Georges Franju has a thing for masks. Both figurative ones and literal ones are dotted throughout his work, most notably in Thérèse Desqueroux (1962), Judex (1963) and Nuits rouges (1974). However, it is in his 1960 work Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage) that the literal mask plays a more prevalent role.
The BFI has lovingly restored the film and crafted a plethora of extras to release it on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK and it doesn’t disappoint. Picture quality is outstanding and the sound perfect. The film opens with Maurice Jarre’s carnivalesque, jaunty yet haunting score as a female (The Third Man’s Alida Valli) manoeuvres her car down dark winding country roads at night; the tension building as a person in a mackintosh and hat sits in the backseat. Something is not quite right and all unease is confirmed when the driver hoists the body from the backseat and dumps it into the local river. Louise works for Docteur Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) a prominent scientist and researcher in facial reconstruction, the viability of living tissue grafts and necrosis – the operation scenes of which are horrific thanks to Georges Klein’s make-up and Charles-Henri Assola’s special effects. The police have their suspicions about the good doctor but fail to act before the film’s climatic denouement.
Inside the Doctor’s home, silence is juxtaposed with the tweeting of birds and barking of dogs. It is eerie and foreboding, shot with low camera angles and a static camera is interspersed with the odd tracking shot. The use of chiaroscuro is stunning and shadows add to the atmosphere of the allegorical fairy tale. Darkness gives way to light the higher the stairs climbed until the bedroom of Christiane (Edith Scob) is reached. The camera work and lighting design is a real testament to Eugen Schüfftan’s cinematography. Director of Photography Schüfftan had previously worked with Lang, Siodmak, Ophüls and Pabst and had a three dimensional way of lighting a scene, alternating each first and third shot which is great for adding atmosphere, angst and anticipation.
Christiane appears to be a young girl in her white room but the deep velvety tones of a woman amid the caged doves cooing is a real surprise; an adult prisoner being harder to subdue. Two mandolins hang above her bed arranged like a butterfly; she is in a chrysalis awaiting transformation after a car accident causes facial disfigurement. Forever incarcerated in the old dark house of creaking doors and balustrades of the staircase casting bar-like shadows on the wall, all mirrors are covered and Christiane is forced to wear a mask. A mask of brilliant white frozen beauty that only allows the eyes to be visible and they are the windows to a tortured lonely soul. After a while we forget it’s a mask, it’s gentle and soothing, the fact that Scob glides within each scene makes her appear as if an apparition or marionette doll. She is the caged dove, the constant reminder of her father’s guilt and the feeder of his hubris.
Eyes Without a Face is Franju’s masterpiece, an austere and elegant horror-based fairy tale. It deals with scientific ethics, solitude and loneliness; never has human torture been so romanticised, so cruel, tender and lyrical. Edith Scob, perhaps it is fair to say one-time muse of director Franju having worked with him on five pictures, is the star. She provides such a nuanced almost delicate (yet powerful) performance, her Christiane is as beautiful as she is strange, objectified beyond expression. Well, almost…
Notoriously incongruous, Franju is quoted as saying he subscribed to images and “my images are my fleurs maladives [evil flowers]”. Eyes Without a Face is one evil flower that all must see, at least once in their lifetime.
Arrow Video’s new restoration of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) follows in the footsteps of Rabid (1977) and Shivers (1975) also restored and re-released on dual format this year. Each film with its disc-filled extras is clearly a labour of love.
Just preceding the Video Nasties Act of 1984, Videodrome, I’m sure would have gotten Mary Whitehouse’s knickers in a twist with the film’s provocative, paranoiac and altogether pleasure-seeking premise. The narrative centres on Civic TV executive Max Renn (James Woods) and his quest to find the next ‘big thing’ in sensationalist programming. His station is responsible for “soft core pornography and hard core violence” which Renn unapologetically justifies as a result of economics. Moral questions arise surrounding the over-stimulation of the consumer following exposure to dehumanising images via the media. These questions are depicted through metaphor, potential Freudian imagery and the former protégé of Dick Smith, multi-Oscar winning make-up effects Wizard Rick Baker (Smith famously created the exploding head in Scanners). Fellow Canadian, composer Howard Shore, yet again, provides the score (Shore and Cronenberg have worked together on all but The Dead Zone) and employs the use of a Synclavier II synthesiser alongside an orchestra. This electronic sound adds a dark, ominous, even metallic, tone to the film and aids with the 80s nostalgia along with the coiffed hair, shoulder pads and leather ties.
