Félicia Atkinson x 'Les Yeux Sans Visage'

About the film

The film revolves around a brilliant, obsessive surgeon who kidnaps women and removes their skin to transplant it onto his daughter's deformed face. In the film, Franju deftly balances between fantasy and realism, clinical detachment and intense emotion, beauty and pain. All of this is dominated by the haunting, haunting eyes of Edith Scob.

J. Hoberman of The Village Voice declared the film to be "a masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality." The Encyclopedia of Horror Films agreed with this claim, stating that "Franju provides the film with a strange poetry in which Cocteau's influence is unmistakable."

In the 2010s Time Out asked authors, directors, actors and critics working in the horror genre to vote for their best horror films. Time Out placed "Eyes Without a Face" at No. 34 in the Top 100, and Pedro Almodóvar drew extensive inspiration for his own 2011 film "The Skin I Live In.

Before he directed 'Les Yeux Sans Visage,' Georges Franju was notorious for his short film 'Blood of the Beasts' (1949), in which he combined images of animals in slaughterhouses with images of children playing. This collage of everyday images is sometimes mysterious and sickening, but always true.

Together with Henri Langlois, Franju founded the Cinémathèque française, the most enduring and influential institution in French film culture, in 1937.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)