Les Yeux sans visage (1960)
Directed by Georges Franju

Film Review

It was the resurgence of interest in horror in European cinema in the late 1950s, spearheaded by the British film company Hammer, that led independent French film producer Jules Borkon to purchase the rights to Jean Redon's novel Les Yeux sans visage. Horror was a genre that had been almost completely neglected by French cinema since the medium had been invented, the only significant offerings being Jean Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher (1928) and Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), the latter of which had been a box office failure.  Borkon was eager to cash in on the latest horror boom but made the slightly bizarre decision to hire Georges Franju to direct his film.  Franju, one of the founders of the Cinémathèque Française, had made a number of documentary shorts and one full-length film, the uncompromising social drama La Tête contre les murs (1959), but was by no means an established filmmaker.  As it turned out, Franju was the ideal choice because of his completely fresh perspective, and he delivered what is widely considered the finest horror film in French cinema.

There is no other film like Les Yeux sans visage.  It is strikingly different from other fantasy-horror films of the period, having neither the Gothic feel of Hammer's horror films or the sensual Baroque quality seen in Italian horror films, such as those of Mario Bava.  The visual style can be described as Cocteau-esque expressionism, combining the classic film noir aesthetic (high contrast chiaroscuro photography and disorientating camera positioning) with a haunting fairytale-like lyricism that is so quintessentially French.  The film's dreamlike texture owes much to its cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, whose previous credits include the Siodmak brothers' People on Sunday (1930) and G.W. Pabst's L'Atlantide (1932).  (Schüfftan was famous as the inventor of the effect, first employed on Friz Lang's Metropolis, which placed actors into miniature sets through the use of mirrors.) It is the subtly expressionistic quality that Schüfftan brings to the film (complemented by Maurice Jarre's eerie score) which makes it so unremittingly creepy and amplifies the mild horror content to frightening proportions.  This is as much Schüfftan's film as it is Franju's, and some would argue that Schüfftan had by far the greater creative input (a point of view that carries some weight when you consider Franju's subsequent films, all inferior to this one).

One thing that concerned producer Borkon was the climate of film censorship that prevailed in Europe at that time.  Even though Franju and his screenwriters (Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac) were careful not to include content that would be deemed unacceptable by the censors, the film still managed to provoke enormous controversy in every country in which it was shown.  It is reported that at a screening in Edinburgh some members of the audience fainted in sheer fright.  Criticism in the press ranged from enthusiastic approval to outright disgust.  There is next to no explicit horror in the film (and certainly nothing like the gore offered by Hammer and Bava), yet the sequence in which Pierre Brasseur occupies himself with the removal of a human face from a living donor has become one of the most notorious in film history. 

Les Yeux sans visage differs from virtually all other films in the fantasy-horror genre.  It doesn't set out to shock us with gruesome images or insult our intelligence with an implausible plot or fantastic characters.  Everything it shows us is frighteningly plausible, but presented to us in a dreamlike manner which, if anything, softens the horror of the situation.  Crucially, it is not evil which provides the stimulus for the horror, but love, the love of a father determined to give his daughter back her life.  In the end, it is the film's haunting poetry, not its horror connotations, which have the deepest impact on the spectator.  This is not a film about mad scientists or demonically possessed villains doing unspeakable acts.  Rather, it is about the choices that have to made in the name of love, choices which may make us heroes or the unwitting servants of Satan.

Film Synopsis

Professor Genessier, once a great surgeon, is now consumed with his overriding obsession - to restore the features of his beloved daughter Christiane.  It is some years since the terrible car accident in which the professor's daughter was hideously disfigured, but the professor still hasn't forgiven himself.  Only Christiane's eyes are undamaged - the rest of her face is scarred beyond recognition.  Driven by guilt, Genessier devotes himself night and day to the task of restoring his daughter to her former beauty.  He believes he has perfected a way of doing this, by grafting skin tissue taken from healthy donors onto Christiane's damaged face.

Confident he will achieve his objective, Genessier throws himself into his diabolical scheme in earnest, assisted by his faithful secretary Louise.  Finding suitable donors and luring them to Genessier's isolated house proves to be the easy part of the operation.  Young women are so gullible these days, so easily led to their doom.  Far more difficult is the process of removing the victim's faces and transplanting the skin - the first attempts prove to be disheartening failures.  The problem of tissue rejection is one that Genessier struggles to overcome.

But, undeterred by his countless failures, the professor persists, confident that in the end he must succeed.  But as he does so he fails to take account of the psychological impact all this is having on Christiane.  As her hopes are raised and dashed in quick succession, she becomes increasingly revolted by her father's insane pursuit.  Finally, she is driven to get in touch with her former fiancé Jacques, hoping that someone will put an end to her living nightmare.  Meanwhile, in the safety of his secret laboratory, Professor Genessier continues slicing up the faces of young women with ever-increasing fervour...