Renn stumbles upon Videodrome – a pirate television station which depicts the torture, brutality and eventual death of its subjects. Becoming obsessive to continually transgress social boundaries, Renn shows the footage to his girlfriend Nicki Brand (a hypnotic Deborah Harry) who, by her own admission, is the perfect over-stimulated test audience. She is sexually free (connoted by her costume, both cut and colour) and is immediately enamoured at the premise of the snuff sequences. Her enthusiasm for all things dark and painful grows and she even disappears to audition in Pittsburgh upon hearing the show is filmed there. Left alone, Max begins to suffer hallucinations; disturbing, intriguing visions which only seek to feed his need to consume the morally ambivalent visual media and further blur the line between fantasy and reality. His interactions with the Marshall McLuhan-inspired Brian O’Blivion (velvet-voiced Jack Creley, only ever visible via a television screen) increase the bizarre especially when we learn O’Blivion’s history to Videodrome. It is an aesthetically pleasurable film; body parts are fetishised, Betamax tapes pulsate and television undulate and literally swallow the flesh.
Anybody familiar with the articulately intense septuagenarian director will immediately recognise the body consciousness which is prevalent in a large percentage of his oeuvre. The man, who has cited Bergman, Fellini and Kurosawa as main inspirations, presents the limitations of the human body within his own artistic nihilism. Ideologies are often invasive and monstrous, the embodied becomes disembodied whilst sex and violence surrounds, causes, or indeed invades the diegesis. There can be contradictory readings of Cronenberg’s films; does he fight for the patriarchal pleasures he depicts and stray dangerously close to misogyny or destroy said pleasures while reinforcing the fragility of the physical body and mind? While the male consciousness is seen in crisis and at odds with the social world around him, it is the female body which appears abject and the site of disgust. In Videodrome, the male mind becomes more abhorrent through feminine imagery; Renn’s torso is repeatedly violated via the vagina-like opening. Or perhaps, it is like the man himself stated a few years ago; he plugs into the zeitgeist, examines and plays around with it. In simple terms Cronenberg’s films are about life and death yet he cleverly uses the horror and prosthetics as a distancing tactic. He questions who or what we are and presents, albeit through social paranoia and viscera, the evolutionary limitations of the human body and the emotional terror of the waking nightmare.
Videodrome has never been more relevant in the face of the current media and image appropriation. It is disorientating, visually audacious and presents an ideology which is fascinating, wholly original but is, perhaps, one of the more convoluted Cronenbergs. That said, as a first time viewer (yes, I know…) the experience of it was exhilarating.
Blu-ray Extras
Never one to scrimp on material, Arrow has collected an array of goodies and following the film, there are numerous options for the viewer to take, although do yourself a favour and hit them all.
Cinema of the Extreme – The 1997 BBC documentary featuring Repo Man director, Alex Cox, David Cronenberg and George A. Romero briefly discuss cinema extremes. These verbal tidbits are intercut with clips of Shivers, Dawn of the Dead (1978) Videodrome and Crash (1996). It is a slight, fairly insignificant documentary which never goes into great detail but Cronenberg’s thoughts on censorship are always worth a listen (Cox’s on Seven, not so much).
Forging the New Flesh – Visual Effects artist Michael Lennick narrates (and stars) in the first of his four contributions to these extras and discusses the techniques used in the making of the film. This, unfortunately, short but fascinating featurette contains behind-the-scenes footage and interviews Rick Baker, Bill Sturgeon, David Cronenberg and star James Woods.
Fear on Film – One of the highlights of the disc extras is a roundtable discussion originally aired in 1982; presented by Mick Garris and featuring David Cronenberg, John Carpenter and John Landis in tweed, flared jeans and big hair respectively. The conversation centres around the horror genre, what scares the filmmakers, films, as well as their individual takes on censorship and ratings. Although, less than 30 mins long, it is a highly entertaining and lively chat and well worth watching.
Samurai Dreams – The complete and uncensored Japanese series Samurai Dreams with optional commentary by Michael Lennick who is still revelling in the Videodrome/Samurai Dreams experience some 32 years later.
Helmet Camera Test / Why Betamax? – Bite-sized early test footage showing Max Renn’s virtual hallucination chamber head-gear and a second segment which very briefly details why Betamax was the format of choice.
Promotional Featurette – This is an extension of Forging the New Flesh documentary although written and directed by Mick Garris and features behind-the-scenes footage and the making of Videodrome. Interviews include: Cronenberg, Harry and Woods As with the previous featurettes, these are brief but still interesting.
Audio Commentary is provided by author Tim Lucas (Videodrome: Studies in the Horror Film).
Cronenberg: Early Works Blu-ray
Transfer of the Future – The ever entertaining and jovial Kim Newman discusses, examines and critiques Cronenberg’s early career and labels him a child of Romero and genre auteur along with fellow underground directors Brian De Palma and Tobe Hooper.
