Eyes Without a Face

Don’t take this film at face value

Cinema is often like the creation of a mad scientist. It starts as the a passionate project of an ambitious creator, growing from the embryonic recesses of the mind, before materialising itself as a much larger project. Films are a cobbled together, Frankenstein’s monster of parts. Be that the different influences and inspirations that manifest themselves within a film, or the varying components that a crew bring to a the project. At then like Frankenstein’s monster, the film is thrust out into the world in search of an identity. Georges Franju’s 1960 horror masterpiece Eyes Without a Face is one such film.

In the late 1950s, British horror films such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958) were popular with French audiences. Yet French filmmakers were yet to delve deep into the darker recesses of the human psyche. Producer Jules Borkon hoped to change this and bought the rights to Jean Redon’s novel Les Yeux Sans Visage, offering the directorial role to Franju. Thus, Eyes Without a Face came to be. Though funnelled into the early-1960s American horror pipelines under the ridiculous title The Horror Chamber Of Dr. Faustus — there is no character named Dr. Faustus in the film — and played alongside trashy Japanese horror film The Manster no less, this film is much more than the pulpy genre shocker that this suggests. Franju felt the story was not a pure horror film, describing his vision as a film of

“anguish… it’s a quieter mood than horror… more internal, more penetrating. It’s horror in homeopathic doses.”

The film falls somewhere between the French fairytale surrealism of a Jean Cocteau film: The Blood of a Poet (1932) and Beauty and the Beast (1946), and the classic black-and-white horrors of James Whale: Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933). It traces the story of brilliant surgeon Dr. Génessier who goes to the extreme lengths of kidnapping young women and attempting to transplant their faces onto his severely disfigured daughter. It’s an incredible conceit in both its shock and its tragedy. “I’ve done so much wrong to perform this miracle,” he says. Guilt-ridden and driven by a twisted sense of love for his daughter, the doctor has descended into the darkest and most depraved depths in order to restore her to her former beauty. With a highly controversial and shocking subject matter, contemporary reaction to the film ranged from appalled to amazed. But this film holds so much more under its skin.

Eyes Without a Face sits somewhere between shock body horror and a hypnotic dreamlike fairytale. With its twisted fairytale aesthetics of the beautiful young woman ostracised from the world, holed up in the room of her father’s mansion, it offers something different to the horror schlockfests of the time: a poetic horror film. It is this unique quality that led Pauline Kael to describe it as

“perhaps the most austerely elegant horror film ever made… it has a vague, floating, lyric sense of dread which goes beyond the simpler effects of horror movies that don’t make intellectual claims. Franju’s approach is almost as purified and as mystic as Bresson’s.”

It is a film that is both melancholic and deeply sad, but visceral and shocking when it needs to be. It perfectly bridges this border with cinematography well ahead of its time, giving the film its own mood and atmosphere, but also distinguishing it from its contemporary counterparts that rely more on the traditional stage-acting style of films.

Rather than focusing on the horrific body horror element of the film, it is a film that achieves its unsettling atmosphere through similar techniques to that of film noir. Film noir is of course inspired by avant-garde French cinema, and the term was applied by French critics to the American genre, so the link manifests itself. The film is at once a surrealist nightmare akin to Salvador Dali or Luis Buñuel, and a monochrome drama like those of Billy Wilder and early Alfred Hitchcock. The low-key black-and-white cinematography of Franju’s film (shot by Eugen Schufftan) relies on the depth of its shadows to create a subtlety throughout, allowing surgery scene to appear all the more shocking through camera’s sudden matter-of-factness and Franju’s clinical approach.

In the famous surgery scene, Franju refuses to cut away. Its incredible that such a scene got past the censors. Its an unbelievably shocking scene for its time, and reveals the fragility of the face when it seems to come away easily like a soft skin mask. But it is perhaps not this shockingly visceral scene that provides the film with its utmost horror. Franju takes a much more humanitarian approach to the subject of his film. He does not simply want to shock, but rather unsettle us on a much deeper level, not only exploring the heinous nature of the character’s crimes, but the deeper issues that surround them.

It is perhaps Edith Scob’s performance as the disfigured daughter Christiane that is most settling about this film. Like a ghost — she is ‘officially’ dead, yet clearly very much alive — she floats around the house, wearing her white expressionless mask. Like a living mannequin, this is so unsettling due to its uncanny nature. It is the human face, a network of skin and muscles that not only gives a person their physical identity, but stresses that personality through expression. With its obvious features, the mannequin-like mask gives the impression of a human face, but equally denies the emotionality of what makes someone human. Thus, Christiane is effectively inhuman. She says that she would rather be blind or dead than hideous, but the truth is, she already is dead, reduced to a trapped ghost in the gothic trappings of her father’s fairytale mansion. The apparent importance of female beauty if stressed throughout the film. It is the reason her father goes to great lengths (despite his beliefs that he is doing it for her good), it is the reason one beautiful girl (almost) gets off completely scot-free for shoplifting, and it is the reason that Edna jumps to her death after the removal of her face. Without her beautiful face, Christiane is as good as dead to society, and this in turn raises the film’s key issues about the role of the face in society.

Franju seems to have a fascination with mirrors, often shooting characters as they are reflected, or reexamining scenes through a mirror. But it is not so much the physical mirror that he is concerned with, but rather the nature of it. The mirror is the way in which we perceive ourselves. Therefore, whilst Christiane may be the recipient of a new visage that is stunningly beautiful, she nevertheless feels hollow, like a stranger to her true self, when she looks in the mirror. The face and identity are of course intrinsically linked. The face is a front door that connects the inside and the outside of the human being. Therefore, though Christiane has acquired a restored external beauty, it only helps to complicate her internal identity, and she suffers for it. Not only does the face constitute a complex surface on which body and mind, as well as language and perception, meet the outside world to find their expressions, but it also offers the possibility, and anticipation, of a new mask. “A new face, a new identity,” is perhaps the key quote of the film, uttered by Dr. Génessier. His flaw, caused by the utter desperation that has led him down this path, is that he sees this as a positive thing, rather than the negative thing that it is. Christiane’s new face literally decays, and this is the natural filmic expression of her internality rejecting her new exterior.

It is this shocking imagery of the film, alongside Christiane’s blank mask that has influenced later horror such as Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), as well as heavily inspiring Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (2011). The removal, transformation, and disfigurement of the face has become a classic instance of body horror, and has cemented its place as a recurring idea in classic cult horror, with filmmakers often returning to it. Therefore, such a sensitive humanitarian approach to shocking visceral ideas elevates Eyes Without a Face above many of its counterparts. Like the deformities that emerge from Dr. Génessier’s lab, it is a film in search of a true identity. The debate is there. Is it a film that relies on grotesque body horror to shock and titillate a voyeuristic audience? Or is it rather a moody Kafkaesque horror of aesthetic beauty that uses the horror of the human face to explore ideas of identity, transformation and social ostracism. I certainly prefer the latter description.