Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face)

[pro-bassoonist]

Georges Franju's Les yeux sans visage a.k.a Eyes Without a Face (1960) has received a preliminary release date: November 2. Courtesy of Gaumont.

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Anton Bitel:

An agitated woman (Alida Valli) drives a car through the rainy darkness, occasionally glancing nervously through the rear-view mirror at the trench-coated figure, face hidden beneath a hat, slumped in the back seat. Stopping at an isolated spot by a river, the woman drags out the body (which we can now see, from the stockinged legs trailing behind, belongs to another woman), and dumps it in the rushing waters.

If this seems like the opening to a conventional noir thriller, then the manic hurdy-gurdy three-step of Maurice Jarre's score – half menacing, half jaunty - that accompanies this sequence is suggestive of something altogether more ineffable and unhinged. Indeed, Georges Franju's Eyes Without A Face ends up occupying uncharted territories somewhere between the gothic horrors of James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), the fairytale lyricism of Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946), and the charnel-house realism of Franju's own abbatoir-set documentary Le Sang Des Bêtes (1949).

The young woman's body, it turns out, was missing a face. Respected physician Dr Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is summoned from a public lecture that he was giving on organ and tissue transplants to verify whether the corpse is that of his own daughter, who had earlier survived a car accident with horrific facial injuries, only to vanish thereafter.

Gravely, the widower Génessier identifies the body, and leaves, on his way out telling Henri Tessot (René Génin), distraught father of another missing girl, "Strange that I should have to comfort you, for whom some hope yet remains." Paternal grief, however, is not all that has been exchanged here – for even as Génessier leaves the faceless body of the dead girl behind him in the morgue, he goes home to his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), similarly faceless but still very much alive.

With the help of his 'secretary' Louise (Valli), you see, the good doctor has been abducting girls and attempting to transplant their surgically removed faces to his own daughter – an operation that he has already performed with considerably greater success on his collection of stray dogs, as well as on his wife. If Christiane haunts the country villa like an insubstantial ghost, then her parents are more like vampires, preying upon victims in their quest for "man's greatest new hope... the recapture of physical youth". Such monstrosity must be stopped, but in the end it will not be Inspector Parot (Alexandre Rignault), nor his police colleague (Claude Brasseur), nor Christiane's one-time fiancé (François Guérin), who will bring things to a close, but rather Christiane herself, longing for release from her living tomb.

Génessier cuts something of a Promethean figure. On the one hand he is a pioneer in an area of medicine that could benefit not only his daughter, but all of humankind – but on the other, his motives have more to do with self-aggrandisement, and his dehumanising treatment of his 'donor' patients evokes those very doctors who, a mere two decades before Franju's film was made, were using living concentration camp inmates as the involuntary subjects of their horrific (if groundbreaking) experiments.

In a genre where mad scientists typically strut and cackle, Génessier's unassuming meticulousness makes him a more interesting, truly chilling sociopath, matched only by Raymond Lemorne in George Sluizer's The Vanishing (1988) – right down to the beard. Génessier's ultimate fate is hardly undeserved, and even seems to fit his crimes in a satisfying kind of symmetry – but, in all his blighted hubris, he remains tinged with tragedy to the very end.

Eyes Without A Face plays a game of peekaboo in the presentation of its more macabre ideas, tastefully holding back on revealing Christiane's absent face, but then depicting surgery itself with a detachment that proves almost as shocking as its graphic directness. Franju is carefully slicing along the line where the concrete rigours of modern science intersect with the abstractions of youth, beauty and ephemerality – and so his film, though filled with familiar elements from the thriller and horror genres, is even more haunting for its poetic imagery, lifted from the Freudian world of children's fantasy (and shot in beautiful expressionist monochrome by Eugen Schüfftan).

Génessier may be a scalpel-wielding killer, but it is his ethereal daughter, floating from room to room, with her doe eyes, long Givenchy robes and unsettling mask, who eats her way further into the mind's eye (and gives the film its evocative title).

Much as Génessier is a man ahead of his times (complaining to one woman, "As to the future, Madame, we cannot wait that long"), Franju's film too shows remarkable prescience, so that its themes easily accommodate our own contemporary obsessions with cosmetic surgery (in a new millennium that saw, as recently as 2005, the first actual face transplant successfully performed on a woman in France).

Eyes Without A Face has inspired the song of the same name by Billy Idol, and a deliriously OTT reimagining called Faceless (1988), starring Telly Savalas (still sucking on lollipops as though he never left the set of Kojak) and directed by Europe's most prolific purveyor of subversive schlock, Jess Franco. It is Franju's original, however, that will make itself at home in the darker recesses of your unconscious.

Pro-B

[Zen_Amako]

I just noticed the listing for this film on amazon.fr. I'd love to own this on Blu-ray, but it looks like there are no English subtitles. I'd like to be wrong about that.

