I. POETIC HORROR.
Along with Henri Langlois, Georges Franju in 1936 founded the world’s most celebrated film archive, La Cinémathèque française. (Both two years earlier had co-directed a short 16mm film, Le Métro.) After the war, Franju became a solo artist, launching his career with the short documentary Le sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949), which surveys, in graphic detail, the routine inside a Parisian slaughterhouse, composing in stark images a freezing reflection on the violence that human existence may require in order to sustain itself. But it is we the viewer who are moved to reflection; we watch workers simply going about their killing business with apparent indifference to the bloody and lethal outcome, and as a result we watch hard for small signs of affect that might suggest the humanity that is being suppressed in order to put meat on dinner tables. Franju’s images combine the brutal and the lyrical, reportage and poetry; irony, too, becomes a prominent element of the director’s distinctive style. (One of the film’s narrators describes sheep being led to their slaughter as “following like men.”) Another brilliant short documentary followed: Hôtel des Invalides (1951), a sardonic tour of France’s national war museum—a withering critique of French infatuation with militarism. Franju’s most celebrated film includes a bravura tracking shot from a statue of Napoleon to an actual patron, a crippled veteran. In effect, the start and end-point of the camera movement create a kind of cut in our mental processing of the visual material; the fact that there is no cut here, that it is all one shot, however, contributes boldly to the irony. The daunting statue embodies France’s military mystique, its quasi-religious adoration of war and warriors; the veteran, the horrific reality of war. A cut between one and the other would have effected at least as much of a jolt, but the continuous camera movement emphasizes causality: the idea that military worship leads to humanity’s shattered outcome. It is worth noting that France at the time of both Le sang des bêtes and Hôtel des Invalides was at war, in Indochina, adding to the urgency of Franju’s reflections. Franju showed a gentler, nostalgic side with a hybrid documentary, one that engaged Franju’s heart as film archivist: Le grand Méliès (1952), in which the pioneer filmmaker’s widow appears as herself, and their son appears as Méliès, and in which are interwoven scenes from illusionist Georges Méliès’s silent classics. Thus the film reaches back with reverence into France’s cinematic past, but also projects forward by implying (through the generational substitution) the continuity of France’s commitment to cinema and, more generally, the continuing magical nature of art. Franju made ten other short documentaries before turning to feature-length fiction, with the striking though shaky La tête contre les murs (Head Against the Wall, 1958). Franju was in his mid-forties.
Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face), Franju’s next film, began a string of sometimes wonderful work, including the novelistic, exquisite Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962), from François Mauriac (who contributed to the script), about an impossible marriage that suggests the ultimate bourgeois entrapment, where the wife poisons her cold, domineering and capricious spouse. Superbly acted by Emmanuèlle Riva and Philippe Noiret, the film contains an amazing “last straw”: when her insensitive, cruel husband starts treating her kindly out of the blue, Thérèse sees more clearly than ever the degree of power that he exerts over her in their union, oppressing her. With this film, Franju, using a sharper ink pen, more or less invented the latter-day (and present-day) Claude Chabrol, who began a remarkable series of marital tragedies and domestic films about murder in the late 1960s. The following year, Franju made his most entertaining film, the flamboyantly lovely Judex (1963), which brims with both reverence and love for the original silent serial by Louis Feuillade (1916). I have seen neither the First World War-set Thomas l’Imposteur (1964), based on Cocteau’s 1923 novel and to whose script Cocteau, still kicking, contributed, nor La faute de l’abbé Mouret (1970), from Zola. The latter is in color, which I cannot imagine doing anything to enhance Franju’s work. The other films I have noted are all in black and white. Truly, given how relatively little of value we have gotten from cinema’s color experiment, one can only wish that its territory, more commercial than artistic, had never been transgressed into. Color tinting can be quite expressive; actual color filming, hardly ever.
Franju’s subsequent work was for French television. Even the theatrically released Feuilladean Shadowman (1974) is a cut version of Franju’s TV miniseries Les nuits rouges. It is in color. Having seen Shadowman when it first came out in the States in the late 1970s, I am happy to discover belatedly that it doesn’t represent Franju’s full intent. Many now decry the neglect into which Franju fell during the last fifteen years of his life. (Franju was 75 when he died in 1987.) Recently Jean-Pierre Léaud, no less, played Franju in the film J’ai vu tuer Ben Barka (Serge Le Péron, Saïd Smihi, 2005).
