Fantômas Over Paris
These pieces are about what we see of Paris and its environs in the first four of Feuillade's adaptations of the Fantômas novels (see here and here). (Paris does not feature in the fifth and last of Feuillade's Fantômas films.)
I have learnt how to watch the Fantômas films from the writings of that feuilladiste extraordinaire David Bordwell. These pieces are simply footnotes to that body of work. I have used the UK, Artificial Eye dvd edition of the films, which is based on the earlier French edition from Gaumont. I am taking the intertitles of the Gaumont version to be part of the text, though I realise I should have found out how far they are authentic and how far they are informed reconstructions - this is particularly relevant insofar as they may have been informed by reference to the novels, when an element of what I discuss is the faithfulness of the films to the novels. Quotations from the novels are taken from Cranstoun Metcalfe's translations, available at Project Gutenberg, here. Summaries of the novels, alongside much other precious and entertaining information, can be found at The Fantômas Website. |
episode 1: 'Fantômas'
The narrative of the first film is organised around six different places: a palace hotel, an elegant suburban villa, a boulevard theatre, a prison and two apartments (a third apartment, overlooking the prison, I read as part of the prison locale). Insofar as we can situate these on the map (with some help from the adapted novel, and some creative conjecture), we can see that the narrative is spread across the city.
|
location 1: le Royal Palace Hôtel (8e arrondissement?)
My investigation of places in Feuillade's Fantômas cycle began well, with a location that for a long time I couldn't locate. All there was to go on was an orangerie-type building in the grounds of the hotel, a ground-level view of the hotel's entrance, and something of what was across the street:
That low building with six arched windows ought to be identifiable (it looks like an orangerie), even if the hotel itself offers little distinctive detail (four steps, at least three pillars).
The novel situates this hotel on the Champs Elysées, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, over which the Princesse is said to enjoy a superb view from her third-floor rooms. If this fictional hotel has a specific model in the real world it may well be the Palace Hôtel (sometimes called the Elysées Palace Hôtel), at 103 avenue des Champs Elysées. We can understand the impulse to modify the hotel's name, since it is shown to be susceptible to theft and murder, but any reader familiar with the names of hotels on the Champs Elysées would make a connection:
The novel situates this hotel on the Champs Elysées, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, over which the Princesse is said to enjoy a superb view from her third-floor rooms. If this fictional hotel has a specific model in the real world it may well be the Palace Hôtel (sometimes called the Elysées Palace Hôtel), at 103 avenue des Champs Elysées. We can understand the impulse to modify the hotel's name, since it is shown to be susceptible to theft and murder, but any reader familiar with the names of hotels on the Champs Elysées would make a connection:
We can see from these near-contemporary postcards that the place filmed by Feuillade is not this hotel. (There is a Royal Palace Hôtel on the place du Théâtre Français, near the Palais Royal, but it is not the place meant by the novel and not the place used by the film.)
Investigating the locations of two films made in 1964, I realised that the hotel we see in those films is the place that is called the Royal Palace Hotel in Fantômas:
I discuss the use of this hotel by Feuillade and then by Truffaut and Chabrol in a separate post, here.
The Hôtel Trianon Palace, in Versailles, was otherwise famous as the location for peace talks in 1919:
The Hôtel Trianon Palace, in Versailles, was otherwise famous as the location for peace talks in 1919:
location 2: chez Juve, '142 rue Bonaparte' (6e arrondissement)
Feuillade's films never give Juve's address, but the novels do. In their continuation beyond those used for the films, they make great play of the fact that Juve has to change address after Fantômas sets fire to his apartment at 142 rue Bonaparte, 6e. (The number is fictional, since the rue Bonaparte stops at 92.)
I conclude (perhaps tendentiously) that the films think Juve lives in the rue Bonaparte, from the premise that details of this kind are present enough in the minds of the spectators - who would have recently read the source novels - to be effectively present in the films. We shall see some instances where the films deviate from the novels in using different locations, but we shall only once see the films formally resituate an action in an identified place (in Le Mort qui tue).
The first film only shows the interior of Juve's apartment. By contrast with the luxurious suite occupied by Princesse Danidoff at the Royal Palace Hôtel, this is a step down in class and style, from aristocratic to bourgeois and from feminine to masculine:
Feuillade's films never give Juve's address, but the novels do. In their continuation beyond those used for the films, they make great play of the fact that Juve has to change address after Fantômas sets fire to his apartment at 142 rue Bonaparte, 6e. (The number is fictional, since the rue Bonaparte stops at 92.)
