Redefining the New French Extremity: from Eyes without a Face (1960) to In My Skin (2002)

Edna, now, lies on the surgical bed. As she opens her eyes, she sees the burnt face of Doctor Genéssier’s daughter, Christiane, which is revealed to the audience for the first time after having been hidden for the entire movie. The camera shows Dr. Genéssier getting ready for the surgery meticulously with the assistance of Louise. He walks towards Edna, who is now unconscious, and examines her face closely. After that, he draws the incision guidelines on Edna’s face. Shortly after, he asks for the scalpel as he begins to cut off the girl’s face. The next shot is the close up of Edna whose face is now covered in blood. Dr. Genéssier’s hands are seen in the frame, now drawing the incision guidelines on Edna’s eyes. With a slow exchange in perspectives, the camera moves from Edna’s eyes to Louise and finally to Dr. Genéssier. He asks for forceps and proceeds to peel her face off. In between this process, the extreme close-ups of Louise and Dr. Genéssier is shown, as he finally removes the skin from Edna’s face. Joan Hawkins writes in her article “The Scalpel’s Edge: Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage” that Eyes without a Face (1960) uses this scene to mortify the audience instead of scaring them. While the mutilation scene is used to create a message as commonly seen in splatter movies, according to the same article; it also inspired contemporary French horror films which use extreme gore for similar purposes. Those films are grouped under the New French Extremity: Consistently transgressive, the films that belong to this trend offer exceptionally graphic depictions of sex and violence and generally deploy an aesthetic that privileges the shocking, the horrific, and the abject (Schaefer 92). In this paper, I aim to find a connection between Eyes without a Face (1960) and the New French Extremity movement by comparing the movie and Mariane de Van’s In My Skin (2002).

In his article, “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema”, James Quandt first introduced the definition of New French Extremity. The following explanation was perceived with mixed responses:

“The critic truffle-snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this recent tendency to the willfully transgressive by directors like François Ozon, Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux– and now, alas, Dumont. Bava as much as Bataille, Salò no less than Sade seem the determinants of a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement (Quandt)”.

Although Quandt’s definition has negative connotations and focuses on how the contemporary transgressive French films thrive at only breaking the taboos using extremity in every aspect, it also correctly identifies the limits of the New French Extremity films. Ironically, Quandt alludes to the works of older French filmmakers, such as Georges Franju, whose film, Eyes without a Face (1960) is best known for the surgical mutilation scene that shocked many audiences at the time. Despite his aim to demean contemporary French films, Quandt contradicts himself by praising Franju. While Quandt does not necessarily consider New French Extremity arthouse, his definition lacks the imperative reasoning behind this argument. Based on his article, we would conclude that splatter films do not meet the prerequisites of the arthouse films, which would also mean that Eyes without a Face (1960) is just a splatter film with no arthouse elements.

Tim Palmer criticizes Quandt’s definition of New French Extremity in his article “Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body”: “…goes on rather perversely to cite the films of Dumont, Grandrieux, Ozon, and others merely to castigate their graphic content, dismiss their artistic agendas as disingenuous, and deride their alleged pretentiousness” (Palmer 26). Since Quandt disregards the artistic agendas and the social and political discourse of the films, his definition does not give justice to the contemporary transgressive French films and Eyes without a Face (1960). Mauro Resmini also opposes Quandt’s ideas in his article “Reframing the New French Extremity: Cinema, Theory, Mediation” by stating that “Quandt’s misperception is endangered by the uncertain and hybrid generic identity of most of the films in question” (Resmini). Resmini’s perception is similar to Palmer’s, however he chooses to focus more on the abstract borders of the nature of genre and how a film can satisfy the necessities of multiple genres. “The NFE transgresses the frontier dividing generic domains, as most of the films associated with this trend are situated in the still largely uncharted territory at the border between art and horror cinema” (Resmini). According to that, most New French Extremity films have similar characteristics with Eyes Without a Face (1960) which was also considered to “rise above” the splatter aesthetic of low horror by some critics (Hawkins). In relation to that, it is possible to find more connections between Eyes without a Face (1960) and contemporary French films, such as Marina de Van’s In My Skin (2002).

Marina de Van’s debut film, In My Skin (2002), paints the picture of a woman’s life that seems to be working well: Esther is happily with her boyfriend and has a good social and work life. In the beginning of the film, there is no hint of any sort of issues she might be facing in her life. Earlier in the movie, she goes to a party and injures her leg. She does not realize the injury until after she goes upstairs and soon, becomes fascinated by this small yet impactful accident on her skin. Despite knowing well she was injured, Esther does not go to the doctor immediately after the injury. Soon after a visit to the doctor, Esther “experiments” with her body progressively. One day, she cuts a part on her leg with a piece of metal at her work’s closet and surprisingly, she is open enough about it to tell her friend, Sandrine. Despite her boyfriend and Sandrine being worried about her health, Esther seems to be overjoyed by what is going on in her life. In her article “Director’s Cuts: The Aesthetics of Self-Harming in Marina de Van’s Dans Ma Peau”, Carrie Tarr talks about this pleasure acquired by self-harm. “What is shocking and fascinating about de Van’s representation of self-harming is precisely the fact that, in her private rituals, Esther wallows in the blood and experiences the self-wounding not just as pain and horror, but also the immense sensual pleasure which fills her with new energy” (Tarr).

