TSPDT

Key Production Countries: France, Italy
Key Genres: Drama, Psychological Drama, Short Film, Documentary, Gothic Film, Crime Thriller
Key Collaborators: Maurice Jarre (Composer), Marcel Fradetal (Cinematographer), Gilbert Natot (Editor), Edith Scob (Leading Character Actress), Pierre Brasseur (Leading Actor), Eugen Schüfftan (Cinematographer), René Génin (Character Actor)

"Franju is cult material par excellence, and from his first bravura documentary release Le Sang Des Bêtes (1949), in which he casts an unswerving eye on the brutal business of meat slaughtering, it was obvious that Franju was not to be conveniently filed and docketed." - Mario Reading (The Movie Companion, 2006)

"First known for making disturbing documentaries that freely intermingled stark realism with a surrealistic edge, Georges Franju went on to use similar techniques for several haunting feature films. Co-founding the world-renowned Cinémathèque Française with Henri Langlois provided Franju with his second claim to fame... In 1949, Franju began the series of nine documentary films for which he became internationally famous. From the beginning, the novice director rejected the notion of objectivity in making documentaries. To Franju, a documentary was personal and reflected the views of its maker... Beginning with La Tete Contre les Murs (The Keepers) (1958), Franju turned toward fully fictional films. Unlike his documentaries, which were forums for Franju's angry world views, these movies both stylistically and thematically were loving tributes to his favorite filmmakers of the past." - Sandra Brennan (Allmovie)

"Franju's film career is divided between his early documentaries and later narrative features… Franju's most famous film, Eyes Without a Face (1960), was released in a watershed year for psychological horror, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho also caused a stir among critics and audiences." - Ian Haydn Smith (Cult Filmmakers, 2019)

"He was a theatre set designer for some time and in the mid-1930s founded, with Henri Langlois, one of cinema's greatest archives, the Cinémathèque Française. Like other French directors in the post-war years, he used short films as a personal means of examining social ideas and attitudes… Franju's remake of Judex (1963) sums up his thematic and visual preoccupations: loss of innocence, the sudden eruption of terror and violence, the use of doves as a poetic symbol." - John Gillett (The International Encyclopedia of Film, 1972)

"From 1949 to 1957, Franju made unique documentaries, expressing an outlook both left-wing and surrealist in images at once direct and powerfully expressive… His feature films, mostly made in the first half of the Sixties, likewise combine realism with shocking or beautiful effects." - The Illustrated Who's Who of the Cinema, 1983