Eyes Without a Face

(1959)

Directed by

Georges Franju

Review by Zach Saltz

Eyes Without a Face stars Pierre Brasseur, that wonderful haggard Vincent Price-like scoundrel from Children of Paradise, as the fiendish Doctor Génessier, clinical surgeon by day, despicable death doctor by night.  His daughter, Christiane (the lovely Edith Scob) has suffered horrible facial disfigurement to her face after a car accident.  Together with his nurse, the callous Louise (Alida Valli, from The Third Man), the two search for just the right young woman to have her face surgically removed by Génessier and put on the young Christiane.  Eventually, a young woman is sought out by the police as a “mole” to Génessier’s evil plot, and, like Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, we see her get caught up in a twisted scheme beyond all comprehension.

In its relation to the development of modern horror, there are two main reasons to see this film.  The first is the unblinking violence it contains – it iss ravaging and disgusting, far more violent than I could have ever imagined, especially for a film made in 1959.  It’s mostly one sequence I’m referring to -- a seven minute, bravura but sickening examination (in extreme detail) of one of Génessier’s operations: The removal of a young girl’s entire face.  Let me say that I’ve seen the masochistic wailings of Passolini, Jodorowsky, and Peter Greenaway, but this was the first time since Gigli that I had to cover my eyes in sheer terror.  The violence of this scene reflects the expansion of the parameters of what was permissible in what could and could not be shown on screen (in that sense, the violence in Eyes may draw comparisons to Goddard’s Band a Part and Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch).

Then there is a curious history behind the making and wide release of Eyes Without a Face.  In France, it was received as a psychological thriller, similar to the works of Hitchcock and Clouzot.  In the United States, however, it was stripped of all ambiance and given the facile title of The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus.  The focus of the film had slanted from a psychological bent to a physical bent, epitomizing the shift in American audience’s expectations of the atypical horror film from erudite terror to mass bloodshed (ironically, the U.S. censor board removed the most graphic portions of the film before its release). 

The technical elements of the film added up nicely.  There are scenes of somber and profound silence, perhaps channeling the great silent films by Murnau and Lang.  Like most horror films, the camera movement is shrewd and conspicuous; we never quite get a good glimpse of Christiane’s horrifying face, but there is one POV shot where we can vaguely distinguish its black figure.  There is something certainly poetical about the final shots of Christiane, as she releases a couple of caged birds, obviously signifying her own freedom from her despicable father -- something that mainstream American horror can never quite seem to accomplish.  The score, by Maurice Jarre (!) is deceptively rich and juicy, with its bumbling strings and ominous shreiks.  But it is a mask, so to speak, to the true nature of the film -- an ugly, perverse psychological drama mostly void of the juicy elements of schlock bloodfests.  It’s similar to The Exorcist -- don’t expect cheap thrills; be prepared for a sobering, shocking tragedy of the fallacy of human necessity.

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