Son aura does not shine as brightly as that of Méliès or the Lumière brothers, yet Louis Feuillade (1873-1925) is considered by historians of the 7e art as the master of popular cinema. With more than 700 films to his credit – silent shorts, many of which have been lost or destroyed – he has also established himself as an inventive creator. The cinema, then a fairground art, becomes thanks to him, in the middle of the First World War, a noble art.
Passed to oblivion with the appearance of the talkies, Feuillade will be rediscovered in turn by the surrealists then by the New Wave. It was Henri Langlois who saved a reel when he founded the Cinémathèque française in 1936. Then many films were found at the Cinémathèque de Belgique and in private homes. Some have been restored and edited by Gaumont in a DVD box set.
But who are you, Mr. Feuillade?
Louis Feuillade, born in Lunel in 1873 into a very pious family of wine merchants, chose to be buried there in 1925. This lover of theatre, poetry and cycling, who was both a wine broker and his father, poet, bullfighting chronicler with a sharp pen (his chronicles are also collected in a book) and journalist in the controversial press was very attached to his origins. It is also bullfighting, which he defended point-blank, which will lead him to the cinema. He will film in the region of Lunel and Nîmes bullfighting scenes which will even appear in The vampires… And a film tribute to the harvest of which the Nouvelle Vague will be the depositary, Vendemiaire.
On his death, the local press dedicated many of its front pages to him, and not a year has gone by since the 1960s without a tribute being paid to him by the passionate essayist Max Brunel and the film buffs of the Fishermen of images association. This year, the city of Hérault is dedicating a film festival to her, street performances, conferences (about the women of Feuillade) and film concerts. To pass on to new generations the history and work of this child of Lunel.
Blockbusters of the 1910s
In 1911, the inauguration of the Gaumont-Palace, splendor of the Belle Époque style on Place Clichy in Paris (destroyed in 1972), was a triumph. Tare, a film by Louis Feuillade, was screened in front of 3,400 people. For four years now, Louis Feuillade has made a name for himself in the small world of French cinema. He took over the artistic direction of Gaumont, succeeding Alice Guy, the world’s first female film director! He writes and produces almost all of Gaumont’s production, with a style all his own. “Workaholic, passionate about theatre, painting, literature, Louis Feuillade is teeming with new ideas. He wants to develop this new art,” says film historian Jean-Noël Grando.
To get ahead of the Americans, he shoots what he calls “aesthetic films”, superproductions inspired by paintings, Antiquity or the Bible in grandiose settings with hundreds of extras, animals… “We had to fill the Gaumont-Palace, and Feuillade had understood how to seduce the public: make them laugh and keep them spellbound,” adds Jean-Noël Grando. “If you want to please, you have to know the popular soul”, wrote Feuillade in 1922. Innovative, he had children play the title roles in the series Babe And Zan’s End, which are even exported to the United States and Italy. He tries his hand at intimate melodrama with the stars of the time, Renée Carl and Marcel Lévesque. He favors outdoor filming, thus breaking with the tradition of studios…
The time of masterpieces
In May 1913, 80,000 spectators flocked to the Gaumont-Palace to follow the adventures of the masked criminal, hero of the serial novel by Souvestre and Allain, Fantômas. “The public is fascinated by violent and fantastic stories, emphasizes Jean-Noël Grando. Feuillade has simplified the plots, reduced the number of characters, and offered a real staging with charismatic actors, René Navarre and Renée Carl. Its adaptation in five episodes is a masterpiece! »
READ ALSOThese singular summers – 1913, the time of recklessnessChases on the roofs, in the sewers, fights in the cellars of Bercy… Feuillade offers an atmosphere that is both realistic and poetic in a Paris plunged into grayness. The war will get the better of Fantômas, which will be reborn in the 1960s and 1980s, “without ever equaling Feuillade”, will say moviegoers. Reformed following a heart attack, Feuillade brings his anti-hero back to life during the war, in the guise of a woman in a black silk jumpsuit: the evil and disturbing Irma Vep, at the head of the Vampire gang, who , for ten episodes, steals, poisons, murders. The police are overwhelmed, and only a journalist, Philippe Guérande, tries to stop him. Feuillade would have been inspired by Freemasonry, of which he never made his membership public. Faced with so much barely feigned eroticism and screenplay audacity, the prefect of police tries to censor the series, but ends up giving up under pressure from the main actress, the famous Musidora.
Eternal Irma Vep
By lending her silhouette and her smoky black gaze to the heroine of Feuillade, Jeanne Roques, known as “Musidora”, will be the first vamp of cinema. “She was so much more than that. Painter, poet, director, she maintains a close relationship with Feuillade, who will make her shoot around twenty very diverse films, says Laurent Veray**, film historian and teacher at the Sorbonne. She certainly inspired her with the modern heroine she plays on screen, a subversive brunette in opposition to the blonde American star of the time, Pearl White, heroine of another episodic adventure film, New York Mysteries. »
In an INA sound archive, Musidora recounts the artistic freedom and eccentricities of his friend Feuillade, who told him to throw himself out of a window or pass under a freight train. The figure of Diana Monti, formidable adventurer in Judex, devotes his talent. The surrealist muse fascinates Olivier Assayas, a big fan of pre-war soap operas and “this cinema of origins”. The director was inspired by it for the film Irma Vep with Maggie Cheung and Jean-Pierre Léaud (1996), and an astonishing series produced by HBO and broadcast on OCS, in which Alicia Vikander plays an American star upset by her role as Irma Vep in the remake of a director (Vincent Macaigne) haunted by the ghost of Feuillade. “It is this close link between the poetry of Feuillade’s cinema and popular cinema, the encounter between mystery, eroticism and the presence of death”, confides the filmmaker to us. The spectators then returned from the front or left there… The war also had a direct impact on the chaotic narration. The technicians and the actors being able to be mobilized from one moment to another, Feuillade writes from day to day and improvises on the set, taking small notes out of his pockets. “My domain is where nothing is impossible, where you can make whatever comes to your mind happen,” he said. No wonder the surrealists considered him to be one of the precursors of automatic writing in cinema, and that his silent work still speaks to us so much.
*Jean-Noel Grando, Fantômas drops the mask (ed. Alliance, 2015, 112 p.)
**Laurent Veray, co-author of the collective work Musidora. Who are you ? (ed. De Grenelle, 2022, 269 p.)