Happy Samhain/All Hallow’s Eve/Halloween! Part 2: Les Yeux Sans Visage/Eyes Without a Face

 

Before we get too far along down this road, I want to reflect on some elements of horror film as a genre and some of the ramifications of those elements. Critical theory and textual analysis in the service of reviewing pop culture seems to strike people as overkill. “It’s just a movie!”

Sure, but by dismissing out of hand the work of dozens (if not, thousands) and the investments, costs, and returns of a collaborative work of any magnitude reveals more about the dismissal than the work itself. It also speaks to how little attention we pay to the very pop culture we consume on a regular basis, from movies to sport to music.

I didn’t apply any great amount of analysis to “Mad Love” simply because, despite its being a study in psychological deterioration and rife with some pretty interesting examples of deviance and queer theory, it has at its heart, that most indefinable element: fun.

Seriously. “Fun” may not be the first word that comes to mind when we think of “horror”, but as I did mention earlier, there is a catharsis in a well-told tale. “The Exorcist” is often grueling, unsettling, and a study in escalating dread; but it provides a satisfying experience. We are privy to a world of heightened spiritual and emotional tensions and combat and by that film’s end, we leave the theater or turn off the device perhaps a little drained, off-balance, but relieved.

Horror movies do not always end on happy notes; as such, they prepare us for the tragedy of real life. There is a distinct Aristotelian utility regarding horror films; they are often ramped or exaggerated tragic plays. They also have the advantage of stretching the imagination, another element that is key to the genre.

The fantastic needn’t always be horror, but horror is mostly an embodiment of the fantastic. As such, a defining element is the absurdity of one or more plot points, the tropes we encounter in representatives of the sub-genres in the horror category, and very often, the invasion of the irrational into mundane reality. In a horror film, we are often forced to suspend our disbelief and while we are trying to rationally interpret what unfolds on the screen, we are equally met with scenarios that hammer us into accepting the film’s internal logic.

Naturally, there are varying degrees of success. A film like “Midsommar” is built on a series of expectations and disruptions. It constructs a hermetic community that could very well exist, and one whose proposed existence speaks volumes about the greater society (“how could people live with the cognitive dissonance” is one of the first questions I hear), but feels real enough to support the main conceit of the film and how the mythic devours the quotidian. There are larger issues “Midsommar” interrogates, but by most criteria, it is a fully successful work of horror.

A genuinely mediocre or bad film might still hit some notes. But mostly, the failure is systemic. Films like “The Creeping Terror” or any number of Ed Woods’ works suffer from failures in execution from script to completion. Mind you, I am not criticizing the ideas behind bad movies; they may be no less preposterous than any masterpiece. Horror films rest on the absurd. Where they fail is in a lack of understanding the medium, and often, just the basics of story-telling and drama.

Having said that, bad horror movies can be fun. (I will actually take a Wood production over some, supposedly better executed movies, any day.)

Fun, the imagination/sense of the fantastic, acceptance of the absurd, and degree of execution form the foundation of the works of the genre. “Mad Love” has these in spades and efficiently deploys each in a little over an hour. This last element is worth looking at for a moment.

Many of the classic horror films rarely exceed 90 minutes. This holds true up through the seventies, but as time has worn on, a kind of overweening need for extension seems to have creeped into the genre (and not just the genre, but film in general). This is neither good nor bad; but audiences can tell when a movie has lingered too long. This proves fatal for a horror film (or any work that traffics in suspense) by halting the momentum or diffusing the tension in the narrative. We don’t really encounter this too much in earlier eras.

That’s not to say that an hour and a half of a lousy film doesn’t feel like two when it’s over, but in the main, you don’t feel cheated out of time you can’t get back if the film is a stinker.

“Eyes Without a Face” clocks in at 90 minutes. In that time, an oneiric world of poetry, pain, and redemption plays out. Not only is it a well-told tale, it speaks to deeper aspects of the human psyche, as the best art does.

“Les Yeux Sans Visage”/”Eyes Without a Face”

As with “Mad Love”, Georges Franju’s film has at its center a brilliant surgeon attempting to restore a patient to health using unorthodox methods, motivated by a kind of love. Gogol’s motivation was, at least originally, rooted in his attraction to Yvonne and in “Eyes…”, Pierre Brasseur’s Dr. Génessier is attempting to restore his daughter’s beautiful face. In both circumstances, each surgeon deteriorates over time, with unique narrative differences.

Gogol is more selfish and a more stunted individual; Génessier seems to have a greater depth of feeling (that is to say, that he is more self-aware), though eventually, a kind of monomania or tunnel vision sets in and he meets his destiny in horrific fashion.

Both men move through their respective films like somnambulists. For good reason; each work is a nightmare of claustrophobia and collapse. Each of these men are hemmed in by their inability to pursue their aims in more expansive and/or rational ways. With Gogol, we are at a remove of a quarter century from Génessier, so we could perhaps say that his approach to grafting would be frowned upon (but I have my doubts; after World War I, substantial advances in surgical medicine were made) and again, owing to the genre rules, we need to accept the absurdity of the situation.

Additionally, each of the protagonists have their “secret lairs”. Each has a physical place where their obsessions, hopes, nightmares can come true. Thus, each film is a manifestation of psychical space, as well, and as such cannot be expected to conform to the world of rationality.

