So I was writing an online squib that referred to the 1959 horror film by Georges Franju, known as Eyes without a Face in English. And I was surprised that the National Gallery capitalizes visage in the French version of the title, Les Yeux sans Visage. Now I thought I knew the rules for title capitalization in French, but it turns out that (a) I had never learned them properly (see what comes of getting your information from kids on street corners) and (b) there are three different conventions that various authorities follow. Laura K. Lawless explains.
The convention I taught myself was rule III, sentence capitalization: Les yeux sans visage. It’s the most egalitarian. Rule I, first noun and its adjectives, accounts for many of the titles that I see that confuse me: Les Yeux sans visage. Looks unbalanced. Rule II, all important nouns, strikes me as quintessentially French, since it calls for a judgment of which nouns are important: Les Yeux sans Visage. Sort if like the way taxes are assessed in France.
(By the way, some people capitalize the English title as Eyes Without a Face. I say that without is a preposition and I say the hell with it.)