Eyes Without a Face (1960)

Eyes Without a Face is so grotesque, yet so beautiful in its use of poetic imagery. The film is a horrific revelation about the artificiality of societal beauty, a scathing rebuke of “perfect” beauty standards. Dr. Genessier and Louise are obsessed with getting the right face for her daughter, who had been left disfigured after a car accident. The pair search for brunette victims, who they could then lift the faces off of for his daughter. In the mean time, Christiane is forced to wear an uncanny mask and live in isolation. The mask serves to show a woman trapped under a false pretense of impurity and ugliness; her unfettered visage is treated with vulgarity from everybody who sees her. The grandiosity of the villa contradicts the claustrophobic surgical chambers, the contrast of which develops this cold harshness. The dogs locked in cages in support of his injurious experiments only serve to further accentuate the macabre inhumanity of the professor’s pursuits. However, this ouroboros of violence comes back to the very perpetrators; the professor’s face is viciously ripped apart by those very dogs and left in complete disrepair, while Louise is stabbed in the neck by Christiane. Her exit from the villa is a freeing of those chains, not just a liberation from her oppressive captors, but a metaphorical embrace of physical imperfection and mental uncertainty.