I conclude (perhaps tendentiously) that the films think Juve lives in the rue Bonaparte, from the premise that details of this kind are present enough in the minds of the spectators - who would have recently read the source novels - to be effectively present in the films. We shall see some instances where the films deviate from the novels in using different locations, but we shall only once see the films formally resituate an action in an identified place (in Le Mort qui tue).
The first film only shows the interior of Juve's apartment. By contrast with the luxurious suite occupied by Princesse Danidoff at the Royal Palace Hôtel, this is a step down in class and style, from aristocratic to bourgeois and from feminine to masculine:
In the second film, Juve contre Fantômas, we see the street outside Juve's apartment, a remarkably detail-less terrace of buildings that are not, certainly, on the rue Bonaparte:
location 3: a villa in Neuilly
In situating the villa of Lord and Lady Beltham in Neuilly, an elegant suburb north-west of Paris, Feuillade is faithful to the topography of the novel: 'They lived, and still live, in the boulevard Inkermann at Neuilly-sur-Seine, in a delightful house where they entertain a great deal.'
In situating the villa of Lord and Lady Beltham in Neuilly, an elegant suburb north-west of Paris, Feuillade is faithful to the topography of the novel: 'They lived, and still live, in the boulevard Inkermann at Neuilly-sur-Seine, in a delightful house where they entertain a great deal.'
Or rather, he is relatively faithful. The novel gives the address as the boulevard Inkermann:
But in the film, when Gurn gives Lady Beltham's address to his gaoler, an insert shows a notebook that reads: '24 boulevard Richard Wallace'. The boulevard Richard Wallace is not far from the boulevard Inkermann, running alongside the Bois de Boulogne in Neuilly and turning to cross the Seine into Puteaux. (The postcard below wrongly situates this part of the boulevard, since this is still Neuilly.)
From what we see of the exterior of the villa in the film, it looks to be of the same neo-Gothic type as the house in the second postcard, a house that had in fact belonged to Richard Wallace.
But Lady Beltham's villa is not Richard Wallace's house nor, indeed, any other in the vicinity. Francis Lacassin (Maître des Lions et des Vampires, p.144) tells us that the house filmed was Feullade's own, situated not in Neuilly but on the other side of Paris, in a small town called Villemomble. Local historian Sylviane Notaire writes here about Feuillade's use of this house, not only in Fantômas but also three years later in Judex:
In Juve contre Fantômas, we return to Lady Beltham's villa in Neuilly. We do not, however, return to Villemomble, at least not to the same house. The street outside, the gates, grounds and the house itself are not the same as in the first film:
I don't know where this second house is. Francis Lacassin refers to another Feuillade home, the 'Villa les Roses, rue de la paix, à Chelles' (Maître des Lions et des Vampires, p.67) - Chelles is just a few kilometres from Villemomble - and Sylviane Notaire mentions a residence at Le Raincy, a town immediately between Chelles and Villemomble. This may be one of those homes, but it could also be any villa anywhere. Perhaps it is even in Neuilly, as the film says it is, though we cannot of course believe everything the film tells us. If we did, I would know to give up trying to find this house, since in the climax to Juve contre Fantômas it was destroyed in a terrible explosion:
Neuilly returns in later Feuillade films (Judex, Parisette), signifying again a comfortable, seemingly safe haven just beyond the city's limits.
location 4: chez Gurn, '147 rue Levert', 20e
The number is a fiction, since the rue Levert only goes up to no. 39. This is a regular device in the novels, a means to give authenticity by the use of actual street names, without compromising anyone at a specific house on the street (see Juve's apartment in the rue Bonaparte, above).
The address is given four times in the film, but always in an insert or intertitle that has been added by the restorers. At Lady Beltham's villa, Juve sees a man's hat with the letter 'G' in the lining (it is Gurn's), then asks for her missing husband's address book; in it he finds Gurn's address. After he has left, Gurn emerges from hiding and writes a letter to a steamship company arranging for his luggage to be removed from the rue Levert and sent to South Africa. The letter is later shown by a man from the company to Juve, who has followed the trail to that address (he will find Lord Beltham's body in one of the trunks):
The number is a fiction, since the rue Levert only goes up to no. 39. This is a regular device in the novels, a means to give authenticity by the use of actual street names, without compromising anyone at a specific house on the street (see Juve's apartment in the rue Bonaparte, above).