[pro-bassoonist]

Originally Posted by Zen_Amako

I'd like to be wrong about that.

You are not wrong.

Pro-B

[Arkadin]

Criterion has the rights for this in the US, so that could very well be the reason there are no English subs.
Hopefully Criterion will release this in the next year now that another hd release has appeared.

[whitesheik]

I have trepidation about Criterion UNLESS they have the rights to this new transfer from Gaumont. In a word, it is simply the best black-and-white transfer on blu-ray that I've yet to see, and having owned several prints of this film in 35mm and 16mm, it is the best it's ever looked - gorgeous. The film itself is the most haunting and poetic horror film ever made, IMO. For me, one of the top 5 blu-ray releases of the year. No, there are no subtitles, but I've seen the film enough for that not to be a problem. So, IF Criterion ends up putting this out and IF they use this transfer ONLY, then it will be cause for celebration. If they use whatever they used for their DVD, then, no, it will look nothing like this brilliant transfer. Perhaps a UK company that licenses Gaumont may have it in the works. It's just weird to put out an all-region blu-ray and NOT have it subtitled - just baffling.

But for fans of this film, this is a miracle.

[rezpekt]

I'm also planing to get this. If I can find it for a reasonable price before there is any information about English friendly release, I'll buy it. I have a PC with BD-ROM and HDMI output so using external subtitles will not be a problem.

[UnionJackMix]

What's going on with Le Chat Qui Fume's website? Seems locked and only mods can access it and there is only the welcome page explaining that shiptments of Les Yeux Sans Visage will ship soon.
Can one still order this title?

Edit: found a facebk page stating they have so many orders to ship they had to lock the site. Hmmmk.
Well, does anyone know if they will have LE copies left, because they write that when they will re-open they will list the SE.
The looks of the LE are so far superior to the Umbrella version from AU that was just announced.

[yukito]

Originally Posted by UnionJackMix

What's going on with Le Chat Qui Fume's website? Seems locked and only mods can access it and there is only the welcome page explaining that shiptments of Les Yeux Sans Visage will ship soon.
Can one still order this title?

Edit: found a facebk page stating they have so many orders to ship they had to lock the site. Hmmmk.
Well, does anyone know if they will have LE copies left, because they write that when they will re-open they will list the SE.
The looks of the LE are so far superior to the Umbrella version from AU that was just announced.

Because of the Olympics some releases got a little bit delayed. The house with the laughing windows and yeux sans visage. House with laughing windows was available on the 25th and les yeux sans visage probably in August. Once again because of the complete insanity with so many people in Paris, le chat qui fume decided to close for some time to be able to ship everything correctly.

Concerning the limited edition of Les yeux sans visage, it's all gone. But there is a standard edition coming soon.

[UnionJackMix]

Originally Posted by yukito

Because of the Olympics some releases got a little bit delayed. The house with the laughing windows and yeux sans visage. House with laughing windows was available on the 25th and les yeux sans visage probably in August. Once again because of the complete insanity with so many people in Paris, le chat qui fume decided to close for some time to be able to ship everything correctly.

Concerning the limited edition of Les yeux sans visage, it's all gone. But there is a standard edition coming soon.

Thank you for the explanation. Do you recall the listing price of Yeux, seeing as I will have to go on the resellers market?

[yukito]

Originally Posted by UnionJackMix

Thank you for the explanation. Do you recall the listing price of Yeux, seeing as I will have to go on the resellers market?

It was 45-50€.

[UnionJackMix]

So, it really looks like this was sold out before street date. Is that really possible? 2000 copies of a French release? Is the movie that sought after? I'm gonna have to settle for the Australian release

[Sleazeaddict]

got it today with Laughing windows uhd gorgeous releases.

[yukito]

Originally Posted by UnionJackMix

So, it really looks like this was sold out before street date. Is that really possible? 2000 copies of a French release? Is the movie that sought after? I'm gonna have to settle for the Australian release

There is a lot of love for Junji Ito these days. Plus, the movie is a classic. I really wouldn't be surprised if it sold really well.

[UnionJackMix]

So far only one showed up on eBay ..... a rare occasion where actual fans bought it???

[UnionJackMix]

A new version showed up on the site, 300 copies Limited Edition. Appears to be in a slipcase. Ordered this time around

[yukito]

I just watched the limited edition with Dolby Vision. I absolutely adore the movie. I've watched it 4 times before and without a doubt the movie looks immaculate in 4K. And a lot of interesting special features.

[Doe Lecter]

I've finally found the (necessary) time to spend in order to enjoying this wonderful set, and I've taken a bunch of pictures of it, which you can see here.



It's one of the most beautiful sets I've stood upon recently, due in great part to the paintings of Junji Ito. If only the discs had English subtitles at least... But I suppose it might be a rights issue, and that Criterion will announce this title in the North American market, eventually.