In 1960, Georges Franju released what was to become one of the most influential pieces of poetic French cinema to ever be released. Surrealist psychological horror Eyes Without a Face remains an uneroded masterpiece by how it transcends the concrete horror genre through its poetic sadness and loneliness, with enough intricate symbolism to curiously branch out from one’s mind for days.
For a director to successfully communicate an intense sadness and philosophical message onscreen, then he needs a careful choice in character focus and the hardships one must endure for the development of oneself and the expense/benefit of others, which Franju gently complicates. Eyes Without A Face’s iconic narrative tropes are anything but for sheer shock value and are used instead to capture an unseen perspective on human ethics and one of the most bizarrely daunting character studies one could imagine. It utilises horror to seek humanity and gruesome deeds and appearances to seek the true extend of justifying misdeeds, as well as where the true warm connection one needs to survive is truly found.
The brilliant Dr. Génessie is brought to a hospital to confirm the identity of his daughter’s dead body that was pulled from a river, which was presumed to be her due to her face being an ‘open wound’ like Christiane’s was left after a car accident to which Genessie was responsible. Little do the doctors know Genessie is actually keeping his mortally-wounded daughter locked up in his mansion while he attempts to find the correct method to give her a successful face transplant to fix her broken beauty. He has his assistant kidnap matching girls so he can scalpel their faces off and attempt to stitch them onto Christiane. As he grievously retries after each failure, she is left longing for death or blindness in the comfort of her room, being made to wear a featureless white mask by her father to cover her destroyed features. After a burial is given to the dead failure ‘Christiane’ and her alive status is unknown, she lonelily trapes through the mansion, finding her only connection in the doctor’s abused German Shepherds and the occasional silent phone call to her mourning fiancé, who angrily picks up the receiver to a presumed silent pranker.
So Eyes Without A Face has plenty of unique daunting tropes and therefore has to earn them by conveying meaning with directing and dialogue, and its narrative centre of a tragic character study definitely works to its advantage to conveying the potential dark emotions to these concepts. Christiane’s loneliness is greatly sympathised with the general plot alone: undeservingly locked away and forced to be the cause of such horrific misdeeds by her father. But Franju understands how to add human complexity through silence by letting subtle performances take over, amplified by delicate camerawork.
Most notably of this being the montages of Christiane’s obscure wandering through Genessie’s mansion as she observes her surroundings with a child-like curiosity while wearing her white mask and gown, mimicking a broken angel as she peers down the bannisters and gazes around the wide rooms. We cannot see her face and are therefore rejected any glimpse into her emotional world and can only guess her thought-patterns through her silent moments of wandering. This choice in ambiguity gives character complexity and therefore a greater feel of poetic realism and a feeling of intense loss in Christian’s melancholic world. Camera movements slowdance-like swerve to and fro her to bizarrely bring a rather romantic sense of scale to the mansion as well as a mirroring claustrophobia to her obedience as a prisoner.
Another iconic ambiguous moment is when Christiane carefully observes and then traces the face of her unconscious transferrer without her mask, obscurely and wordlessly conveying her state of mind as she attempts to desensitise herself with the grotesque concept of wearing another person’s face. But the rapidly raising demonic music building up to the horror of the reawakening victim tragically shifts the personification of the defaced Christiane from an innocent victim to a monster. This is mostly done via foreshadowing the victim’s initial impressions and, therefore, our general expectations of a horror monster, having not seen her without her mask and heard horrific context to her face beforehand. This draws the film’s main line between true self and appearance.
Christiane’s sympathetic feel is heightened constantly and is built upon once again with horror-like expectations, but this time on another victim: Genessie’s experiment dogs. Ever since the man steps foot in his mansion you hear the echoey vicious gnarling of a dozen hounds from the basement, which nervously foreshadows imminent hungry violence and builds up their wrath to expect the basement to be a sort of den of monsters. However, when the lonely Christiane finally visits the dark fearful prisoned hounds, which shout and snarl with baring teeth at her entrance, they gradually calm and show their beaten-down love when she slowly pets and shows gentle affection to each one. This not only empathises with the dogs but is ironically the only scene of true unconditional affection and connection in the film, as the two beings are ironically wrongly-prisoned and abused. While Gennessie may be acting out of love and guilt for his daughter, the barbaric extent of his actions and constant isolation he induces onto Christiane certainly shows an ill trade and obscures whether he truly cares about his daughter’s facial dignity or is trying to create a perverse artistic masterpiece. The more he desperately delves into finding a superficial cure, the more he ironically disconnects from her.