The address is given four times in the film, but always in an insert or intertitle that has been added by the restorers. At Lady Beltham's villa, Juve sees a man's hat with the letter 'G' in the lining (it is Gurn's), then asks for her missing husband's address book; in it he finds Gurn's address. After he has left, Gurn emerges from hiding and writes a letter to a steamship company arranging for his luggage to be removed from the rue Levert and sent to South Africa. The letter is later shown by a man from the company to Juve, who has followed the trail to that address (he will find Lord Beltham's body in one of the trunks):
This is an exclusively interior location, constructed in the studio at the cité Elgé (quite close, in fact, to the rue Levert) , but in the virtual topography of the film we are taken across Paris from the refined elegance of the villa in Neuilly to the more urban ethos of Gurn's bachelor apartment. Like the earlier movement from the Royal Palace Hôtel to the rue Bonaparte, this is a step down in class and style, from aristocratic to bourgeois:
There are similarities between the residences of the aristocrats Princesse Danidoff and Lady Beltham, and so too are there similarities between the apartments of Juve and Gurn (who is of course Fantômas). Both men have leather armchairs, for example - in fact I'm sure that it is the same armchair in both settings.
(The above is from the end of the film, with Juve in his own apartment again, his home invaded by a vision of his arch-enemy. In the novel L'Evadée de Saint Lazare, published a year before the first film premiered, Juve appropriates for himself an apartment vacated by Fantômas.)
location 5: la prison de La Santé, 14e
The prison to which Gurn is taken is the most developed location in the film, involving seven different places: the street outside the prison, two prison cells, a corridor linking them, the prison office, the site of the guillotine and an apartment overlooking that site.
The two shots of the exterior differ from the exteriors of the Paris hotel and the Neuilly villa in purporting to be a real and recognisable place:
The prison to which Gurn is taken is the most developed location in the film, involving seven different places: the street outside the prison, two prison cells, a corridor linking them, the prison office, the site of the guillotine and an apartment overlooking that site.
The two shots of the exterior differ from the exteriors of the Paris hotel and the Neuilly villa in purporting to be a real and recognisable place:
This looks much like three of the four streets surrounding the prison (it couldn't be the fourth, the boulevard Arago, which is tree-lined), but the brickwork doesn't correspond to the distinctive burrstone construction of the prison's walls, seen here in Man Ray's Etoile de mer (1928), Marc Allégret's Zouzou (1934), Claude Heymann's Victor (1951) and Jacques Rivette's Paris s'en va (1981):
The wall in Fantômas is a different wall entirely, probably not even that of a prison (it seems too low). My guess is that this is a cemetery wall (perhaps the rue Ganneron in Montmartre, or the rue des Rondeaux near the Père Lachaise).
Like the Gare de Lyon in Juve contre Fantômas or the Palais de Justice in Le Mort qui tue, the Prison de la Santé setting brings the film's fiction into a real world that is known and documented, even if it is not the actual prison that we see. The name creates that reality effect, regardless of whether settings are real or constructed.
Feuillade's film offers a view through the apartment window of the guillotine. This is a studio construction, building on earlier execution scenes, as in Zecca's Histoire d'un crime or Méliès's Les Incendiaires:
Like the Gare de Lyon in Juve contre Fantômas or the Palais de Justice in Le Mort qui tue, the Prison de la Santé setting brings the film's fiction into a real world that is known and documented, even if it is not the actual prison that we see. The name creates that reality effect, regardless of whether settings are real or constructed.
Feuillade's film offers a view through the apartment window of the guillotine. This is a studio construction, building on earlier execution scenes, as in Zecca's Histoire d'un crime or Méliès's Les Incendiaires:
This sensationalist staging also makes a connection with a documented real world. Public executions only began at La Santé in August 1909, so that the dénouement of the novel, published in February 1911, had had great actualité. Even closer to the premiere of the film, on May 9th 1913, was the execution at La Santé on April 23rd of three members of the Bonnot gang, bank-robbing murderers with anarchist associations.
These executions, like the execution about to take place in the film version of Fantômas, were conducted in the street outside the prison walls. What we see through that window is supposed to be the boulevard Arago, viewed from an apartment across the street (at 'no. 96').
These executions, like the execution about to take place in the film version of Fantômas, were conducted in the street outside the prison walls. What we see through that window is supposed to be the boulevard Arago, viewed from an apartment across the street (at 'no. 96').
Here, from January 1912, is the report of the execution of Arthur Renard, who had killed a policeman on the boulevard Sebastopol in August 1910. The photograph shows the guillotine on the pavement of the boulevard Arago, a ground-level version of the view enjoyed by Gurn and Lady Beltham: |
Feuillade's account of this room with a view departs from the novel, firstly by changing the address of the apartment from the rue Messier to the boulevard Arago itself. He does without an involved passage of business between Valgrand and his dresser around the exact location:
'"This rue Messier. Look it up in the directory."
