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LES YEUX SANS VISAGE

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (UK TITLE)

THE HORROR CHAMBER OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS (USA TITLE)

Released post World War II, Georges Franju’s film Les Yeux Sans Visage has been claimed by critics to explore the notion of the ‘god-like power’ of doctors while also implicitly expressing anxieties concerning the horrors of the Second World War era, in particular, the German atrocities, and France’s own involvement in the tragedies.

Michel Foucault describes the medical (clinical) gaze as the privilege ‘of a pure gaze, prior to all intervention and faithful to the immediate, which it took up without modifying it…the observing gaze refrains from intervening: it is silent and gesture less.’ (Foucault, 1994, 107 – 108 )

Richard Von Busack suggests that the essence of Les Yeux Sans Visage is the loathing of the God-like power of doctors. This hatred extends no just to their capacity for causing pain but also to their ‘obscurity, their capacity for hiding behind a glass.’ (Hawkins, 2000, 68 )

Dr. Génessier, played by Pierre Brasseur, with his surgical mask, white coat and stilted movements in a sterile environment, embodies the modern clinical method.

As Adam Lowenstein suggests Franju dwells on the clinical details of the operating sequence through the methodical, meticulous movements, the putting on of gloves, the passing of instruments, the eerie sheen of the operating tables. (1998 )

Through the development of the films clinical visual style, Franju dwells on the omnipotence of medical power. The majority of the film is whitewashed in a clinical, sterile atmosphere. The mise-en-scene is often clouded in white, invoking a sterile atmosphere in not only the clinic and operating theatres but also Dr. Génessier’s mansion.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon

In exploring the character of Dr. Génessier and the notion of the clinical gaze, we can align his ‘god-like’ medical power, to that of Franju’s power as a director. As Raymond Durgnat states ‘poetry – cinematographic or literary’ ‘is the art of really seeing.’ (1968: 28 ) Thus, the notion of the power of the medical gaze can be aligned with the cinematic apparatus at the hands of the director, whereby ‘the power politics of medicine are shown here not to be all that different from the power politics of film. The god-like power of an unscrupulous medical ‘God’ embodied patriarchal paternal figure links to lingering anxieties about the horrors unleashed during World War II.

‘…female identity is a medical construction, as essential and fragile as the surgical “skin job” that creates it. Traditional binary oppositions between interior and exterior, Self and Other, literally break down as the skin of various women is peeled away, resutured, rejected, peeled away again. Meaning and the production of identity reside in the flesh and power is precisely measured through literary incisions and markings on the skin’ (Hawkins, 2000, 80)

David Cronenberg’s films are a good example of this all-powerful god-like notion of the male medical gaze, whereby the ‘Otherness’ of the fleshy female body is explored and often reworked by the phallic medical male, particularly Dead Ringers (1988), where a gynecologists becomes obsessed with the interior of the female body, creating specialised, almost barbaric tools in an attempt to control it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Durgnat, Raymond, 1968, Franju, Berkeley and Loss Angeles: University of California Press, 28

Foucault, Michel, 1994, The birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception, New York: Vintage Books

Hawkins, Joan, 2000, ‘The Scalpel’s Edge: Georges Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage’, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Lowenstein, Adam, 1998, ‘Films Without A Face: Shock Horror in the Cinema of Georges Franju, Cinema Journal, vol. 37, no. Summer, 37 – 58

FILMOGRAPHY:

Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg, 1988

Les Yeux Sans Visage, Georges Franju, 1959