Georges Franju Films | Georges Franju Filmography | Georges Franju Biography | Georges Franju Career | Georges Franju Awards

Franju's career falls clearly into two parts, marked by the format of the films: the early period of documentary shorts, and a subsequent period of fictional features. The parts are connected by many links of theme, imagery, attitude, and iconography. Critical attention has focused primarily on the shorts, and there is some justice in this. While it is difficult to accept Noel Burch's assertion that ?the magic that is so much a part of his nonfiction work no longer survives in his fiction features,? it is true that nothing in the later work surpasses Le Sang des b?tes and H?tel des Invalides, and the intensity and poetic concentration of those early masterpieces are recaptured only in intermittent moments. It is necessary to define the kind of documentary Franju made (it is highly idiosyncratic, and I can think of no close parallels; though Resnais's documentaries are often linked with his, the differences seem more important than the similarities).

The traditional documentary has three main modes: the factual, the lyrical, and the politically tendentious. It is the peculiar distinction of Franju's documentaries that they correspond to none of these modes. The kind of organization that structures them is essentially poetic, built upon imagery and juxtaposition, rather than on overt statement or clear-cut symbolism. H?tel des Invalides might well have been expected, from its genesis, to correspond to either the second or third type of documentary (or an amalgamation of the two, a quite common phenomenon). It was commissioned by an organization called Forces et Voix de France, and the intention was to celebrate a national monument-institution: the Mus?e de L'Arm?e, home of Napoleon's tomb, an edifice dedicated to the glory of France and of war. Franju seized upon and made central to his film the fact that the building also houses the victims of war and ?glory?: the veterans' hospital of the film's title, peopled with the shell-shocked, the crippled, the mutilated. These wounded soldiers continue to carry military banners, wear their medals, and attend the religious ceremonies that constitute an aspect of their oppression. Beyond the skillful use of purely cinematic codes (lighting, camera movement, editing, etc.) and Maurice Jarre's music, Franju adds nothing extraneous to his raw material. The introductory commentary (spoken by Michel Simon), locating the museum in place and history, is rigorously factual and unemotional. Once inside, we have only the ?authentic? commentary of the museum guides. Yet the application of cinematic codes to this material transforms its meaning totally, producing a continuous irony that modulates back and forth between the violent and the subtle: the emblems of military glory and national pride become sinister, monstrous, terrifying.

A politically tendentious documentary after all, then? Certainly not in any simple or clear-cut way. Ultimately, H?tel des Invalides is no more an anti-war movie than Le Sang des b?tes is an appeal for vegetarianism?though those meanings can and will be read by many viewers. The film's elements of rage and protest are finally subordinated to an overriding sense of irredeemable insanity, an intimation of a world and a species so fundamentally crazy that protest is almost superfluous. The supreme irony Franju produces out of his material involves the museum's very status as a national monument: here, at the heart of civilization, regarded with pride, admiration and wonderment, stands what amounts to a monument to pain, cruelty, ugliness, death?and no one notices.

The basic problem with Franju's feature films is that he does not seem greatly interested in narrative. He has usually relied on the support of a pre-existent literary work, whose structure, characters, and movement he recreates with a generally scrupulous fidelity, delicacy, and discretion, the changes being mainly of emphasis and omission. The curious feat of Th?r?se Desqueyroux has often been noted: a faithful, almost literal translation of a novel by a famous Catholic writer (Mauriac) that never violates the integrity of Franju's atheism. Cocteau singled out Franju as the director to whom he would most confidently entrust his work, and Franju justified that confidence fully with his version of Thomas l'imposteur. Nonetheless, these films are discernibly Franju's: the directorial reticence should not be mistaken for abdication. The clearest way to demonstrate the continuity of the director's work is to show how the Franjuesque iconography that is already fully developed in the documentaries recurs in the features, producing those moments of poetic density and resonance that are the films' chief distinction.

If Les Yeux sans visage remains the finest of Franju's feature films, it is because it is the one that permits the greatest concentration of poetry created out of the association of these elements.?ROBIN WOOD