On cruelty: women and Frankenstein on screen
- On cruelty: women and Frankenstein on screen
When people talk about disturbing images from art that have stayed with them – images they often wish they hadn’t seen – they are almost always talking about images from movies (and sometimes photographs) rather than images from books.
– Maggie Nelson The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (W.W. Norton 2001: 113)
When it comes to women, Frankenstein’s cinematic afterlives have a troubled history. Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without A Face; Franju France/Italy 1959) and La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In; Almodóvar Spain 2011) are two films that have been successfully read as adaptations of the larger Frankenstein [End Page 158] corpus (both are adapted from French novels; cf. Mary Pharr ‘The lab and the woods’ in SFFTV 1.1 (2008)). Women in Frankenstein narratives aren’t always given a lot to do, but their bodies are often at the centre of the narrative. Eyes Without A Face, with its haunting imagery of the melancholy Christiane Génessier (Edith Scob) and its notorious ten-minute facial surgery sequence makes arresting viewing. The disfigured Christiane stands in for Frankenstein’s Creature, experimented on by her own father. Dr Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is obsessed with restoring his daughter’s lost beauty and with how his success will impact his reputation; it’s a strange twist on Frankenstein’s desire to choose beautiful features for his creation. Joan Hawkins notes that ‘In Les yeux sans visage, female identity is a medical construction, as essential and fragile as the surgical “skin job” that creates it’ (Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avante Garde, U of Minnesoa P, 2000: 80).
The Skin I Live In shares this idea. Dr Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) experiments on Vera (Elena Anaya), the woman he keeps prisoner in his remote villa, whom he has altered to resemble his dead wife. The surgical incisions made into Vera’s body indicate Robert’s position of power. Ann Davies identifies Vera’s re-purposing of the tools of conventional femininity as resistance to Ledgard’s imposed narrative of creation: she uses make-up to draw on the walls of her room and strips of cloth from dresses to create sculptures reminiscent of the work of Louise Bourgeois. Eventually, Vera is reduced to making use of her femininity and her body by seducing Robert. In both these films, we see how ‘the surgeon desires the body he has recreated while simultaneously punishing the original body that was the basis for his design’ (Davies, Contemporary Spanish Gothic, Edinburgh UP 2016: 139).
In these Frankenstein stories, there’s no escaping the guilt of being female. These films constitute uncomfortable viewing – they are exquisitely shot, with beautifully rendered mise-en-scène, and yet the acts they showcase are abhorrent and cruel. Their beauty and horror are intertwined. We must ask ourselves: what are the consequences of these representations? If Frankenstein is a story about transgression and bodily boundaries, then can we use these films to provoke a wider discussion of the legacy of Mary Shelley’s greatest work? [End Page 159]
Sarah Artt is Lecturer in English and Film at Edinburgh Napier University. She co-leads the Age of Frankenstein Project with Dr Emily Alder. Her work has appeared in the journal Scope, and in collections with Winter Verlag, BrillRodopi and Bloomsbury. Her research and teaching interests include sf, women’s cinema and the uses of silence on screen.
