"Horror in Homeopathic Doses": Franju's Eyes Without a Face

Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju,  France/Italy, 1959)

More than any other image, an erased human face remains horribly eloquent. In fact, a face cannot be made to vanish completely: it stays sufficiently human to horrify by its exact lack of humanity. Hence the unnerving effect of Georges Franju's film Eyes Without a Face (1959), in which a young woman, disfigured in a car crash, is subjected to her father's insane and murderous plan to give her a new face. We never see the daughter's ravaged face, but the featureless white mask she wears for most of the film is enough to suggest her uncanny oscillation between human and inhuman.
Brian Dillon, 'The Revelation of Erasure', Tate Etc., Issue 8, Autumn 2006

Being a horror buff of the rather squeamish and easily frightened kind, Film Studies For Free usually likes its scary, gory movies to be Lyrical... Poetic... Beautiful. That way, it finds, it doesn't have to avert its eyes from the screen too much. 

Thus, FSFF is a particular fan of the truly horrific but extraordinarily beautiful film Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face. Georges Franju's classic delivers its 'horror in homeopathic doses', as Franju himself so aptly put it. 

So, it's the film FSFF just had to choose for its little homage in scholarly links this Halloween. (P.S. If you are based in the USA or Canada, you can also currently watch it for free online as part of October Halloween Festival of free films at The Auteurs website).

• Curtis Bowman, 'A film without politics: Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959)', Kinoeye, Vol 2,  Issue 13, Sept 2002
• Elizabeth Cowie,  'Anxiety, ethics and horror: Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959)', Kinoeye, Vol 2,  Issue 13, Sept 2002
• Paul Cronly, 'Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face)', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 5, December 2008
  
• Lee Hill, 'Skin Deep', Vertigo Magazine, No. 17, May 2008
  
• Reynold Humphries, 'Dr Franju's "House of Pain" and the political cutting edge of horror', Kinoeye, Vol 2, Issue 13, Sept 2002 
• Kate Ince, 'Reply to Michael du Plessis', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007
• Gary Johnson, "Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face', Images Journal, 2004 
• Katerina Loukopoulou, 'Review of Georges Franju by Kate Ince [Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005]', Scope, Issue 9, October 2007
• Michael du Plessis, 'Fantasies of the Institution: The Films of Georges Franju and Kate Ince’s Georges Franju', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007  
• Donato Totaro, 'Martyrs: Evoking France's Cinematic and Historical Past', Offscreen, Vol. 13, Issue 5, 2009
  
• Donato Totaro, Salute Alida', Offscreen, Vol. 10, Issue 5, May 31, 2006 
• Catherine Wheatley, 'Les Yeux sans visage', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, 2007