The Early Works – Restored by the Toronto Film Festival, Criterion Collection and Arrow Films respectively, these films show the progression of Cronenberg as an art student and his shorts through to the first feature film which was made some five years before Shivers.
Transfer (1966)
From the Drain (1967)
Stereo (1969)
Crimes of the Future (1970)
In Transfer, shot on a snowy Canadian landscape, an analyst (Mort Ritts) and his patient Ralph (Rafe McPherson) thrash out their doctor/patient relationship via farce and Freudian speak; while in From the Drain, two men (Mort Ritts and Stephen Nosko), seemingly war veterans sit clothed in a bathtub awaiting something ominous which may or may not come out of the drain. Stereo was the first short feature film shot on 35mm and has an establishing shot reminiscent of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and appears to be heavily influenced by Bergman. It stars Ronald Mlodzik (later seen in Shivers and Rabid) whose costume looks deliciously Hammer-House-of-Horror-like. This is the best of the bunch, definitely my favourite; shot in black-and-white, silent save for a voiceover, the canted camera angles add to the general creepiness and sterility of the sanatorium set amidst the Ontario north woods. Subjects are placed in isolation and operated on, telepathic ability and extra sensory perception is monitored through sexual interaction. Finally, the last feature is Crimes of the Future a potential follow-up to the preceding film. Restored exclusively by Arrow Films from a new 4k scan of the original 35mm negative, again starring Mlodzik (as Adrian Tripod), and again silent but for the added commentary, only this time in colour. In the House of Skin all women are extinct and Tripod is in search of the enigmatically named Antoine Rouge.
It is fascinating to see the early attempts of an artist, to witness how he develops and to note his visual interests and motifs even back then. There’s the Freudian terminology (which all eventually came to a head in A Dangerous Method [2012]), themes of consciousness, sexual experimentation, telepathy and the oddly monikered characters which have all been seen over the Cronenberg oeuvre at one time or another. They may not, necessarily, be to everybody’s taste but they are revelatory in their style, content and deserve to be seen in all of their restored loveliness. All-in-all, Arrow has produced a beautiful box set which cannot be recommend highly enough.
Somebody once sang that love was a battlefield (okay, it was Pat Benatar in 1983) and it immediately sprung to mind when watching Thomas Cailley’s feature debut survivalist melodrama Les Combattants, as it has moments in which it is quite literally the case. This multi César award winning film is a surprising delight and one surely to feature on many a film-fan’s end of year list. The film opens in a small French coastal town with brothers Manu (Antoine Laurent) and Arnaud (Kévin Azaïs) incredulously arguing with an undertaker about the inferior grade of wood used and extortionate price of their father’s coffin. Although Manu is older, he looks to his younger sibling for help and at times guidance but it would appear that Arnaud is just as lost; unsure what his future holds but happy to help out in the family carpentry business over the summer. Apparently, in France following the recession the second largest recruiter (after McDonald’s™) is the Army. Cue stoic men in fatigues setting up their mobile office and offering anyone who will listen to their drafting spiel, an inflatable lilo and tips on focus and self-defence. During these beach combat sessions, Arnaud is pitted against Madeleine (Adèle Haenel) whom he initially refuses to fight because she’s a girl. He needn’t worry for she can handle herself.
A chance shed-building leads Arnaud to the Beaulieu’s home and their daughter… Madeleine is an only child; an avid swimmer who drinks raw mackerel smoothies for breakfast and is determined to join the army. Her view of the world and its eventual destruction is rational and profound but labels her ‘weird’ and yet her preoccupation with survival attracts Arnaud and in true romantic fashion, he attempts to impress her by impulsively signing up to the Army training camp she is enlisted on. If Madeleine is impressed she makes it impossible to tell with her increasing deadpan expression. There is something incredibly convincing about both characterisations but it is Madeleine who produces the laughs, much like a 30s film dame only quirkier. Sensitive, nature-loving, amiable Arnaud and sullen, sporty, survivalist Madeleine make a strong team. The camp comes as a surprise to both of them and their capabilities.
Cailley’s film is an unusual one in the sense that it doesn’t quite fit a genre; to call it a romantic-comedy is to do it a disservice. Nothing is forced. It is slight, wry and a little odd but wholly persuasive in not only its gender roles but resounding in its depiction of a country coming out of a recession, heading for ruin and a race of people to (eventual) extinction. The cinematography provided by David Cailley (brother of Thomas) is beautifully simple and while he manages to depict so much physical gorgeousness, there is always a sense of foreboding present, an atmosphere which pays off strikingly pre-denouement. Its electro soundtrack by Hit ‘n’ Run keeps things relatively upbeat amidst the threat of melancholia and existential crisis.