Based on the novel Celle qui n’était plus by Jean Redon,* Eyes Without a Face is somber and lyrical and is often described as a poetic horror film. It is that and more than that. But its generic identification as a horror film is a reasonable place to begin discussing it. After all, here in the States the film was first released, in a cut, dubbed version geared to the drive-in crowd, as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus! Moreover, its dreaminess, and the surreal quality of some of its finest imagery, certainly do make its “horror” “poetic.” Poetic horror is something of a French tradition; one thinks of Jean Epstein’s 1928 silent version of Edgar Allan Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, with its wind breezing through the pages of a voluminous book, and the eerie funeral, which seems to unfold in the unconscious rather than in time—a passage that surely influenced Carl Theodor Dreyer’s German Vampyr (1931), the greatest “poetic horror” film ever made, and indeed one of the greatest films of any kind. In turn, this film by a Dane, along with instances of German Expressionism, influenced Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman in such films as Wild Strawberries (1957) and Hour of the Wolf (1967), and even, when you think about it, Fanny and Alexander (1982).
There is a mad scientist in Eyes Without a Face, but his name isn’t Faustus; it’s Génessier (Pierre Brasseur, too fat to associate with his Frédérick Lemaître in Les enfants du paradis fourteen years earlier, but grim, concentrated, powerful, magnificent). Dr. Génessier is a famous French plastic surgeon. Due to his arrogance (what’s a mad scientist without arrogance?), manifested in his recklessness at the wheel of his car, his daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob, in the performance of the film and the performance of a lifetime), is facially disfigured in the extreme. Like Erik in The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925), which is based on a French novel by Gaston Leroux, Christiane wears a mask to hide where there no longer really is a face; her soulful eyes, however, shine through. Driven by guilt and the studious need to apply to the limit his professional expertise, the widower performs operation after operation, each one an attempt to graft onto Christiane another face. These surgeries are performed in secret, their privacy abetted by the fact that Génessier has declared somebody else’s dead daughter as his own. Each of these attempted face transplants have failed, Christiane’s body—or, perhaps, soul—rejecting the grafted skin. These potential new faces for Christiane come from young women whom her father murders in order to attempt to restore his daughter to wholeness. Dr. Génessier, then, is a serial killer. Dr. Frankenstein at least used the already-dead for his experiments, but of course his procedure permitted him this luxury. Génessier must rob lives rather than graves.
Génessier has his own Fritz (the assistant to Frankenstein that Dwight Frye plays in the 1931 film by James Whale). Génessier’s is far prettier—elegantly beauteous in fact, for she looks just like Alida Valli. Louise is a former patient of the doctor’s; his successful restoration of her burnt, scarred face has moved her to devote herself to him, and it is likely that the two now are also lovers. (Valli gives an excellent performance.) As his Fritz, Louise befriends Génessier’s victims and lures them into his secluded country domain, and sometimes disposes of the resultant corpses by herself. For much of the film Louise drives around and around, picking up and delivering young women to their ends—a metaphor for the dead-endedness of her own life of perpetual self-sacrifice. All three major characters—the doctor, his daughter, Louise—may be aptly described as “the living dead.” Génessier’s remark that one must drain the blood of organ transplant candidates in order to prevent contamination and thus facilitate the procedure’s success marks the man with a hint of vampirism. Moreover, the implicit lesbianism in Louise’s prowling around for attractive young women also marks her with the same hint according to the genre’s monstrous mythology. Eyes Without a Face is a “vampire film” at a couple of removes.
Another element of the film’s grisly horror is the dark, surreal chamber in which Génessier’s dogs are kept locked up, each in its own cage. The lighting and the architecture combine to create a cavernous, seemingly warped space out of the first great horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919), with banks of cages flanking both sides, receding into an empty, shadowy space in the background of the frames. (Both Eugen Schüfftan’s cinematography and Auguste Capelier’s production design are brilliant—brilliant!—throughout.) These dogs, strays, parallel the doctor’s victims; Génessier uses them to experiment on, in an effort to perfect his face transplant procedure. The suggestion here of Nazi death camp medical and scientific experimentation is vibrant and caustic (the dogs’ chamber is adjacent to the surgery room), and the continuous moaning and barking that we hear make its own stinging commentary about “necessary” research. This comes to combative fruition at the end when Christiane, fed up also with her father’s experiments on her (she comes right out and says so), releases the dogs, which proceed to attack, maul and kill their master. It is a liberating moment that can be interpreted as bestowing moral equivalency on human and other animal life—a possible interpretation, too, of Le sang des bêtes. On the other hand, there is an even more compelling sense of the paramount nature of humanity, for at that moment of liberation and gruesome communal execution, even if we haven’t thus processed this earlier, the animals loom as avenging spirits of the girls that the doctor and Louise have dispatched. (Indeed, Christiane has already killed Louise, stabbing her in the throat just above the pearl choker, which Louise has always worn, covering the scar from her plastic surgery.) I am not referring here to either symbolism or metaphor; rather, as in the Catholic mass where, according to the dogma of transubstantiation, the wafer becomes the body of Christ, the wine, Christ’s blood, the dogs become these avenging spirits before our bewitched eyes. Franju’s lyricism and inspired belief transform the horror into poetry. It is one of cinema’s most magical moments.
