Eyes Without a Face (Les jeux sans visage) is a 1960 French horror film directed by Georges Franju and written by Boileau-Narcejac, Jean Redon, Claude Sautet and Pierre Gascar, based on Redon’s 1959 novel. The film stars Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, and Edith Scob.

The response during the film’s initial theatrical release was not all positive, with controversy in Europe over the gore, which even though minimized to satisfy the censors, still caused a reaction of disgust from some critics. When released in the US, the film was oddly renamed The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, and shown in a double bill with the 1959 Japanese-American horror film, The Manster.

Over the years, though, EWaF‘s critical reputation has improved, with contemporary critics praising the film’s poetic approach to horror, as well noting its influence on other movies (Halloween, Face/Off, and The Skin I Live In, to name a few examples; EWaF even inspired the Billy Idol song of the same name). The film is thus now considered one of the greatest and most influential horror films of all time.

Here is a link to quotes from the movie (in English translation). Here are links to the full movie (this one, though colourized and breaking down a few times, at least has the English subtitles synchronized with the French speaking).

The film begins with a kind of eerie carnival- or circus-like music during the opening credits, suggesting how the two villains of the movie are playing a macabre game on their unsuspecting young female victims. One of those villains, Louise (Valli), is driving a car outside of Paris at night with a tense look on her face; in the back seat is the faceless corpse of a girl Louise is about to dump in the river. Her driving out at night is a journey into the darkness, a losing of one’s way, metaphorically speaking, that sets the tone for the film.

The next day, Dr. Génessier (Brasseur)–the man who surgically removed the facial skin of the girl in a failed attempt to graft it onto the face of his daughter, Christiane (Scob), whose face has been disfigured after a car accident–is giving a lecture on skin grafts to an audience including women in awe and admiration of his abilities. Ever cool and emotionally detached in his attitude, the doctor leaves the admiring women thus to discuss, with the police, the discovery of what seems to be the corpse of Christiane (actually, it’s the body of the girl Louise dumped in the river).

Génessier (his name a pun on Genèse, or Genesis) fancies himself on the verge of a scientific and medical miracle: the transplanting of skin onto other people’s faces, as he has successfully done to Louise, and so he hopes, with utter determination, to do so for his daughter. The doctor thus has a God complex, playing God in changing the Chaos of his daughter’s disfigured face into the form of a new, pretty one, then looking on his work and seeing that it is good.

Christiane, whose name is an obvious pun on Christ, is the suffering servant, if you will, of her narcissistic “God the Father.” Her disfigured face would thus be like the bloody face of Jesus with the crown of thorns on his head. She’d rather die, yet her father keeps her ‘resurrected’ (even while she’s legally dead, with the body of the other girl buried in Christiane’s place at ‘her’ funeral, so no one other than her father and Louise knows she’s still alive) so Génessier can continue attempting grafts using the facial skin of other girls whom Louise will find for him and lure to his house.

He keeps Christiane’s despair alive, ironically, by keeping her hope alive…then frustrating it (if unintentionally) with his every failed skin graft. He tries to comfort her by telling her to keep faith in him, that one day, he’ll finally get it right; yet his version of faith, hope, and love, which would abide forever, is instead an eternal despair and self-loathing for her.

Until a successful graft is achieved, she has to wear an expressionless white mask, one that inspired the Shatner mask that Michael Myers wears in the Halloween franchise. And yet though she is disfigured, Christiane is no monster: she’s a gentle, kind-hearted soul, full of empathy and compassion. She loves, for example, the many stray dogs Génessier is holding captive for his medical experiments. Indeed, it is he who is the monster, a kind of combination of Dr. Victor Frankenstein (in his attempts to bring her to life, as it were) and the Frankenstein monster (in soul, if not in body).

For all of his supposed love of Christiane, Génessier is really doing the surgeries for his own vanity. As a typical narcissist, the doctor sees his daughter as an extension of himself. Seeing her disfigured face, he doesn’t feel compassion for her, but rather a wound to his own ego. When he looks at her, he’s looking into a metaphorical mirror. He has lost face figuratively, just as she has lost face literally.

Speaking of mirrors, all of those in his house have been removed, but she can still see her faceless face in other reflections–in glass, etc. He would have her wear her mask as a habit, though she doesn’t like wearing it, calling it more frightening than her disfigured face. The mask is to shield his eyes, not hers, from her disfigurement, for it reminds him of the fact that it was his fault she is disfigured: the car accident happened because he was driving too fast at the time. He doesn’t feel guilt over it, though–as a typical narcissist, he feels shame over it.

