Eyes Without a Face

In the magazine this week, Anthony Lane writes about “Les Diaboliques,” the 1955 shocker by Henri-Georges Clouzot, based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who worked together as Boileau-Narcejac. They also were among the team that scripted Georges Franju’s 1960 thriller “Eyes Without a Face,” which I discuss in the clip below. The Clouzot film has a nifty, twisty plot. Franju’s hallucinatory film has a much more straightforward story, in which the mystery and the wonder are provided by the images themselves.

Franju—a co-founder, with Henri Langlois, of the Cinémathèque Française—as strongly influenced by surrealism. He delighted in the art of jolting yet understated juxtapositions; by adding a touch of the strange to a normal context, he could sound the mind’s dark depths more subtly than would the overtly grotesque. He started as a documentary filmmaker (his great first film, “Blood of the Beasts,” a 1949 documentary about the slaughter of animals at the stockyards of Paris, is included on the Criterion DVD of “Eyes”), and, in his narrative features, the meticulously detailed and patient observation of horrifying behavior renders it all the more excruciating.