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: NOW PLAYING :: CINEASTE :: DVD Review: Eyes Without a Face Directed by Georges Franju; produced by Jules Borkon; cinematography by Eugen Schufftan; starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, and Edith Scob. DVD, B&W, 90 mins. A Criterion Collection release, www.criterionco.com. Horror has never been as beautiful, and beauty never so horrible, as it is in Georges Franju’s rhapsodically terrifying Eyes Without a Face (1959). Little wonder that on its initial release no one knew what to make of it. The producer, Jules Borkon, wanted to establish a French tradition of horror, and picked the right director, Georges Franju, for the job. The mortifying tableaux of Franju’s stylized slaughterhouse documentary, 1949’s Blood of the Beasts, anticipate the shocking skin-graft skullduggery at the center of the feature. But the French, beginning to absorb the shock of the New Wave, weren’t interested, and Franju’s film was dismissed as toxic. Abroad, it found few fans. England’s Hammer Films had pumped new blood into the genre with its full-color hits The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958) but critics, largely revolted by the whole genre, were blind to Eyes’ virtues. (A rare favorable notice, in the London Observer, reached for comparisons, remarking that the film had “a ghastly elegance that recalls Tennessee Williams in one of his more abnormal moods.”) When a cut and dubbed version of the film, retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, turned up Stateside in 1962, (twinned with the two-headed terror of The Manster for drive-in double bills), Pauline Kael praised its “vague, floating, lyric sense of dread which goes beyond the simpler effects of horror movies that don’t make intellectual claims.” While only a handful of supporters cared to “face” the film beyond outrage at its content, Eyes had a ripple effect that continues to reverberate today. Period skin- rippers like 1960’s Circus of Horrors, and copycat international co-productions like that same year’s Mill of the Stone Women (both in the blood-dripping full color that Franju eschewed, feeling that viewers would get nothing but repulsion out of the images), were the immediate side-effects. Kinder reassessments in later years pinpointed the film’s importance as a true boundary-breaker. Billy Idol’s 1983 chart-topper, “Eyes Without a Face,” at least reminded listeners of its existence, and even used the original French title, Les Yeux sans visage, in its refrain. But its greatest paternity is felt on television, as audiences pore over the fleshy police procedurals of CSI or, more aptly, the plastic surgery nightmares of FX’s Nip/Tuck—it was Franju who quite literally gave us the eyes to peer into these once-taboo images. I’m not sure the Horror Chamber variant, which like a ghost ship is said to have haunted graveyard TV slots for years, ever got much play in the New York area; a confirmed monster-movie buff, I would have stayed up till the wee hours to have seen it. My first exposure to the film, in its original language but still edited, came from a laserdisc that I bought sight unseen, so high had its reputation had become. The Eyes had it: I was instantly captivated, by Maurice Jarre’s opposite-of-ominous score, which delicately draws you into its mysteries, and by the restless, cat-burglar cinematography of the great Eugen Schufftan, stealthily taking you into rooms marked “no admittance” and threatening, at one point, to hurdle into the path of a moving train. The “poetic” imagery I had read about exceeded my imaginings; the final shots of Christiane (Edith Scob), the remorseful recipient (and victim) or her surgeon father’s facial reconstruction techniques, wreathed in white doves, astonished. (As did Scob herself, who under the constraint of an expressionless mask does as much as Claude Rains did in The Invisible Man to secure herself a place in horror film history.) And there was nothing at all dated about the electrifying face-removal sequence, five minutes of squeamishness that Franju does not pull back from. Well, make that four minutes and change…the laserdisc edit did pull back from its final agonizing seconds as the scissors and forceps complete their task on Georges Klein’s realistic makeup. The new disc, produced by Curtis Tsui, goes the distance, and the anamorphically enhanced picture coaxes new details out of what had been black-and-white fuzz. I was struck this time by the resemblance of Scob’s eyes to those of Mia Farrow, who in Rosemary’s Baby a decade later would make her mark in fantastic films, and noted that the play that the doomed Edna (Juliette Mayniel) is about to see when the implacable Louise (Alida Valli, as understandable but as unknowable as in The Third Man) abducts her for scientific purposes is by Ionesco. What makes the disc commendable, however, is its use of supplements that made me look at the film in a new way, particularly its central character, Christiane’s father, Doctor Genessier. Pierre Brasseur, who plays Genessier, has the bulk, and truculence, of Rear Window-period Raymond Burr. There is no excuse for the wicked things he does in the name of