Where to begin with Louis Feuillade

Louis Feuillade is not an easy sell. A Catholic monarchist with a military background, he had championed bullfighting as a journalist before becoming a screenwriter at Gaumont. Here, he quickly rose to succeed Alice Guy-Blaché as artistic director in 1907 and transformed the company’s fortunes with a string of hit crime serials.

Unpersuaded by the merits of stylistic experimentation, Feuillade was convinced that cinematic truth was best conveyed by melodrama. Unlike D.W. Griffith, however, he didn’t belong to the Belasco school of moralising melodramatists. There’s little sense of Belle Époque nostalgia about a Feuillade epic. Indeed, there’s something futuristic about their obsession with criminality, technology, paranoia, alienation, mind control, conspiracy, terrorism and the foibles of the élite.

For all their teasing modernity, though, Feuillade’s serials may seem hopelessly old-fashioned to audiences accustomed to CGI blockbusters. Unlike American equivalents such as The Perils of Pauline (1914), there are no chases involving galloping horses, skidding cars or hurtling trains. Even cliffhangers are at a premium. So are cross-cuts and camera movements.

Although he eschewed the fixed theatrical tableaux of some early cinema and abhorred gesticulatory acting, Feuillade preferred to use a static camera and shoot in depth. This allowed him to block the action to sequentially focus on key details, resulting in a visual fluidity whose languorous rhythms seem at odds with the frantic storylines. Yet they mesmerisingly impose the dreamlike logic that made Feuillade such a favourite of the surrealists, who believed that he had captured the spirit of the new century on celluloid.

Despite their trapdoors, false ceilings, sliding panels and secret compartments, Robert-Jules Garnier’s interiors often resembled stage sets. But, by also shooting the largely unscripted action in familiar locations around Paris and the Riviera, Feuillade brought the fantastical and the fear-inducing into the everyday. Moreover, by melding Lumière brothers-style verisimilitude with Georges Méliès-style whimsy, he laid the foundations for 1930s poetic realism.

Even though Feuillade’s themes and style can bear modern scrutiny, there’s no escaping the fact that his serials require a fair investment of time. The five instalments of Fantômas (1913 to 1914) last 337 minutes, while the 12 chapters of Judex (1916) run to five hours. More dauntingly, the 10 episodes of Les Vampires (1915 to 1916) take up 417 minutes, and the 12-part Tih-Minh (1918) is a minute longer still. Time flies, however, if you think of them as silent boxed sets and have yourself a good old binge.

If archivist extraordinaire Henri Langlois had not been tipped off that Gaumont was having a clear out in the 1930s, the finest of all silent serials would have been junked and Olivier Assayas would never have been inspired to make either the 1996 feature or the 2022 mini-series named after Feuillade’s most iconic creation, Irma Vep.

First appearing in the third episode of Les Vampires, this anagrammatic anti-heroine was played by Jeanne Roques, who took the stage name ‘Musidora’ from a Théophile Gautier novel. Unlike Pearl White’s character in The Exploits of Elaine (1914), which had taken France by storm, Irma Vep was no damsel in distress, as she donned (albeit fleetingly) a black silk catsuit to roam rooftops and purloin jewels when not adopting myriad disguises, clinging to the undercarriage of trains, or abseiling down buildings on an uncoiling rope. Although not the leader, she was the malevolent spirit of ‘Les Vampires’, the criminal gang that plucky journalist Philippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé) had vowed to bring to justice with his comic sidekick, Oscar-Cloud Mazamette (Marcel Lévesque).

Part of the reason Irma became the focus was that Feuillade kept losing his Grand Vampire, as he fired actor Jean Aymé for persistent tardiness and then Louis Leubas was summoned to the trenches after just two episodes. Musidora’s raised profile came in handy, however, as she was able to persuade police prefect Louis Lépine to unban a serial he had deemed bad for wartime morale, with its contempt for authority and glorification of evil.

With the guns often audible from the Western Front, Parisian audiences found relief in the rampageous action, as ships were blown up, cannons were secreted in upper-storey rooms, knockout gas caused swells to swoon at soirées, and the hero’s sweetheart was lassooed at her bedroom window and yanked into a getaway car. Yet nothing was pre-planned, as Feuillade discerned urban poetry and socio-sexual emancipation in the chaotic crumbling of the old order.

Despite it being nowhere near as iconic as Les Vampires, there are those who believe the uncomfortably Orientalist Tih-Minh to be the superior work. Making thrilling use of the winding roads, crags, castles, rooftops and quarries of the Côte d’Azur, the 12 episodes are action packed, as explorer Jacques d’Athys (René Cresté), servants Placido (Georges Biscot) and Rosette (Jeanne Rollette) and English diplomat Sir Francis Grey (Édouard Mathé) strive to keep Tih-Minh (Mary Harald) and a code-laden tome out of the clutches of the shape-shifting triumvirate of German spy Dr Gilson (Gaston Michel), Hindu occultist Kistna (Louis Leubas) and the clairvoyant Marquise Dolorès de Santa Fe (Georgette Faraboni), who are pursuing some MacGuffinesque Indochinese treasure. 

No synopsis can ever do justice to a Feuillade serial, as they depend so much on auteur showmanship, anarchic inventiveness and oneiric atmosphere in depicting the breakdown of leadership and moral authority in unpredictable times. But Feuillade was the master of the Rocambolesque set-piece, as the sequences involving gun-toting nuns, spying dogs, high-powered hosepipes and the zombified female occupants of the Villa Circé cellar can attest.

Cresté and Leubas had already locked horns as avenging nobleman Jacques de Tremeuse and murderous banker Henri Favraux in Judex, whose black-caped crime-fighter is the forerunner of so many comic-book heroes, with his dark secrets, hidden lair and ingenious gadgets. Although keen to provide escapist entertainment and avoid re-offending the authorities, Feuillade nevertheless blurred the moral lines around Judex’s vigilantism, while also relishing the seductive wickedness of Musidora’s larcenous adventuress, Diana Monti. The result is a barrage of outlandish ploys and fiendish incidents, whose sheer far-fetchedness was affectionately pastiched in Georges Franju’s Judex (1963).

Whereas the later chapterplays were all Feuillade’s work, Fantômas drew on the 32 bestsellers penned by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. More an instalment film than a serial, this five-parter centres on a malevolent mastermind (René Navarre), whose reign of terror against the establishment confounds the Lestrade-like Inspector Juve (Edmund Breon) and his journalistic cohort Jérôme Fandor (Georges Melchior) – who were later played by Louis de Funès and Jean Marais in André Hunebelle’s parodic feature trilogy in the mid-1960s. 

Watching Fantômas, you can detect the roots of film noir in the réalisme fantastique which Feuillade concocted to convey the waking nightmare of Paris being powerless to combat a dastardly criminal genius – one who revels in his villainy and elusiveness. The blend of brooding psychology and pulse-quickening spectacle also leaves superhero cinema forever in Feuillade’s shadow and in his debt.

Some 500 Feuillade films are known to have survived. But, as serials La Nouvelle Mission de Judex (1917), Barrabas (1919) and Parisette (1921) are infuriatingly unavailable (even online), there’s little point in trying to start with them. Ten shorts can be found on DVD in the Gaumont Treasures collection, but even they offer few clues as to why Feuillade was airbrushed out of French screen history after Louis Delluc and his impressionist acolytes castigated him for cheapening the seventh art. How wrong they were.

Louis Feuillade: The Complete Crime Serials 1913 to 1918 is out now on Blu-ray.