106 - Eyes Without a Face, 1960, France. Dir. Georges Franju.

Sunday, April 16, 2017

106 - Eyes Without a Face, 1960, France. Dir. Georges Franju.

A woman drives mysteriously down the road at night.

She is Valli.  Alida Valli.

Who was Mrs. Paradine in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947).  Anna Schmidt in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949).  That was the movie with the zither and Orson Welles' improvised speech about the cuckoo clock.  The countess in Visconti's Senso (1954), which we will see.  Florentine opposite Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim's Italian outdoor noir The Night Heaven Fell (1958).

And now Louise.

What is she up to?

Why is she driving mysteriously?

What is that pearl choker doing wrapped around her neck?  This time of night?

She looks in the rearview mirror.

A . . . person? . . . slinks in the back seat.  Draped in a trench coat.  Covered by a fedora.

A truck passes.

Louise tenses.  She does not want to be caught.  By this trucker.  By anyone.

The truck moves on.

Louise stops in an isolated spot.  By the river.

What dark secrets lurk beneath the surface?

Louise will add one.  A dark secret.

She will dispose of this blanketed thing.  A body.  A corpse.  A woman in man's clothing.

The police will find the body.

And call in Dr. Génessier to identify it.  He identifies it.  He claims it is his daughter.

He is a highly respected scientist.  A great mind.  A pioneer.

Young men look up to him.

Mature men learn from him.

Elderly women swoon over him.

He gives public lectures.

In an age when the advances of science were praised as public spectacle.

He is, after all, a leading figure in the art--ahem, the science--of homografty.

What?

You know.  Homografty.

Homografty is the transferring of tissue from one creature to another of the same species.

Some movie reviews use the term heterograft, but that is the transferring of tissue from a creature of one species to a creature of a different species.  As in placing a baboon heart in a human.

This is human to human.  The same species.

As in "skin graft."

Dr. Génessier is transferring the skin from one woman's face to that of another.

This now happens in our day.

But in 1960 it was still beyond their grasp.  So why not put it within the grasp of a mad scientist.

Dr. Génessier loves his daughter Christiane.  He wants to heal her.  To give her a new face.

Her old one was destroyed in a car wreck in which he was behind the wheel.

He feels responsible.

She wears a mask.  She hates her mask.  She hates her life.  She is kept secluded in his big mansion.  Isolated.  Alone.  Waiting for a successful transplant.

This woman that Louise has just dumped into the river was the last donor.

How generous!

The transplant didn't take.  The new face was rejected.  They need to find a new donor.

Louise is loyal.

After all, Dr. Génessier succeeded in performing a miracle on her.  She has a beautiful face.  She only has to hide the scar behind that pearl choker.

She will find a suitable donor for Christiane.

Whether the donor is willing or not.

For some reason people are not so eager to give their faces away.  They require a little . . . coercion.

They try a girl named Edna.  Louise brings her to the mansion.  Gets her past the German shepherds.

Edna donates.

Edna tries to escape, her face completely wrapped, like a mummy head.  She falls out an upper window.  She does not escape.

Christiane's body rejects Edna's face.  Her condition is worsening.

They try a girl named Paulette.

They do not know Paulette is a plant.  The police are now on to him.  They have sent her in.

Christiane is now disillusioned with her father and frees Paulette, attacks Louise, frees the dogs (and the doves).

Dr. Génessier explains everything to the police.  His version, anyway.  He is so smooth that they believe him.

But then there are those dogs.  Angry.  Hungry.  Now freed.

Christiane will walk into the woods.

Her father will not follow.

Eyes Without a Face was written by the men who wrote Les Diaboliques (1955), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, which we saw, and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), which we discussed then.

It was filmed by Eugen Schufftan, who developed the Schufftan Process, used famously in 1927 by Fritz Lang in Metropolis and by Abel Gance in Napoleon.  He also worked on our first film, People On Sunday (1930) (001, January 1).  After Eyes Without a Face he would shoot The Hustler and win an Oscar.

The Schufftan Process is doing with glass what we do now with green screen.  You carve out a plate of glass where part of it is transparent and part of it is mirror.  You set the glass at a 45-degree angle to the camera lens.  The camera sees through the transparent part to the landscape in front of it, and it sees the reflection of the mirror part to the person or object reflected.  It superimposes the mirrored subject onto the seen landscape.

If you have the Billy Idol 1984 hit song playing in your head while reading this, and wondering if there is a connection, the answer is Yes.  Billy Idol's song is a reference to this movie.

Sing on.