4. Les Vampires (1915)

France 440m Silent BW

Director : Louis Feuillade

Screenplay: Louis Feuillade

Music: Robert Israel

Cast: Musidora, Edouard Mathe, Marcel Levesque, Jean Ayme, Fernard Herrmann, Stacia Napierkowska

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Louis Feuillade’s legendary opus has been cited as a landmark movie serial, a precursor of the deep-focus aesthetic later advanced by Jean Renoir and Orson Welles, and a close cousin to the surrealist movement, but its strongest relationship is to the development of the movie thriller. Segmented into ten loosely connected parts that lack cliffhanger endings, vary widely in length, and were released at regular intervals, Les Vampires falls somewhere between a film series and a film serial. The convoluted, often inconsistent plot centers on a flamboyant gang of Parisian criminals, the Vampires, and their dauntless opponent, the reporter Philippe Guerande (Edouard Mathe).

The Vampires, masters of disguise who often dress in black hoods and leotards while carrying out their crimes, are led by four successive “Grand Vampires”, each killed off in turn, each faithfully served by the vampish Irma Vep (her name an anagram of Vampire), who constitutes the heart and soul not only of the Vampires but also of Les Vampires itself. Portrayed with voluptuous vitality by Musidora, who became a star as a result, Irma is the film’s most attractive character, clearly surpassing the pallid hero Guerande and his hammy comic sidekick Mazamette (Marcel Levesque). Her charisma underctas the film’s good-versus-evil theme and contributes to its somewhat amoral tone, reinforced by the way the good guys and the bad guys often use the same duplicitus methods and by the disturbingly ferocious slaughter of the Vampires at the end.

Much like the detective story and the haunted-house thriller, Les Vampires creates a sturdy-looking world of bourgeois order while also undermining it. The thick floors and walls of each chateau and hotel become porous with trap doors and secret panels. Massive fireplaces serve as thoroughfares for assassins and thieves, who scurry over Paris rooftops and shimmy up and down drainpipes like monkeys. Taxicabs bristle with stowaways on their roofs and disclose false doors to eject fugitives into convenient manholes. At one point, the hero unsuspectingly sticks his head out the window of his upper-story apartment, only to be looped around the neck by a wire snare wielded from below; he is yanked down to the street, bundled into a large basket, and whisked off by a taxi in less time than it takes to say “Irma Vep!”. In another scene, a wall with a fireplace opens up to disgorge a large cannon, which slides to the window and lobs shells into a nearby cabaret.

Reinforcing this atmosphere of capricious stability, the plot is built around a series of tour de force reversals, involving deceptive appearances on both sides of the law: “dead” characters come to life, pillars of society (a priest, a judge, a policeman) turn out to be Vampires, and Vampires are revealed to be law enforcers operating in disguise. It is Feuillade’s ability to create, on an extensive and imaginative scale, a double world-at once weighty and dreamlike, recognizably familiar and excitingly strange-that is of central importance to the evolution of the movie thriller and marks him as a major pioneer of the form.

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Information

Internet Movie Database (IMdb)

Wikipedia Article

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RapidShare Links

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http://rapidshare.com/files/51622404/Les_Vampires_1915_E10.part3.rar

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This article was written by Martin Rubin and is included in the book “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die” (Ed. S. J. Schneider)

Copyright © 2006 Quintet Publishing Ltd

~ by kostasg82 on November 25, 2008.