Génessier goes about his business in that most Victor Frankensteinian manner; harvesting faces off beautiful young women’s skulls to transplant onto his disfigured daughter’s. Unlike Frankenstein, Génessier requires fresh flesh and the corpses are disposed of later by his loyal Igor in the form of Alida Valli’s Louise, a woman whose face Génessier successfully grafted.

Of course, his daughter Christiane’s – Edith Scob managing to communicate pathos behind a mask to painful effect – grafts fail as her body rejects each transplant. This leads to a series of murders of faceless women and the recovery of one such that Génessier identifies the body as Christiane’s, freeing him up to pursue his guinea pigs in a more routine manner.

All of that said, there are wrinkles along the way, not the least of which is Christiane feeling the weight of the carnage that rests on her shoulders, freeing the last of the victims, killing Louise, and setting free caged doves and dogs that had been housed in a converted gas chamber, from the looks of it. Génessier had just sent the investigating officers away when he discovers and is discovered by the freed canines. They attack and maul him, destroying his face and Christiane by this point is wandering off into the woods.

Along the way, imagery and relationships reinforce a sense of hermetic or insular and while employing a number of cliches, subverts them. As Raymond Durgnat points out, this has much to do with Eugen Schüfftan’s cinematography (1). There is a kind of superimposition of unreality onto the narrative and this in itself is a kind of irony, given that up to this point, Franju had made his reputation as one of France’s great documentarians.

Schüfftan’s work is more dynamic than Toland’s and more layered. If Toland’s is a sequence of portraits and architectural settings that absorb the characters, Schüfftan’s is more like undulating landscapes of fetishism and the erotic. The way a scalpel is held, the naked body of a woman clothed only in an overcoat as the corpse is sent to drift away in a river at night, the idée fixe of Louise’s rounds to procure another subject/victim. All of this has a distinct rhythmic quality that lulls the viewer into a dream state.

Unlike other works where there is an investigation/encroachment from outer reality, even the police seem to fall into some kind of symbolic role; almost every character feels archetypal and every scene allegorical. This would be insufferable were it not, again, for the craft involved.

Much is made of the surgical procedure of the removing of Edna Gruber’s (Juliet Mayniel) face – and it is disturbing – but there’s the resonance of the clamps haloing Edna’s face finds an echo in Béatrice Altariba’s Paulette’s EEG at Génessier’s clinic (Paulette is deployed as bait to draw out Génessier who is now a suspect – particularly since his daughter, in a spell of longing, called her ex-fiancee, Génessier’s assistant). This is yet another circular/reflexive element in the dream logic of the film.

The resonance between Paulette's EEG and Edna's procedure.

There’s the series of dichotomies throughout, not just in the pairings of different characters (and how they form a kind of psychic/narrative chain) but in Génessier’s clinic located next door to his house, the pairing of sounds – the stillness and hush of a cemetery juxtaposed with the sound of an airplane flying overhead, and the match-ups of the caged animals with Christiane’s imprisonment, one that leads to the twinning of her mental deterioration along with Génessier’s as he continues to casually carry out his experiments.

Louise disposing of a victim; there is a mythopoeic quality to this.

There is also a sense of the darker sides of nature throughout. We see trees lit by headlights appearing like negative images; the darkness of the river where Louise dumps the bodies, Christiane’s disappearing into the woods at night. In many of these, we can sense a foreshadowing of how David Lynch would use nature in “Twin Peaks”; we cannot escape our absorption into the unknown.

Christiane on her journey into the woods, (a return) to the unknown.

It is this last point that Franju and his script-writers foreground for us, again elevating material that could easily have been rendered hacky. Nature is unknown and perhaps unknowably. In Franju’s world, it is the failure of the grafts, the rejection by the host (telling since Génessier’s name = Genesis), and the final return to darkness.

The polarities and dynamics of the various relationships also set up cycles of light and dark. The victims – Edna and Paulette – are just girls, young women trying to get on in life and as such, feel more alive but completely unattuned to the darkness of the world around them. Franju avoids the cliché of rendering them as “mere babes in the woods” by giving them personalities that are more well-rounded, with fuller backstories than many in similar circumstances. Their stories feel organic as opposed to the contrivances we often find in the genre.

The police and François Guérin as Jacques Vernon are likewise in the outer circle of light, though they tend to read less as fully fleshed figures. This is by design; they are far from the centrality of the darkness at the center of the film. The victims are not. Jacques and Christiane may very well pine for one another across the void, but their opposition is as much the limit of the rational-masculine set against the enveloping darkness of the unknowable.

It also occurs to me that the unknowable is not the unknown. We encounter the unknown with every breath. It is not the case that it has to be horrible or tragic; it is simply that we are confronted with each moment with what we are not previously aware of, what we do not know. However, in this present context, the unknowable is final and it is dark, and it is enveloping.

Notes

1.       I owe this to Durgnat’s insightful review of “Les Yeux Sans Visage” in his French Cinema: the A – Z Guide to the French New Wave, pp. 31-32.

 

Bibliography

Durgnat, Raymond. French Cinema: the A - Z Guide to the French New Wave. Raymond Durgnat. MOTION Publications. Essex, UK. February 1963

Jones, Alan. "Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage)" pp. 94-96. The Rough Guide to Horror Movies. Rough Guides Ltd. New York. 2005