Eyes Without A Face

Apart from the optional English subtitles, the only real extras here is a fascinating 10-minute extract from 'Georges Franju: Visionary', an episode of the French TV series Cinema Of Our Time, in which Franju, just weeks before his death in 1987, is shown in an editing suite talking through two scenes from Eyes Without A Face.

In the first, a macabre and tense night scene at a family crypt is interrupted by the sound of a passing aeroplane, "straight from the realm of the unusual, because of the moment it occurs". In the second, Génessier's Citroën DS is seen from above pulling in to the parking lot of the morgue – but Franju concentrates on the tiny moment of widescreen emptiness before the car enters the camera's frame. "It's in these shots where nothing is happening", Franju comments, "that something happens and it's called mystery. It's the wait that creates the anxiety." Coming from the 1936 co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française film archive, and one of France's most important cinematic figures, this feels, for all its brevity, like a genuine masterclass in the filmmaker's art.

Still, it is a pity that Second Sight did not follow the example of the US's Criterion Collection release by including Franju's celebrated abbatoir-set documentary Le Sang des Bêtes (1949) as an extra.