The Eye Was in the Tomb
and Looked at Daney

In 1980, twenty years after having first seen George Franju's Eyes without a Face, the French critic Serge Daney was still terrified by a sound — a small detail from the film's soundtrack that fear inscribed permanently in his memory. Watching the film today, is that same sound as terrifying as it was back then? has the passing of time eroded the horror it conveyed? or has Daney's text immortalized it as a perennial entry in our shared dictionary of cinematic terrors?

Chloé Galibert-Laîné is a researcher and filmmaker, currently employed as a Senior Researcher at the Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland. Her practice-based PhD focused on the reuse of the online media in contemporary non-fiction cinema. In the fall of 2022 she is a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts and has recently taught at the University of Bern, Beaux-Arts de Marseille, California Institute of the Arts, and Université Paris 8. Her desktop films and video essays, which explore questions related to modes of spectatorship, gestures of appropriation, processes of knowledge production and mediated memory, have been presented at IFFRotterdam, FIDMarseille, Oberhausen Festival, transmediale, Ji.hlava DFF, FIPADOC, Ars Electronica and others.