Valgrand stamped impatiently up and down the room while Charlot hurriedly turned over the pages of the directory, muttering the syllables at the top of each as he ran through them in alphabetical order.
"J ... K ... L ... M ... Ma ... Me ...--Why, M. Valgrand…."
"What's the matter?"
"Why, it is the street where the prison is!"
"The Santé? Where Gurn is - in the condemned cell?" Valgrand cocked his hat rakishly on one side. "And I have an assignation at the prison?"
"Not exactly, but not far off: right opposite; yes, number 22 must be right opposite."
"Right opposite the prison!" Valgrand exclaimed gaily. "The choice of the spot, and the desire to see me in my costume as Gurn, are evidence of a positive refinement in sensation! See? The lady, and I - the counterpart of Gurn - and, right opposite, the real Gurn in his cell! Quick, man: my cloak! My cane!"'
Feuillade also changes the appearance of the apartment Lady Beltham has rented for the assignation:
'Number 22 rue Messier was a wretched one-storeyed house that belonged to a country vine-dresser who seldom came to Paris. It was damp, dirty, and dilapidated, and would have had to be rebuilt from top to bottom if it were to be rendered habitable. There had been a long succession of so-called tenants of this hovel, shady, disreputable people who, for the most part, left without paying any rent, the landlord being only too glad if occasionally they left behind them a little miserable furniture or worn out kitchen utensils. He was finding it ever more difficult to let the wretched house, and for weeks together it had remained unoccupied. […]
In the principal room, on the first floor of this hovel, a little poor furniture had been put; a shabby sofa, an equally shabby arm-chair, a few cane-bottomed chairs, and a deal table. On the table was a tea-pot, a small kettle over a spirit-stove, and a few cups and small cakes. A smoky lamp shed a dim light over this depressing interior, and a handful of coal was smouldering in the cracked grate.'
And here, in these miserable surroundings, Lady Beltham was installed on this eighteenth of December.'
Though less lavish than her villa in Neuilly, the surroundings in which Feuillade has placed Lady Beltham are far from miserable. The operative contrast here is, rather, with the bare cell in which Gurn is held and in which Valgrand will be installed. An earlier sequence, where the corrupt prison guard goes to Lady Beltham's villa, had established the terms of that contrast.
'"This rue Messier. Look it up in the directory."
Valgrand stamped impatiently up and down the room while Charlot hurriedly turned over the pages of the directory, muttering the syllables at the top of each as he ran through them in alphabetical order.
"J ... K ... L ... M ... Ma ... Me ...--Why, M. Valgrand…."
"What's the matter?"
"Why, it is the street where the prison is!"
"The Santé? Where Gurn is - in the condemned cell?" Valgrand cocked his hat rakishly on one side. "And I have an assignation at the prison?"
"Not exactly, but not far off: right opposite; yes, number 22 must be right opposite."
"Right opposite the prison!" Valgrand exclaimed gaily. "The choice of the spot, and the desire to see me in my costume as Gurn, are evidence of a positive refinement in sensation! See? The lady, and I - the counterpart of Gurn - and, right opposite, the real Gurn in his cell! Quick, man: my cloak! My cane!"'
Feuillade also changes the appearance of the apartment Lady Beltham has rented for the assignation:
'Number 22 rue Messier was a wretched one-storeyed house that belonged to a country vine-dresser who seldom came to Paris. It was damp, dirty, and dilapidated, and would have had to be rebuilt from top to bottom if it were to be rendered habitable. There had been a long succession of so-called tenants of this hovel, shady, disreputable people who, for the most part, left without paying any rent, the landlord being only too glad if occasionally they left behind them a little miserable furniture or worn out kitchen utensils. He was finding it ever more difficult to let the wretched house, and for weeks together it had remained unoccupied. […]
In the principal room, on the first floor of this hovel, a little poor furniture had been put; a shabby sofa, an equally shabby arm-chair, a few cane-bottomed chairs, and a deal table. On the table was a tea-pot, a small kettle over a spirit-stove, and a few cups and small cakes. A smoky lamp shed a dim light over this depressing interior, and a handful of coal was smouldering in the cracked grate.'
And here, in these miserable surroundings, Lady Beltham was installed on this eighteenth of December.'