science, for the good of his daughter, whose face he ruined in a car accident caused by his overbearing need to control. (I wonder if Borkon’s desire to film Jean Redon’s penny-dreadful novel was in part motivated by the boxoffice racked up by generation-gap Fifties horrors like I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, where parental figures wreak havoc on the young.) His crimes begin with the vivisection of stray dogs that wander innocently onto the grounds of his villa in the suburbs of Paris and escalate to the abduction, mutilation, and murder of the Christiane “donors.” The women are led to his boiler-room laboratory by Louise, a former patient and the only one on whom his skin graft techniques achieved success. Does all this evidence make Genessier a “bad” man? In a jacket essay entitled “Appearances to the Contrary,” Patrick McGrath, the author of Spider and Asylum, says guilty: “What we have is a lunatic father impelled to perform ever more desperate acts of violence to make his child good once more.” I’d say, though, that McGrath’s essay belies its title and is really the same old, same old. Genessier himself wears a mask of cold-blooded authority, which nearly slips in a key scene (yanked from the U.S. print) where he is politely, and feelingly, evasive toward a mother distraught over her young boy’s declining condition. The burden of always having to be in charge and to be functional, complicated by his crushing guilt, makes him I think more human, rather than less. Genessier is detached, but not depraved; the postwar German market wouldn’t tolerate a mad scientist, Borkon explained to Franju, so the director gave him a relentless clinician for whom the scientific method becomes “a terrible parody,” in Kael’s words. And is pitiable Christiane necessarily a “good” person? The way she covets Edna’s face in one scene gives me pause. Franju, co-founder of the Cinematheque Francaise, loved pulp and clearly relished the “ridiculously naïve plot elements” Kael scorned but peeled back its layers, soberly and purposefully, to expose the humans pinned like butterflies beneath its surfaces. (David Kalat’s liner notes are more up-to-date in its consideration.) In Agnes Jaoui’s Look at Me, a social-climbing author tries not to be thoroughly embarrassed at appearing on a low-brow TV show celebrating highbrow achievement. These programs are clearly part of the cultural landscape, as Franju found himself on one in 1982, answering questions from a schlubby mad-scientist host on a set littered with boiling beakers, which you will not find in Eyes. In an excerpt the director (who died in 1987) confesses to being “bored stiff by fairy tales” (just as I wrote on my notepad that the mirror-less Genessier residence, with its two-car garage—one for driving, one for dumping bodies—relocates Grimm’s castles to suburbia) and reveals that the one film that truly terrified him was a medical documentary about the treatment of epilepsy. The disc also includes a generous assortment of production ephemera, including trailers, stills, and lobby cards, and photos of an unused mask that Scob retained from the film—a thick, black piece that might have added a racial dimension to the picture had it been worn (while she put her face forward, it’s too bad that Scob, who later worked with Luis Bunuel and Leos Carax, could not have provided a commentary track). Additional interesting documentary footage is provided by a 1985 TV piece on writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who wrote the novels on which Vertigo and Diabolique were based and penned the Eyes screenplay. They don’t talk about the Franju film but given their focus on crime victims, and the shock of the visceral, rather than crime solvers, and detection (useless in Eyes), plus their orientation toward their work (“the hard part is not finding mysteries, it’s solving them,” Boileau remarks) they were clearly in sympathy with the director. The most significant “extra,” one that stands alone, is the 22-minute Blood of the Beasts, not an easy film to see—and hardly an easy one to watch. Beginning with shots of impoverished children playing with discarded objets d’art on the outskirts of Paris, the film moves into the nearby slaughterhouses, where a pretty white horse is silenced, and then torn apart, by the tools of the trade, wielded by men who are themselves at the mercy of their dangerous work. A former boxing champ poleaxes cattle and lambs, in the words of the narrator, bleat like “condemned men who sing yet know their song is useless.” As in Eyes the black-and-white imagery is aesthetic but not anesthetic; our own reactions supply the pain to accompany the stark facts of death and decay as the workers go about doing their tasks more efficiently and “humanely.” The animals, like Genessier at the close of the feature, wind up as meat, and will become refuse, as surely as the lovely junk shown at the opening. That’s life. “I believe there’s nothing but the truth, whether it’s beautiful or not, and consequently only the truth matters. Nothing else counts,” Franju says of his rationale during another interview segment, about Blood, on the DVD. For him, beauty was never skin deep.