Also as is typical with narcissists, Génessier wants to have control over everyone and everything. When he was driving like a lunatic, he even wanted control of the road, so Christiane complains to Louise. Similarly, he wants control of Christiane [he even tries to control her smile later in the film, not wanting her to smile too much, after a temporarily successful graft] and Louise, as well as of all the dogs he has in captivity. There is a clear parallel between the two women and the dogs: the former are in a metaphorical cage, the latter in literal ones, as are some doves they have in the house. Christiane is what society, with its cruelly high standards of beauty, would call a “dog” because of her disfigurement, and accordingly, she is in a cage of her own.

At the funeral supposedly for Christiane, Louise feels a pang of conscience about the girl who really died, and she says she cannot go on doing what the doctor would have her do–find more girls for him to remove their facial skin. He slaps her and angrily tells her to be quiet. It’s clear he’s using Louise out of her sense of obligation to help him, since he repaired her face, and she wouldn’t want to seem ungrateful to him; so she’s in a cage of her own, too. She wears a choker pearl necklace to hide a surgical scar on her neck.

With his stony, cold expression, a truly ugly face, it’s also clear that he cares only about himself, not his daughter’s happiness. For in removing the faces of other pretty girls to put on Christiane’s, he may be restoring her beauty (if successful, which he ultimately never is), but he’s also destroying the beauty and lives of these other girls, something the doctor obviously doesn’t care about, despite his cool admission that he’s done much wrong in trying to restore Christiane’s face, a mere paying of lip service about his crimes.

Indeed, the father of the first victim, a girl named Simone, asks about the body discovered by the police, asking Génessier if he’s sure that it’s Christiane’s, and not Simone’s. Knowing full well he’s killed the man’s daughter, the doctor lies that the discovered body is Christiane’s, then abruptly leaves Simone’s father, icily saying the man still has hope of finding the girl (when, of course, he has no such hope at all).

EWaF, in a larger sense, can be seen as a social commentary on the pressures put on women to be beautiful, men’s preference of that beauty obviously being a huge source of that pressure. Génessier, as the head of Christiane’s patriarchal family, thus personifies that male preference of beauty.

Christiane doesn’t necessarily have to be beautiful, of course–she just needs to be loved. As one of her father’s latest experiments, she isn’t being particularly loved by him. She misses her fiancé, Jacques Vernon (played by François Guérin), her father’s medical associate (in the hospital nearby Génessier’s house) who assumes she’s dead as does everyone else. Even if she were to get a new face, how could she be with Jacques again? Discovery of her still being alive would lead to a new police investigation, the discovery that the faceless corpse is Simone’s, and criminal charges against Génessier.

Christiane yearns so much to be with Jacques again, to hear his voice, that she has a habit of phoning him, just to hear him talk; yet not daring to let him know it’s her on the other end, she cannot say anything. He just ends up being annoyed at the silence after his asking who the caller is, and he hangs up.

During the time leading up to the first of these phone calls, and starting with Louise having put the mask on Christiane, we hear some plaintive soundtrack music in C minor and in triple time, as she wanders about the house alone, seeing a photo of Jacques. Indeed, for a horror movie, EWaF has an overall sad tone to it, like George A. Romero‘s Martin. The scene ends with her seeing a painting of her former self with a dove on her hand. She looks wistfully at the picture, longing for the freedom she sees in it.

Louise goes out to Paris to find the next victim, a Swiss girl named Edna Grüber (Mayniel). As Louise befriends and charms Edna, soon offering a place for the college girl to stay while studying away from home, we hear that carnival/circus music again (“Générique“), for the game is being resumed.

Louise drives Edna to Génessier’s big, beautiful home out in the country, a charming place surrounded by trees, yet its distance from Paris is a problem for the university student. When she arrives at the house and hears all the dogs barking, this is an ill omen for her, and she’s having second thoughts.

When Edna is introduced to Génessier, Louise lies and calls him “M. Dormeuil,” a pun on dormir, “to sleep,” for indeed, Edna will soon be put to sleep with a cloth, soaked in chloroform, pressed against her face. Edna, after realizing what will have been done to her, will later die by suicide from a jump from a window on an upper floor of the house…”to die, to sleep, no more.” Dr. Génessier, the would-be bringer of the genesis of life, is actually Dr. Dormeuil, bringer of “that sleep of death” (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I).

What is the most unsettling scene in the whole movie is soon to come: Edna’s surgery to remove her facial skin, shown in agonizing, graphic detail, in real time. Génessier, assisted by Louise, of course, draws a line around Edna’s face to mark where he’ll cut the skin, and he draws circles around the eyes, too. We see the actual cutting and removal of the skin, ending the scene with a brief shot of the bloody interior of what was Edna’s face.

This infamous scene is what makes EWaF truly a horror film. At its screening at the 1960 Edinburgh Film Festival, seven audience members fainted during the surgery scene, and countless others walked out. When learning of the fainting, Franju quipped, “Now I know why Scotsmen wear skirts.”

