Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without A Face)

Abstract

[...]one of the most remarkable aspects of Les Yeux sans visage is the way the excesses of its gothic narrative are frequently foiled by Franju's sedate cinematic style. [...]the scene plays on an audience's assumption that seeing is believing.

Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without A Face) (Dir. Georges Franju) France/Italy, 1960

Second Sight

E.T. summed up the whole ball of wax when he said "Ouch''. The plain fact of the matter is that pain and hurt are universal, but it takes a low-life like Spielberg to make that particular truth digestible for large portions of the cinema-going public. Indeed, the history of popular cinema demonstrates that truth is a peculiar thing, and is seemingly most palatable in sugary morsels divulged from the foam lips of a Christ-like alien puppet. A case in point is the popular and critical response offered Les Yeux sans visage (1960) upon its initial release. Georges Franju's second fictional film served up a rather fecund mix of pain and hurt, truth and lies that proved unappetizing and disagreeable for the majority of its viewers. Famously, the film's unflinching scenes of facial surgery gained it instant notoriety when several audience members were stretchered out from the theatre during the film's first screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

Of course, Georges Franju was no stranger to upsetting his audience's physical or moral sensibilities. Prior to Les Yeux sans visage, Franju's most notorious film was Le Sang des bêtes (1949);a twenty-two minute documentary shot in and around a Parisian abattoir that evokes a lyrical surrealism by counterpointing scenes of graphic animal slaughter with scenes of quiet suburban landscapes. Tellingly, this extraordinary film's notoriety is probably less founded on its audience's response to animal slaughter per se, and has more to do with the transgression of filming such scenes at all. In this instance, scenes of real death reaffirm the mechanics of cinema, specifically, the camera's ability to reveal or falsify reality. Le Sang des bêtes, like all of Franju's work, including Les Yeux sans visage, can be seen to engage with the form and mechanisms of film as a means of displacing a confirmed reality and exposing the uncanny within a realistic setting.

Based upon a novel by Jean Redon, with a script by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Naijecac, Les Yeux sans visage is a routine, if somewhat perverse, story told in an extraordinary manner. The plot revolves around celebrated surgeon, Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), who is aided in his abduction of young women by his devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli), so he might attempt a series of experimental heterograft surgeries to restore his daughter Christiane's (Edith Scob) disfigured face. The plot outline is distinctly gothic, containing as it does, a crazily obsessive doctor, a disfigured and imprisoned daughter, an obedient and devoted assistant, murder, experimental science, and an unrequited love from beyond the grave (kinda). Yet for all this, Les Yeux sans visage is strangely devoid of melodramatic thrills. In fact, one of the most remarkable aspects of Les Yeux sans visage is the way the excesses of its gothic narrative are frequently foiled by Franju's sedate cinematic style.

At the time of its release, Franju stated his intention was to create an "anxiety" film as opposed to a "horror" film. It might be worth noting here the significant contribution that incidentals like ambient sound effects, silences, and Maurice Jarre's musical score make to the film's anxious mood. More significant to this end, Franju adopts a clinical and intellectual approach that is exemplified by extended shots, mute exchanges and a rather static photographic style. The combined effect conjures a kind of off-kilter realism. Additionally, Franju decides against using film techniques like rapid editing or jolting jump-cuts as a means of "guiding" his viewer's emotional responses or provoking more traditional horror-audience screams. Certainly, the infamous surgery scene is photographed with an appropriately steady, unflinching detachment worthy of a medical documentary. Needless to say, this is not an educational documentary, but Franju utilises the long take to suggest a documentary reality. Accordingly, the scene plays on an audience's assumption that seeing is believing. Franju displaces the physical "horror' by the very act of showing it, but unlike a Herschell Gordon Lewis blood fest/feast which displaces its horror with comedy via an unrealistic slapstick of gore and body parts, Franju sidesteps any comic displacement by making the scene appear realistic and believable and thereby reconfiguring the emotional content of the scene towards a kind of helpless voyeurism.

Les Yeux sans visage was photographed by the celebrated Eugen Schüffian and the film's beautifully still compositions undeniably contribute to its clinical mood. The camera photographs the macabre goings-on with a detached contemplation that becomes increasingly unsettling. There is a terrific series of shots early in the film that show Dr. Génessier walking quietly through the rooms and halls of his sterile mansion, ascending two separate flights of stairs, then continuing on to a small room in the attic of the house where his daughter Christiane resides. Arguably, the very length of the scene is unnecessary, but the slow deliberate pace and quiet ominous mood it establishes superbly conveys the shame, secrecy, and even the methodical aspects of Dr. Génessier's personality, while simultaneously suggesting the physical and psychological isolation suffered by Christiane. Franju's static framing helps undermine the panorama of his exterior locations while, conversely, they dispel a sense of intimacy within his interior sets, so that characters seem physically subdued and resigned to their fates as they forlornly enter and exit the frame. This feeling of resignation permeates the entire mood of the film and is only ever disrupted during short-lived moments of physical violence, assault, or terror, when abducted women struggle against an imposed fate. The scene in which Dr. Génessier chloroforms a young woman lured to his house to view a room (supposedly for rent) is all the more unsettling because of its brevity. The suddenness of the assault and the pitifully short struggle that ensues are contained ruptures in the pervasive deathly still mood of the film.

A character's scream of terror is frequently the first and last means of protest in traditional horror movies. In Les Yeux sans visage, screams are infrequent and short-lived. However, while it can be safely said that the film does not boast any Fay Wray moments, it still manages to evoke the cinema of the early thirties, and its transition from silent pictures to talkies. In this respect, Les Yeux sans visage is peculiarly like a silent film with sound. Certainly, the film's small but superb cast defer from the type of emotive acting commonly attributed to silent movies, but the film is full of extended silences and wordless exchanges between characters. Particularly memorable is the mute shake of the head Christiane gives a moment before she stabs Louise in the throat, which marks Christine's silent rejection of the fate imposed on her and triggers the events that end the film. Significantly, Les Yeux sans visage's plot resolution hinges less on a series of authoritative actions and more on a prevailing mood of French fatalism and a healthy dose of arbitrary justice. Ouch indeed.

This latest edition of Les Yeux sans visage, released by Second Sight, has one extra; an extract from the 1987 French documentary 'Cinema of Our Time - Georges Franju: Visionary.' Rather disappointingly, this ten-minute "extract" is only about Les Yeux sans visage. It would have been far more interesting to include the documentary in its entirety. For my money, the Criterion edition of the film (Region 1) released in late 2004 is a much better buy with plenty of worthwhile extras, most notably Franju's gruesome documentary Le Sang des bêtes.