Eyes Without a Face

Eyes Without a Face

This is a film that came out in 1960, did decent business, faded into obscurity, and then became the object of a cult, or more accurately, one object among many venerated by a complex network of overlapping cults – since that is what cult artworks are. It owes this cultic afterlife to a single image of great power, a single sequence of great power, and to a prescient dedication to working out difficult, intimate emotions via the body.

Let’s begin with the body. Body horror is a concept with a semi-academic lineage, first appearing in Philip Brophy’s essay Horrality: the Textuality of the Contemporary Horror Film; which from the title sounds like one of those ivory towers things, but Brophy was in fact also a practitioner, director of the among other things the short film Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat and the feature Body Melt (sample line: “The first phase is hallucinogenic. The second phase is glandular”). As a concept it is meant to be specific, applying not to your standard issue mutilations, but to those that have metaphorical force.

Thus to this point, Eyes Without a Face is about face transplants. We follow a certain Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur, delicate-featured when younger, but who was fifty-five at the time of filming and a louche-looking slab of a man), whose daughter Christiane (Édith Scob) has been disfigured in an automobile accident. Her face is scar tissue, except for her eyes. Dr. Génessier therefore has begun a program of kidnapping young women, removing their faces, and grafting the tissue onto his daughter. We know that he has attempted this operation several times, never with success, and while we don’t know his exact protocol, all of the donors have ended up dead. His daughter knows about all this. It tortures her, she hates her father, but also she loves her father, and she wants back her face. Nor is Dr. Génessier proud. He is conscious of having become a monster out of love for his daughter. We as viewers can then take the next step, and see that by becoming a monster he has hurt his daughter more badly than if he had loved her less; that his love has become oppressive, and that by seeking to help his daughter he is imposing a morality on her that she cannot accept and which will destroy her. Thus the film is dealing with a standard set of father/daughter issues, but heightening and embodying them – at the end of the film Christiane causes her father to be (somewhat) eaten by dogs. So, yes.

Now to the sequence. Dr. Génessier has obtained a young woman, sedated her, and strapped her to a gurney. Soon he will operate. Before that, Christiane enters the theatre. She looks down at the woman’s face, touches it. The woman awakens and sees Christiane’s ruined face, so do we – for the first time! – and there follows one of the great cinematic screams. We cut from the scream to the operation. The woman is sedated again; Christiane lies on the gurney next to her, face covered. The director of Eyes was Georges Franju; this was his first feature after nine documentaries – and so maybe we can assign to him a clinical eye. Moreover, his previous film was the one-time arthouse staple The Blood of Beasts, which covered in explicit detail a day in the life of an abattoir. So Franju is not squeamish. And finally we can add that he was in fact deeply interested in surgical procedures, that this was a long-standing interest, a passion. All of this is to say, that when it comes time to slice off a face, Franju shows us a face being sliced off. It’s a shocking, slow piece of gore, made the more so by the film’s release date. Psycho came out in 1960, and was generally considered to be pushing things, a bit. Psycho has nothing on this scene. Nothing. It’s all done with chocolate syrup and a rubber mask, but it looks real enough, and there are few cut-aways. We see clearly what is being done, over a long period of time.

Circling back to body horror – this could easily be its ground zero (I’m not stating this as a certainty, I have no idea, I’m not a body horror scholar). And from here the trope would go far. We have today of course the hardcore practitioners (Cronenberg, Verhoeven, Miike, Gordon, early Lynch), but also so many dabblers (Spielberg has indulged now and then). Body horror has become an excepted method of thinking on film, a useful extension of film’s visual metaphoric language. Eyes came very early, and laid down strong markers. It is natural and correct (says the non-body horror scholar) to look back from this vantage point and see it as a visionary work.

Now to the image. Christiane’s face is disturbing, to others and to her. All of the mirrors in the house have been painted black. As an added precaution she has been given a mask to wear, a white, expressionless replication of her features. Almost always, when we see her, she is wearing this mask, and so this is the image, or images – of a young woman walking, talking, musing, petting a dog, with every trace of her personality erased. It’s a deep, dream-image, and the details make it work. The actress, Scob, has a long tapering body, a delicate neck, and a large head; her hair is cut in a bob that frames the top and sides of the mask; she wears high collars, which have a leaf-like affect, making the neck into a stem, and the mask into a botanical, non-animal version of the human face. The mask itself lies tightly on her skin (in fact it was more of a cosmetic than a mask, taking three hours to apply every morning before filming) – it doesn’t completely hide her, and thus there is an element of vulnerability. The mask used in Halloween was based on the mask in Eyes; but that is a loose mask, its features have nothing to do with the features of the killer, it is purely alienating. Because the mask Christiane wears has some of her life in it, even as it estranges us from her, it creates an emotional tenor; we have a frayed connection to her. She is like one of those fairytale near-people, whom we might hurt or who might hurt us, all out of incomprehension. We last see her communing with birds.