Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas: The Murderous Corpse
Louis Feuillade’s FANTÔMAS DVD Review Part I
The same advice is offered to anyone with the slightest interest in film style. Much of the interest in Feuillade is due to the fact that his career occupied the pre-1920s period in which many of the conventions of film aesthetics hadn’t yet fully solidified. While Fantômas isn’t exactly a radical challenge to the way most viewers understand movies – only a few scattered scenes flirt with incomprehensibility – the sharp-eyed in the audience will find much that seems eccentric a century hence, particularly Feuillade’s tendency to eschew editing as a way to structure his scenes.
I found only a handful of closeups across five films, and they all served to accentuate a detail rather than, say, capture a character’s reaction or establish an eyeline. Camera movement is also rare, due to the bulky nature of the pre-WWI apparatus, so most of the Fantômas films are staged as tableaux, with Feuillade relying on the movements of actors to play out the dramatic logic of his scenes.
He finds many inventive and subtle ways to go about this, mostly involving Fantômas unexpectedly entering and exiting the frame, but also in more quotidian, expository scenes as well. (A collection of earlier, non-Fantômas shorts on Disc One also provides useful examples of this style.)
I wouldn’t necessarily want every movie to look like this, but against the background of seemingly every 21st-century film consisting of little else but incomprehensible "action" scenes or endless series of talking closeups, it is a nice change of pace. And it ought to be an example to filmmakers interested in the possibilities of their chosen medium.
While not exactly bursting with extras, the set contains some useful historical context on Disc One in the form of a short documentary – which helpfully draws attention to the generic breadth of Feuillade’s vast output; Fantômas and Les Vampires aside, he hardly confined himself to thrillers – and feature commentaries by David Kalat on Fantômas in the Shadow of the Guillotine and Juve vs. Fantômas.
Discs Two and Three serve up their films (The Murderous Corpse, Fantômas vs. Fantômas and The False Magistrate) and nothing else, to the dismay of no one – more extras wouldn’t have improved this nearly perfect package.
My only complaints involve a few minor presentation matters. The False Magistrate appears here in such rough condition – extensive damage to the print is obvious in a way that it isn’t in the other movies, and several important scenes are missing entirely, replaced by title card descriptions – that I questioned the wisdom of including it at all.
But I suppose even a fragmented, spotty reconstruction attempt is better than nothing at all, and its not as though Kino (let alone restoration director Jacques Champreaux, who did truly heroic work here with most of the surviving footage) can be blamed for the poor condition of these nearly century-old materials.
More egregious and irritating is the inclusion of sound effects in seemingly randomly chosen scenes. This usually takes the form of ambient sound such as the noise of traffic or tweeting birds, but every so often becomes explicitly diagetic sound – gunshots, for some reason, are a favorite target for this treatment. I’m not a strict purist regarding silent movies; dead quiet can be psychically "louder" than appropriate musical accompaniment, particularly since anyone watching silent films in the 21st century will subconsciously expect to find something to occupy the ear.
The sound effects in these films are simply jarring and distracting, though, not to mention bewildering. Did the party responsible for this really think that audiences would be more confused by silent gunshots than silent actors? In any case, this is my severest criticism of the set, and it’s pretty penny-ante stuff.
© Dan Erdman
Photos: Courtesy of Kino