Although Louise’s unearthly riding around in the dark contributes something to this aspect of the film, the film’s principal agency of visual poetry is, of course, Christiane. Her eyes; those gracious tilts of the head, the better to see through her mask; her almost gliding movements. There is a point when a victim sees Christiane’s horrible unmasked face, and she understandably screams; but that face is so full of sorrow that we feel only sadness. This is also a poetic moment, one evoking images of forlorn eyes in paintings and graphic works by French artist Odilon Redon. At the end, in addition to releasing the dogs, Christiane also releases caged doves, one of them lighting upon her arm as she moves away from her father’s mansion in the dark. Génessier had used these lovely birds, too, as guinea pigs, and now they symbolize the freedom from the grip of guilt that Christiane has finally attained. What happens to Christiane? The film ends with her in middle-distance view, wandering off, seemingly floating away. It’s possible that Christiane will die now. I tend to think, however, that she is already dead, that that’s what her liberation means. For me, Franju has created an extraordinary scene of passage from one side of experience to another, one without any discernible point of “crossing over.” For me, it is the Holy Ghost that has lit upon Christiane’s arm, visually effecting the crossing over, taking her to her true, eternal father. At the end of Franju’s beautiful film, the full import of Christiane’s Christian name impresses itself on our hearts and minds.
II. MORE THAN POETIC HORROR.
Earlier I described Franju’s signature film, Hôtel des Invalides, as sardonic. Franju is a satirist of sorts, and is so in Eyes Without a Face. If nothing else, this film is satirizing the genre of horror films—or, perhaps, the widespread notion that such films are primarily, if not entirely, escapist and really about nothing, all of them little more than an occasion to induce shudders in the audience. There is scarcely any scene in cinema that induces such queasiness as the unblinking one in Franju’s film in which a face is surgically cut and lifted off a victim—unless it be, of course, the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). But what are we to make then of the giddy carnival music (by Maurice Jarre) with which the film opens, as Louise drives in darkness in order to dispose of one of Génessier’s corpses? A slip of the composer’s pen? A baton with a subversive life of its own, misleading us into thinking we are listening to one of the circus themes that Nino Rota composed for Federico Fellini? A slower rendition of the same music ushers in a more sorrowful note; but the initial version, which crops up a few times more as if comically punctuating the unhappy proceedings, alerts us to something unexpected about the film. Caught at a particular angle, Eyes Without a Face is satirical—grimly satirical, to be sure, but satire as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman has called the film “a morbid comedy.”
A key to understanding this aspect of the film is Louise, with whose appearance the Jarre-ing music is introduced. Eyes Without a Face is a satire about love. With all her heart Louise believes that she is in love with her false savior, this surgeon who saved her face and thus at least her cosmetic life. But there is something askew about devotion that makes one become an accomplice to murder after murder, that makes one lug around bodies in the dark in order to keep the appearance of a plastic surgeon’s practice “clean.” We recognize that what Louise mistakes for love is the dependence that is fostered by gratitude and strengthened by guilt, each participation in one of Génessier’s murders creating sufficient guilt in Louise that she tries silencing it by participating in another murder, and another, at his behest. What Franju is satirizing, then, is our capacity to misinterpret our own feelings, calling them love. The irony is that, in her eyes, Génessier has saved her life when in fact she has abdicated her life, her own existence, in this perverted adoration of and attachment to him. To what of our own feelings do we give the name love that others perhaps see more clearly as something else?**
Indeed, other major characters are no less immune to the charge that the love they profess is in reality a distortion or an aberration of love. Christiane appears to be a creature of love, the two principal recipients of this love of hers being her fiancé, Jacques, a surgeon working alongside her father in his clinic, and her father. Yet by allying herself with her father’s scheme, part of which presents her as being dead to the world, she denies Jacques, along with herself, the pleasure of their company. In effect, she has coldly chosen family over a love relationship apart from family—a relationship that traditionally confers a supportive function and secondary status to biological family in giving itself primary status. Every now and then, for whatever reason (loneliness, longing for Jacques, guilt over the separation that the deception has imposed), Christiane telephones Jacques; but these calls, silent on her part, only underscore the unnaturalness of the course she has taken at her father’s behest: a reflection of her father’s deceiving both a medical colleague and a prospective son-in-law. Eventually Christiane does speak a word or two before aborting the conversation, and Jacques’s reporting of the incident to the police leads to a sting operation targeting Dr. Génessier. As the plot hums along, it is easy to miss the full meaning of Jacques’s remarkable contact with the police. Up to this point the model of a grief-stricken boy deprived of the love of his life, instead of storming her home on the evidence that Christiane may still be alive, what any person who is passionately in love would instantly do, Jacques instead goes to the police! In so doing he reduces the love that we have imputed to him to the narrow dimensions of a criminal case. We instantly realize what Jacques himself probably remains unconscious of: he never really loved Christiane in the first place but only courted her for the sake of career and his professional relationship with her celebrated father. (The earlier shot of the two men side by side at Christiane’s supposed funeral now resonates with new import.) Meanwhile, Christiane’s protracted attachment to her father reflects France’s Roman Catholic infatuation with patriarchy. Father knows best.
