Christiane, Liberated Doll: Surrealism and the Female Gothic in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face
Cassidy Englund
Christiane’s mask reflects the surrealist exploration of the “uncanny” and the animate/inanimate binary in Eyes Without a Face.
Until the final five minutes of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage, 1960), the motives of Christiane (Edith Scob) — a young woman who has suffered massive injuries and scarring to the face as a result of an automobile crash caused by her father, Doctor Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) — are largely unclear. Alternatively, Doctor Genessier and his assistant Louise’s (Alita Valli) motives are evident; they abduct young women and surgically remove their faces in hopes of finding a skin graft that will successfully cover Christiane’s disfigured features, a scientific breakthrough that would bring the doctor even greater fame. Christiane, however, is passive for the film’s majority. She traipses around her father’s mansion, moving in an ethereal, eerie fashion like a ghost floating in ultra-feminine white dresses that resemble a doll’s clothes and a smooth white mask that is simultaneously shockingly lifelike and decidedly artificial. Christiane’s movements, mask, and clothing all make her appear doll-like and “uncanny,” a term that, according to Sigmund Freud in his essay “The Uncanny,” “is in some way a species of the familiar” and yet describes an unsettled feeling that can arise from certain items or motifs, like dolls, that embody a combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar (134-135). Christiane’s doll-like nature, animate yet somehow inanimate, evokes this strange combination. Her circumstances, too, render her doll-like, as her father uses her in his experiments while he attempts to bring himself fame through a successful transplant. Christiane’s doll-like qualities contribute to the film’s surrealism, as many surrealist films — and surrealist works of art more generally — feature dolls or doll-like characters. There are also additional motifs present in Eyes Without a Face that render the film surrealist, namely the thematic focus on multiple selves — another uncanny motif that Freud refers to as “doubles” — and a blurring of the human/animal binary (Freud 141). Two key scenes — the scene in which Edna (Juliette Mayniel) sees Christiane’s face and the ending scene in which Christiane’s motivations are revealed — feature these surrealist motifs, which are present in surrealist films of both the initial surrealism movement and the years since the initial movement, and highlight them through mise-en-scène, diegetic sound, framing, and editing, and reinvent them in the context of the female gothic.
According to Adrian Martin in “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema,” surrealism can be understood as a term describing an artistic “philosophy” or “attitude” with two distinct but interrelated forms (190). Martin states that the first form of surrealism is “historic surrealism,” which refers to “the activities of those who invented the term surrealism and called themselves surrealists” (190). The surrealist movement of the 1920s was a movement that touched many artistic mediums; surrealist artists, for philosophic and politically revolutionary ends, sought to reclaim childlike imagination and expose the uncanny, but still real, aspects of daily life, especially through infusing works of art with dreamlike qualities and an air of the irrational (Martin 191). The cinematic medium specifically attracted many surrealists, Martin notes, due to its ability to convincingly blend the real and the fantastic to create a “reality [that] surprises us” (191). Two of the first films of historic surrealism were Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’age d’Or (1930), both directed by Luis Buñuel. Un Chien Andalou and L’age d’Or both lay the foundation for motifs that would later become links between surrealist films across genres and time periods, including dolls or mannequins, doubles, and the blurring of the human/animal binary. The second form of surrealism Martin identifies is “eternal surrealism,” which is “much broader … and has expressed itself in the acts or works of many” (Martin 190). Eternal surrealism includes works by artists and filmmakers who followed the initial surrealist movement and reiterated its themes, motifs, and techniques in new and innovative ways. Eternal surrealism informs both Vera Chitylova’s Daisies (1966) and Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Hallmarks of the classification, these films feature motifs of historic surrealism, like doubles, dolls, and a blurring of the human/animal binary, but also function as feminist commentary and at times directly challenge the misogynistic traditions that, as Bliss Cua Lim notes in “Dolls in Fragments: Daisies as Feminist Allegory,” exist in some works of historic surrealism (65-66). The two protagonists of Daisies are doll-like doubles of one another who mock patriarchal ideals of femininity, and Deren’s film is a story in the female gothic tradition — a narrative form that often sees a female protagonist seek to escape the domestic space (Warner 9).
