13.10.24, 20:00, Félicia Atkinson x Les Yeux Sans Visage, Videodroom

Les Yeux Sans Visage of Eyes Without a Face verkende vanaf de release de grenzen van wat door publiek en critici als aanvaardbaar werd beschouwd. De film combineert poëtische zwart-witbeelden en een sprookjesachtig verhaal met ongezouten scènes vol brutaliteit, waaronder een beruchte operatiescène die op het Edinburgh Film Festival van 1960 voor menige appelflauwte zorgde.

About the film
The film revolves around a brilliant, obsessive surgeon who kidnaps women and removes their skin to transplant it onto his daughter's deformed face. In the film, Franju deftly balances between fantasy and realism, clinical detachment and intense emotion, beauty and pain. All of this is dominated by the haunting, haunting eyes of Edith Scob.

J. Hoberman of The Village Voice declared the film to be "a masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality." The Encyclopedia of Horror Films agreed with this claim, stating that "Franju provides the film with a strange poetry in which Cocteau's influence is unmistakable."

In the 2010s Time Out asked authors, directors, actors and critics working in the horror genre to vote for their best horror films. Time Out placed "Eyes Without a Face" at No. 34 in the Top 100, and Pedro Almodóvar drew extensive inspiration for his own 2011 film "The Skin I Live In.

Before he directed 'Les Yeux Sans Visage,' Georges Franju was notorious for his short film 'Blood of the Beasts' (1949), in which he combined images of animals in slaughterhouses with images of children playing. This collage of everyday images is sometimes mysterious and sickening, but always true.

Together with Henri Langlois, Franju founded the Cinémathèque française, the most enduring and influential institution in French film culture, in 1937.

About Félicia Atkinson
For Félicia Atkinson, human voices live in an ecology alongside and within many other things that do not speak, in the conventional sense of the word: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The French electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices and brings them into conversation with her own, merging field recordings, midi instrumentation and fragments of essayistic language in both French and English.

Her own voice, always shifting to make space, can whisper from the corner or take on the tone of another character. Atkinson uses composing as a way to process her imaginative and creative life, often engaging with the work of visual artists, filmmakers and novelists. Her layered compositions tell stories that alternately stretch and fold time and place, stories in which she is the narrator but not the protagonist.

Atkinson lives in Normandy and has been making music since the early 2000s.

She has released many records and a novel on Shelter Press, the label and publishing house she runs with Bartolomé Sanson. She has collaborated with musicians such as Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Chris Watson, Christina Vantzou and Stephen O'Malley, and with ensembles such as Eklekto (Geneva) and Neon (Oslo). She has performed at venues and festivals such as INA GRM/Maison de la Radio and the Philharmonie (Paris), Issue Project Room (NYC), the Barbican Centre (London), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Atonal (Berlin), Henie Onstad (Oslo), Unsound (Krakow) and Skanu.