The Poetry of the Terrifying
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vaiyach — 21 years ago(March 11, 2005 06:02 AM)
hi jason
i have not yet seen the movie and i'll look it up in Fnac. But one thing i wanted to ask you is that if you noticed any elemnts in the movie that could give reference to Dr Faustus because in America it has been released under the title named The Horror Chamber Of DR Faustus. I am doing a project study on Dr Faustus and your reply might help.
Thanks a lot and take care!
Vaibhav -
davedave202001 — 20 years ago(May 25, 2005 01:00 AM)
Eyes with out a face was called The horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus because the film was played as a double feature with the film Manster. I guess in the 50's horror chamber sounded good as a title for the double feature. Great film you'll enjoy it.
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evenstar-11 — 20 years ago(February 08, 2006 06:46 PM)
I couldn't agree more. I just watched it after not seeing it for over ten years and it was just as potent and subtley horrific as I remembered it. Yes, that last scene is amazing. One of the most haunting I have ever seen.
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cedrus-libani — 19 years ago(January 12, 2007 05:26 AM)
I agree. I love the complexity with which it plays with the theme of looking, of masks and eyes. Its sense of dread comes in the way it slowly reveals what its horror is about, as if lifting a mask. The opening sequence, in particular, is brilliantly deceptive and I love the way my certainties are disturbed. Such reversal and ambiguities run through the film. For example, with Genessier and Luise playing both her protective parents and her tyrannical jailers, Christiane is both a fairy tale princess and a monster. She is the lovely minotaur in her labyrinthine house, wafting around in a white mask that replaces and mocks her lost beauty.
I'm also stunned by how horrifying this film manages to be, despite the blood oozing in monochrome rather than spurting red. The operating scene was, for me, painfully protracted, performed clinically, daring me to stare intently at what I can't really bear to witness.
Apropos of your thread title, The Poetry of the Terrifying, think the beauty of the film's title is worth pondering. Eyes are traditionally the manifestation of the soul, and if they're absent then the soul is traditionally considered not to be visible in the body. So the victims can give Christiane back her face but never her soul. In that remarkable last shot of her as the madwoman loosed from her attic, it is as if she has finally given up her soul, or become a lost soul herself. Another scene that sticks in my mind and conveys the same point: the closeup of the bandaged face of one of the victims who has leapt to her death. All we can see is her bandaged face, eyes wide open, gazing in impassive horror. No face, just looking, is all we're left with. Looking into the abyss, making me feel like I have just fallen into one myself.
And by all means, don't miss Franju's classic surrealist documentary,
Blood of the Beasts
, on the same DVD. -
PoppyTransfusion — 12 years ago(May 21, 2013 12:58 PM)
Poetry of the terrifying evokes the film's mood well. Christiane, once such a beautiful young woman, has become an object of terror and yet she is beguiling still in her deformity and sorrow.
Keep silent unless what you are going to say is more important than silence. -
Bree_33 — 11 years ago(September 11, 2014 03:34 PM)
I must say that the shot that I found most beautiful AND most terrifying simultaneously was the final one. The sight of the daughter gliding out into the darkened forest, silently and gracefully, had a seductive poetry to equal the finest painting in a museum, yet at the same time,[green] I couldn't help but imagine the terror of an unsuspecting person walking home through the woods and coming face-to-face with that sinister, silent masked figure!/green] To evoke two such contrary reactions at one and the same time is the highest art. Anyone agree?
Great description!
Two types of horrors
The story is ethically resolved by Christiane's action in choosing to set free the girl, which is figured by Franju's closing images as also a freedom for herself. But her ethical choice is not onlyand perhaps not even primarilyher action to prevent another girl's defacement. Rather, it is to finally turn away from the fascination with the beautiful constituted for her by her father's desire, and accept a self, even a mutilated one, which is her own.
There are two horrors in the film, therefore. One, quite straightforwardly, is the gruesomeness of the faceless face, made literally visible in the scene of the skin which is shown being lifted away from Edna's drugged form. This is straightforward insofar as it draws for its effect on our identification with Edna. The dismemberment of the self represented by the face is made viscerally palpable here in the dispossessing of what should be inalienable. It is a matter quite literally of "your face or mine," which is either good black humour or a shocking apprehension in a terrifying encounter with the real such as to produce, perhaps, the sudden fainting reported amongst some contemporary audience members.
Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959)Here arises the second horror, that what the Other of my desire desires of me is this dismemberment of myself in support of the Other's desire. For while Christina's desire doubles that of her fathersince each desires a new face for hernevertheless Gnessier desires the separable face for his daughter, such that it is the object for him. Christiane, in thus desiring the desire of her father, is also doubled with Edna, who becomes "unfaced" by Gnessier just as Christiane has been.
What is involved is not, therefore, desire, but an enjoyment by the Otherjouissance. The cost of such an enjoyment is my pound of flesh. Edna also serves the desire of Christiane, not only of her father. And in another form of doubling, both women function as support to Gnessier's enjoyment, suggested in the repetition of Christiane's movement through the house to observe her kidnapping, now followed in reverse by Edna as she flees, falling to her death which, her scream notwithstanding, may be suicide. For Christiane, however, there is escape and freedom, although perhaps also madness, while it is her father who dies.
It had been Christiane's mask that subsequently seemed the focus of my disturbance in this film, a connection further motivated by the similar role of a mask and a face destroyed in Kaneto Shind's Onibaba (Japan, 1964), which I saw a few weeks later, with equal horror. No subsequent reflection, even after my intellectual encounter with psychoanalysis, resolved the enigma of my horror. But I have noticed that my sense of horror was also very much like my horror in Voltaire's Candide and its story of the girl who must pay for survival with the flesh of her buttock.
The horrible mask as the thing of horror has been a kind of fetish standing in for a traumatic real but whose role for me remained unconscious. My squeamish horror was not an ethical response but a traumatic encounter. If my remembered horror remains uncanny for me, but not traumatic, this is notwithstanding my analysis here of Les Yeux sans visage, which could only offer me the satisfaction of a mastering I must continuously re-make.
http://www.kinoeye.org/02/13/cowie13.php
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-_\<,_ ___(*)/ (*)____ nec spe, nec metu
And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.