Though less lavish than her villa in Neuilly, the surroundings in which Feuillade has placed Lady Beltham are far from miserable. The operative contrast here is, rather, with the bare cell in which Gurn is held and in which Valgrand will be installed. An earlier sequence, where the corrupt prison guard goes to Lady Beltham's villa, had established the terms of that contrast.
(As a sign that the boulevard Arago apartment is a home-from-home for Lady Beltham, she seems to have brought with her the table from her salon in Neuilly.)
The four other places associated with the prison are all within its walls. Three are contiguous: the cell occupied by Gurn, an unoccupied cell next door and the corridor outside. The cells are appropriately bare, with basic furnishings, in contrast to those over-dressed interiors in which Fantômas has appeared in the course of the film, chez la Princesse Danidoff and chez Lady Beltham, or with his own more modest but still comfortable apartment, rue Levert.
These two cells, numbered 127 and 128, are in fact the same profilmic space, slightly adjusted to suggest occupancy or not. It might be surprising to find the same space used to represent two different places in the same film, but with cells in the same prison the point is of course that these places will be uniform in appearance. Here, from two later films, are two similar cells (numbered 28 and 29) in the Dépôt at the Palais de Justice:
We shouldn't be surprised, in fact, to find the same spaces recurring across Feuillade's work (see the Villemomble villa in Fantômas and Judex, discussed above), or indeed (as we shall see) across Gaumont productions more generally. This is due in part to economic exigencies, affecting both exteriors (on location) and interiors (in the studio). The latter, especially, are constructed from a reserve of décor elements that can create an impression of recurring spaces. Here, for example, is the same Modern Style wallpaper in two different places, a family-run boarding house in Auteuil (Le Mort qui tue) and a 'discreet little hotel in the banlieue' (Fantômas contre Fantômas):
Similarly, the corridor in the Prison de la Santé shares décor elements not only with the corridor of the Dépôt at the Palais de Justice but also with the corridor outside Fantômas's cell when he is in the prison at Louvain, in Belgium (Le Faux Magistrat), and with the Dépot when it appears in Les Vampires two years later:
The last place within the prison walls at La Santé is the clerk's office, where the film reaches its dramatic dénouement (the discovery that Gurn has been replaced with the actor Valgrand, who is saved by Juve at the last minute from being executed in error). Following immediately the sequence with Gurn and Lady Beltham looking through the apartment window onto the guillotine, expecting to see Valgrand, the space of the clerk's office is organised in a similar way, even if the set is deeper, with a window at the rear through which Valgrand can be seen as he is brought from the cells to the office:
The unfolding of this climactic sequence illustrates well how Feuillade's organisation of cinematic space is not just a matter of arranging the décor, indeed is as much or more a matter of arranging bodies within that décor (as David Bordwell has often demonstrated, e.g. here and here).
location 6: le théâtre du Grand Tréteau
Juve's revelation that 'this man is not Fantômas' is a genuine 'coup de théâtre', aptly, since a theatre has served as spatial counterpoint to the carceral spectacle staged in this second half of the film. 'Le Théâtre du Grand Tréteau' is an invented name that echoes the Tréteau Royal, a café-théâtre on the rue Caumartin that had opened in 1907 (Colette had acted there in a play by Sacha Guitry).
Three different areas of the 'Grand Tréteau' are shown: the dressing room of the actor Valgrand; the stage door, with the street outside; and the stage, with the auditorium and a private box.
The dressing room, even when not crowded with bodies, is crowded with décor, contrasting again with the bareness of the La Santé prison cell (to which the unwitting Valgrand will be taken):
Three different areas of the 'Grand Tréteau' are shown: the dressing room of the actor Valgrand; the stage door, with the street outside; and the stage, with the auditorium and a private box.
The dressing room, even when not crowded with bodies, is crowded with décor, contrasting again with the bareness of the La Santé prison cell (to which the unwitting Valgrand will be taken):
When Valgrand leaves for the assignation that will bring him within minutes of being executed, we get two exterior views, a glimpse through the stage door of a fence across the street, and a longer shot of the pavement alongside the building:
The second view should be the one that enables us to identify the location filmed, but actually it is the first that does so. The fence looks very much like what can be seen today on the rue Caulaincourt as it begins to cross over the cimetière de Montmartre:
Here is Bernadette Lafont crossing that street, then going down an alley into a building opposite (spied on by Jean-Pierre Léaud), in Jacques Rivette's Feuilladian Out 1, from 1971:
There may be many other streets in Paris with similar fencing, but none would be in so pertinent a location. The building Bernadette Lafont goes into is a cinema, two years before its demolition in 1973. In 1931 that building had replaced the one from which Valgrand emerges in Feuillade's film, on his way from the theatre to a rendez-vous with death. The 'Théâtre du Grand Tréteau' is in fact the biggest cinema in the world at that time, the Gaumont Palace:
The rue Caulaincourt is the one on the right of the postcard.
