Founder with Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque française in 1936, George Franju was the creator, with The Faceless Eyesone of the most fertile myths in the history of cinema. Beyond this classic, Franju never ceased to stage the struggle of the anarchist powers of dreams and night with those, alienating, of power.
Christiane’s chiseled, ideal but artificial face covers a nightmare: a face mutilated and cracked with black scars. This mask of dreamy Columbine is the prison of the fantasies of her father, a mandarin inflated with his power. Génessier has made Christiane’s face his unknown masterpiece, constantly starting over from the skin he tears off from other young girls. The dark mirror leading to Eyes without a faceFranju first went through it in the documentary. In the short film Dustthe delicacy and whiteness of the porcelain hide the cancerous lungs of the kaolin workers. The beautiful blonde visitor to the museumHotel des Invalideswho wears her hair in a periscope, has as its reflection the broken faces of 14. The other side of beauty, peace or comfort is illness, disfigurement and the power exercised over a reduced people to what Franju called “terror professions”. These are practiced under the surface of the earth, in mines, in the metro, or in the slaughterhouses of the suburbs, world « noble et ignoble » (Cocteau, on The Blood of Beasts1949) whose decor becomes this assembly of skin, smoking meat and bones. There lies the terror for Franju, in a fantasy stripped of all folklore but which touches deep anxieties, and first and foremost his own. He often declared that he had turned The Blood of Beasts while he loved animals, Head against the walls when nothing frightened him more than being “contaminated by madmen”, and The Faceless Eyes as the blades terrorized him.
