DESIGN & CINEMA: Eyes Without a Face (+ film analysis)
Eyes Without a Face by Georges Franju
France-Italy, 1960, 1h28 • Not recommended for children under 16
With Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Edith Scob
NUM
Christiane was disfigured in a car accident and now lives as a recluse in a mansion, wearing a white, expressionless mask to camouflage her bruised face. Her father, the eminent surgeon Génessie, wants to give her a new face and, with the help of his assistant Louise, lures young women in order to steal theirs. A classic of French horror cinema, Eyes Without a Face retains all of its strangeness and hypnotic power more than sixty years after its creation. Culminating in a famous heterograft sequence, long considered unbearable, dizzying in its power of suggestion, Eyes Without a Face is as disturbing as a ghost film, stylized as an expressionist film, poetic and horrific as a macabre tale. Slipping fantastical figures and motifs into the realistic framework of an investigation with a fatal outcome, Eyes Without a Face is a waking nightmare, an anguish on every level.
Session followed by an analysis of the film by Nicolas Thévenin, publication director of the magazine Répliques, member of the Cinématographe programming committee and teacher at l'école de design Nantes Atlantique.
Enseignant / Permanents