Georges Franju’s beautiful body horror masterpiece come to 4K UHD
Elegant, superbly gorgeous, and at times shockingly graphic, Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face is a singular achievement in cinema. While I usually bristle at the meaningless term “elevated horror” and how it’s often applied, there’s no question that Eyes Without a Face is, by any metric, an elevated horror film.
When his daughter Cristiane (Édith Scob) is horrifically scarred in an accident, respected surgeon Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) – whose reckless driving is directly responsible for the accident – seeks to restore her destroyed face. We rarely see her true face, for she usually wears a form-fitting mask covering her deformity and revealing only a pair of mournful eyes. It’s this iconic mask which is the film’s most enduring image, simultaneously elegant and creepy, seemingly emotionless and yet deeply evocative.
The doctor is singularly focused on restoring Christiane’s beauty, but his unscrupulous methods for doing so involve kidnapping and murdering girls – the fairer, the better – to steal their faces for transplanting. Each failed experiment means another girl must die. Assisting him in his grim task is Louise, (Alida Valli), a grateful previous patient whose own face was similarly restored.
Christiane herself is withdrawn, observant, and nearly silent as a witness to the compounding atrocities – until she makes a critical decision. Meanwhile, a police investigation is also casting suspicions on the good doctor.
There’s some unnerving scenes of surgical body horror which were and remain quite impactful. At the time of its release, the premise was cutting edge and futuristic – modern surgical transplanting had kicked off with the first kidney transplant in 1954 and picked up significant growth in the next decade. Facial transplants were far from being realized. I find it interesting that the history of organ transplants has notably had significant French contributions (particularly Nobel-winning surgical pioneer Alexis Carel, whom I suspect somewhat inspired the film), and when the first facial transplant occurred in 2005 (45 years after Eyes Without a Face), it was indeed a French surgical team and patient who accomplished this feat.
The film is strikingly shot and mostly set in a grand country manor that serves as the home, workshop, and kennel for its characters. The marriage of grand beauty and the grotesque is a trait of classic French horror and fantasy films, but in modern terms the closest familiar parallel is Guillermo del Toro with his gothic art-horror films like Crimson Peak and Frankenstein.
Speaking personally I came to the film backward; as a teen I discovered a cover version of the classic Billy Idol song “Eyes Without a Face” performed by Phantasmic, which led to tracing it to the original version, and eventually discovering the French film that inspired and preceded it. So in a sense I was predestined – or at least predisposed – to love it. And it’s not as uncommon a phenomenon as one might suppose – after all, how many horror fans have discovered films like The Living Dead Girl or The Astro-Zombies, specifically because they were referenced by Rob Zombie or The Misfits?
Regardless of personal history, Eyes Without a Face remains one of my favorite European films. It’s haunting, thoughtful, and absolutely gorgeous.
Side note, there’s a shot in the film which I’m convinced is referenced in Ghostbusters.
The Package
The Criterion 4K edition of Eyes Without a Face is a 2-disc presentation which also includes a Blu-ray disc. Aside from the 4K presentation, it has the same features and extras as the prior Criterion Blu-ray.
The included 20-page booklet (not including covers) features essays by novelist Patrick McGrath (“Appearances to the Contrary”) and film historian David Kalat (“The Unreal Reality”) , notes on the 4K restoration, and acknowledgements.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Blood of the Beasts (1949, 22:08) with Interview/Introduction (2:57)
A black and white documentary observing a slaughterhouse in Paris. Don’t casually wander into this one. It’s a difficult watch, showing professional butchers at work: killing livestock, draining their blood, and carving up their bodies. It’s intensely graphic, though in a straightforward and matter-of-fact fashion. In the corresponding interview, Franju discusses his reasons for choosing the brutal subject matter, why he filmed in black and white, and the efforts he made to shoot it with a unique camera eye. - Excerpt from Cine-parade “Le Fantastique” (1982, 5:31) – featuring an interview with Franju on his career and its relation to the fantastique, marrying reality and unreality, horror and fantasy.
- Interview with actor Edith Scob (8:39), who plays Christiane in the film
- Excerpts from Les grand-pères du crime (1985, 7:10), describing the screenwriting partnership between Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
- Trailers – French trailer (3:45) and US trailer (3:25) – The US trailer notably undersells the film and trashes it up as part of a double billing, under the sensationalized title Horror of Dr. Faustus
A/V Out
