Man With A Movie List

Director: Louis Feuillade Year: 1918 Runtime: 338 min (originally 418 min split into 12 films) Source: A bootleg DVD version of what's on Youtube, but translated This had the potential to be the most interesting of the three Feuillade serials on this list.  Though it's not in his well-regarded trilogy of crime serials, it is clearly cut from the same cloth.  We have a well-to-do civilian and his friends faced off against a shadowy cabal, although the bad guys turn out to be German spies this time around.  Tih Minh aims to have one long continuous story arc, much more so than Fantomas  or Les Vampires .  The plot relies on a heady mixture of technology and psychology, and it involves amnesia potions, a great deal of hypnotism, and an extremely early mode of electronic surveillance involving wires strung through foliage.  Of course it also woudn't be a Feuillade serial without a man hidden in a wicker basket at some point.  (Seriously, the man love...

Director: Louis Feuillade Year: 1915-1916 Runtime: 10 films with a total of 6:57:00 Source:  Kanopy Feuillade immediately capitalized on the success of his first crime serial with a more ambitious follow-up.  Les Vampires bears a lot of hallmarks of its rushed production.  It's nearly identical to Fantomas in its broad outline - criminals with devious disguises (no actual vampires, I'm afraid), a plucky journalist hero, plenty of curtains - but this time, Feuillade was making it up as he went along, apparently letting his actors workshop much of the basic plot. Contemporary critics considered it a classless genre flick at the time, but the public ate it up, and Les Vampires is now considered his finest and most influential work, the origin of the modern thriller.  While Fantomas comprised a sequence of mostly self-contained detective stories (like the newspaper serial it was adapted from), Les Vampires is more of a true serial, with a serpentine plot, and...

Director: Louis Feuillade Year: 1913 Runtime: 0:09 Source:  Youtube This one's a trifle, but it has charm.  A tiny short with no dialogue, it follows the young boy Bout-de-Zan as he steals a small elephant from the circus, and then gets into a few harmless, slapstick-filled mishaps with it.  It's too short for any coherent plot or resolution, and I suppose that's not the point anyway.  The elephant's cute, and it's a charming and harmless bit of children's entertainment, but on a personal note, it's hard to overcome the melancholy I feel when looking at circus animals. There's not much else to report here, but a tiny bit of research uncovers that this was a part of a series of Feuillade shorts starring the young urchin Bout-de-Zan.  (Although his means are unclear: he looks like Chaplin's Tramp, but it does appear that he lives in a nice home with patient, well-to-do parents.)  The Bout-de-Zan series succeeds an earlier series starring a simil...

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 Fa...