1960
Director: Georges Franju
As part of my French film module this year, we are required to study a range of French cinema, including Georges Franju's "Les Yeux Sans Visage". As we studied Les Diaboliques et Godard's new wave masterpiece Breathless last year, I was expecting to discover another classic French gem. In short, I did not.
Acclaimed plastic surgeon, Docteur Génessier, aims to revive the beauty of his disfigured daughter's face by performing radical surgery on a number of young women, kidnapped by his wife. They are brought to a desolate grand building where ominous lighting creates an atmosphere of imprisonment and mistrust as you are initially unsure whether to pity or despise the Génessier family. This eeriness and sense of entrapment, initially created with a proficient right dolly in the opening sequence, are perhaps the only parts of the film I found impressive.
The film is often praised for its tense and haunting nature and though its subject matter is admittedly shocking, the dénouement lacked true progression and the film felt overworked and predictable of the genre. Its old-fashioned air could simply be justified with the fact it was made over 50 years ago, but so was Hitchcock's Psycho, a work that still remains a masterful example of the horror genre that fails to age. Here, we are overloaded with genre conventions; a close-up of a ringing phone, voiceovers as we are introduced to a line-up at a funeral, intensified sounds and melodramatic music. Also, it seems that Franju thought dissolves were the only ways to change scenes.
Many critics have also praised this piece for its visual poetry. You may call the masked Christianne prancing out of the prison that is her home, releasing doves into the air as her father's face also becomes disfigured poetic, I found it tiresome.
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