Just before the surgery scene–in which Génessier and Louise maintain cold looks on their faces as they proceed to ruin Edna’s–we see Christiane wandering about, visiting the dogs in their cages. She pets several of them, showing them love and affection, an empathy and compassion sharply contrasted with the cold, clinical attitude of her father and Louise.

After seeing the dogs, Christiane goes into the operating room to see Edna, still unconscious and lying on an operating table. She comes close to Edna’s coveted, pretty face, and when she touches it, Edna wakes up. Now, Christiane has already removed her mask, so Edna sees in horror what’s up until this point been kept from us, the audience–how Christiane’s disfigured face actually looks: dark, skinless, scarred, and grotesque. Edna screams at an image that will soon be a mirror for her; Christiane also sees a soon-to-be mirror, for that face will soon be her new one, if only temporarily.

This mirror symbolism is important, for in seeing each other, the girls will identify with each other, too–Edna committing suicide (as Christiane has wanted to do), and Christiane gaining compassion for any future victims.

Indeed, when Christiane has Edna’s facial skin on, and she finally looks normal–if only for a time–she sees Edna’s face rather than her own in the mirror. It’s almost as if Edna is looking back at her. Christiane may be pretty again, but she still isn’t free. She also wants to be alive for Jacques, yet she’ll have to have a brand new identity, and all she wants to be is herself.

Edna’s body is put with Simone’s in the grave of ‘Christiane.’ If Christiane represents Christ, and Génessier represents the God of the Genesis creation story, then Simone (and Edna) can be seen to represent the one who some Gnostics believed was substituted for Christ on the Cross, Simon of Cyrene. This would in turn make Génessier the Demiurge creator of the physical world, whom the Gnostics often characterized as an evil god, that of the flesh as opposed to that of the spirit.

Génessier is not, however, the only man in this film who is using a female to further his interests and imperiling her to the point of possibly having her face cut off. The police have apprehended a girl caught shoplifting, and as their suspicions about Génessier mount, which include Jacques believing he’s heard the voice of Christiane on the phone, they want this girl, Paulette Mérodon (played by Béatrice Altariba), to dye her hair blonde to make her look more like the two missing girls and thus entice the predatory doctor to go after her. After all, Jacques having noticed–at the funeral–the pearl choker necklace high on the neck of the doctor’s assistant, Louise, matches the testimony of someone who’d heard Edna say Louise always wore that distinctive necklace.

Anyway, Christiane’s new skin soon begins to waste away, and so her father will have to find a new victim for another attempt at a graft. Pauline, with her hair dyed blonde, is sent to Génessier’s hospital, pretending to have migraines. The doctor will see her there, regard her face as a suitable one for the next graft, and have Louise ready to pick her up in her car just after Pauline has been discharged from the hospital.

Meanwhile, Christiane has not only lost hope in her father’s attempts to restore her face: she’s also grown a sense of moral disgust at what he’s been doing to these poor girls. She can’t bear to sit idly by and let other girls suffer the loss that she has suffered.

So while Génessier–called back to the hospital to discuss Pauline’s disappearance with the police, and therefore interrupted from the surgery in the nick of time–is absent from the operating room, Christiane takes a knife and cuts a wakened and terrified Pauline free from her restraining straps on the operating table. Then, when Louise returns to the operating room and demands that Christiane stop what she’s doing, the latter uses the knife to stab the former in the neck–fittingly, right where the surgical cut has been hidden behind the necklace–killing Louise.

Then, Christiane goes to the room with all the dogs in their cages, and she frees all of them. She also frees the doves in a large cage nearby. She’s freed all of these animals, as she freed Pauline, because of course she identifies with all of them. In freeing them, she’s freeing herself, for she’s accepted her appearance as it is; she no longer wants or needs a new pretty face, stolen from another victim.

The dogs, in their rage over how Génessier has treated them, run outside with his having returned and opened the door into their room, and they attack and kill him.

Christiane also comes out the same way with the doves flying after her, one of them resting on her hand as in the picture mentioned above. Just as she represents Christ as God the Son (or in her case, God the Daughter), so do the doves represent God the Holy Spirit. As for the Father…well, God is dead, as is the rule of the patriarchal family hitherto dominating her and insisting that she be ‘pretty’ again.

She disregards his bloody corpse and walks into the neighbouring forest with the doves fluttering by. She’s free because, even with the mask covering her disfigured face, she’s truly beautiful inside, with her good, compassionate heart. Even when the police (after the end of the film) presumably connect her with the stabbing of Louise, a self-defence plea (and defence of Pauline) should be easy, given the extreme nature of Génessier’s crimes, with Louise as his accomplice, and the compassion that should be felt by a jury for long-suffering Christiane.

Her acquittal will be her Ascension.