Franju, Georges

(1912-1987)

   Director and screenwriter. Georges Franju was born in Fougères. He began his career in cinema working as a set director, and then in 1934 codirected the short film Le Métro with Henri Langlois. In 1936, Franju cofounded, with Langlois, the Cinémathèque Française, the most important film archive in France, and, for two years, Franju worked as an archivist at the cinémathèque. In 1938, Franju expanded his role in the archiving of film and became executive secretary of the International Federation of Film Archives and later the general secretary of the Institut de cinématographie scientifique. In 1949, Franju returned to active filmmaking with the documentary Le Sang des bêtes, an exploration of Parisian abattoirs or slaughterhouses. He went on to make several more shorts immediately following, including Hôtel des Invalides (1952), the short biopic Le Grand Méliès (1952) about the filmmaker Georges Méliès, Sur le pont d'Avignon (1956), and Monsieur et Madame Curie (1956). In 1959, Franju made his first feature-length film, La Tête contre les murs. This film was followed by Les Yeux sans visage (1959), a horror film about a mad doctor who attempts to reconstruct his daughter's disfigured face with the faces of murdered women. Franju went on to make only a handful of other films, including Pleins feux sur l'assassin (1961), Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962), Judex (1963), a remake of the classic Louis Feuillade silent film series, and Thomas l'imposteur (1964), based on the novel by Jean Cocteau.

   Franju's influence on French cinema was enormous, despite the small body of work he produced. His involvement in the creation of the Cinémathèque already ensured him a role in French film history. However, his films themselves, although forgotten for some time, also merit him a place. The influences on his filmmaking are evident in the subjects of the films he undertook. His homages to Méliès and Feuillade reveal that he was interested in those early pioneers who attempted to capture the sublime on film, both the horror and the beauty of human existence. His interest in Cocteau reveals a belief in film as a transcendent art form, as a form of visual poetry. In fact, a study of Franju's own filmmaking style bears these influences out. He is a late link to these early figures, who sought to push film to the limits of art.