Georges Franju: The Poet of the Gentle Macabre

There is a shot in Georges Franju’s first film in which a calf’s severed head lies in a Paris gutter while, off in the suburb beyond the abattoir wall, a barge slides down the canal and someone plays an accordion. The camera holds. The narration continues in a tone of mild civic affection, as though describing a market square. Franju spent forty years perfecting that exact temperature — atrocity filmed with the calm of a tourist board — and it made him the most quietly disturbing director France ever produced.

He was born in 1912 in Fougères, in Brittany, trained as a set designer, and by his early twenties had done the thing that would have secured his place in film history even if he had never picked up a camera. With Henri Langlois he founded the Cercle du Cinéma in 1935 and then, in 1936, the Cinémathèque Française. Franju was its first secretary. The institution that preserved the world’s film heritage, that taught the Cahiers generation everything they knew, that Truffaut and Godard grew up inside — that was Franju’s before it was anyone’s, and he ran its early years while Langlois hoarded the prints.

The documentaries that are horror films

Le Sang des bêtes (1949) runs twenty minutes and is the most important thing he made. It is a documentary about the slaughterhouses at La Villette and Vaugirard, and it opens in the flea markets and vacant lots of the Paris fringe, where children play among discarded furniture and lovers meet by the canal. Then it goes through the gate. Franju films the killing floors with unhurried, luminous black-and-white photography and Joseph Kosma’s score behaves as though nothing is happening; the two narrators, one man and one woman, describe the process in the register of a schools broadcast. Workers sing while they work, because they do. A decapitated sheep’s legs continue to run.

The film’s technique is entirely a matter of mismatch. Franju gives the images no rhetorical assistance at all — no ominous chord, no editorialising, no pity — and the effect is far worse than agitprop, because the viewer is left to supply the horror personally and cannot locate anyone to blame. The abattoir workers are craftsmen. The suburb is lovely. The system is functioning perfectly. Everyone who has since tried the calm-atrocity documentary, from Titicut Follies to The Act of Killing, is working in a room Franju built.

He kept doing it. Hôtel des Invalides (1951) was commissioned by an arm of the French state as a nice piece about the army museum, and Franju delivered a film in which a war-disfigured veteran guides visitors through cases of beautiful weaponry and the camera lingers on the wrong things. The sponsors were appalled and released it anyway. It remains one of the great acts of institutional sabotage in the documentary form.

Eyes Without a Face

Franju came to features late, at forty-seven, with La Tête contre les murs (1959), an asylum drama with Pierre Brasseur and Charles Aznavour. A year later he made the film that outlived everything else.

Les Yeux sans visage (1960) takes a lurid premise — a surgeon abducts young women to graft their faces onto his disfigured daughter — from a pulp novel by Jean Redon, adapted with the assistance of Boileau and Narcejac, the crime writers whose books became Vertigo and Les Diaboliques. Every ingredient is mad-scientist trash. Franju shot it as a fairy tale. Eugen Schüfftan, who had invented the mirror process that built the city in Metropolis, photographed it in a silver-grey that makes the clinic look like a memory of a house. Maurice Jarre wrote a fairground waltz for the daughter’s theme. The camera is patient, courteous and never once excited by what it is filming.

The mask is the reason the film is immortal. Édith Scob wears a rigid, near-featureless facsimile of a face, slightly too smooth, fixed so that its edges vanish at the hairline. It permits her exactly two expressive instruments — her eyes and the way she moves — and Franju had her walk with a kind of drifting lightness, so that Christiane haunts her father’s house while still alive in it. The most beautiful horror film ever made earns that description on this one design decision: a mask that hides nothing and communicates everything.

The reception was violent. At Edinburgh in 1960 the audience reportedly fainted during the transplant sequence, a long, clinical, procedurally accurate few minutes in which the surgery is filmed like surgery. British censors cut it. The Americans dubbed it, retitled it The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, and released it on a double bill with a Japanese monster picture, which is one of the great crimes of distribution history. French critics were largely dismissive, having decided horror was beneath a Cinémathèque founder.

Judex and the debt to Feuillade

Franju’s other governing passion was the French serial cinema of Louis Feuillade — Fantômas, Les Vampires, Judex — and in 1963 he remade Judex as an act of love. Channing Pollock, an American stage magician, plays the caped avenger, and the film contains the sequence Franju’s admirers cite before any other: a masked ball at which the guests wear the heads of birds, and Judex arrives in a hawk mask carrying a live dove, which he appears to kill and resurrect while the band plays. It has almost nothing to do with the plot. It is there because Franju wanted it there.

