LES YEUX SANS VISAGE (EYES WITHOUT A FACE) (double feature w ORPHEE) $5-$9 February 2, 2007

Double Feature
$9, $6 Students, Seniors, Members
$2 service fee for online purchases

$5 for the second film only with no advance purchase

7:30 ORPHEE (ORPHEUS)
9:20 LES YEUX SANS VISAGE (EYES WITHOUT A FACE)



(1960/b&w/88 min.) Scr: Pierre Boileau, Pierre Gascar, Thomas Narcejac, Claude Sautet, based on the novel by Jean Redon; dir: Georges Franju; w/ Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Edith Scob.

Jean Cocteau, whose novel Thomas l'imposteur (1923) had also been filmed by Georges Franju, said of the face-lifting scene in Les Yeux sans visage that "it takes us implacably to the end of what our nerves can bear." The premise is lurid: a mad doctor attempts to restore his daughter's mutilated face with skin obtained from young women that he has had abducted and imprisoned in a remote château. But the execution is poetic and dreamlike, enriched by free-floating allusions to then-recent European history, such as Nazi scientific experiments and Orphée's leather-clad messengers of death. As Kenneth Turan noted in the Los Angeles Times, "Eyes is a series of images that burn themselves into your subconscious. Every visual is carefully thought out and brilliantly composed for effect, creating a world that is simultaneously real and surreal. With its ability to go deeply into our fears, this is a motion picture that captures the texture of nightmare as convincingly as it's ever been done on film."

Through the Looking Glass (and Down the Rabbit Hole...) January 19, 2007–February 24, 2007 "The world is much deeper but also more transparent than we think.... And the magic of film consists in the possibility to express any phenomenon you want. That's why I like it so much. Sometimes you may think that I am out of touch with reality, but in fact I am a part of reality, that's all."—David Lynch Rene Magritte's enigmatic paintings, with their deadpan humor and emphasis on monumental objects, were created during a century that saw the birth of both cinema and psychoanalysis and, in the words of LACMA's senior curator of modern art, Stephanie Barron, continue "to appeal to modern audiences hungry for the puzzling conjunctions of the everyday and the fantastic." Though the concept of parallel realities existed in the Victorian era, it was cinema that could induce a dreamlike state in the viewer and depict the visual landscape of the unconscious. Lewis Carroll's "looking glass" is perhaps our most famous metaphor for the irrational, but it is also an ancient symbol with a variety of meanings: vanity, duplicity, madness, schizophrenia, and hallucination among them. Not surprisingly, many of the films in this series are thrillers, and many depict characters whose obsessions become pathological or self-destructive. For filmmakers like David Lynch, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, and Jacques Rivette, the "looking glass" is the cinema itself, and the silver screen is the mirror through which we, the audience, pass. At its most mythic, death is the unknown land that lies on the other side of the looking glass: in Orphée and Vertigo, the characters journey into the mirror to steal a loved one back from Death itself. Alternatively, films such as Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz depict imaginary landscapes peopled by delightful and menacing creatures. And in virtually all the films in the series, the audience, like the characters, must ask itself: what is real, and what is fantasy?

Official Website: http://www.lacma.org/programs/FilmSeriesSchedule.aspx#1165007846033