As a film that incorporates doubles and the blurring of the human/animal binary as motifs and foregrounds a doll-like character trapped in the domestic space, Eyes Without a Face is a film with roots in historic surrealism that functions as a form of eternal surrealism — the doll’s female gothic. Costuming, framing, editing, and diegetic sound all contribute to the prominence of the surrealist motifs of dolls, doubles, and the blurring of the human/animal binary in the scene in which Edna sees Christiane’s face. The scene begins when Christiane enters the basement laboratory, approaches a mirror, and removes her mask. The camera follows Christiane’s hand as she takes the mask off and discards it on a nearby chair, and then lingers momentarily on the mask. The shot of the mask isolated highlights Christiane’s doll-like nature, as the mask is a quasi-body part that she can take on or off in order to appease her father and Louise, who repeatedly implores Christiane to wear her mask throughout the film. Then, a tracking shot follows Christiane from behind, her face still concealed, as she nears the table upon which Edna, another young woman that Louise and Doctor Genessier have abducted, lies motionless. The following shot is a medium close-up of Edna’s face, with Christiane’s hands slowly entering the frame as she begins to covetously stroke Edna’s unblemished skin. For a moment, Edna awakens, and there is a sequence of rapid cutting between the medium close-up of Edna and a medium close-up of Christiane, sans mask. The rapid cutting between Edna’s face and Christiane’s face with similar framing, the faces juxtaposing each other, suggests how soon they will become doubles of each other, with Christiane adopting Edna’s face and Edna becoming disfigured. A crucial difference between the shots of the two women is that while Edna’s face is perfectly clear, Christiane’s face, during the only moment in the film in which it is uncovered, is out of focus and cloaked in shadow. Her expression remains obscured although it is in frame, creating a contrast between Christiane’s face with and without the mask, as Christine’s masked face is stark and bright. The two shots of Christiane sans mask suggest a sort of multiplicity, as the version of Christiane with her mask appears very different from the version of Christiane without her mask. Additionally, the second shot of Christiane without her mask features the menacing sound of the dogs that Doctor Genessier keeps caged for experiments beginning to bark. The use of diegetic sound during this shot creates an associative link between Christiane and the dogs, suggesting not only that Christiane and the dogs, both caged, are in similar situations, but also that Christiane harbors an animalistic rage. A shot that features Christiane being linked with the dogs closely following a shot of her hands moving over Edna’s face in a predatory manner implies that Christiane, an animal desire for her old features motivating her, may selfishly support her father’s experiments. Thus, in this scene, costuming, editing, and framing highlight the surrealist motifs of dolls and doubles, and diegetic sound highlights the blurring of the human/animal binary.
Eyes Without a Face “adopts surrealist motifs for feminist ends,” with Christiane boldly reclaiming freedom for herself.
