Georges Franju

Georges Franju
Born	12 April 1912 Fougères, France
Died	5 November 1987(1987-11-05) (aged 75)[1] Paris,[2][3] France
Occupation	director, screenwriter
Years active	1934, 1949–1978

Georges Franju (French: [fʁɑ̃ʒy]; 12 April 1912 – 5 November 1987) was a French filmmaker. He was born in Fougères, Ille-et-Vilaine.^[4]

Biography

Early life

Before working in French cinema, Franju had several different jobs. These included working for an insurance company and a noodle factory. Franju was also briefly in the military in Algeria and was discharged in 1932. On his return, Franju studied to become a set designer and later created backdrops for music halls including Casino de Paris and the Folles Bergère.^[4]

In the mid-thirties, Franju and Henri Langlois met through Franju's twin brother Jacques Franju.^[5] As well as creating the 16 mm short film Le Métro, Langlois and Franju also started a short-lived film magazine and created a film club called Le Cercle du Cinema with 500 francs he borrowed from Langlois' parents.^[4] The club showed silent films from their own collections followed by an informal debate about them amongst members.^[4][5] From Le Cercle du Cinema, Franju and Langlois founded the Cinématheque Française in 1936.^[6] Franju ceased to be closely related with the Cinématheque Française as early as 1938, and only became associated with it strongly again in the 1980s when he was appointed as the honorary artistic director of the Cinématheque.^[6] In 1937, Franju and Langlois co-founded another less successful film journal titled Cinematographe which had only two issues.^[5] In early 1940, Franju and Dominique Johansen co-founded another organization to promote cinema called Circuit Cinématographique des Arts et des Sciences which closed on 31 May 1940.^[1]

Film career

In 1949, Franju began work on a series of nine documentary films. The Nazi occupation of Paris and the industrialism following World War II influenced Franju's early works. His first documentary, The Blood of Beasts (French: Le Sang des Bêtes) was a graphic film of a day inside a Paris slaughterhouse. The second documentary, commissioned by the government in 1950, was Passing By the Lorraine (French: En Passant par la Lorraine). The film was commissioned as a celebration of the modernization of the French industry, but Franju's film showed his view of the ugliness spewing forth from monstrous factories. Franju's third film commissioned by the French government, Hôtel des Invalides (1951), was a look at life inside a veterans' hospital. The film was commissioned as a tribute to the hospital and the War Museum, but Franju turned it into a film against the glorification of militarism. Franju later said that Hôtel des Invalides was his favorite of his three "slaughter" films.^[4]

With The Keepers (French:La Tete Contre les Murs) in 1958, Franju turned toward fiction feature films. His second feature was the horror film Eyes Without a Face (French:Les Yeux sans Visage) about a surgeon who tries to repair his daughter's ruined face by grafting on to it the faces of beautiful women. His 1963 film Judex was a tribute to the silent film serials Judex and Fantomas. In Franju's later years his film work became less frequent. Franju occasionally directed for television and in the late seventies he retired from filmmaking to preside over the Cinématheque Française.^[4] Georges Franju died on 5 November 1987.^[7]

Film style

In her study of French cinema since the French new wave, Claire Clouzot described Franju's film style as heavily influenced by his predecessors. Clouzot described it as "a poignant fantastic realism inherited from surrealism and Jean Painlevé science cinema, and influenced by the expressionism of Lang and Murnau".^[8] Franju's focus of the film was on visuals which he claimed marked a director as an auteur. Franju claimed to "not have the story writing gift" and was focused on what he described as the "putting into form" of the film.^[9]

Georges Franju was also extremely influenced by surrealism and uses elements of surrealism and shock horror within his films in order to “awaken” his audience. Franju has a long history of friendship with well-known surrealists, such as Andre Breton, and the influence of this movement is extremely evident in his works. Franju uses these elements of surrealism to link horror, history, and modernity’s ideals of progress. Georges Franju is quoted within the article as having said “It’s the bad combination, it’s the wrong synthesis, constantly being made by the eye as it looks around, that stops us from seeing everything as strange.” Throughout Le Sang des bêtes, Franju reminds the audience just how strange everyday life can be. The opening sequence of the film presents the modern age as a “dream land” in which there is a need for some sort of awakening and Franju’s awakening comes through historical knowledge. Surrealist depictions of strange mannequins on the city’s edge are reminiscent of the bodies of the men wounded in war. Walter Benjamin argued that surrealism must “disturb capitalist culture’s mythic assumptions of a rationalized evolving history” which is done by provoking a simultaneous interpretation of the past and the present. This, as Benjamin argues, relies on the recognition of horror within everyday life. Franju does this in many ways throughout Le Sang des bêtes. For example, “La Mer” plays druing a sequence in the slaughterhouse, comparing the lyrics to aspects of the slaughter, forcing the audience to interpret the love song in new, more horrific ways. A similar contradiction can be seen in the film during scenes in which there is a voice over. The voice over in the film works to undermine that of a typical science film. By alternating male and female narrators, the clinical, typically masculine authority of the science film is undermined. During the scene in which the instruments of slaughter are examined, the contradiction between the clinical account and the visceral horror of the instruments themselves, the horrors denied by modern society become clear. Lowenstein argues that modern society represses painful discourse and that film, and certainly the films of Franju, sensitizes audiences. This is also true of Fanju’s film Les Yeux sans visage, which also uses aspects of the science film to accentuate horror. Les Yeux sans visage proved so horrific that audience members in Edinburgh fainted during screenings. Throughout the film, there is a specific focus on the scientific aspects of the procedures Dr. Genessier performs. This is most notable during the most graphic grafting scene in the film during which a large importance is placed on surgical lamps, the scalpel being used, gloves, masks, and operating tables. Once again, the contradiction between the methodical, scientific approach to this horrific situation serves to accentuate the horror. Les Yeux sans visage also uses surrealist elements in order to address aspects of post-war life. During one scene, loud, disrupting noises of an airplane and church bells are heard while Dr. Genessier and Louise bury a failed facial graft candidate. This scene serves to portray the loss of faith in medicine (represented by the body created by another of Dr. Genessier’s many failed attempts to complete this surgery), the progress of technology (represented by the airplane), and the comfort of religion (represented by the church bells). This surrealist combination forces a new view of modernity and thus a reevaluation of the past. ^[10]

Filmography

As director

Notes

References

• Ince, Kate (2005). Georges Franju. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-6828-2. 

External links

• Georges Franju at Allmovie
• Georges Franju at the Internet Movie Database