Head Against the Wall (La Tête Contre Les Murs) first published by Little White Lies, September 2010 as a review of Eureka!’s DVD release
In a recent interview included on this disc from Eureka!, Jean-Pierre Mocky, who adapted Head Against the Wall (La Tête Contre Les Murs) from the 1949 novel by Hervé Bazin and also played its misfit protagonist François Gérane, boasts that the film is still screened at psychiatric conferences today. It is a testament to the enduring relevance of the film’s central debate, embodied within the contrasting methodologies of Dr Varmont (Pierre Brasseur) and Dr Emery (Paul Meurisse), as to whether the principal rôle of psychiatrists is to keep their patients from society, or to return them to it – and the film also has something to say about the way that mental illness can be created as much as cured in asylums.
All this, though, is to reduce somewhat the concerns of a film that seems to be commenting more broadly on the difficult dynamic between freedom and control within any system. So while Sam Fuller‘s Shock Corridor (1963) and Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) are often cited as natural descendants to La Tête Contre Les Murs, in fact the allegorical horrors of Jan Svankmajer’s Lunacy (2005) and Brad Anderson’s Stonehearst Asylum (2014) – both adapted from Edgar Allen Poe’s 1845 short story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether – seem more closely related to the spirit of Franju’s film.
The feature debut of Georges Franju (and of composer Maurice Jarre) serves as a bridge between the director’s earlier documentary shorts like the slaughterhouse exposé Blood of the Beasts (Le sang des bêtes, 1949), and his masterwork Eyes Without A Face (Les yeux sans visage, 1960). For while it was shot in an actual psychiatric hospital in Dury, and depicts the workings of such institutions with a sombre realism, it also offers all the dramatic appeal of a youthful romance (with Anouk Aimée‘s Stephanie) and two escape attempts, while introducing the sociopathic rationalism of Pierre Brasseur, the hysteria-tinged beauty of Edith Scob, and the poetic potential of caged doves – all of which were further developed in his better known second feature.
There is another sense in which Head Against the Wall serves as a bridge. For as a film made by a 46-year-old director that was to come out in the same year as the much younger Jean-Luc Godard‘s paradigm-shifting Breathless, it is an important missing link between the cinéma du papa and the emerging nouvelle vague. Main character Gérane is first seen sporting a leather jacket and recklessly riding a motorbike, in a clear evocation of the sort of Fifties anti-hero popularised in Laslo Benedek’s The Wild One (1953) and Nicholas Ray‘s Rebel Without a Cause (1955) – and his refusal to play by society’s rules, not to mention his great antipathy towards his bourgeois daddy (Jean Galland), is what sees him sectioned in the first place.
Within less than ten years, such rebellious ‘instability’ would be shaking the world – and Franju has the foresight to make Gérane a figure worthy of sympathy rather than of the indignant condemnation afforded him by his prosecutor father. In this film, Gérane is shown to be no more or less in need of treatment than the stifling world of hypocritical patriarchy that he inhabits (and is always trying in vain to escape). His fellow inmate Heurtevent (played by singer Charles Aznavour) suggests one way out, but the following decade would confirm that 25-year-old Gérane’s behaviour, far from being aberrant, was to become the norm amongst his generation.
strap: Rebelling against (cinéma du) papa, Georges Franju’s debut feature sees patriarchy itself as an insane asylum of control and coercion
Anton Bitel