Built in 1899 for the 1900 Exposition, the Hippodrome, as it was originally known, became a permanent cinema in 1911 when it was bought and converted by Léon Gaumont.
Built in 1899 for the 1900 Exposition, the Hippodrome, as it was originally known, became a permanent cinema in 1911 when it was bought and converted by Léon Gaumont.
Various parts of the Palace served as locations for Gaumont productions. Here is Onésime on the roof (which is supposed to be the roof of the Opéra):
Here is the entrance to the cinema, from Les Vampires ('Le Spectre'):
Here is, to the left, Onésime climbing down from the building just behind the Palace (with a view that includes the fencing we see in Fantômas) and, to the right, from Judex, a view from that building's fifth-floor balcony:
Since Feuillade has used the vicinity of the Gaumont Palace to represent the vicinity of the Théâtre du Grand Tréteau, we might expect the stage and auditorium of the theatre to be represented by those of the cinema, but we can see here that this is not the same place:
The theatre space in Fantômas appears in other films. Here, in two different episodes of Les Vampires, it is used first as a theatre ('La Bague qui tue') and then as a cinema ('Les Yeux qui fascinent'):
Here it is in Jean Durand's Onésime débute au théâtre, from the same year as Fantômas:
We can tell that this space is a studio construction because its constituent parts wobble or collapse as Onésime is chased through it:
In Onésime débute au théâtre this is supposed to be the Opéra Garnier:
In Fantômas, as the Théâtre du Grand Tréteau, it is a more modest, boulevard-type theatre, the kind that would stage sensationalist melodramas like 'La Tache sanglante' ,'The Bloody Stain', the play in which Valgrand is appearing as a Gurn-like murderer awaiting execution. (He is not actually playing Gurn, but has modelled his costume and makeup on a photograph of him.)
Durand's film breaks up the space with changing camera positions and angles, each time to best capture Onésime's gestures, leaps and pratfalls. Feuillade's use of the same space is confined to a single axis but is nonetheless more complex. As David Bordwell has pointed out, Feuillade contrasts theatrical and cinematic performance in this setting. Valgrand's histrionics, embedded in a proscenium frame deep in the set, are a literal mise-en-abyme of Renée Carl's performance as Lady Beltham:
Durand's film breaks up the space with changing camera positions and angles, each time to best capture Onésime's gestures, leaps and pratfalls. Feuillade's use of the same space is confined to a single axis but is nonetheless more complex. As David Bordwell has pointed out, Feuillade contrasts theatrical and cinematic performance in this setting. Valgrand's histrionics, embedded in a proscenium frame deep in the set, are a literal mise-en-abyme of Renée Carl's performance as Lady Beltham:
In Les Vampires ('La Bague qui tue'), Feuillade does the same thing, in the same space, when the Grand Vampire is at a performance of a ballet called 'Les Vampires'. Here the contrast is not so much between acting styles as between different ways of being a vampire, between Marfa's elaborate but ineffectual display and the Grand Vampire's imperceptible but deadly act, the poisoning of Marfa:
The situation here is similar, in that the stage performance alludes to the action of the film by which it is framed, but there are also striking differences.
In Fantômas the main contrast is between two styles of acting (filmic and theatrical), in Les Vampires it is between two kinds of representation (film and ballet).
In Fantômas there are only two views in this three-shot sequence, the view from within Lady Beltham's loge and a view from about same distance but a slightly different angle, showing just the auditorium and stage:
In Fantômas the main contrast is between two styles of acting (filmic and theatrical), in Les Vampires it is between two kinds of representation (film and ballet).
In Fantômas there are only two views in this three-shot sequence, the view from within Lady Beltham's loge and a view from about same distance but a slightly different angle, showing just the auditorium and stage:
In Les Vampires there is this same view from the loge, and the same slight displacement of the axis for the view of the stage, but the stage in all is shown from five different points along that axis. Here are the eight shots that make up this sequence:
The camera moves progressively into the space of the stage, then out a stop, then even further in for the close up and then progressively out, back to the starting point. We meet read this as invasive scrutiny, but the care taken in the editing to match the cuts to the dancer's movements suggests something more consensual, as if to show that the camera is at home in this space, as able to render the ballet as it is to render the unchoreographed collapse of its star. The space is of course a studio, the camera's natural home.
