After a wee break, Pictures That Move is back.
To mark the occasion, I wanted to draw attention to a frankly mouth-salivating Blu-ray appearing on the horizon.
Eureka Entertainment has taken time out from releasing the classical and historically important cinematic works of *looks at notes* Chuck Norris and Cynthia Rothrock (alright darlst), making a return to the type of classic and historic world cinema that made their name.
In my inbox, yesterday, there landed a wonderful press release from the company. And one I actually read for the first time in ages.
Eureka will be releasing, this 30th September, a mighty boxset of Louis Feuillade’s complete crime serials. All restored and put out in glorious 4K. My God, the images … watch the announcement trailer here. Fantômas, Les Vampires, Judex et Tih-Minh. Formidable!
Feuillade (1873-1925) is important to early genre cinema as DW Griffith was to the American film. Feuillade, however, was forgotten for decades in homeland, then rediscovered in the mid-1940s. Outside France, for a longer time, he was completely unknown. Only in time was his contribution to cinema recognised as gigantic and celebrated internationally..
Feuillade, a fascinating man, whose high school yearbook, were he American and raised in a more recent era, would have read “the guy least likely to direct ground-breaking crime serials”. A royalist Catholic, a conservative, a former accountant, he ended up making, yes, you guessed it, pioneering crime thrillers.
He spent his early years in the French film industry writing scripts and making all sorts of films, including feuilletons (shorts on a range of topics), then he became the artistic director at Gaumont.
In 1913, he helmed Fantômas, based on the serialised novels written by Marcel Allain (1885-1969) and Pierre Souvestre (1874-1914). This was a true game-changer in the development of what would become genre cinema.
Today, we regularly read about bidding wars related to a new novel or what is known in the business vernacular - however vulgar - as “IP (intellectual property)”. Fantômas was subject to a bidding war between Feuillade’s Gaumont and rivals Pathé. Gaumont won. But it shows producers saw the potential in Fantômas as a new venture in screen entertainment.
Released as a 5-parter, Fantômas follows the exploits of criminal and master-of-disguise, the titular Fantômas, a figure of the Parisian underworld who foils the cops at every turn. This mystery man, this genius crook, fascinated an increasingly literate French public in the run up to The Great War (1914-1918), where citizens of the western world were finding life more cynical and fatalistic. A smash hit adored by the masses and intellectual artists and thinkers, as Lucy Sante wrote in her Criterion Collection article, “Feuillade’s series tunneled into the national subconscious.”1
Fantômas’s brazen and sometimes daredevil antics, and his gleefully antisocial stance, especially thrilled future Surrealists such as Andre Breton and Luis Buñuel. It was Feuillade’s shooting style, too, filming the fantastical and the outrageous with a realistic eye, incorporating plenty of real and recognisable exterior locations, which equally met their approval. Feuillade’s style of crime melodrama and crime-based thrillers would be years later labelled “fantastical realism”. Today we can trace the serial’s lineage in the works of Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, the Italian fumetti neri (black comics). Comic-book villains in general owe a debt to the Allain and Souvestre creation. Lang later created the two-part action thriller The Spiders (1919) and found his own Fantômas in the diabolical Doctor Mabuse, creation of Luxembourgian writer Norbert Jacques (1880 - 1954), and subject to a series of films directed by Lang from the early 1920s to the early 1960s.
After the success of Fantômas, Feuillade created his own icon of screen villainy: Irma Vep (an anagram of “vampire”), leader of a gang of thieves known as Les Vampires (The Vampires).
For this ten-part serial, Feuillade took inspiration from the anarchist group the Bonnot Gang aka Les Bandes Tragiques (The Tragic Bandits). These miscreants, led by 36-year-old Jean Bonnot, were around only a few months between December 1911 and April 1912, the tail end of the Belle Epoque, which writer Mitchell Abador noted was only ‘“belle” for just the privileged few’2.
The group was formed of working-class radicals with ties to trade unions and anarchism. They stole cars and used them as getaway vehicles for the string of bank robberies they performed (how forward-thinking!) and armed themselves with repeater rifles and died in a siege with the fuzz, like Wild West outlaws.
Les Vampires was wildly popular at the box office but less so critically. It also proved controversial (one episode was banned temporarily because it offended the policing profession).
Played by Musidora, stage name of Jeanne Roques (1889-1957), Irma Vep’s bat-style costume regularly appears in books about silent cinema, such is her striking pose and proto-horror costume design. Again we see how these French characters will have later influence on the superhero genre and the crime caper.
The Surrealists loved Musidora, especially. Henri Langlois, though not a surrealist, made a great point about the Surrealist fondness for the serials of Feuillade: ‘One only has to take Les Vampires to see that the cinema, because it was an expression of the twentieth century and of its universal subconscious, bore the essence of surrealism within it.’3
Feuillade deserves to be celebrated for the pioneer genre filmmaker he was and these forthcoming discs are heavyweight titles and have restored a bit of faith in Eureka.
Lucy Sante, The Eyes That Fascinate, Criterion Collection website, 2022
Revolutionary Bandits, Jewish Currents, Mitchell Abidor, 2018
Quoted in Richard Roud’s essay, Louis Feuillade and the Serial, 1980, in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary - The Major Filmmakers, A-K, Volume 1.