CINE CITY

Based on Jean Redon's novel LES YEUX SANS VISAGE, French director Georges Franju's gloomy, atmospheric horror film EYES WITHOUT A FACE is a masterpiece of cinematic poetry. After his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob) becomes horribly disfigured in a car accident of which he was the cause, guilt-ridden plastic surgeon Doctor Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) grows obsessed with perfecting the reconstruction of her once-beautiful, but now-ravaged, face. With the help of his sadistic nurse Louise (Alida Valli), Genessier kidnaps young girls and brings them back to his isolated manse for grisly medical procedures that graft the victims' living skins onto that of his daughter's. Often compared to Jean Cocteau's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, the film's nightmarish power springs from the surrealistic beauty of its haunting images--from the fiercely blank mask that shields Christiane's wounded face to the merciless incisions of Genessier's surgeries--and a moving climactic scene that garners one of the most transcendent finales in all of cinematic history.

The pulp poetic masterpiece from surrealist director Georges Franju, in which a maniacal plastic surgeon becomes obsessed with restoring his beloved daughter's face, which was mutilated in a horrible accident. When all conventional methods fail, he hatches a mad plot, murdering women in an insane attempt to graft their faces onto his daughter's.