Eyes Without a Face (1960) An all-timer & one of horrors true one-of-a-kind movies (Review)

The longer cinema has existed as a collaborative medium the more competition there is and the more movies are being made. To stand out from the masses you have to strive to be ahead of the curve – good directors can beat the crowd by a few years; the legendary ones are decades ahead of the game. Georges Franju is one such legendary director with Eyes Without a Face. With its prescient posture on cosmetic surgery and tropes that wouldn’t become established for another 10+ years, Eyes Without a Face is the work of the rarest of talents. Now in 2015, BFI has given this genre-defining subversive classic the full red carpet treatment.

Pierre Brasseur and Alida Valli play opposite Edith Scob – the titular Eyes. Prior to the events of the film, Doctor Génessier (Brasseur) crashes his car causing horrific facial mutilation to his daughter, Scob (Christiane). As a pre-eminent cosmetic surgeon, he pushes forward the boundaries of his trade to fix the catastrophic injury he caused his own flesh and blood. Face transplants may be a difficult but attainable reality today, in 2015, but in the day Farnju made this, such a notion was tantamount to science fiction. Of course, then success is out of reach but to such an extent that the Doctor sends his assistant Louise (Valli) to scours the streets of Paris for pretty young faces to steal.

Frankenstein may be an easy comparison to make given the base components of Franju’s film, but that doesn’t carry on to Eyes Without a Face’s “Monster”. Whether people have seen this film or not they will know one image – Edith Scob adorning a Michael Myers-like white mask. There is a ghostly beauty to Scob’s creepy angelic doll. She says in one of the discs interviews, Franju believed her to have a presence that floated on air and essence he captures that beautifully on camera.

When she is first introduced, Doctor Génessier climbs up his tower of a home to reach the locked away “Princess”, the camera gingerly sashays over each and every step removing more and more realism along the way and with each step, Génessier’s face becoming contorted with regret. The way Scob is presented on screen, even before she is on screen, there is something remarkably other at play. There is only one scene in which Scob isn’t wearing that mask, for the rest, her disquieting wanderlust is framed by Eugen Schüfftan’s cinematography that captures a performance of remarkable detail. Outside of body language, much of her communication is enacted through her expressive eyes. In a genre revolving around savage spectacle and conceptual grandeur it’s no surprise it has been overlooked, nonetheless, the simplicity makes this is one of horror’s best performances.

Contrasting Scob’s ethereal presence is the violence found in this vision of Paris which builds up and crescendos from the humble beginnings of Génessier publicly burying his daughter in the family plot. Said crescendo is a flurry of bludgeoning violence that pre-dates the slasher by a decade and the first Giallo (Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much) by at least 3 years. However that bloody climax is but a drop in the ocean compared to the centrepiece which sees the doctor and his assistant, Louise, operate on one of the women they found, surgically removing the flesh from her face. For a film shot in 1959 this is staggeringly graphic and still manages to pack a significant punch nearly 60 years later. How it hit the crowds in those days, I can only imagine.

Cinema history has criminally overlooked the work of Franju, now, thanks to BFI he has the opportunity to win over a whole new generation of fans. This is the very apex of an auteur who valued mood and execution over all else, a film beautifully acted and shot with an unreal quiet aura albeit, with a savage edge, this all spins its web into one of cinema’s great one-offs. I can guarantee you, there are no films even remotely like this one. No one would have the audacity to even try.

As well as a gorgeous restoration there is a bevvy of extras worthy of your time. The disc contains two short films, the first of which is Monsieur et Madame Curie, a curio that saw Franju experiment with pseudo-documentary recreation. The more complete of the two shorts is the First Night. Using a boy lost in one of Paris’ railway stations, his gliding camera work and droning tubular score evoke the isolation of being a lost child. This is a wonderful experimental short that paints a complete early picture of Franju’s copious talents. Completing the set is a recent interview with Edith Scob and a retrospective of a prodigiously talented director.

Thanks for reading our review of Eyes Without a Face

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