional works, beginning with Head Against the Wall (also known as "The Keepers"). While he was making this film, he was contacted by producer Jules Borkon about the project that would become Eyes Without a Face. From the beginning, Franju embraced the challenge of making a uniquely French horror film. Franju had spent a decade giving documentaries the look of fiction and surrealism. He could certainly now turn that equation inside out and give a fictional fantasy the look of actuality. Though horror had not been much a part of the French repertoire, the French were adept at depicting the fantastical through surrealism and poeticism. That is how Franju decided he would approach Eyes Without a Face.
Borkon wanted a project that would be marketable around the world as well as in France. To get past French censors, there could not be too much blood. A little, but not much! The British have a particular distaste for animal cruelty, so that too would have to be downplayed. The Germans were sensitive about mad doctors, which recalled certain of the Nazi atrocities. With those stipulations, Borkon handed Franju a script about a mad doctor who cut up his patients with a scalpel and abused animals for his research. Instead of fainting, Franju took it as a challenge.
The first important step toward success was hiring a established team of writers, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Norcejac, who were fresh off two sterling successes: Diabolique (1955) and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) (See cripper's Review). The first stroke of genius was to subtly shift the relative importance of the two central characters: Doctor Génessier and his daughter, Christiane. By emphasizing Christiane's disfigurement, the Doctor's motivation would now be based not on science or medicine run amok, but on a father's guilt over having destroyed his daughter's beauty.
The Story: A woman, Louise (Alida Valli), nervously drives down a tree-lined road to a desolate spot. In the rear seat, we see a slumped over individual whose face is obscured by a top hat. Louise stops and drags what we now realize is a lifeless body down to the river and pushes it in. When the police discover the body, two fathers of missing daughters are called to the morgue to examine the body and identify it if either can. The first of the men to arrive, Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), sorrowfully identifies the corpse as that of his daughter, sparing the second the necessity of examining it. Dr. Génessier, however, is lying and the body is really that of Emile Tessot, daughter of the other man.
Dr. Génessier is a plastic surgeon. The face of his daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob), was badly disfigured in a automobile accident caused by the Doctor's own negligent driving. Wracked by guilt over his daughter's condition, Génessier is obsessed with restoring her beauty by transplanting an entirely new face. The heterograft technique that is required is not yet well enough developed, resulting in rejection of transplants, typically in just a few weeks. Génessier goes through the charade of burying his daughter for the benefit of the police, so they will discontinue their search for her. In reality, Christiane is pining away in her father's catacomb-like estate. She wears a waxy plastic mask to cover her disfigurement while her father attempts to perfect the transplant technique, with repeated failures.
The sources of the facial tissue, horrifically, are beautiful young girls of Paris whom Louise lures into the clutches of Dr. Génessier. We observe in grotesque detail the face of one such young woman, Edna (Juliette Mayniel), being surgically removed in one piece, except for her eyes. Louise, who is the Doctor's nurse, assistant, and lover, all rolled into one, is utterly devoted to him because he successfully repaired her own disfigurement some years earlier. Christiane tries to maintain faith in her father's skill as a physician, but is increasingly discouraged as each failure leads to inflammation, rejection, and necrosis. Christiane yearns to speak with her former lover, Jacques Vernon (François Guérin), who is an intern working under her father at the hospital (but unaware of the Doctor's nefarious activities). If Jacques discovers she's alive, however, her father's schemes will be exposed. Christiane repeatedly calls Jacques, just to hear his voice. On one such occasion, she is unable to resist whispering his name. This rouses Jacques' suspicions, which he relays to Police Inspector Parot (Alexandre Rignault). The Police are dubious about Jacques' claim of having heard his former girlfriend's voice over the phone, but nevertheless decide to set a trap to test Doctor Génessier. A young woman, Paulette (Béatrice Altariba), who was caught shoplifting and who matches the eye color and physical dimensions of the women who have disappeared recently, is pressured into allowing herself to be admitted to the hospital – as bait. The story then builds to its inexorable climax.
