Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Table of contents
Introduction
Georges Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage, or Eyes Without a Face (1960), explored the topic of facial transplantation decades before it became possible in France. In the film, Christiane has a facial disfigurement following a car accident caused by her father. We see the people surrounding her treat her like a monster or like a wild animal in a zoo. Meanwhile, her father attempts to transplant the faces of beautiful women he kidnaps onto hers in a restorative manoeuvre that would simultaneously reward his scientific hubris.
In this essay, I will discuss how Georges Franju uses disfigurement as a spectacle in the film. As Norden (2007, p.127) states, ‘the facially disfigured person is the most hackneyed symbol in cinema and theatre, commonly standing for something that has gone dreadfully wrong’. In Eyes Without a Face, this intersection between disfigurement and visibility highlights how women are gazed at differently when they have a facial difference.
Music
Jaunty music initially leads us into the film. This reminds me of the type of music you might hear at the circus. Overlaying Christiane’s misery with a cheerful tune highlights that disfigurement in this surgical context is fascinating. I would argue that Biernoff’s (2018, p.2) declaration, ‘this is the stuff of Gothic horror, grave robbers and Victorian freaks shows’ would apply to Franju’s film.
This is because of the relationship between spectacle and fainting. According to Biernoff (p.10), ‘surgical spectaculars were a theatrical phenomenon as well as a cinematic one’ bewteen 1897 and 1962 with the number of faintings viewed as ‘a measure of an evening’s success’. Earlier in the essay, Biernoff (p.7) acknowledges that ‘several members of the audience reportedly fainted’ during Edna’s facial removal scene.
There is no music or horrified expression when we see Christiane’s new face. We simply return to the regular male gaze with both her father and Louise commenting only on her beauty. There is no longer a fascination but rather a return to regular desire.
The jaunty music is often also playing when Louise is on-screen. This appears to be to remind us she is in and of herself a spectacle because of her disfigurement. Although we don’t learn much about the scenario, we know that Génessier also operated on her with a greater degree of success. She also wears a visual reminder in the pearl necklace around her neck like a dog collar.
Funereal Spectacle
When the police find the body from the beginning, Génessier falsely identifies it as his daughter. He does this in an attempt to bide himself more time to get the transplant right. However, he does this at the expense of Mr Tessot and his daughter, whose body it really is.
Once outside following the identification, Génessier gets into his car to avoid a barrage of questions and laments from Mr Tessot. His bright headlights briefly illuminate his unfortunate counterpart before quickly leaving him in darkness as he drives away. This is symbolic of Mr Tessot and his daughter’s removal from the spotlight so no one will look at or for her again. The camera’s gaze no longer sees her as her face has become Christiane’s.
Later, Génessier holds a funeral for his ‘daughter’. Génessier designs this funereal spectacle to trick the gaze and distract it from the socially ‘monstrous’ face of his daughter in reality.
Christiane’s Mask
The only time we see Christiane’s real face is through the eyes of Edna, a stranger. She is visibly terrified, screaming and Christiane’s face is only showed to the audience slightly blurred. This emphasises that spectacle is appealing when it’s separate and safe, but otherwise is considered socially ‘monstrous’.
Christiane’s mask places a ‘safe’ barrier between the camera’s gaze and her face, but it is still horrifying. Kuntz (2012, p.263) suggests that ‘George Franju evokes horror not by giving an image to the face of violence but by forcing the violence to remain hidden behind a mask’. As such, the audience are aware of what lies beneath the mask and are equally horrified and fascinated.
Clinical Gaze
A woman in the crowd describes Génessier’s speech on ‘heterografts’ as ‘thrilling’. This delineates the fascination the average person may have had when considering complex surgeries like transplants. It may have seemed like something from science-fiction, hence the array of films released that explore this topic and adjacent topics.
The medical photographs evidencing Christiane’s facial deterioration further belies a fascination with surgery. Biernoff (2018, p.11) asserts that ‘…the photographs perform a clinical gaze that objectifies and ‘cadaverises’ its human subject’. This ‘cadaverisation’ is also in various scenes where Christiane is laying despondently on her chaise longue or the floor, getting closer to death each time something goes wrong.
Christiane is treated as an experiment in a similar manner to the dogs Génessier keeps. She is similarly confined to the house like the caged birds, evoking the image of animals in a zoo. Norden (2007, p.126) explains ‘…disabled movie/TV characters are typically created with a high degree of “to-be-looked-at-ness”‘ which this confinement is aligned with.
Although the painting of Christiane and her phone calls to her fiancé remind us she no longer fits into society’s accepted definition of a woman, the clinical gaze is still present due to her disfigurement and her father’s experimental surgeries.
Edith Scob
The actor who played Christiane, Edith Scob, explained the difficulty of acting without the use of her face. Since the mask was difficult to put on and began to crack when she talked, she had to remain silent while shooting scenes. She explained in a video on the Criterion Channel that she had to learn how to use her body language to act as her facial language was no longer available to her.
Conclusion
The spectacle in Eyes Without a Face serves to deflect, fascinate and horrify and it succeeds in these missions in various ways. Through the use of physical and auditory techniques, Georges Franju has emphasised his own, and the general fascination towards surgery in France at the time. Scob suggests the film was a ‘premonition’ of how the plastic surgery and facial transplant industries have developed. This makes you wonder what medical ‘miracles’ we see in science-fiction today might be only a few decades away from becoming reality.
Thank you for reading this essay. If you’d like to delve into another film essay, you can read about colonialist, imperialist and racist attitudes in Black Narcissus (1947).
Sources
- https://www.criterionchannel.com/videos/eyes-without-a-face
- The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television, BRILL, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=556597.
- Biernoff, Suzannah. “Theatres of Surgery: The Cultural Pre-History of the Face Transplant.” Wellcome Open Research [England], vol. 3, 2018, p. 54, https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.14558.1.
- Theorizing Visual Studies : Writing Through the Discipline, edited by James Elkins, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=1101387.
- https://www.criterionchannel.com/videos/edith-scob-on-eyes-without-a-face
