"The ancestors of this film live in Germany, the Germany of the great cinematographic era of Nosferatu" (Jean Cocteau). In Grand Guignol spirit, a plastic surgeon causes his daughter's disfigurement and attempts to find a new face for her. Perhaps because of its reputation as a horror film that caused seven Scotsmen to faint at the Edinburgh Festival, director and critics alike dwell on the lyric aspects of the film. Franju's Expressionist leap is to take the face out of the domain of the realist cinema, to offer it in a different perspective, a different topography, a planisphere brought before our eyes through surgery. The mask that covers Christiane's face has the perverse beauty and innocence of the tabula rasa. Her father is willing to sacrifice all other women so that his daughter can reassume the superficies that allow her social acceptance. All creation exists to be tortured for some ideal of beauty in her father's mind. In its projections and inversions-eyes without a face, face without eyes-the film literalizes idioms like "losing face" and prompts us to Raymond Durgnat's allegorical readings of names like Dr. Genessier (Genesis) and Christiane.-William Nestrick