Themes: One theme – arguably the core theme – is the issue of human identity. Christiana complains of looking in the mirror or seeing her reflection in a window or a spoon and not recognizing herself – whether it's when she is wearing the wax mask or the face that once belonged to another girl. She sees someone who looks a bit like her but not herself. Each person's visage is a big part of his or her identity, but Christiana has been reduced to a mannequin. Christiana wonders whether it is worth living at all if she can't live as her own self. She begins to long increasingly for release from her suffering, through death. The film's title is doubly apt because it describes both the victims of Dr. Génessier's surgical procedure, who have had their faces stolen, as well as Christiana in her mask, with her eyes the only visible element that is truly her.
Another less obvious issue of the film is the tyranny of patriarchy. Dr. Génessier dominates the women in his life, both Louise and Christiane, not to mention the young women whom he treats as mere sources of tissue. His objectification of the victims is worse than the objectification of women as sex objects; here, they are reduced to mere tissue donors. Emile, Edna and Paulette were forcibly abducted and unlawfully confined, but Christiane is also a caged bird in a way, as unable to leave her father's abode as the others. The Doctor uses stray dogs cruelly for his medical research, but Christiane is also being used for his experiments, even if as a recipient rather than a donor.
A third theme relates to our sometimes spurious claims to be doing something out of love. Dr. Génessier undoubtedly believes that his motivation for his grotesque activities is love for his daughter, but he is really only acting to assuage his own sense of guilt. The Doctor's professions of love and, in one scene, affectionate interactions with a little boy further highlight by contrast the horror of his cruel abuse of the young women. It is infinitely more frightening to observe a creature of horror that is very human at times than one that is fully perverse.
Production Values: Most horror films gradually lose their edge over time as their special effects get imitated repeatedly. What was once frightening is soon reduced to the status of camp, at best. The main exceptions to that trend are a handful of classic artsy horror films that built their special brand of frightening tension through evocative sets and lighting, gradually escalating tension, and great performances. Delicate shadows, eerie sound effects, and surreal sets provide a much more durable and penetrating kind of terror than gushing blood, heads split open by axes, and other kinds of graphic violence.
The cinematography for Eyes Without a Face is magnificent high-contrast chiaroscuro. Cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan had previously worked with the likes of Fritz Lang and G.W. Pabst. The creative use of light and shadows is highly effective. The soundtrack is pretty nifty as well. It was built mainly around two recurrent themes composed by Maurice Jarre. One carrousel style number accompanies Louise's trolling through Paris for victims while another more plaintive tune serves as companion to Christiane's strolling and lolling about her father's estate.
Although both Pierre Brasseur and Alida Valli give stellar performances as the evil duo, the highlight performance of the film belongs to Edith Scob. Reduced to acting only with her eyes and her physicality, Scob manages a highly stylized performance that reveals an amazing range of emotions, from longing, to resignation, to anger, to pain. Her darting eyes are magnificently large and expressive, and reveal a fevered agitation and distress about her condition. She seems to be floating as she moves about, as though she were already half apparition. She seems like one of those restless souls of the dead that has been denied eternal rest because of some transgression.
Bottom-Line: Though Eyes Without a Face was contemporaneous with the first films of the French New Wave, it takes its own course, drawing its inspiration more from traditional French directors like Cocteau and Renoir. I generally dislike horror films but have a deep appreciation, usually, for art films, so I was determined to find out how I would react to an artsy horror film. There was one disgusting scene in the film that I could just as well have done without, though it is probably the only scene that true fans of horror films will find up to their standards. I very much enjoyed the atmospheric parts, the cinematography, the character portrayals – in short – all the artsy aspects of the film, but not the horror per se. That's just me. If you like the classics of horror, such as Psycho and The Exorcist, you're bound to enjoy this film. If you prefer straight blood and guts, you might be disappointed.
The magnificent Criterion DVD provides a marvelously crisp transfer along with subtitles that are improved in both sense and visual clarity. The Criterion version also restores footage previously cut by American censors. There's a nice set of extras, including the Blood of the Beasts documentary discussed above, an interview with Franju, a documentary about the writers Boileau and Narcejac, theatrical trailers, and a gallery of stills. Eyes Without a Face is in black-and-white, in French with English subtitles, and has a running time of 90 minutes.
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About the Transfer: Eyes Without a Face is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1. On standard 4:3 televisions, the image will appear letter...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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