Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage, 1959) has often been characterized as a "poetic" horror film. This designation still seems apt, since Franju manages the tricky balancing act of thoroughly inhabiting a genre that is almost by definition déclassé while simultaneously adopting the moodiness, visual fluency and symbolic richness of an "art" film. For years the film was distributed in the U.S. mainly in a cut and dubbed version. However, the original French version has been distributed on home video sporadically for the past couple of decades and new 35mm prints of it toured nationwide last year. Criterion's new DVD ups the ante by providing a solid transfer and some valuable special features, including Franju's similarly poetic but profoundly disturbing 1949 documentary short Blood of the Beasts.

Synopsis: Dr. Genessier, a respected French surgeon, is responsible for disfiguring his daughter Christiane's face in an auto accident and becomes obsessed with restoring her beauty through facial transplants. He keeps the troubled Christiane confined to the villa and convinces the police that she is dead. His sinister assistant Louise helps him lure beautiful young women to his villa in order to remove their faces for the procedure, but the "heterografts" (as he calls them) fail to take hold and Christiane is once again left without a face. Christiane's grief-stricken fiance (and fellow doctor) Jacques Vernon becomes suspicious and offers to help the police with their investigation, but can they find the newest intended victim before it is too late?

George Franju's Eyes Without a Face was part of the global artistic renaissance of the horror genre in the late 1950s and early 1960s that included the Hammer films (especially those directed by Terence Fisher), Italian horror maestros such as Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda, and more self-consciously "arty" forays into the genre by mainstream directors. The best-known examples of the latter are Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Franju's film. However, while many of these new horror films displayed a great deal of stylistic verve and psychological sophistication, they often had difficulty overcoming pre-established marketing expectations and critics' highhanded dismissal of the genre. Eyes Without a Face, for instance, was originally released in the U.S. in 1962, in a dubbed and edited version entitled The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus, as part of a double bill with the notoriously inane The Manster (1961). In terms of sheer disparity of artistic merit, this must have been one of the most absurd double features ever.

The pleasures of Franju's film are many, starting with the ultra-grim undercurrent of black comedy. For instance, when Dr. Genessier delivers a public lecture on the "heterograft," a pair of elderly women take almost vampiric relish in the purported "rejuvenating" effects of such transplants. The venerable French actor Pierre Brasseur gives a superb performance as the domineering, obsessive doctor, wielding his deep bass voice like a scalpel. Alida Valli is deliciously perverse as Louise, a former patient whose unhealthy loyalty extends to assisting with murder. While Edith Scob's face is covered for much of the film, she conveys a delicate, melancholy grace through her eyes and especially her body movements. The direction and screenplay are first-rate--both in terms of how economically information is revealed to the viewer as the film progresses, and in terms of the film's development of the themes of facelessness and moral responsibility.

However, Eyes Without a Face is still very much a horror film, and it delivers the goods; the surgical sequence at the heart of the film is grueling to watch even today. Franju's film has undeniably left an impact on the genre, though perhaps not in the way Franju may have intended; we find traces of it, for instance, in the medical horrors of Jess Franco's The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962) and The Diabolical Dr. Z (1966). While the prolific Franco also achieves something approaching cinematic poetry during his rare flights of inspiration, the frankly exploitative nature of his films--especially his later projects--will probably prevent the mainstream critical establishment from ever embracing them as "Art." Fortunately, that is not the case for Eyes Without a Face.

This may be one of Criterion's less expensive one-disc releases, but they don't skimp on the special features. First and foremost is Franju's 20-minute documentary short on Parisian slaughterhouses, Blood of the Beasts/Le Sang des betes (1949). Sparing nothing for the viewer, Franju depicts horses, bulls, calves and sheep being slaughtered and prepared for sale to the city's meat markets. While some viewers today might interpret the film as a tract for vegetarianism, Franju is deliberately non-judgmental in his approach. He views the slaughterhouses as a necessary aspect of the city's existence, a point made clear by the circular imagery that opens the film. I, for one, unexpectedly came away with heightened respect for the slaughterhouse employees' exhausting and sometimes dangerous work. This is unquestionably a great documentary in terms of the artistic quality of the photography and editing. However, those sensitive to images of animal slaughter have been warned.

The disc also features three interviews--two with Franju and one with the screenwriters Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the French thriller writing team best known for the source novels of Clouzot's Diabolique and Hitchcock's Vertigo. Franju's 1982 interview for Cine-Parade is unspeakably bizarre, and all the more entertaining for it: the interviewer is a man in a mad-scientist's getup of a white lab coat and fright wig, and the pair is surrounded with bubbling beakers and luridly colored lighting. It's a treat for those who remember the good old days of late-nite horror movies on TV hosted by cut-rate celebrities such as the Vegas Vampire. Yet amazingly, Franju maintains his composure and speaks matter-of-factly about Eyes Without a Face and the horror genre in general. The stills gallery is a great deal of fun, with no shortage of promotional materials for the Horror Chamber/Manster double bill. The basic incompatibility of the two films results in all sorts of absurd and amusing graphic combinations. My favorite: a lobby card that juxtaposes the image of a two-headed monster attacking a Japanese scientist with the quote "A ghastly elegance that suggests Tennessee Williams!" Thankfully, Criterion included the double feature trailer along with the original French trailer. The transfers for both Eyes Without a Face and Blood of the Beasts do a great job of rendering the textures of their black-and-white photography. If anything, the transfer of Eyes has richer contrast than the new 35mm print that played in theaters recently. The mono sound is also fine. Highly recommended.

For more information about Eyes Without a Face, visit Criterion Collection. To order Eyes Without a Face, go to TCM Shopping.

by James Steffen