The Mask, or caricature, is a trope of theater that extends at least as far back as the theater of Ancient Greece, where actors wore masks that were especially constructed not just to indicate character and personality, but were also constructed so the actor could speak normally yet be heard throughout an entire arena or colosseum. The masks allowed for no other expressions.
More recently in film, the Mask has no expression at all. It is a powdery white until splattered with non-virgin blood. The mask, combined with the lumbering relentless physicality of the character comes to mean an insane person with a singular desire. In the 1959 French horror thriller Eyes Without A Face, the powdery white and still inflexible mask takes on altogether different symbols.
As the young daughter of a surgeon, Christiane wears a specially constructed mask after being burned severely in a car accident. Her father attempts many times to graft faces of young girls onto his daughter. The young girls die. The grafts don't take. When the professor goes to lecture on the development of his technique, John Woo and John Carpenter were taking notes. Woo especially loved the pigeons at the end. But Christiane's mask is of altogether different stuff. Is her vanity such that she cares not at all for her father's victims, only for her own restoration? Could be. One eerie scene, sans mask, where she goes to touch and admire the face of a future victim certainly suggests it.
Is her last act one of benevolence or one of selfishness, simply wanting to unburden her own conscience. The mask allows for all interpretations. It is a most interesting feature of the mask that the interpretation tells as much about the interpreter as it does the person who wears it.
I thought as I watching that Christiane was a poor, vain, weak and almost monstrously selfish. I am not sure at all of what my interpretation says about me or what I think about such women.
Her surgeon father also wears a mask. It's just not a physical one with tied strings. He is a man almost entirely without charisma (though he has won the devotion of his nurse) but he has a vaguely aloof intelligence. He is overweight, pasty, bearded. He betrays no conscience at killing his victims, but he takes no joy either. They are simply doors to be walked through. When the proper time comes to dispose of the evidence, he casually takes his dogs for a stroll into the nearby woods for a meal (Thomas Harris was also taking notes. Ridley Scott practically cribbed the scene in the kennel, substituting pigs). He is Nietzsche's Superman without all the bluster, a man of reasonable temper.
His, in other words, is the mask of a man you wouldn't notice a second time if he walked straight into you. Average eyes, average face, average build. Anywhere from 5'8-6'4. That is the Masks one true horrifying ability -- it can not only make Gregory Peck become an Ahab or Steve Railsback into Manson. Those who wear it well can seem like anybody or even nobody.
As easy as I make it seem, the actors and actresses who give us these performances worked like heal to pull them off. Without facial and other types of expression, an actor is deprived of at least 1/3 of the tools of his craft and must compensate otherwise. Christiane is continually cornered and walks only furtively. She is constantly startled even by the most unthreatening words and gestures. The young loyal nurse is the essence of stoic fealty and devotion (her much more egomaniacal but just as plain ordinary and logical sister turns up in One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest). She makes the most of the one scene where she communicates this devotion (which in a way she has already done through actions at the beginning).
Fitting the plain grim logic, the direction is subdued and rightly so. The logical filming choices still fill the screen with grim images -- the young daughter walking in the kennels is an enormously humane scene, emphasizing she is not without human warmth. By that time in the film, the emphasis is much needed. Yet at the very beginning, our young nurse is driving a disguised corpse to the river. When death is sitting up in the car with sunglasses in the backseat and a young woman casually driving to the river, the shot really doesn't need much else. (Rod Serling taking notes, calling the episode "Going My Way?")
When most people think of French films, rarely are works of suspense and horror ever mentioned. That's kind of too bad, as French film of the late '50s to mid '60s counted such well regarded films as Diabolique, Purple Noon, and Eyes Without A Face.
About the Transfer: Eyes Without a Face is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1. On standard 4:3 televisions, the image will appear letter...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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