Chamber Films will showcase the classic and the curious, the weird, the wired and wonderfully askew. There’s no theme, no thesis, no seam running through these films, unless there is. The subconscious is a hell of a film programmer.

LES YEUX SANS VISAGE

Dir. Georges Franju. 1960. Starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Edith Scob.

Dr Gennessier, a plastic surgeon, has a daughter who keeps rejecting the severed faces he gets for her. She’s not just being picky; her ruined face will not accept the grafts he has taken from the young women his assistant lures back to his private clinic. Christiane leads a poetic, elegiac existence, wafting about to Maurice Jarre’s perfect score in her close-fitting bone mask, her only friends her pet birds.

Boileau-Narcejac, the novelists who wrote Les Diaboliques, were taken on to write the adaptation of Jean Redon’s novel, and the result is both beautiful and oneiric and visceral and cruel.