Analysis of Les Yeux Sans Visage

for Professor Koos
International Cinema
April 9, 1998

Les Yeux Sans Visage's use of lighting played a key part in this 1959 dramatization of the novel and heavily influenced the premiere installation of one of the most popular American horror series in history. Shadowing created an intense and perverse mood that accented the main characters' emotional struggles throughout the film. They emulated the shadowing and cinematography in certain key scenes very closely in John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween.

The first scene of the movie shows a nurse, Louise, driving her car in the dark, leaning forward to try to see better on the dark road. The first cut is to the road immediately in front of the car, the headlights illuminating part of the road, but the shadows from the trees on either side are dominant and foreboding. The next cut shows Louise in the car, the shadows of the tree branches darkening her face as she continues to drive down the road. The next cut is one of the most important: the shot is from directly behind Louise, from her mid-back to the roof of the car. The car goes around a number of turns, and the illumination of what is in front of the car is especially sharp. This shot is duplicated almost exactly in Halloween when Dr. Loomis and a nurse are driving to an insane asylum to see Michael Myers. In that shot, rain is pouring down obstructing their view of the road, and a very similar shot is used with bright illumination of what is only immediately in front of them. The tension of the scene in Halloween takes a sharp turn when an escapee of the asylum jumps on the Doctor's car.

A few cuts ahead in this scene of Les Yeux Sans Visage brings us to the first clue of the forthcoming tension. Louise's black-gloved hand, significant in and of itself due to negative, archetypal nature of the color black, adjusts the rear-view mirror, showing a tilted hat evoking the immediate response of "There's a sleeping detective in the back seat!" Alas, we soon find this is not so.

As a large truck approaches and passes the car, the body in the back seat slumps slightly, then further. This is where the viewer realizes the perverseness of the situation. To add to it, the lighting takes on an intriguing quality; when Louise stops the car and the truck goes past, we are looking from the passenger's perspective at Louise. Despite the darkness of her surroundings, there is an especially sharp, yet slightly diffused, light that shines on the wall on the opposite side of the road. It is not at all clear what the source of the light is--especially since the light seems to come from the ground, directed up.

In a later scene, M. Genessier approaches his daughter Christiane, who is buried face-down into a pillow. His daughter was disfigured in a car accident that was due to his overly aggressive driving. She is ashamed of her own face, as she keeps it out of sight during the entire scene. The shots of Christiane have her in a diagonal direction on screen shot from above, her back, the couch, and the pillows illuminated. The corner is darkened, but so is the spot on the pillow when she lifts her head. She is ashamed and emotionally distraught, as we might expect, and the lighting is used to hide her horrible disfigurement. A few shots later, her father leans down and we notice the corner that was previously pitch black now has the same unexpected illumination we saw earlier in the truck-passing-car scene. As a matter of fact, as the camera zooms and Christiane lifts her head, the entire wall and corner are very well illuminated and the only reason her face is not visible is because it is the back of her head that we see.

But the lighting seems to change again. When Louise enters the room, we see the bed from another angle, directly facing the wall parallel to Christiane. However, this time the wall is dark and we again see the pointed illumination from the corner. After moving through more changes in lighting back to previous shots, we come to a series of especially important shots. When Christiane leans up and Louise says "His fault? It was a car accident, pure chance," we see that Christiane's back is fully illuminated and there are no significant shadows present. However, two shots later, as Louise lifts Christiane's head, there is a very noticeable shadow covering the majority of Christiane's back. At the same time, the background has also darkened, leaving mainly Louise's face and Christiane's head from the shoulders up illuminated. The light here focuses our attention to the key location, where Louise will put the mask on Christiane's face. The darkness, while serving as a contrast to the focused light, also dominates the screen, leaving us with an impression that this is a disturbing, evil thing about to happen.

The next shot allows us to see Christiane with her mask on. The angle allows us to see the wall behind her that we have seen before, and it is lit differently yet again: the corner is dark, but the flat area of the wall is illuminated. The key lighting aspect to notice here, however, is shadowed portion of Christiane's mask. The half-dark/half-light approach shows us beyond a shadow of a doubt (ahem) that Christiane is dealing with many dueling emotions. She wants to either live her life as it was or die; she hates her normal face, but hates her mask; she once trusted her father to make things better, now she doesn't. Christiane is part of evil plans and evil surroundings, but partly illuminated face shows that she is the good in this evil family.

This scene shows that Christiane has been taught to hate her physical disfigurement and that she should hide it. Similarly, in Halloween, Michael Myers wears a basic, nondescript mask to avoid showing his facial disfigurement as well. Compared side by side, the two are actually quite similar.

The last scene to discuss here is the one in which Edna escapes and flees up the stairs. As the doctor follows her, he comes to an open window which he looks through, and sees Edna laying on the ground, arms slightly sprawled and knees bent. The notable lighting in this scene is a sharp, bright light just above Edna's body outside, which seems to come from directly above.

What makes this scene so very notable is the similarity to one of the final scenes in Halloween. Michael Myers seems to fall to a similar destiny as Edna--he drops from a second floor balcony to the ground, and is laid in almost the same position. In Halloween we see the body on the ground before the observer in the movie does, however, where in Les Yeux Sans Visage the audience sees it at the same time as the doctor does.

Yet another striking similarity is the almost twin-like appearance of Dr. Genessier and Dr. Loomis. The profile views of each in their respective scenes reveal the same gruff, bulky appearance. Both their faces have a natural frown to them, a quality that is not frequently seen.

The history of the horror movie has shown us that it is an artform with styles and techniques all its own. And within that genre there are trendsetting films from which others draw inspiration and stylistic elements. In this case, we see that the chilling, and occasionally confusing, lighting elements help create the classic status of Les Yeux Sans Visage. The movie was considered one of the first horror movies with noticeable gore elements. Almost 20 years later, the Halloween series began, and became one of the most popular horror series of our time. The creature in Halloween had many of the same emotional barriers as Christiane, and John Carpenter recognized this—Halloween's stylistic elements often directly paralleled those in Les Yeux Sans Visage, showing that the building of a classic is often based on another classic already in place.