The space is probed in Les Vampires because the film is curious about the performance going on there. Though the theatre scenes in the two films are both inter-medial mises-en-abyme, the thing that is different from the film that frames it in Les Vampires is stranger than in Fantômas. The ballet in Les Vampires is a poetic reimagining of the activities of the eponymous criminals - they don't fly around like bats - whereas the elements of the performance in Fantômas are all derived from the world of the film. Valgrand's appearance is based exactly on a photograph of Gurn, and the stage décor around him is a replica of the cell Gurn occupies:
Ironically, the pose in the photograph is un-Gurn-like, as if in adopting it Gurn was anticipating Valgrand's appropriation of his image. There is irony, certainly, in Valgrand's unconscious mimicry of Gurn's position at the table, since Valgrand is expressing despair at this point, whereas, having just corrupted the prison guard, Gurn here is triumphant. Actually, at this point I should be saying not 'Gurn' but René Navarre, since Feuillade is contrasting how a condemned man is played by two different actors - one theatrical, the other cinematic; one fictional, the other real. And then we have to implicate the real actor Henri Volbert (apparently a noted mime), who plays Valgrand, remembering also the character (whose name we don't know) that Valgrand is playing in 'La Tache sanglante'. At the other end of the scale we must acknowledge that in the fiction Gurn is just one of many characters - Chaleck, Loupart, le père Moche, Tom Bob - played by Fantômas (whoever he is).
There is irony again, later, when Valgrand is put into Gurn's cell and we see him point to the door as he had done on stage:
There is irony again, later, when Valgrand is put into Gurn's cell and we see him point to the door as he had done on stage:
The matching of poses and gestures between the film and the play embedded in the film, the contrasts of performance style between stage actor and film actor, the added intermediality of the photograph, the framing through the window of the guillotine as spectacle... all these make of this last section of the first Fantômas film a powerful reflection on the cinema as medium, a sustained self-reflexivity of a kind little seen in the cinema hitherto. There is nothing like it in the other four Fantômas films, but later in Les Vampires Feuillade will develop this abyssal reflexivity to the full - through theatrical ballet, of course, as we have seen, but also through a varied array of other intermedial mises-en abyme: spiritualist séance, phonographic recording, actualité film, cabaret performance, poster, painting, caricature, photograph, mirror, map, codebook, newspaper article, literary fable, reminiscences of the Napoleonic wars...
There is also a reference to newsreel, which is not exactly inter-medial, but the news cameraman appears along with print reporters to interview Mazamette, so that his report, presumably for Gaumont Actualités (founded in 1910), would be not just generically different from the film in which reference to it is embedded. The episode that ends with this reference had included earlier a more fully intra-medial mise-en-abyme, when Mazamette and Guérande go to the cinema, in which the immediacy and veracity of the actualités are deconstructed. This happens in a space analogous to the intermedial space of Fantômas - the same curtain is used in the theatre and the cinema - but we also see the auditorium and the cinema foyer (with strategically placed posters for other Gaumont productions - Poirier's Le Nid and Feuillade's l'Expiation):
Elizabeth Ezra has summarised the abyssal qualities of the episode ('Les Yeux qui fascinent') in which this sequence occurs:
'But this episode also suggests that there is another kind of eye with a similar capacity to objectify those on whom it fixes its gaze: that of the movie camera. Immediately after the scene in which Moréno hypnotizes his housekeeper, we see Philippe and Mazamette seated in a cinema. They are watching a newsreel entitled L’Assassinat du Notaire, L’Enquête dans la Forêt de Fontainebleau / The Murder of the Notary, and Investigation in the Fontainebleau Forest. The illusion of a film is created by means of live actors on a stage before the cinema audience, surrounded by a rectangular frame, meant to be the screen. In a mise-en-abyme effect, in which we see an audience watching people who are themselves engaged in looking at something, the audience sees a small group of people, including Irma Vep in male drag, intently examining the ground beneath them. We learn that the vampire gang, returning to the scene of their most recent crime to remove any incriminating evidence, has been caught on camera by a roving news reporter. A movie camera then makes a second appearance at the end of the episode, brandished by one of the journalists who are interviewing Mazamette in his home after he has been given a big reward for solving a crime.'
('The Case of the Phantom Fetish: Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires', Screen 47.2 (2006) p.207.)
Ezra goes on to analyse at length the remarkably strange narrative structure of this episode as a whole, but there is more to be said about the reflexivity of the scene at the cinema.
