There’s gotta be a word for this thing. It happens to Whitney and me often. We’re deep in the middle of making a film and then discover what absolutely should have inspired us to make it, but in fact didn’t. Our latest feature, a sprawling, episodic mystery movie called Dream Team, was first written in 2017 and production began in 2019, but it wasn’t until in 2020 that we started watching the 1910s silent serialized crime films of Louis Feuillade. Still, we’d swear we were ripping them off.
Our first Feuillade was Tih Minh, which mixes colonial fantasies and paranoia in a story revolving around the perpetually unconscious, hypnotized and/or drugged Asian wife of a French adventurer. Then we watched Les Vampires, a saga of competing networks of urban criminals, most notably the seductive and opportunistic Irma Vep. Next, the proto-Batman serial Judex, about a caped superhero who, armed with an arsenal of surveillance technologies and a fantastic pack of dog detectives, first imprisons and then rescues an unscrupulous capitalist. Now, we’re on to Fantômas, the oldest of these film series (more standalone than the later serials), following a daring master-of-disguise criminal.
Together, these films total dozens of hours. The two of us live in different cities, and we watch them together a little bit at a time over Skype, sometimes even splitting a single serial episode over a few sittings. Silent films, especially Feuillade’s, call for a special attention. You can’t rely on sound to keep you engaged, and the long-take wide-angle visual storytelling can wash over you. Like in a group meditation, our attention drifts away and then snaps back, revealing weird and wondrous moments.
Dream Team is finished and released. But we’re still watching Feuillade’s films and getting inspired … to make Dream Team? Time is an illusion.
Dream Team (2024, Kalman/Horn)
Judex: La meute fantastique (1917, Feuillade)
Feuillade’s films don’t lack for story, indeed they have too much – every character and plot point seems to be an iteration of another – convolutions, disguises and dead ends abound. But the plots aren’t to be followed, they’re there to erupt. Unforgettable and surreal images and personalities flow out of the back-and-forth details of the stories. And the fact that the films are so earthbound, filmed in long takes in real locations (or charmingly cardboard-feeling sets), makes them all the more uncanny. The weirdness is imminent everywhere.
An example: in Juve contre Fantômas, the hero, Juve, is warned he will be visited at night by “the silent executioner.” The next scene finds him, dressed in full fancy pajamas, smoking a cigarette intently. He and his sidekick, Fandor, wrap his arms and torso in giant spiked corsets. Fandor then climbs into a giant wicker basket at the foot of the bed, and Juve lies down to rest. Next, a real live giant snake climbs through the window and wraps itself around Juve, nearly killing our hero. You’ve never seen anything weirder. And it’s done in the plainest way possible.
Feuillade’s fantastic realism, the mix of everyday and bizarre, charges every shot with surreal potential. Just look at these giant cabbages. Big enough to hide Petit Jean! Was this really how cabbage grew in 1917, during the war? Anyway, they’ve captured our imagination.
Judex: L'expiation (1917, Feuillade)
Like the cabbage, characters in Feuillade films don’t so much emerge from the story as burst out of it. By force of their charm, they derail the narrative – you’re like, Who cares about the mystery, I wanna follow this person around. There’s, of course, the actress Musidora as Irma Vep in Les Vampires, icon of icons. Like Heather Locklear on Melrose Place, you forget there were even episodes before she arrived.
Musidora’s auratic and erotic performance in Les Vampires has inspired a film, a TV show, academic analysis and all-time poster art. The fascination isn’t just retrospective. Consider this letter a soldier sent her from the battlefield:
Musidora isn’t the only performer whose charisma insistently exceeds the bounds of the narrative. René Poyen was just four years old when he began starring in short films by Feuillade. He first appears in the second episode of Judex, L'Expiation, as the fourth-wall-breaking charmer the Licorice Kid. As this excellent blog post puts it, “A streetwise urchin on the side of good, he walks into the story, wedges himself there, and refuses to budge.” By episode six, the kid gets a spin-off episode dedicated to him, which we assume was a reaction to fan demand.
Judex: Le môme réglisse (1917, Feuillade)
This way that the films can catch and follow inspirations is a function of their seriality. One thing succeeds another without that feeling of rising action towards an end point. This is emphasized by the way story elements iterate and repeat – somebody is perpetually being knocked out, kidnapped, pulling a tiny gun, emerging with a fake beard … Episodes don’t even have a set length, so you have no idea how far along you are. This open-ended accumulation can be frustrating, and it can be liberating.
Feuillade made these serials between 1913 and 1919, parallel to the development of the classic Hollywood feature film, exemplified by 1915’s The Birth of a Nation. Watching them now, they suggest paths not yet taken, an escape route. Who needs three acts and dramatic unity, when we could have multiplicity, fantastic realism and sudden snakes?
Les Vampires: La tête coupée (Feuillade, 1915)
Lev Kalman as the Invisible Man in Dream Team raw footage.
