A young woman’s body is fished out of a river in Paris, an apparent victim of drowning. Notably, the woman’s entire face except for her eyes is “an open wound” -- a disfigurement that matches that of a girl recently reported missing. The girl’s father, a famous doctor in Paris, identifies the body as that of his daughter and she is buried at the family crypt. However, the doctor knows full well that the body is not his daughter’s -- she is safely sequestered in his sprawling clinic in the suburbs while he attempts to cure her disfigurement with plastic surgery.
The dead girl, in fact, was the unwilling subject of one of the doctor’s attempts to graft a new face onto his daughter’s skull. Despite the failure of the experiment, the doctor presses on -- enlisting his female assistant to gain the trust of another girl and lure her to the clinic with the promise of a room for rent. But as the experiments continue -- no more successful than before -- the police notice similarities among missing girls in Paris and begin to close in on the doctor. Meanwhile, even his daughter starts to lose hope and resist his cruel experiments.
Is it any good?
There was a time in my life when I spent a great deal of time thinking about what exactly the definition of “science fiction” might be. But it was eventually stories like EYES WITHOUT A FACE that convinced me that the exercise was more or less hopeless. Face transplants were certainly science fiction in 1960 (and were so even until just a few years ago), but every experiment in the movie is ultimately unsuccessful -- some of them disastrously so. The movie also feels more like a tragic and macabre character study than a typical sci-fi flick, but this is no doubt in part a result of different cultural and artistic fascinations in France as compared to the U.S., the U.K., or the Soviet Union. In fact, one of the interesting things about considering EYES WITHOUT A FACE through the lens of sci-fi is that the scientific experiments are all presented very clinically and soberly, while any fantastic elements arguably arise from the shockingly cruel behavior of characters driven by guilt, despair, or blind obedience.
If EYES WITHOUT A FACE is classified in a genre at all, it usually seems to be thought of more as a horror picture, but I’m not sure how well it fits that label either. It was originally marketed as a horror flick in the U.S. -- it first showed in an edited and dubbed version under the title THE HORROR CHAMBER OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS on a double-bill with 1959's THE MANSTER (a movie which I am pretty fond of, but which is really far more of a standard thriller-chiller). And there are certainly horrific elements in the movie: the disfigured girl who almost always appears in a creepy mask, the misguided and murderous doctor, the pack of continuously barking dogs caged in the clinic’s basement, the visits to the family's crypt, and even the imposing old estate that serves as the clinic itself. But the most horrific and most memorable sequence in the movie is also the most scientific. It’s a long, understated, and utterly clinical sequence that depicts one of the face transplant experiments with in a straightforward and un-melodramatic way. The mad scientist here doesn’t jump around shouting, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” Instead, he hold s his forceps carefully steady while his assistant daubs sweat off his brow.
It’s that sequence, I think, that makes me think that EYES WITHOUT A FACE belongs in some capacity in the science-fiction genre (though not to the exclusion of other genres, of course). It draws much of its tension and horror from the cold, detached way that the doctor and his assistant go about the procedure and from the little medical details that make it seem more realistic. Even though there’s nothing particularly fantastic or futuristic about a failed experiment, it’s almost impossible not to take it as an invitation to consider the limits of science, the hubris of man, and the devastating consequences of the combination of the two -- in other words, an invitation to consider some of the favorite themes of science fiction.
So what did you think of it? I gather you liked it. Personally, I love this film. There's something about treating such a Gothic, eerie story in such a methodical and rational way that somehow renders the film even more chilling than it would be normally. And the final shot of the film, where all the wrong-headed reasoning and misguided paternalism fails, is brilliant. It's like pulling an elastic band until it seems like it'll stretch forever, only to have it suddenly snap.
ReplyDeleteAs to genre, I'm not really sure if you could ever fit it in any one category. It's part detective film, part pre-Cronenberg medical horror, part Gothic... I suppose science-fiction makes as much sense as anything else.
Oh yeah I enjoyed it, even though I don't think it was exactly what I expected. It is a pretty big stretch to call this movie "science fiction", and I thought about not doing this blog entry. But I do think you can make an argument for EYES WITHOUT A FACE as sci-fi, even if it's not 100% convincing.
ReplyDeleteI also think that looking at the fringes of a genre forces you to be more precise about what you think the genre is "about". I had a pretty interesting time thinking about whether EYES WITHOUT A FACE was sci-fi enough to count, so that was what really made me post this in the end.