Celebrity Biographies
Georges Franju
He has a mythical work, “The eyes without a face”, which inspired Pedro Almodóvar to make “The skin I live in”. Although Georges Franju’s filmography is not super-extensive, his contribution to documentary cinema, his unique look at the serial, and his reflection on masks, real or metaphorical, that invite pretense, are notable.
Georges Franju was born in Fouguères, France, on April 12, 1912. A film scholar and decorator at the beginning of his career, with Henri Langlois he founded the Cinémathèque Française in 1936 and promoted the care and conservation of films while being the secretary of the International Federation of Movie Files.
His first efforts as a director were in the field of documentary, where he made many films, with topics as diverse as Notre Dame Cathedral, the scientific marriage of the Curies or the cinema pioneer Georges Méliés, but without a doubt the most important are La Blood of the Beasts (1949) which describes in a brutal way, not exempt from a curious surrealist lyricism, the activity of a day in a Parisian slaughterhouse, and Hôtel des Invalides (1952), about the physical and mental injuries resulting from the war.
Franju’s first work of fiction, La cabeza contra la pared (1949), preserves the documentary interest of the filmmaker in a certain parsimony that is reflected in the detail with which he describes the daily life of an asylum. His denunciation against the excesses of psychiatry will continue in films where the figure of the “mad doctor” is present, who exceeds the limits of good scientific practice with his experiments, of course in Los ojos sin rostro (1960), his best film, and also in the debtor serial of Fantomas and Louis Feuillade Red Nights (1973), where he collaborated with a grandson of this author, Jacques Champreux. The constant of a certain anticlerical streak is also noted in the grotesque detail of the priest who continues with his prayers at a funeral, as if nothing happened, when a person suffers an attack; This will have its maximum expression in the adaptation of a work by Émile Zola , The Sin of Father Mouret (1970). The masked types, typical of adventure serials, which he loves, are also repeated, as in Judex (1963).
Interesting, but irregular, and greatly admired by nouvelle vague filmmakers, Franju has to her credit Relato íntimo (1962), a work in the tradition of “Madame Bovary”, which, based on a novel by François Mauriac , denounces a certain bourgeoisie and discrimination against women, recounting the case of Thérése Desqueyroux, condemned to ostracism by her vulgar husband, and played by a wonderful Emmanuelle Riva . This one repeats with the filmmaker in Thomas the impostor (1965), where Franju offers an anti-war story about the pretense based on a work by Jean Cocteau .