Eyes Without a Face

Les yeux sans visage

In Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, the surgeon Dr. Génessier – wracked with guilt for the disfigurement of his daughter’s face during a car accident where he was driving – devises a diabolical plan. With the help of Louise, his loyal assistant, he kidnaps beautiful young women in order to steal their faces and surgically graft them onto his daughter, who is forced to wear a terrifying porcelain mask in the meantime. As these disappearances of young women gradually increase, the police nose out the root of this evildoing and close in on the desperate doctor. Eyes Without a Face, which signaled Franju’s definitive shift from the documentary form to fiction features, elicited extreme reactions from audiences at its first screenings; the film would, of course, go on to influence such major directors as Pedro Almodóvar, John Carpenter, and John Woo, and also inspired Billy Idol to write a hit song that shared its title. An ingenious take on the Frankenstein myth, as well as a stunning homage to the tenets of German expressionism, Franju’s film delineates an electrifying treatise on the fluid notion of identity, on the fear of death, and on the slippery vanity of beauty, while also serving as a metaphor for the constructs and illusory semblances of cinema.
Screening Schedule

No physical screenings scheduled.

Direction: Georges Franju
Script: Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon, Claude Sautet
Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan
Editing: Gilbert Natot
Sound: Antoine Archimbaud
Music: Maurice Jarre
Actors: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Edith Scob, François Guérin, Béatrice Altariba, Alexandre Rignault, Claude Brasseur, Michel Etcheverry, René Génin, Marcel Pérès, Lucien Hubert, Charles Blavette, Birgitta Juslin, Yvette Etiévant
Production: Champs-Élysées Productions, Lux Film
Producers: Jules Borkon
Costumes: Marie Martine
Sets: Auguste Capelier
Make Up: Georges Klein
Format: DCP
Color: B/W
Production Country: France, Italy
Production Year: 1960
Duration: 88'
Contact: Gaumont

Georges Franju

Georges Franju was born in Fougères, Ille-et-Vilaine in 1912. He co-founded the Cinématheque Française in 1936. The Nazi occupation of Paris and the industrialism following World War II influenced his early works. His first documentary, The Blood of Beasts, was a graphic depiction of a day inside a Paris slaughterhouse. In 1959, With Head Against the Wall, he turned toward fiction feature films. He occasionally directed for television and in the late seventies, he retired from filmmaking to preside over the Cinématheque Française. He died on 5 November 1987.

Filmography

1949 Blood of the Beasts (short doc)
1952 Hôtel des Invalides (short doc)
1958 La première nuit (short)
1959 Head Against the Wall
1960 Eyes Without a Face
1961 Spotlight on a Murderer
1963 Judex
1965 Thomas the Impostor
1970 The Demise of Father Mouret
1974 Shadowman