Eyes Without a Face (1960)

---

---

Les yeux sans visage Frankrike, Italia 1960 Regi Georges Franju Manus Boileau-Narcejac, Jean Redon, Claude Sautet Foto Eugen Schüfftan Med Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Alexandre Rignault 1t 28m DCP Fransk tale, engelsk tekst Aldersgrense 15 år

Eyes Without a Face is based on a novel of the same name by Jean Redon (Les yeux sans visage), written in 1959.
Georges Franju, one of the founders of the Cinémathèque Française, was chosen to be the director.
The film’s screenplay was first initiated by Claude Sautet (also first assistant director), after which Boileau-Narcejac took on the rest of the writing. Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac had written novels from which the films Les Diaboliques (1955) and Hitchcok’s Vertigo (1958) (D’entre les morts) were adapted.

Franju said the film is rather more about “anguish… it’s a quieter mood than horror… more internal, more penetrating. It’s horror in homeopathic doses.”

Cocteau wrote about Eyes Without a Face:
“It took a lot of audacity to dare to make such a film, the almost monstrous calm of Pierre Brasseur and the fairy-like lightness of Mademoiselle Scob to make it bearable. But the horror film has titles of nobility, and Franju has not forgotten the great rule which consists of treating the unreal with maximum realism. The ancestors of this film live in Germany, this Germany of the great cinematographic era of Nosferatu. For a long time, we have not reclaimed the dark poetry, the hypnosis caused by the macabre, the menacing houses, and the fabulous monsters of the screen.”

Les Yeux sans visage is the last entry in the chapter Trans/trance-facing from the Vampiric Projections program at Cinemateket Trondheim. The films in the concluding chapter of the series deal with the face either getting entranced in a vampiric setting, or undergoing a transformation/mutilation via cosmetic surgery.

Oscar Debs will share thoughts and readings on the film after the screening.

This screening is supported by Institut français.