Les yeux sans visage (1960)

A surgeon causes an accident which leaves his daughter disfigured, and goes to extremes to give her a new face.

Director:

Georges Franju

Writers:

Jean Redon (novel), Pierre Boileau (adaptation) (as Boileau-Narcejac)

Stars:

Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel

Cast

Complete credited cast:
Pierre Brasseur	...	Docteur Génessier
Alida Valli	...	Louise
Juliette Mayniel	...	Edna Grüber
Alexandre Rignault	...	Inspector Parot
Béatrice Altariba	...	Paulette (as Beatrice Altariba)
Charles Blavette	...	L'homme de la fourrière (as Blavette)
Claude Brasseur	...	Un inspecteur
Michel Etcheverry	...	Le docteur Lherminier - médecin légiste / Forensic surgeon
Yvette Etiévant	...	La mère (as Yvette Etievent)
René Génin	...	Emile Tessot
Lucien Hubert	...	Un homme au cimetière
Marcel Pérès	...	Un homme au cimetière (as Marcel Pères)
François Guérin	...	Jacques Vernon (as Francois Guerin)
Edith Scob	...	Christiane Génessier

Storyline

After causing an accident that left his daughter Christiane severely disfigured, the brilliant surgeon Dr. Génessier works tirelessly to give the girl a new face. He does so however by kidnapping young women and attempting face transplants. He has been woefully unsuccessful to date. The doctor's world begins to collapse around him when his daughter realizes just what he has been doing.

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Plot Keywords:

captive woman | disfigured face | surgeon | experiment | face transplant | 

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Taglines:

Beautiful women were the victims of his FIENDISH FACIALS!!! [American retitled and dubbed version poster]

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Genres:

Drama | Horror

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Details

Country:

France Italy

Language:

French

Release Date:

24 October 1962 (USA)

Also Known As:

The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus

Filming Locations:

River Marne, Noisiel, Seine-et-Marne, France

Box Office

Opening Weekend USA:

$19,628, 2 November 2003, Limited Release

Gross USA:

$52,709, 30 November 2003

Company Credits

Production Co:

Champs-Élysées Productions,Lux Film

Technical Specs

Runtime:

90 min

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Recording)

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Originally released in the U.S. on a double feature with the Japanese horror film The Manster (1959).

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Goofs

When she's not wearing it, Christiane's mask is very thick and heavy and would only seem to cover her face. When she puts it on, however, it is very thin, close-fitting, and seamlessly covers her jawline and the underside of her chin, revealing that the mask itself is a prop while the actress probably wears a combination of makeup and prosthetics.

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Quotes

Louise: She's happy this time. She has faith.
Doctor Génessier: Finally.
Louise: I showed her how nicely it's healing. I changed the bandages. It looks fine. Much better than yesterday.
Doctor Génessier: I'm so afraid.
Louise: Don't be. I have faith this time, too.
Doctor Génessier: All I can do is hope.

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Alternate Versions

The films initial 1962 release to the US was edited and the film was re-titled. The surgery scene was cut down for content, while scenes that made Dr. Genessier seem sympathetic (particularly the scene where he cares for an ailing boy) were also edited.

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Connections

Referenced in The Domestics (2018)

User Reviews

Beautiful Horror

At the time 'Les yeux sans visage' was released, the film was not very popular and faced common rejection by the critics. Regardless of those dis-affirmations, it raised to the position of a classic in the horror genre. Franju - one of the founders of the legendary Cinemathèque Française - succeeded in an intriguing way to make film history sensible as a source of inspiration of an entirely peculiar vision.

The clinic of Dr. Génessier (P. Brasseur) is located not very far from Paris. Famous as a specialist in skin grafting, nobody foreshadows that the scientific ambition of the surgeon is incident with a horrifying secret: Since an accident has destroyed the face of Génessier's daughter, Christiane (Scob), the doctor does everything to reconstruct her beauty. With the help of his assistant Louise (Valli) he clucks young women in his remote mansion, benumbs them and makes them a victim of a macabre surgical operation. In a hidden operating room in the basement of his house, Génessier removes the facial skin and transplants it on Christiane's face. Without lasting successes.

That Franjus film has not suffer losses from its immensely disturbing effects is because of, if nothing else, the camera work of Eugen Schüfftans. His brilliant black and white shots resurrects the bright dark of the expressionist German silent film. It imparts Villa Génessier a threatening life of it's own, transmutes it in a mazy horror house which seems like one can not escape. The shadows of the stairway handrails lay on everybody who enters the building like grids and makes him optically a prisoner of Génessier's delusion, mostly his daughter Christiane. Cut from a real life she haunts through the paternal ruins, the garbled face concealed behind a white porcelain mask, whose sad expression seems to nail the doom of the young woman.

Christiane's mask also points out a central principle of formation of the film: It's suspense results substantially from the interaction of visible and invisible things, of showing and dissembling. Franju subtly creates a nightmarish atmosphere that evokes the horror of Génessier's actions, but never makes it explicitly in the first instance - only to show it the viewer more pitilessly: When the surgeon unprovided cuts into the juvenilely beautiful face of one of his victims. This moment of shocking intensity reminds of the razor blade cut through the woman's eye of Bunuel's surrealistic classic 'Un chien andalou' (1929). With the same zest to provoke, Franju also presents the result of an ostensibly succeeded operation: A sober sequence of photographs shows, commented by Génessier off-stage, at first Christiane's angelically delicate face, then how the transplanted skin becomes patchy a few days later, splits open and two weeks later dies off. The cruelty of those two sequences exposes Génessier as a perverted, pestilent doctor and his paternal love as brutal obsession. The attempt to give his daughter a new face means at the same time to erase her identity, to create the ideal woman.

'Les yeux sans visage' remains in the memory of the viewer as one of the rare places on the imaginary continent, phantasmagoric and exigent with ample suspense and shocking details, a perfect alchemy of horror and allegoric poesy whereby one of the most beautiful horror films came into being.