That instinct explains the shape of his whole career. He was a surrealist by formation, and he believed the fantastic had to be filmed as documentary fact for it to work at all — the more outrageous the event, the flatter and more literal the camera. This is why his horror lands and why so much horror since has not. A director who signals dread with the grammar of dread has already told the audience it is a film. Franju filmed a face transplant the way he filmed a slaughterhouse, and filmed a slaughterhouse the way another man would film a bakery.

He worked steadily afterwards without ever matching it: Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962) from Mauriac, with Emmanuelle Riva taking the Volpi Cup at Venice; Thomas l’imposteur (1965) from Cocteau; La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1970) from Zola; and Nuits rouges (1974), a last, pulpy Feuillade throwback for television and cinema. He died in 1987.

The inheritance

The mask escaped the film almost immediately and has been reappearing ever since. John Carpenter’s Michael Myers wears a blank white face because a blank white face is the most frightening object available, an idea Franju proved twenty years earlier — the Halloween blueprint inherits its central design from a French art film about a surgeon’s guilt. Pedro Almodóvar remade the premise as The Skin I Live In in 2011 and said so. Billy Idol took the title. And in 2012 Leos Carax cast Édith Scob in Holy Motors and, in the last minutes, let her put the mask back on — a fifty-two-year echo, and the most graceful tribute one filmmaker has ever paid another.

Franju’s standing remains odd. He sits inside the French fantastique canon and near the top of the Eurohorror canon, yet he is rarely discussed as a horror director at all, because the people who write about French cinema prefer the Cinémathèque anecdote and the people who write about horror find one masterpiece and a documentary about cows difficult to build a filmography from.

The honest case against

A career read owes the reader the weaknesses, and Franju’s are real. The features after 1963 are largely inert. Thomas l’imposteur and La Faute de l’abbé Mouret are handsome, dutiful literary adaptations by a man who plainly found the source material more respectable than interesting, and they move with the deadening politeness of the “tradition of quality” cinema the New Wave had spent the previous decade demolishing. Nuits rouges is a fond mess. Even Judex, for all the bird ball, has long stretches where the pastiche simply lies there, admiring Feuillade instead of doing anything with him.

The reputation, in other words, rests on a twenty-minute short and a ninety-minute feature made eleven years apart, plus two subversive commissions. That is a slim body of work to hang the word auteur on, and Franju’s defenders tend to answer the charge by talking about the Cinémathèque, which is a different achievement entirely. The fairer answer is that his subject was always the moment when an institution — an abattoir, an army, a clinic, a family — performs cruelty as routine, and he only found the form for it twice. He needed a real process to film. Given a novel, he filmed the novel. Given a killing floor or an operating theatre, he found a register nobody else in cinema has.

There is also an argument, which I half accept, that Eyes Without a Face is colder than it needs to be about its victims. The abducted women exist almost entirely as material; the film’s sympathy runs to Christiane, to Louise the assistant, even to Génessier, and the dead are a supply chain. Franju would probably have said that was the point, and the ending — which I will keep out of this — makes the case for him. But it means the film’s famous humanity is narrower than its admirers claim.

Why the calm works

The lesson Franju offers any filmmaker is about withheld emphasis. Horror is generated by the gap between what an image contains and how the film behaves about it, and every unit of anxiety the director supplies from outside — the sting, the shudder, the swooping camera — is a unit the audience no longer has to produce themselves. Franju supplied none. He pointed a beautifully lit camera at the intolerable and let the accordion keep playing, which forces the viewer into the position of a witness who has been given no instructions.

His nearest relative is Jacques Tourneur, who arrived at a similar restraint from the opposite direction — poverty rather than principle, an RKO budget rather than a surrealist creed. Both men understood that a camera which refuses to flinch is more frightening than a camera that flinches on your behalf.

Start with Le Sang des bêtes, which is on the Criterion edition of Eyes Without a Face and takes twenty minutes. Then the feature, which is on Blu-ray in most territories and looks extraordinary. Then Judex for the bird ball. It is a small filmography, and there is nothing else quite like any of it.