Tag: film essay

Disfigurement and Spectacle in Georges Franju’s ‘Eyes Without a Face’
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.

The hand reaches for the mask Christiane must wear. Image Source: Our Golden Age

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.

Both Christiane and Louise are Génessier’s guinea pigs. Image Source: The Guardian

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.

Medical photography belies a fascination with the surgical. Image Source: Criterion Collection

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
1. https://www.criterionchannel.com/videos/eyes-without-a-face
2. The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television, BRILL, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=556597.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. https://www.criterionchannel.com/videos/edith-scob-on-eyes-without-a-face
8th May 2026
Black Narcissus (1947): Colonialist, Imperialist and Racist Attitudes
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Table of contents
Black Narcissus (1947) poster. Image Source: Wikipedia.

People

The most striking issues with Black Narcissus (1947) are the constant references to the local people as ‘primitive’. People have used words like ‘savage’ since the dawn of colonisation to justify the barbaric methods of displacement and oppression utilised by colonising countries. According to the Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity and Culture (2003), the word ‘primitive’ has replaced the word ‘savage’ but still has ‘derogatory connotations’ (pp.231-232).

Shortly after they arrive, the sisters pay people to attend the school and dispensary they’ve set up. As the schoolroom becomes crowded with children, Sister Ruth says, ‘what can you do with them? They look very stupid to me. Remember, they can’t speak a word of Hindustani or English’ (Black Narcissus, 1947). The way Sister Ruth correlates stupidity with an inability to speak the languages the sisters speak belies the attitude that colonised people should speak the language of their colonisers.

Prior to colonising countries all over the world, English was only spoken in Britain (Simon and Simon, 2023). However, as a result of English schooling, the language came to be associated with education, and according to Migge and Léglise (2007), the ‘linguistic decolonisation of both European and non-European cultures is hardly complete’ (p.1). This highlights the lasting effect attitudes like Sister Ruth’s have had on global cultures and languages.

One of the main characters on the receiving end of the convent’s overt racism and classism is Kanchi. Sister Clodagh judges for her open sexuality and Ayah beats her for stealing a ‘brass chain from the church room to put around her dirty neck’ (Black Narcissus, 1947). People expect this sexuality from the Indian teenager, but assume the white nuns are ill or mad when they display any hint of sexuality.

However positive you may feel about the innovation in terms of the filming of Black Narcissus, you cannot deny the frequent use of brownface is distracting. Despite managing to cast Indian actor Sabu in the role of Dilip Rai, apparently no other Indian actors could make the casting and instead, we have white people in brownface for several of the main characters, including Toda Rai, Ayah and Kanchi. Guy Aoki (2015) explains that ‘having white actors play other races, often in ways that mock, is as old as the film industry itself’ and ‘racism is certainly a factor contributing to the casting of white people to play other races’.

This seems to be the case for Black Narcissus. For example, in one scene, Sister Ruth responds that ‘they all look alike to me’ when told the people are not black. This is a shocking admission that makes the entire viewing uncomfortable today.

Place

Approximately five minutes into the film, Mr. Dean describes Mopu to the sisters at the convent in his letter. He explains that it is in ‘the back of beyond’ and the palace is ‘called a palace but there may be a slight difference between your idea of a palace and the general’s’ (Black Narcissus, 1947). This condescending description further serves to other the community in Mopu and emphasise the supposed superiority of the British in the final years of their rule over India.

The entire film is shot at Pinewood Studios and in West Sussex in a private gardens with the appropriate types of plants. The crew didn’t film any of the scenes on location in the Himalayas. This is a creative feat by the cinematographer, Jack Cardiff and art director, Alfred Junge. Although by today’s standards, the use of matte paintings and miniatures is glaringly obvious, the ability to transport the audience to India using these methods was extremely innovative and exciting at the time. The creative duo reportedly took Technicolor to ‘delirious new heights’ by creating ‘an otherworldly atmosphere that reflects the psychological arc of the film’s characters’ (Criterion, 2018).

On the other hand, this filming off location paired with the rampant racism displayed throughout suggest further categorisation of India and its people as other. The concept of filming something set in a remote, mountainous location in a studio in Buckinghamshire is one that is distancing, firmly placing the Indian characters as being ‘over there’ and the British ones, especially at the end when their mission has failed, as ‘over here’.

Another scene in the film emphasises difference between the sisters’ experiences at home and their experiences in the palace. Sister Bryony suggests something ‘unhealthy in the water’ is causing the women’s spots. Mr. Dean quickly rebukes this but the insinuation that Britain is clean and India is dirty still remains – another attitude firmly rooted in colonisation.

Religion

The holy man lives on the mountain, seemingly never moving, even to eat. The local people mythologise him, bring him offerings and in general, he offers comfort and a source of pride. However, Sister Clodagh does not replicate this respect. She focuses more closely on property boundaries and asks Mr. Dean if he can be relocated somewhere else. This shines a light on Christian attempts to displace local religions and pedestalise their own as the predominant religion in the respective region.

Sister Clodagh’s question of the general ‘turning out’ his uncle, the holy man, is an imperialist attitude – instead of respecting him in the same way as the locals do or simply leaving him alone to continue doing what he has done for a long time, she wants to forcibly remove him. This could suggest she is uncomfortable with any ‘competition’ in the religious sphere, believing as she does in Jesus Christ and God. We can also see this in the battle between the horns and drums in the village and the bells of the palace. The former are unfamiliar to the sisters so they attempt to drown them out with the ringing of the bells.

Sexuality

The palace at Mopu previously housed the general’s harem and you can see evidence of this in some of the images dotted around the building. There is a clear juxtaposition between the sexualised Indian women and the ‘pure’ nuns in their symbolic white attire. This distinction is again showing popular and derogatory stereotypes of the period.

However, as the film progresses, we see that Sister Clodagh was previously in a relationship with a man whom she believed she was going to marry. These flashbacks are often interspersed with images of Clodagh in the present with a smile on her face. She evidently has fond memories of this time in her life despite the unfortunate ending and we see a new side to her that audiences wouldn’t necessarily associate with a nun.

Mr. Dean acts as the great temptation and we see flirtations between him and Sister Clodagh despite the latter’s loyalty to the convent and vows to God. Sister Ruth’s religious dedication also unravels but to a greater degree as she becomes obsessed with the attractive caretaker. We see her become more visually dishevelled, with her facial features becoming more distorted and sinister. She develops red rings around her eyes, hinting at a mixture of sleeplessness and psychosis. Similarly, when she resigns from her position as a sister, she dresses in a red dress with bright, red lipstick. This highlights her burgeoning sexuality in pursuit of Mr. Dean. It also evinces the increasing danger she poses to herself and those around her.

While the Indian women, particularly Kanchi and those depicted in the murals are chastised and judged for their open sexuality, Sister Ruth is portrayed as being mad or ill. These are usually temporary states, suggesting this sexuality is not in Ruth’s nature as a white woman. Sister Clodagh represents abstinence in the face of temptation, as she leaves Mr. Dean to work in a different convent despite clearly harbouring some feelings for him.

It seems strange and discomfiting that these white women yearning for Mr. Dean is set against a backdrop of open racism. While it is recognisable that Black Narcissus contributed a great deal to the cinematic landscape, the handling of the subject matter is regularly uncomfortable and distracting.

If you’d like more film essays, read about disfigurement and spectacle in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face.

Sources
4th May 2026