Audio By Carbonatix
At first glance, it seems odd that French surrealist filmmaker Georges Franju began as a documentarian. But his non-fiction visit to a slaughterhouse (Le Sang des Betes, 1949) and his grim look at World War I relics (Hotel des Invalides, 1951) set the stage, in their way, for his later fictional films, in which he characteristically juxtaposed the macabre and the ordinary while keeping his emotional distance from both. Franju’s most renowned work, at least among horror-movie cultists, has to be Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face), which he made in 1959. It was released in this country as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus.
Relentlessly creepy and vividly stylized, it’s the tale of a distinguished (but crazed) surgeon and researcher (Pierre Brasseur) who kidnaps a string of young women because he means to graft their features onto the face of his daughter, who has been horribly disfigured in an automobile accident. Salted with allegory and steeped in baroque imagery, Les Yeux is justly famous for its dark thrills, and it has been widely imitated and borrowed from, most recently in the inventive John Travolta/Nicolas Cage vehicle Face/Off.
Franju’s gripping little classic opens Friday, December 26, at the Starz FilmCenter at the Tivoli; it runs through January 1. For information and showtimes, call 303-820-3456.
