2. Fantômas

May 5, 1913
Gaumont
Directed by Louis Feuillade

Léon Gaumont, a Parisian engineer, began shooting movies the same year as Méliès, but before a year had passed he handed the production duties to his secretary Alice Guy, who is unquestionably cinema’s first female auteur. Having taken two different film introduction classes in college, I must admit I was wholly unexpected to discover Mademoiselle Alice, almost as if she had been purposely hidden from the received history of film. Her movies are instantly captivating and her extant works exhibit some radical developments from Méliès. Some key works:

1. La Fée aux choux is disputedly her earliest extant film. The titular fairy smiles at the camera, pulls a newborn from a cabbage plant, and offers it to the camera. Wire fence spans the entire background. As she picks up the second baby, she cups her ears, aurally searching for tiny brassican cries. She leans in to pick up a third baby, but there is a sudden cut. Then we see her back away without the baby in her arms. It lies motionless, either a doll or dead newborn. Are we witness to one of the first and cruelest victims of the cinema? The two babies up front continue to twitch and mewl. This movie is decisively pagan, inappropriately voyeuristic, and resolutely strange.

2. Le Pêcheur dans le torrent, in the following year of 1897, starts with a fisher on the rocks, water rushing below him. Shirtless boys invade from the top of the frame and force him into the water with a sudden splash. The decisive moment of the water’s spray is lost somewhere between frames, but the immediacy of the action is conveyed well enough. One of the other boys visibly convulses with laughter. The angry man grabs the perpetrator, bends him over, and wails on him. The boy eventually gains his bearing and pushes the man back into the water. The other boys, totally excited, slide into the fray and begin their assault, not just upon the man, but each other. These two films both give us an entire story in a single minute, each developing in an unpredictable and exciting manner.

3. Chirurgie fin de siècle depicts, in one hundred and twenty seconds, the end of the terror and suffering of surgery. The background set features double-doors in the center. Above hangs the sign “Do Not Cry” addressing us directly. The patient, after kicking his legs violently, passes out after breathing the ether, administered by a large cone. The doctor brings out the hacksaw and amputates multiple limbs. New limbs are drawn from a large container and reattached, the man revived in a feat of cinematic biowonder.

4. Her most ambitious project, La Naissance, la vie, et la mort du Christ, was released in parts throughout 1907, the final year of her tenure as Gaumont’s productrix and directrix (she will return to our story later). It’s an half hour of Gospel scenes unlike anything I’ve seen in film, print, or a church. Joseph and Mary search for an inn until they are threatened and run off by a hostile horsed Roman. The manger is a vast wood and brick structure in front of a cave, whose black mouth yawns in a central arch behind the Christ child. One of the magi even picks him up and swings him around in some ritual manner. The third scene is the Christ child asleep, while Joseph, Mary, and the celestial musicians watch, totally unhurried. The most compelling scenes of the movie show Jesus with women. The multitude of les Rameaux are all women, save for a few bare male soldier legs. When Mary Magdalene washes the feet of the Lord, she dominates the scene. Through the expression of her love for Christ, despite the objections of the surrounding men, this becomes not only feminist cinema but the beginning of a spiritual cinema.

The same year that the episodes premiered, she married a coworker and left the job to start her family, handing the post of artistic director to her most promising protégé, Louis Feuillade. Feuillade spent the next several years producing comedy serials such as Bébé Apache, about a five-year old seeking the revenge of her father, and La Vie telle qu’elle est, an unending melodrama of Parisian concerns.

In 1913 he directed Fantômas, a series of five films adapting the ongoing monthly pulp series, which was by this time almost to issue #30. Fantômas the character is an antiheroic gentleman thief who will stop at nothing to build his crime empire, including murdering his own children, and to my knowledge is not stopped either in the books nor the films. The plots hew relatively closely to the books, such that none of the major events that occur are anything but entirely obvious to the audience. The lurid Sadism of the books though, is considerably toned down. Our antihero’s victims are miraculously saved. Perhaps this is the beginning of a long tradition of movies disappointing lovers of the book. It’s certainly the beginning of the tradition that embraces the opportunity of cinema to provide illustrations of successful contemporary novels. One huge advantage over the modern superhero/villain films is that it wastes no time with origin. Fantômas is evil, he cannot be stopped, and it’s off to the first adventure – the robbery at the hotel. Fantômas occupies a princess’s hotel room, makes his position known and talks some game to her, and makes off with some valuables. He cruises through the building while everyone is in such a panic, they are helpless to stop him.

The locations are each set up with one camera position. This is only interrupted by (largely unnecessary) title cards, cues from the outside world, or close-ups of the various clues that the characters are investigating. Each room is a single vision. The close-ups of written documents are clearly not photographs of the same props the actors are looking at, and occupy their own separate space. The interior shots are always beautifully arranged, full of historical detail, arranged in meaningful and pleasing order for one perspective. We have time to explore every object in the frame before the event finishes and a new scene appears.

After thirteen minutes of interiors, the camera moves out the door and onto the Parisian street, Fantômas now pursued by Inspector Juve. Juve is tracking the missing Lord Beltham, who was murdered by Fantômas (with help from Lady Beltham). The mystery is never complicated. Juve is there to save the lives of the innocent, but never to catch the quarry. The ease with which Fantômas resists capture through the simplest devices is the premise for Peter Sellers’s Juve parody Inspector Clouseau. Fantômas’s success at his endeavours largely rests on the horror induced on any person or mass of people that hears or sees it on one of his calling cards.

The first movie was followed by four sequels, although I could never make it even to the end of the third. I wonder what Mademoiselle Guy could have made of the same material. The curves of Lady Beltham’s body hide a set of desires which are never fully explored. She can reach the mysterious central figure of Fantomas in ways that no one else in the movie can. The motives of the male characters are obvious and clear, but the women recede into the background as soon as they have struck us with an action (or more usually, a passion). The fifth and final Fantomas film premiered in May 1914 to a nation whose republic had been paying little attention to the two wars in the Balkan peninsula that removed first the Turk from Middle East hegemony and left two mighty coalitions in its place, whose nations held memories of martial glory in ages past. But before we revisit Europe we must head across the Atlantic to dredge up America’s more recent (though hazier and more dubious) memories of courage and honor.