French fantastic cinema gave birth to a few masterpieces such as the films by Jean Cocteau (The Beauty and the Beast), The Devil’s Envoys by Marcel Carné or The Devil’s Hand by Jacques Tourneur, but the « horror » genre has rarely been exploited in France. A major genre in the United States or in Italian cinema, the horror cinema -made to create fear- has at least given birth in France to a real masterpiece: Eyes Without a Face by Georges Franju, now available at last in a remarkable French DVD edition.

Professor Genestier, a renowned surgeon, feels guilty since a car crash he had with his daughter that left her faceless. To give her back a face, he needs to transplant skin he has to take off from young girls. Adapted by the famous duet Boileau and Narcejac (Diabolique, D’entre les morts adapted by Hitchcock through Vertigo) from a novel by Jean Redon, the plot of Eyes Without a Face comes at the same time from Frankenstein and The Body Snatcher (which, inspired by the Burke and Hare case, tells the story of criminals delivering dead bodies to the doctors of the nineteenth century Great Britain) and has given birth to countless avatars.

Seen by Georges Franju -a uncommon filmmaker whose work must be rediscovered-, this story turns into a morbid poem. Even if the director hides nothing from the surgery in a sequence that must have struck -and still strikes- its contemporary viewers, the film is much more a gothic tale than a gore film. Led by the virginal and ghostly figure of Edith Scob, the film insinuates fear by small touches, by the look it takes upon a reality contaminated by strangeness. The mask the actress wears, which let us see distinctly her eyes, becomes the theatre of our projected fears, the very mirror of our anxiety. With the beautiful music by Maurice Jarre and an intense performance by Pierre Brasseur, Eyes Without a Face is a unique film, a dark gem with a haunting poetry.

Thanks to the wonderful restoration made by Gaumont, Eyes Without a Face is available at last in France in the most beautiful transfer ever, the most complete too as the previous releases were cropped. Presented in this DVD edition with a 45-minute documentary about the director with some of his co-workers and friends (Jean-Pierre Mocky, Claude Chabrol and many others), Eyes Without a Face finally gets the showcase it deserves.

Francis Chérasse

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