Eyes Without a Face
With Edith Scob, Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Beatrice Altariba, Francois Guerin, Alexandre Rignault, and Claude Brasseur.
With Ernst Hugo Jaregard, Kirsten Rolffes, Ghita Norby, Soren Pilmark, Holger Juul Hansen, Annevig Schelde Ebbe, Jens Okking, Otto Brandenburg, Baard Owe, and Birgitte Raabjerg.
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No less annoying is the crude miniseries structuring–mechanical crosscutting between one set of characters and another, guaranteeing that we never stay with any single story line for long. This as well as the visual crudeness might have irritated me less if I were watching it on TV, where such simplicities are routinely tolerated in exchange for the comforts of being at home. We’re living through a transitional period when it comes to film and video. Reviewers are often expected to ignore the differences between the media while both filmmakers and video artists are obliged to present their work in a transferred state: video artists usually have to transfer their work to film if they want it to be shown at film festivals, and many independent film artists who can’t afford to set up preview screenings for reviewers find themselves settling for “preview tapes” instead.
I’m not sure how much The Kingdom has to say about Scandinavia in general and Denmark in particular, but there seems little doubt that von Trier wants it to say a lot. Unfortunately, the hospital-as-nation metaphor seems almost as unwieldy and pretentious here as it was in Lindsay Anderson’s top-heavy satire Britannia Hospital (1982), and periodic aerial shots over an enormous building that’s supposed to be “the Kingdom” (i.e., the hospital) are more rhetorical than convincing. Arguably The Kingdom works better as a weirdo cult item than as the grandstanding state-of-the-union address it sometimes pretends to be. For instance, the anti-Danish gibes of Stig Helmer (Ernst Hugo Jaregard), a petulant Swedish doctor, made more sense to me as an eccentric character trait a la Twin Peaks than as a telling illustration of Scandinavian rivalries. (The film is coproduced, incidentally, by Danish, Swedish, and “Nordic” television.)
Yet this anticlerical, morally committed film artist must be a central reference point whenever we talk about the transgressive poetry of shock. Franju had strong ties to the French surrealists, to Jean Cocteau (who said in praise of Eyes Without a Face, “The more you touch on mystery, the more important it is to be realistic”), and to German fantasy directors like Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. “Hammer Films meets Georges Bataille” was English critic and filmmaker Christopher Petit’s elegant formula for Eyes Without a Face. And if there’s any black-and-white movie in town this week that demonstrates the awesome difference between 35-millimeter film and video, it’s this one–filmed by German-born cinematographer Eugene Shuftan, who won an Oscar for The Hustler only two years later. For chilling noirish textures, check out the remarkable opening sequence (“as haunting as the first dream of a dead man,” wrote novelist Iain Sinclair), which shows Alida Valli driving a black Citroen DS at night down a tree-lined road to a river to dispose of a female corpse wrapped in a raincoat.
Up to this point I’ve linked Franju’s poetry to certain French art traditions, yet it seems to me that there’s a historical fact implicitly standing behind this movie: the German occupation of France, and all the baggage that goes with it–among other things, the Nazi medical experiments on Jews and others; the attack dogs they kept, like Genessier’s kennel dogs; and even certain film traditions associated with Germany. To quote Cocteau yet again on Eyes Without a Face: “The ancestors of this film live in the Germany of the great cinematographic epoch of Nosferatu.”
