Les Yeux sans Visage

Les yeux sans visage


1960

dir. George Franju st. Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel

After I finished this film, I found this film to be an oddity of its classified 'genre' of 'horror.' There were no quick shot montages, or squeaky violin motives (I'm looking at you, Hitchcock.) or rushing pace and consistent hysterical screams. This film also made the 'villain's' motive and drive appear less villainous and more understandable.

Maybe I should give you a quick summary of it. (From IMDB.com)


A brilliant surgeon, Dr. Génessier, helped by his assistant Louise, kidnaps nice young women. He removes their faces and tries to graft them onto the head on his beloved daughter Christiane, whose face has been entirely spoiled in a car crash. All the experiments fail, and the victims die, but Génessier keeps trying...


This sounds pretty typical of a horror story. Except you side with the father, and his reasons for wanting to restore his daughters face, despite his 'unorthodox' ways of trying to restore her face.


I don't think this film can be classified as just a horror film, there are so many undertones to this that are made apparent in certain scenes. (I shan't tell, that'd ruin the rest of the film.)


Franju, was known for his documentaries, and there some scenes in the film that do have a documentary feel to them, but those help push the story forward in a few seconds when he could have taken twenty minutes to show every nitty-gritty detail and totally lose his audience.


Can a film be classified as an artistic nightmare? Because this is definitely the category for this film then. There is no extreme blood, guts, and gore that push the story along. It's all about the brutal, obsessive love a father has for his daughter that is driving him to keep her alive, even forgoing her wants and trying everything to give her face instead of the white mask that she wears.