Georges Franju, the subversive poet of the cinema, is perhaps best known to PFA audiences for the 1959 film Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) and Judex (see August 11). Franju has affinities with the Surrealists but his films also recall, after a fashion, the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur noir cycle in recording the everyday horror of our existence. "Dream, poetry, the unknown must all emerge out of reality itself," Franju has said. In his first, documentary films (see August 11), Franju immediately established the concerns he would pursue in his feature films, the first of which is the remarkable La Tête contre les murs. Profoundly anticlerical and antimilitary, in this film Franju extends his vision to a portrait of contemporary society's ultimate weapon of coercion and incarceration-the insane asylum. Jean-Pierre Mocky portrays a rebellious youth, François Gerane, consumed by resentment for his well-to-do father, whom he blames for his mother's death. When he steals from the old man and wantonly burns several important papers, Gerane père retaliates by having the boy committed. In the asylum, François becomes the quarry of two doctors, the old-fashioned Valmont (Pierre Brasseur) and the "modern" Emery (Paul Meurisse), and befriends an epileptic (Charles Aznavour in a haunting role). Shot in the oppressive environment of a real asylum, an already eerie atmosphere is transformed by Franju's vision into something strange and terrifyingly beautiful, set to the atonalities of a score by Maurice Jarre and a poetic use of natural sounds. This is the film Jean-Luc Godard called "a crazy film on madmen, thus a film of crazy beauty."