Fantômas

Director: Louis Feuillade
Year: 1913
Runtime: 5 films with a total of 5:37:00
Source: Bluray

Contemporary film critics frequently strive to overturn the perceived dominance of "high art" in our cultural discourse.  This has led to the championing of directors as different as Takashi Miike and Paul Verhoeven, whose work may have been previously dismissed as genre fiction.  Perhaps there is no better time for a critical re-appraisal of the great crime serials of the French director Louis Feuillade.  Feuillade has always had a certain reputation among cinephiles, but rarely is he placed on the same level as his contemporaries Griffith, Lang, and Murnau.  Feuillade was an extremely prolific director who attempted on multiple occasions to promote various high art philosophies in his work, but today he is best known for his more populist works, such as Fantômas and Les Vampires (although the first of these was a critical success).

The titular villain of Fantômas, played by Rene Navarre, is a heartless criminal and master of disguises.  He's a man without a backstory, for whom motives are irrelevant.  He could be anyone, anywhere.  Although the plots of these films are filled with humorous and fun cliches - the preferred hiding place is always behind a floor-length curtain - there is something about Navarre's menacing sidelong glares and cold demeanor that will always be a little chilling.

Feuillade is able to convey twisting and convoluted storylines with surprisingly few intertitles.  There are a great deal of hand-written notes displayed on the screen, but the actors also demonstrate the lost art of conveying the content of a conversation through context and facial expressions.  (Unintentionally, the villain's name is excellent for lip-reading.)  Although most audience members at the time would be well familiar with these stories, adopted from an extremely popular newspaper serial, they are easily understandable today, if you are willing to swallow a great deal of preposterousness and contrivance.  As a devoted fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I have a high tolerance for this sort of thing.  But while Fantômas is good pulpy fun, there is plenty for cinephiles to dissect here as well.  

Although it is something of a misconception that early film directors shot movies as if they were plays, Feuillade comes closer to this idea than the most famous silent film auteurs, who worked in the following decade.  His actors were undoubtedly well trained in theatrical conventions of blocking, and the most fascinating scenes of Fantômas are static shots set up like Renaissance paintings, with multiple active characters, competing points of interest, and exaggerated gestures.  (I was strangely reminded of Kubrick's underrated classic Barry Lyndon.)  Close-ups and tracking shots are used extremely sparingly, to reveal important clues or as a character stumbles upon a criminal's hideout.  But Feuillade was certainly aware of the advantages of film, and there are many sets and camera angles that would be impossible in a theatre.

Discovering great directors like Feuillade is exactly why I'm engaging in this ridiculous project, and it's encouraging that the first substantial work on this list is as good as it is.  Looking forward to two more of his serials soon.