"Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage--literally translated as Eyes Without A Face--is that rarity among subgenres: an art house horror film..." |
Mention the term "art house" film and many horror fans think of boring foreign flicks with subtitles and obscure plots. They may be surprised to learn that one "art house" film is also a dandy little horror film. In fact it is...
By PAUL KESLER (Paul Kesler is a free-lance poet and writer from the suburban Philadelphia area, who specializes in poems, prose poetry, and occasional film criticism. He also collects films in both tape and DVD format, mostly in the areas of horror, sci-fi, and the bizarre. His shorter fiction can be sampled in two on-line magazines: Road Of Shadows (issues 3 through 6) and Moongate. Kesler, like Franz Kafka, works as a government drone, but any other resemblance is purely coincidental.) Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage--literally translated as Eyes Without A Face--is that rarity among subgenres: an art house horror film. It ranks, in that respect, with possibly a half-dozen other films of similar caliber and intent--Robert Wiene's The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr, Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan, Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock, and George Sluizer's Spoorloos. Paradoxically, the film also contains allusions--intentional or otherwise--to a number of commercial horror films issued by American studios in the Thirties. I'll return to the last point later. Of course, Americans who have seen this film in poor video versions--often badly dubbed in English with titles like Horror Chamber Of Dr. Faustus and House Of Dr. Rasanoff, may have gotten the impression that Les Yeux is little more than Grand Guignol with a dash of lurid "effects." In reality, this film is one of the most intense and disturbing "morality plays" of the last half of the twentieth century, and shows exemplary restraint in depicting the struggles of a "mad scientist" even more repellent than most.
Franju might almost have subtitled his film: "A Study in Masks," since it is the paradox of the mask, both what it conceals and what it reveals, that lies at the center of the film. But along with the mask motif, the film also contains valuable subtexts--themes of moral conscience and the relationship between freedom and captivity. The plot of the film is simple. It centers on a doctor, an experimental surgeon preeminent in his field, who has recklessly ruined the life of his daughter in a car accident. Though we do not witness this accident, we learn, as the film proceeds, that the doctor was driving when the car presumably crashed or spun off the road, resulting in the badly-burned face of his once-beautiful daughter.
Apart from her face, the girl, about 20 years old, is physically unscathed, but nevertheless wears a mask to hide the grotesquerie of her post-accident visage. This confers upon her the aspect of an eerie, gliding ghost, who prowls the dark corridors of the country mansion where the doctor and his wife have taken refuge. As the film proceeds, we learn there is a mission going on in its gloomy tableaux, which stems from the moral ambivalence of the doctor after his crash. It begins, in fact, with a clue that strange doings are afoot--the surgeon's wife is driving down a dark road, framed by trees and wavering headlights, with occasional shots of a crumpled figure in the back seat wearing a man's hat and coat. The woman stares nervously ahead of her; a truck rumbles by. Suddenly, she stops the car, opens the back door, pulls out the figure. As she drags it out, we see, beneath the edges of the coat, two hairless legs, clearly female, sweeping along the ground. She continues to drag the bundle, then fumbles down an embankment to a river, where she drops the body in.
This mission is one of both guilt and redemption--as the doctor's wife, the woman is also a pawn in his plan to restore the burned face of his daughter. And it is testimony to the dark ingenuity of this couple that at no time do the authorities catch on to their plot. The body is found, pulled from the river but mysteriously missing a face--almost, as one inspector says, as if it had been cut with a "scalpel." But the reality never dawns. The doctor has conveniently planned for it all, substituting the name of his daughter, Christiane, for the name of the actual girl whose body (and face) have been stolen. That way, as he tells his daughter later in the film, no one will investigate--if they think she's dead, his guilt will not be questioned. But that is the crux of this film--the inescapable crux of the doctor's guilt. His plan to abduct young women, to chloroform them, and to graft their skin to the ruined face of Christiane, is on one level a mission of restoration. But on a more meaningful level it is the mission of the doctor to escape his own guilt.
The mask he uses to cover his daughter's face is also, from one perspective, merely a means of concealing her ugliness. But it's mainly a tool of evasion--he cannot face the reality of his former recklessness, and must cover the lingering evidence of it--the hideous, accusing crater where Christiane's face once was. There's an irony running through this film, and one that Franju may have deliberately intended by his title. For while Christiane and the other victims have eyes without faces, the doctor and his wife have faces without eyes in an ethical sense. They try desperately to convince themselves that the restoration of their daughter is "worth any price"--but it's clear that for the doctor, this goal, combined with the desire to assuage his own guilt, blinds him to every consequence. From the moment he conceives his mission, he's locked in a vicious cycle, and when attacked by his own experimental dogs at the end of the film, there's a sense of inexorable justice. These dogs, moreover, like the "death mask" of Christiane and the social "masks" of the doctor and his wife, are symbols of captivity. So, too, are the birds kept in cages at various parts of the mansion--in one scene, just after the doctor has explained his plan to his daughter, the camera pans over to a large painting of Christiane releasing a flock of doves with an upraised hand. The painting is "prophetic," for at the end of the film, not only are the dogs released (only to attack the doctor), but the birds, too, are freed by Christiane as she floats out of the deadly mansion like a liberated specter.
In the end, in other words, the faces without eyes are destroyed (the wife, too, murdered when Christiane stabs her with a scalpel), while the eyes without faces-- with the exception of the previous female victims--are freed from their captivity. As Christiane vanishes into the night, the swirling music score of Maurice Jarre seems to lift her, like a bird herself, white coat furling like a large white wing. Franju, despite his overall restraint, does not spare us details when they're suitable for his message. At one point, in fact, we witness one of the most graphic scenes ever fashioned for a pre-Sixties horror film. It shows the doctor leaning over a female victim in the operating room of his mansion, literally lifting the scalped face of the girl from her anaesthetized skull. Though the "face" is clearly rubber, the black-and-white photography lends verisimilitude, and must have been jolting to audiences of 1959. "So much harm you have done to achieve this miracle," he says to his wife--and this scene shows the most flagrant manifestation of that harm. Later, after the girl escapes to an upstairs room, we get another demonstration--having fallen from a window, she lies on the stones of a courtyard, her entire body bandaged, her eyes staring blindly like a petrified doll. It's hard to know whether the apparent allusions to previous horror films in Les Yeux were intentional. Perhaps not, but the resemblance of Christiane's gnarled face to that of the wax sculptor in Mystery Of The Wax Museum gives us pause. So, too, the similarity of the bandaged female suicide to that of Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, or the many variations on Universal's The Mummy.
As for the doctor, there are too many precedents to count--all the mad scientists from Dr. Jekyll to Dr. Cyclops, and beyond. More likely, these seeming homage's were little more than coincidental, the natural consequence of dealing with an essentially Faustian theme--it may, in fact, be appropriate that one of the alternate titles of this film contains the name Doctor Faustus. Franju directed other films, including a notorious 1949 documentary on slaughterhouses, Le sang des betes. He also has importance as a film historian and archivist, having co-founded with Henri Langlois the "Cinematheque Francais" in 1937. But he will probably be best remembered for this masterful excursion into the macabre, one of the most subtle portrayals of the "dark side" of humanity ever put on film. Many thanks, Paul. Since you mentioned the poor condition of the film now available to us, isn't it about time a restored version was issued on video and DVD--Anchor Bay, are you listening? Article copyright © Paul Kesler |
