Holy LOLA! Issue 3 on MASKS Online

FSFF's montage of frame grabs from Les yeux sans visage / Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960) and Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012). Read Part One of LOLA's collective hailing of the latter film

Film Studies For Free is delighted to bring you the always lovely news that not only has a new issue of Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu's LOLA been published -- on Masks -- it has already been extended, as per the new rolling publication style of this wonderful online film journal.

There is one final roll-out for this issue coming soon. This will include texts on Jerry Lewis, Rivette and Carpenter compared, Sitges Film Festival, and the conclusion of 'Hail Holy Motors'. FSFF will add links to the below list of contents once these are online.

LOLA, Issue 3 (December 2012): Masks

• Hail Holy Motors Part One A Spontaneous LOLA collective 
• A Pilgrimage to the Peloponnese: Gregory Markopoulos, Eniaios and the Temenos Erika Balsom 
• Is It Weird? Or, Actualising Disallowed Cinema Philip Brophy  
• She Thinks She Looks Dana Linssen  
• Webs of Destiny and Bits of String: Edgar G. Ulmer Luc Moullet  
• Transient and Intrinsically Valuable in Their Impermanence: Television's Changing Aesthetic Norms Tom O'Regan  
• The Macao Gesture Cristina Álvarez López  
• Investigation of a Stolen Life: I giorni contati Yvette Bíró  
• Road Trip: Toronto International Film Festival 2012 Girish Shambu

Notes on Contributors

"Horror in Homeopathic Doses": Franju's Eyes Without a Face

Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju,  France/Italy, 1959)

More than any other image, an erased human face remains horribly eloquent. In fact, a face cannot be made to vanish completely: it stays sufficiently human to horrify by its exact lack of humanity. Hence the unnerving effect of Georges Franju's film Eyes Without a Face (1959), in which a young woman, disfigured in a car crash, is subjected to her father's insane and murderous plan to give her a new face. We never see the daughter's ravaged face, but the featureless white mask she wears for most of the film is enough to suggest her uncanny oscillation between human and inhuman.
Brian Dillon, 'The Revelation of Erasure', Tate Etc., Issue 8, Autumn 2006

Being a horror buff of the rather squeamish and easily frightened kind, Film Studies For Free usually likes its scary, gory movies to be Lyrical... Poetic... Beautiful. That way, it finds, it doesn't have to avert its eyes from the screen too much. 

Thus, FSFF is a particular fan of the truly horrific but extraordinarily beautiful film Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face. Georges Franju's classic delivers its 'horror in homeopathic doses', as Franju himself so aptly put it. 

So, it's the film FSFF just had to choose for its little homage in scholarly links this Halloween. (P.S. If you are based in the USA or Canada, you can also currently watch it for free online as part of October Halloween Festival of free films at The Auteurs website).

• Curtis Bowman, 'A film without politics: Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959)', Kinoeye, Vol 2,  Issue 13, Sept 2002
• Elizabeth Cowie,  'Anxiety, ethics and horror: Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959)', Kinoeye, Vol 2,  Issue 13, Sept 2002
• Paul Cronly, 'Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face)', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 5, December 2008
  
• Lee Hill, 'Skin Deep', Vertigo Magazine, No. 17, May 2008
  
• Reynold Humphries, 'Dr Franju's "House of Pain" and the political cutting edge of horror', Kinoeye, Vol 2, Issue 13, Sept 2002 
• Kate Ince, 'Reply to Michael du Plessis', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007
• Gary Johnson, "Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face', Images Journal, 2004 
• Katerina Loukopoulou, 'Review of Georges Franju by Kate Ince [Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005]', Scope, Issue 9, October 2007
• Michael du Plessis, 'Fantasies of the Institution: The Films of Georges Franju and Kate Ince’s Georges Franju', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007  
• Donato Totaro, 'Martyrs: Evoking France's Cinematic and Historical Past', Offscreen, Vol. 13, Issue 5, 2009
  
• Donato Totaro, Salute Alida', Offscreen, Vol. 10, Issue 5, May 31, 2006 
• Catherine Wheatley, 'Les Yeux sans visage', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, 2007