Background
Georges Franju was born on 12 April 1912 in Fougères, Bretagne, France.
Georges Franju was born on 12 April 1912 in Fougères, Bretagne, France.
Franju’s films are fragile, fierce elegies against inhumanity. He has achieved single images that are among the most disturbing in the cinema: the slaughterhouse in Le Sang des Bâtes; the escape across burning stubble fields in La Tête Contre les Murs; the deathly oppressiveness of the woods in Thérèse Desqueyroux; quivering veterans in Hôtel des Invalides; Edith Scobs precarious purity in Eyes Without a Face. Franju insists on the throb of surrealism within the matter-of-fact, and at his best the two modes interchange without strain. But there is often a feeling of contrivance as he attempts to coax lyricism out of horror, as in Les Yeux Sans Visage, or to assert universal madness, as in La Tête Contre les Murs and Thomas l'Imposteur.
More than with most directors, it is necessary to see his features—taken up only in middle age—as a continuation of work in documentary. In fact, there is something of a contrast between the intense, muddled anarchy of the features, and twenty years spent in documentary and the general service of the cinema. As earlv as 1934, Franju made a short, Le Métro, with Henri Langlois. Three years later, the two men founded the Cinémathèque Française. All through the war, Franju served as secretary of the International Federation of Film Archives. The personality of his films is not really that of an archivist or administrator, but the interest in early cinema is clear all through Franju’s own work: one of his most tender documentaries is Le Grand Méliès, a tribute to a forgotten innovator, who shared Franju’s own sense of fantasy; while Judex is a re-creation of the vision of Louis Feuillade, a very entertaining movie, but more offhand and discursive than the Franju of La Tête—and Les Yeux—ever seemed capable of. More basically, Franju concentrates on the poetic resonance of pure visual narrative; he is often indifferent to plot or dialogue, but takes great pains over superb grey-and-white photogra-phy, invariably directed by Marcel Fradetal or Eugen Schufftan. Indeed, the presence of Schufftan, and the morbid view' of a deranged, cruel world organized by misguided doctors, indicates Franju’s debt to classical German cinema.
His great documentaries show the alarming company that civilized society keeps with nightmare; this effect is achieved by photography that is beautiful but stark. Above all, in Hôtel des Invalides, the dry cataloguing of a national institution is penetrated by an anguish that is rare in strident antiwar films.
The features are all flawed to some extent by mistaken conception or unrealization, so that passages from Franju’s work seem more impressive than any single film. It is to the credit of Buñuel— a figure to whom Franju seems akin—that the Spaniard has so often found a form that expresses his calm fury. Franju, by contrast, is possessed by a furious but fluctuating grace. There are passages in La Tete Contre les Murs—the asylum gardens, the roulette scene, even the opening wasteland— that are as factual and as fantastic as Sang des Betes and Hotel des Invalides. But Franju’s equation of helpless beasts and human creatures is facile and disproportionate because of his inability to sustain the vision against melodrama, a specious faith in innocent madness and whimsy. Les Yeux sans Visage is fearsome when content to be a horror picture, but shallow when it emerges from the genre. Thomas I'lmpostcur is too preoccupied by the blithe chaos of the First World War for the stray moments of agony to be more than decoration. Judex is probablv his most balanced film in that it successfully inhabits the old serial form and invests it with melancholy.