Head Against the Wall

Georges Franju (12 April 1912 – 5 November 1987) was a French filmmaker. He was born in Fougères, Ille-et-Vilaine.

Before working in French cinema, Franju had several different jobs. These included working for an insurance company and in a noodle factory. Franju was also briefly in the military in Algeria and was discharged in 1932. On his return, Franju studied to become a set designer and later created backdrops for music halls including Casino de Paris and the Folles Bergère.

In the mid-thirties, Franju and Henri Langlois met through Franju’s twin brother Jacques Franju. As well as creating the 16 mm short film Le Métro, Langois and Franju also started a short-lived film magazine and created a film club called Le Cercle du Cinema with 500 francs he borrowed from Langlois’ parents. The club showed silent films from their own collections followed by an informal debate about them amongst members. From Le Cercle du Cinema, Franju and Langlois founded the Cinématheque Française in 1936. Franju ceased to be closely related with the Cinématheque Française as early as 1938, and only became associated it strongly again in the 1980s when he was appointed as the honorary artistic director of the Cinématheque. In 1937, Franju and Langois co-founded another less successful film journal titled Cinematographe which had only two issues. In early 1940, Franju and Dominique Johansen co-founded another organization to promote cinema called Circuit Cinématographique des Arts et des Sciences which closed on May 31, 1940.

In 1949, Franju began work on a series of nine documentary films. The Nazi occupation of Paris and the industrialism following World War II influenced Franju’s early works. His first documentary, The Blood of Beasts (French: Le Sang des Bêtes) was a graphic film of a day inside a Paris slaughterhouse. The second documentary, commissioned by the government in 1950, was Passing By the Lorraine (French: En Passant par la Lorraine). The film was commissioned as a celebration of the modernization of the French industry, but Franju’s film showed his view of the ugliness spewing forth from monstrous factories. Franju’s third film commissioned by the French government, Hôtel des Invalides (1951), was a look at life inside a veterans’ hospital. The film was commissioned as a tribute to the hospital and the War Museum, but Franju turned it into a film against the glorification of militarism. Franju later said that Hôtel des Invalides was his favorite of his three “slaughter” films.

With the Keepers (French: La Tete Contre les Murs) in 1958, Franju turned toward fiction feature films. His second feature was the horror film Eyes Without a Face (French: Les Yeux sans Visage) about a surgeon who tries to repair his daughter’s ruined face by grafting on to it the faces of beautiful women. His 1963 film Judex was a tribute to the silent film serials Judex and Fantomas. In Franju’s later years his film work became less frequent. Franju occasionally directed for television and in the late seventies he retired from filmmaking to preside over the Cinématheque Française. Georges Franju died on November 5, 1987. —Wikipedia