The ending scene — in which Christiane frees Paulette (Beatrice Altariba), another abducted young woman, and sets the dogs loose on her father before escaping the laboratory — puts forth a decidedly feminist form of eternal surrealism through costuming, makeup, framing, and diegetic sound that all further foreground the surrealist motifs of dolls, doubles, and the blurring of the human/animal binary in the mode of the female gothic. The scene begins with a medium close-up of Paulette as she awakens strapped to the operating table in the laboratory, an outline drawn around her face. The makeup of the outline around her face mirrors the outline of Christiane’s mask, highlighting how Paulette and Christiane are doubles of each other, both situationally and visually. The film then cuts quickly from a medium shot of Christiane back to the medium close-up of Paulette before returning to Christiane in a tracking shot as she nears the operating table, wearing her mask and moving like a doll. Indeed, both Christiane and Paulette are dolls in this scene, both playthings of Doctor Genessier, who has drawn outlines around their faces. Once Christiane approaches Paulette, she grabs the scalpel that Doctor Genessier uses during his procedures, appearing as though she might try to cut off Paulette’s face. Instead, there is a close-up of Christiane’s hand cutting Paulette’s restraints, freeing her, in a shot similar to the previous medium close-up of Christiane’s hands stroking Edna’s skin. Approaching the film’s conclusion, Christiane’s motives become apparent, and she starts the process of liberating herself from her existence as her father’s doll, wielding her father’s own tool as a weapon. Then, after plunging the scalpel into Louise’s neck, Christiane goes to free the dogs from their cages. A stationary long shot captures Christiane opening each cage as the sound of barking swells. During this shot, it is clear that the sound of the barking does not embody Christiane’s rage over the loss of her face — one that might motivate her to support her father’s crimes — but instead an inherently female rage, the rage of a daughter kept as her father’s doll. A long sequence of shots immediately following Christiane’s release of the dogs features the dogs attacking and killing Doctor Genessier, as the barking grows increasingly loud and overwhelming. After freeing the dogs, Christiane frees the many doves Doctor Genessier has also kept caged. As Christiane frees the doves, the diegetic sound of flapping wings overpowers the fading barking, suggesting that since Christiane has killed her father, she can finally liberate herself and metaphorically fly away from the domestic prison of the mansion. Christiane leaves the basement, passing her father’s lifeless body and entering the forest with a dove perched on her hand. A quick medium shot of Doctor Genessier’s face that visually echoes previous medium close-ups of Edna, Paulette, and Christiane then reveals that the dogs have eaten away half of his face, leaving his eyes, like Christiane’s, still intact amidst injured skin. In his article “Films Without a Face: Shock Horror in the Cinema of Georges Franju,” Adam Lowenstein notes that Doctor Genessier “is emasculated during [his] gory death, … [coming] to resemble his faceless female victims” (50). In death, Doctor Genessier becomes a double of all his victims. Crucially, emasculation through mutilation of the body is also present in Daisies and can serve as a feminist surrealist response to the misogynistic mutilation of women’s bodies in some historic surrealism (Lim 65-66). Consequently, makeup, framing, and diegetic sound in the ending scene render Eyes Without a Face a film that repurposes the surrealist motifs of dolls, doubles, and the blurring of the human/animal binary in the mode of the female gothic.
Though it harbors motifs with roots in historic surrealism, Eyes Without a Face adopts surrealist motifs for feminist ends. The mise-en-scène — most notably costuming and makeup — framing, editing, and diegetic sound of both the scene in which Edna sees Christiane’s face and the ending scene all serve to foreground the surrealist motifs of dolls, doubles, and the blurring of the human/animal binary as Christiane’s story unfolds. In the vein of the female gothic and other feminist surrealist films like Daisies, Christiane must take her fate into her own hands in order to escape her existence as a doll. Reinvention of surrealist motifs in the context of the female gothic subverts the misogynistic traditions of historic surrealism and demonstrates the multifaceted nature of eternal surrealism as a form of surrealism that can touch many different genres and serve a wide variety of ideas and artistic visions.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Uncanny, Translated by David McLintock, London, Penguin Books, 2003, pp. 123-162.
Lim, Bliss Cua. “Dolls in Fragments: Daisies as Feminist Allegory.” Camera Obscura, vol. 16, no. 2, 2001, pp. 37-77.
Lowenstein, Adam. “Films Without a Face: Shock Horror in the Cinema of Georges Franju.” Cinema Journal, vol. 37, no. 4, 1998, pp. 37-58.
Martin, Adrian. “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema.” Surrealism: Revolution by Night, edited by the Publications Department of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, 1993, pp. 190-195.
Warner, Rick. “Confronting Traumatic History: Documentary and Horror.” Lecture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 2024.