In this intricate satire of the suppressed, convoluted feelings that are sometimes christened with the name of love, the character who looms most largely in this regard is Génessier. How he loves his daughter! He must do everything in his power to restore her face, even commit brutal murders; but even Christiane herself, confronting her father with the fact that he has converted her into another of his “guinea pigs” through his cruel succession of operations on her face, ultimately pierces the mask of his pretense at love. At some point, of course, he must truly have loved Christiane; but the film commences after that point. What we instead see is a situation in which the form of a father’s love for his daughter has eerily outrun any content of genuine feeling. In this light, a tantalizing possibility arises of the larger purpose of Franju’s satirical intent: Eyes Without a Face is a masked assault on reactionaryism. Such a reading shortens the intellectual distance between it and the earlier Le sang des bêtes and Hôtel des Invalides.
A heartrending circumstance that came to a close in the U.S. in 2005 is oddly illuminated by Franju’s film. I am referring to the Terri Schiavo affair, which drew national attention beginning in 2003. A 26-year-old St. Petersburg, Florida, woman, Terri Schiavo, collapsed, went into respiratory and cardiac arrest, and fell into a coma in 1990. Schiavo’s persistent vegetative state—this diagnosis came in 1993—led her spouse and guardian, Michael Schiavo, to petition the courts in 1998 to remove her gastric feeding tube. Contesting that this was in accordance with their daughter’s own wishes, the position that Michael was maintaining on the basis of conversations with his wife prior to the 1990 medical events (in 2000, a court determined that Terri had made the statements that Michael claimed), Terri’s parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, opposed the removal of Terri’s life-support. The initial court ruling in Michael’s (and, of course, Terri’s) favor launched an avalanche of petitions and appeals in various courts, resulting in a media circus, political manipulation and exploitation (involving, among others, Florida governor Jeb Bush and his brother, the second President Bush), and the removal of the feeding tube on three occasions. The last of these occurred in mid-March 2005. Thirteen days later, on March 31, Theresa Marie Schiavo died. An autopsy revealed extensive damage to Schiavo’s nervous system and brain functions.
Terri Schiavo’s parents, it seems to me, duplicated in a way Dr. Génessier in Eyes Without a Face, the form of their love for their daughter outrunning any content of genuine feeling. Indeed, because they could not muster the courageous love necessary to let go of their daughter, they clung to the form of her being way past the point that that form showed any responsive, autonomous life. The Schindlers obsessively denied the medical evidence of their daughter’s (one might add, patently evident) vegetative state, reading signs of volition into involuntary spasms as though their daughter were a drunk cup of tea in which they were reading tea leaves. In the name of love they subjected their daughter to goodness knows how much protracted, unnecessary pain, for one cannot begin to know what, if anything, Terri felt inside her coma. I offer this interpretation of their behavior not as any sort of condemnation; surely they were not any more aware of their motives than are Génessier and other characters in Franju’s film. Doubtless the Schindlers believed they were acting out of love for their daughter. However, Franju’s film helps us see the more complicated truth of the matter.
Another 2005 event, one occurring in Franju’s own France in November, also connects with Eyes Without a Face: the world’s first face transplant, which was performed on the victim of a vicious dog attack. Her new nose, lips and chin came from a brain-dead donor.
The United Kingdom, incidentally, congratulated itself on having the expertise for successfully performing such a procedure and the standards to refrain from performing it due to the ethical issues involved. Meanwhile, the patient in France who lost her face through no fault of her own now has a face again. It is not necessary for us to analyze the tangled mix of motives that may have guided the surgeon who led the operation. The patient has a face. Strengthened by the psychological support she received before and after the operation, she is moving forward. It is the right direction for all of us.
* Redon is among those credited with the film’s script. The others are Claude Sautet, Pierre Gascar, and the writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. I have been unsuccessful in all my attempts to establish whether and, if so, how Jean Redon was related to Odilon Redon, whose spirit in any case hangs over Franju’s film, inspiring much of its affect and some of its imagery.
** This differs from my own Shakespearean position, that convoluted motives behind love help explain love but do not negate the authenticity of such love.
Tags: Franju