Some explicit symbolism is even shown when he first enters his mansion home, with the dogs’ barking from below the ground floor rather explicitly mirroring the hounds of hell he needs to face for his sins against nature and humanity. After walking up from his imminent punishment, he ascends the stairs to his false idea of heaven, with his daughter unwillingly forced, begging for death, into the image of an obscured angel in a blissfully perfect white room with harmonious music playing. Mortifying stuff.
But that’s not to say Christiane doesn’t get her revenge in the end, oh no. The girl, rather fantasy-like, becomes a symbolic force of nature as she finally cracks after another failed transplant and frees all the hungry abused dogs and a cage of doves. The hounds get revenge on Genessie and ironically destroy his face in the process: a symbolic comeuppance against the mutilation of natural creation. The white Christiane then wanders contrastingly into the black forest, her curiosity now the hopeful kind, symbolised with a single dove resting on her hand.
While this is a rather obscure ending to leave on such an uncaringly violent note, this is the beauty in the obscurity of character humanity. Christiane is presented as suffering but with remaining wholesomeness, which she preserves through animals. Throughout the film, it’s shown she loathes her father’s deeds but decides to endure them as a gateway to seeing her fiancé again. It’s only until she’s pushed to an unexpected limit after so many fails that her unpredicted murderous hostility explodes, inciting her father’s death and stabbing his assistant. These finally-vented emotions make this film all the more rewatchable, as you gain an almost entirely new perspective on each character with the previous obscure scenarios they got caught up in and the possible suppressed emotions that came with them. Even the mutilator Genessie is shown to have a complex conflicting character, having areas of general sympathetic care outside his contrasting cruel deeds, such when he gives psychotherapy to a troubled boy in his ward.
But back to aesthetics, another defining element of Eyes Without A Face is its soundtrack, which ranges from melancholic-romantic to near mortifying. It guides and amplifies the ambiguous emotions felt throughout the film and aids the slow pacing and long non-dialogue takes to make them more vibrant and engaging. Be it the loud, morbidly-striking French orchestral when Genessie’s assistant stalks her next victim to friction up a sinister vibe or the melancholic piano to Christiane’s isolative wandering, the sound just entices the narrative to make the altogether film more of a breathing creature of modern art than a simple Greek tragedy.
But one, if not the most infamous segment from the entire film is the face transplant scene, where we finally see how brutally Genessie uses his specialities. His drugged-unconscious victim lays strapped to an operating table and several bladed instruments are laid out for whatever gory use the handler can muster. This scene is so artfully mortifying by how it retains its nail-biting damaging effects despite its practical fakeness being so explicit. It takes advantage of the black-and-white format as a style than a limitation (hence the 1960’s release) by Dr Genessie’s actor essentially ‘scalpelling’ his victim’s still face with a paintbrush, with black paint oozing from the sides to represent blood, which ironically conveys artistic escapism. But the psychological daunt still hammers effect to this day by how superbly the scene’s patience is, dragging on as long as a procedure would take in full white-lit settings, supported with strained close-upped performances taking the intensity of the mutilation to a valuable extreme.
Eyes Without A Face is a rare film that has philosophical human questions to go with its slow-paced artistic value. Its core narrative is an aching tragedy but gets resolved in an unexpectantly brutal way from the seemingly innocent protagonist, ultimately and ironically showing how superficial both her face and our understanding of her was. And watch this film and you’d find its aesthetic styles and iconic tropes to be no superficiality, but instead subjecting a particular face to this strange, cruel world as Genessie did to his daughter. Whether you’re eager about French cinema or looking to explore how deep horror can reflect human messages, this is a surreal artistic trip not to be passed by.