Visually, it has a very simplistic palette; mostly greens, greys and muted blues which is complimentary to not only the camouflage colours of the army uniform but also the organic elements of nature which are so often shot – water, sky and foliage with occasional sunshine yellow warmth. Cailley’s direction, his brother’s cinematography and Lilian Corbeille’s almost carefree editing serves the narrative well; natural lighting gives way to gloomy grey by the end. Given the integral use of colour, a Blu-ray release of the film would serve it greatly especially enhancing the already picturesque mise-en-scéne. Sadly, there are no extras on the disc either.
Les Combattants makes for an intelligent, sweet-natured, amusing film. Figuratively speaking, Madeleine and Arnaud could be the last two humans on earth (or indeed animals), passing the time without thinking, engaging in aggression and affection of equal measure and above all surviving but when you’re in the early throes of love, isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?
It seems almost apt that the man who declared ‘hot patootie bless my soul, really like that rock and roll’ would wind up playing the director of a musical summer camp for kids. For Meat Loaf Aday – his film roles seemingly have come full circle from his Rocky Horror days and his theatrical stage performances – as his Roger McCall nurtures and mould the little darlings for their annual show in Jerome Sable’s directorial debut Stage Fright.
The film opens with the Minnie Driver’s primadonna Kylie Swanson ending her performance in The Haunting of the Opera to rapturous applause, her twins Buddy and Camilla take a tour of the auditorium, while their mother preens in front of her dressing room mirror. She is then savagely hacked to death by an unknown assailant wearing the mask of the Opera’s villain. Ten years later, the twins work at Center Stage Camp, a place where all misfits/theatre geeks love, laugh, sing, dance and, best of all, fit in. The Haunting of the Opera is chosen to be the musical book restaged (in keeping with the tragic anniversary), albeit relocating setting to Japan and replacing the plain white mask with that of a Kabuki, complete with top-knot. Camilla (Ally MacDonald) has always wanted to perform on the stage and despite being kitchen staff and not a student is allowed to audition. As pre-production begins, one-by-one cast and crew are picked off.
Okay, so it is not extremely difficult to see what, who, or how this film was inspired, it is painting a rock-horror-musical-by-numbers. It is an extended Glee episode (although the cast is by and large far more likeable) via The Phantom of the Opera and Friday the 13th. The score and song list is, however, original and fluctuate between eye-rollingly naff and grin-inducing, especially those songs sung by the supremely camp, foul mouthed villain who is, typically, dressed heed-to-toe in black brandishing a knife and electric guitar with murderous aplomb. In fact, one criticism is that he is not on screen nearly enough and an audience has to sit through more teen-angst than is absolutely necessary; where is the slicing and dicing?
There are enough sly allusions to other horror films to keep the seasoned genre-crowd satisfied (the sight of a twelve-year-old set designer wearing an apron whirling a hand-saw around made me chortle) and for those with a hatred or largely indifferent view of musicals there is a splendid rock and roll slayer to empathise with. Anyone with a sense of humour and a 90-minute window to fill should enjoy Stage Fright. It does exactly what it sets out to do, perhaps not quite frighten but it certainly entertains for the most part.
Charlotte (Maxine Peake) is having a bad day. Not only has she been passed over for partner in her job but then she returns home to find her cleaner smoking and potentially stealing from her; an altercation ensues and triggers a catastrophic turn of events which has things going from bad to so much worse and in real time too.
British thriller, Keeping Rosy is a highly televisual affair and would work well as an ITV drama due to its episodic editing, this is not necessarily a bad thing; it just lacks a certain filmic quality. Peake is a fantastic actress and her performance really gives pause for thought, her Charlotte begins the film as a brittle, uptight career woman with a pinched face who physically flinches at the prospect of holding a colleague’s new baby. Yes! That gendered caricature; however, she makes the very best of the material at her disposal and is extremely engaging, even making the character more likeable as desperation takes hold. That said, as her controlling workaholic unravels it does make it impossible not to notice plot-holes and makes it increasingly difficult to reconcile character motivations. Throw in an annoying younger sister Sarah (Christine Bottomley) and a quite inexplicable performance by Blake Harrison (The Inbetweeners) as security guard, Roger and it is easy for interest to be all but diminished by the third act.
Roger Pratt’s cinematography is grimly effective – especially the shots within Charlotte’s sterile, open-plan apartment which overlooks a building site – in its depiction of London; the City divides and rules, and this is reinforced by the inclusion of some rather crass stereotyping ; Northerners, Southerners, Poles, they are all expendable it would seem albeit by a really implausible denouement.
By the end, the audience is left unsure as to what the film is trying to say specifically in relation to gender politics, class, crime and punishment. There are hints but it never fully commits.
The Framing Device 