Debaser: Les Yeux sans visage (1960)
Jul. 19th, 2020 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sonofgodzillaIt is gaudy, the music vaudeville, surreal and haunting. The soundtrack is full of the noise of animals, dogs barking, birds calling, whilst on screen, there are people, alone with their thoughts, locked into their own private sufferings. Les Yeux sans visage is full of malevolence, a film that has not grown any easier to watch with the vast distance between when first I saw it, and where we are now.
The film begins following an accident, the disappearance of Christiane (Édith Scob), and the torment of her gifted father, Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur). Summoned to the morgue by the police, Génessier is confronted with a corpse that he confirms to be his daughter. A number of girls have gone missing in Paris over the season, and, slowly it is revealed that Christiane has not disappeared, she has not died, but instead, has been stolen away by her father, left terribly disfigured following a car crash. Génessier, detached and removed from the grief of others, and his assistant, Louise (Alida Valli), begins kidnapping girls and removing their faces with cold dispassion, pioneering a new form of transplant in the hope of restoring his daughter's beauty.
Watching the film again, I find that I am not as dispassionate myself as I was when I first saw it, and during the many complex medical scenes, I found myself momentarily looking away, unable to face the events taking place, moments that at once reminded me of the silliness of films such as the 1958 original version of the The Fly, and also of the long sojourns of hospital experience that would later haunt me. I remember feeling that Christiane was deeply relatable when I first saw this film, as well as not entirely without blemish. The message resonates for me even more nowadays: others must suffer, so that you may become whole. I wonder if we are all like this, if we all need the suffering of others in order to make us who we are.
Watching the movements of Édith Scob, her gentle grace, there is a sense of horror and beauty, her movements inspiring. As she holds the phone and does not speak, listening to the voice of her fiancé, Jacques (François Guérin), she is all of us, locked away and unable to communicate our feelings, unable to express the violent details of our internal lives. This scene is expanded on and referenced as part of the play-within-the-film enacted by Sadako's theatre troupe in Ring 0, and it draws a direct line of comparison that, for me, is terribly important, speaking of women who are somehow trapped by circumstance and left incomplete.
For years, I thought Les Yeux sans visage was my secret, that no one else knew this film, but the internet tells me that the film is something of a cult classic—and rightly so. Watching this film again, I keep thinking of our incompleteness, and I keep thinking there is perhaps no real way to fix ourselves, to recover that spark of magic left us by higher powers. The final scene of the movie, during which Christiane advances into the dark, into the forest, her face hidden by her mask, the beating wings of doves about her—I realised when watching this again, that we are all "the other," and that none of us will ever truly find the words we tell ourselves are ours, the words we need to explain who we are to others.
The film begins following an accident, the disappearance of Christiane (Édith Scob), and the torment of her gifted father, Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur). Summoned to the morgue by the police, Génessier is confronted with a corpse that he confirms to be his daughter. A number of girls have gone missing in Paris over the season, and, slowly it is revealed that Christiane has not disappeared, she has not died, but instead, has been stolen away by her father, left terribly disfigured following a car crash. Génessier, detached and removed from the grief of others, and his assistant, Louise (Alida Valli), begins kidnapping girls and removing their faces with cold dispassion, pioneering a new form of transplant in the hope of restoring his daughter's beauty.
Watching the film again, I find that I am not as dispassionate myself as I was when I first saw it, and during the many complex medical scenes, I found myself momentarily looking away, unable to face the events taking place, moments that at once reminded me of the silliness of films such as the 1958 original version of the The Fly, and also of the long sojourns of hospital experience that would later haunt me. I remember feeling that Christiane was deeply relatable when I first saw this film, as well as not entirely without blemish. The message resonates for me even more nowadays: others must suffer, so that you may become whole. I wonder if we are all like this, if we all need the suffering of others in order to make us who we are.
Watching the movements of Édith Scob, her gentle grace, there is a sense of horror and beauty, her movements inspiring. As she holds the phone and does not speak, listening to the voice of her fiancé, Jacques (François Guérin), she is all of us, locked away and unable to communicate our feelings, unable to express the violent details of our internal lives. This scene is expanded on and referenced as part of the play-within-the-film enacted by Sadako's theatre troupe in Ring 0, and it draws a direct line of comparison that, for me, is terribly important, speaking of women who are somehow trapped by circumstance and left incomplete.
For years, I thought Les Yeux sans visage was my secret, that no one else knew this film, but the internet tells me that the film is something of a cult classic—and rightly so. Watching this film again, I keep thinking of our incompleteness, and I keep thinking there is perhaps no real way to fix ourselves, to recover that spark of magic left us by higher powers. The final scene of the movie, during which Christiane advances into the dark, into the forest, her face hidden by her mask, the beating wings of doves about her—I realised when watching this again, that we are all "the other," and that none of us will ever truly find the words we tell ourselves are ours, the words we need to explain who we are to others.