The movie never makes an enemy of Esther for engaging in unorthodox experiments on her body. After she gets promoted at her job, she is invited for a business dinner, in which her arm becomes nothing but an “object” which she can attack vigorously. Soon after, she “escapes” the dinner and checks-in to a hotel room nearby. The camera’s mainly static during the scene at the hotel room where she cuts off her arm and starts nibbling on it. The fact that the camera does not shy away from showing this “intimate” scene of a woman exploring her own skin and becoming one with herself, quite literally. Mariana de Van talks about this aspect of the film: “People pretend that self-mutilation is caused by rage or self-loathing or done in a trance. But the wounds Esther inflicts on herself are also like caresses. I wanted to show the pleasure she gets in the process without hiding the pain. She gets into a very childish and primal area” (Tarr). It is important to note that acquiring unconventional approaches to its contexts is a characteristic of the New French Extremity films, which makes it difficult to analyze the films in a conventional practice. Jerome Schaefer adds that “this is a good thing, as it leaves no doubt about what is required, that a differentiated approach is needed and that these films cannot be explained as mere representations” (Schaefer). The same situation is seen with Eyes without a Face (1960) since it represents a blend of splatter and arthouse films. The brutality and duration of the surgery scene in Eyes without a Face (1960) shows that extremity does not necessarily make a movie “pointless” and that the film does not show brutality and gore for the sake of showing, instead it encaptures the audience into the doctor’s world of innate ferocity driven by his extreme personal ambitions and desires.

In contrast to Eyes without a Face (1960), Marina de Van portrays a woman who embodies both the victim and the perpetrator in herself. Doctor Génessier is not a conventional killer in slasher films, either, since it would be possible to consider his motivation of giving her daughter a brand-new face. On the other hand, these motivations could also be interpreted as selfish and self-centered since the failure of “fixing” his daughter’s face would mean a failure for him professionally, which he perceives as being demeaning, given the fact that he is well-known for his profession. Esther, on the contrary, finds the satisfaction of experimenting with her body which includes self-harm and mutilation. It is a childlike instinct and a possible way of coping with her mental issues and/or stress. As repulsive and inhumane as it sounds, this embodiment of the victim and the perpetrator creates a unique dynamic of identity and “self”. It almost feels as though Esther did not know how her skin looked prior to the first accident she has in the beginning of the film. Similar to Eyes without a Face (1960), In My Skin (2002) also approaches the human body in a much more materialistic and static way than conventional films do. Franju chooses to take away the voice of the victim by putting her into the arms of a multifaceted serial killer, while de Van forces her protagonist to be the killer and the victim at the same time. Either way, it is painful to witness the destructive acts performed by these two unconventional characters who continue with their damages to a point where defeating them ends up with death or darkness. Carrie Tarr states that “As Olivier de Bruyn points out, de Van makes deviance a poetic, aesthetic experience, as in the work of directors such as Franju [and Polanski]’ (Tarr).

Figure 1. Eyes without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960).

Figure 2. Dans ma peau. (Marina de Van, 2002).

In conclusion, the commonalities between Eyes without a Face (1960) and In My Skin (2002) point to an obvious influence of Franju’s filmmaking on one of the contemporary New French Extremity films, which was made forty-two years after the former one. It also proves that while Quandt coined the term of New French Extremity and paved the way for further research on the genre, his definition does not necessarily do justice for the films and their artistic abilities. Instead, the definition aims to label them as senseless and unreasonable films that use extremity to shock its audience. However, as seen in the example of Eyes without a Face (1960), it is possible to create a blend of the horror and arthouse genres, which is also seen in In My Skin (2002). Therefore, it would be helpful to know what makes the New French Extremity and which films satisfy this framework, while reading more into the films and what their contexts aim to tell to the audience. As a result, I can conclude that Franju’s inspiration on In My Skin (2002) shows that New French Extremity is a movement that was inspired not by the gore and brutality but also the arthouse pioneers from the past.

Works Cited:

Hawkins, Joan. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Palmer, Tim. “Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 58, no. 3, 2006, pp. 22–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20688527. Accessed 15 Aug. 2020.

Quandt, James. “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema” in Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall (eds.), The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 18–25

Resmini, Mauro. “Reframing the New French Extremity: Cinema, Theory, Mediation.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 30.3 (2015): 161–87. Web.

Schaefer, Jerome. An Edgy Realism : Film Theoretical Encounters with Dogma 95, New French Extremity, and the Shaky-Cam Horror Film, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bu/detail.action?docID=4534672.

Tarr, Carrie. (2006). “Director’s Cuts: The Aesthetics of Self-harming in Marina de Van’s Dans ma peau”. Nottingham French Studies,45(3), 78–91. doi:10.3366/nfs.2006–3.007