'But this episode also suggests that there is another kind of eye with a similar capacity to objectify those on whom it fixes its gaze: that of the movie camera. Immediately after the scene in which Moréno hypnotizes his housekeeper, we see Philippe and Mazamette seated in a cinema. They are watching a newsreel entitled L’Assassinat du Notaire, L’Enquête dans la Forêt de Fontainebleau / The Murder of the Notary, and Investigation in the Fontainebleau Forest. The illusion of a film is created by means of live actors on a stage before the cinema audience, surrounded by a rectangular frame, meant to be the screen. In a mise-en-abyme effect, in which we see an audience watching people who are themselves engaged in looking at something, the audience sees a small group of people, including Irma Vep in male drag, intently examining the ground beneath them. We learn that the vampire gang, returning to the scene of their most recent crime to remove any incriminating evidence, has been caught on camera by a roving news reporter. A movie camera then makes a second appearance at the end of the episode, brandished by one of the journalists who are interviewing Mazamette in his home after he has been given a big reward for solving a crime.'
('The Case of the Phantom Fetish: Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires', Screen 47.2 (2006) p.207.)
Ezra goes on to analyse at length the remarkably strange narrative structure of this episode as a whole, but there is more to be said about the reflexivity of the scene at the cinema.
Four years before Feuillade had illustrated just how sophisticated the abyssal inscription of film within film could be, when in L'Erreur tragique a protagonist in a Paris cinema watches a comedy (starring Onésime) in which he sees his wife arm in arm with another man:
It is possible that live performers inside a screen-like frame were used to simulate cinema in Les Vampires for technical or economic reasons, but it is not possible that audiences would not have read this as a simulation, as a joke, possibly, about the truth-telling capacities of actualités. The response of Mazamette and Guérande on recognising Irma Vep and the Grand Vampire among the figures on the screen is near hysterical, as if the Vampires were actually there, which in reality they are but in the fiction are not:
After failing to induce the same panic in other audience members (this is not the mythical audience of a Lumière train film), Mazamette and Guérande are ejected from the cinema. The film continues with them reading the film they have seen 'properly', as evidence that the Vampires can be found near Fontainebleau, and the episode can pass on from this metatextual moment.
I have digressed at this length regarding Feuilladian mise-en-abyme because these other examples highlight by contrast the specificity of the abyssal apparatus in the first Fantômas film. To give one last instance: the audience response figured above can easily be identified with the familiar responses of real audiences such as those who find themselves watching Les Vampires. On the other hand, Lady Beltham's reluctance even to turn her gaze towards the stage on which Valgrand is mimicking her lover is an entirely alien type of response, inconceivable in a cinema audience. Even the husband in L'Erreur tragique, who like Lady Beltham has a personal investment in the spectacle on offer, must keep his gaze fixed on the screen:
(To note in passing: the peculiar intensity of the husband's gaze is figured with remarkable economy by Feuillade. When the lights go out all we can see is the screen and the white collars of the men in the audience. If we have paid proper attention to where the husband sits we can know which collar is his and can see, by the movement of that patch of white in the dark, when he stands up and moves closer to the screen.)
The cinema space in L'Erreur tragique is not the same as the theatre space in Fantômas (or in Onésime débute au théâtre or Les Vampires), though as studio constructions these spaces are all in the same place, the Cité Elgé (see here for a discussion of this place in relation to other Gaumont films):
The cinema space in L'Erreur tragique is not the same as the theatre space in Fantômas (or in Onésime débute au théâtre or Les Vampires), though as studio constructions these spaces are all in the same place, the Cité Elgé (see here for a discussion of this place in relation to other Gaumont films):
I shall return to this place, among many others, in posts on the next four films in the series.
Juve contre Fantômas... 'bientôt sur cet écran': see here.
Juve contre Fantômas... 'bientôt sur cet écran': see here.
References
The postcards used as illustrations were found on collector sites such as CPArama and delcampe.net
- Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes To Town: French Cinema 1896-1914 (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1994)
- David Bordwell, 'La Nouvelle Mission de Feuillade; or, What Was Mise-en-Scène?', Velvet Light Trap 37 (1996)
- David Bordwell, 'Feuillade, or Storytelling', in Figures Traced in Light (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)
- David Bordwell, 'How to watch Fantômas, and why' (November 2010): here
- Vicki Callahan, 'The Fantômas series: Cinematic Vision and the Test of "Immediate Certainty"', in Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005)
- Elizabeth Ezra, 'The Case of the Phantom Fetish: Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires', Screen 47.2 (2006)
- Christophe Gauthier, 'Fantômas' - Cours de cinéma au Forum des Images (2007)
- Tom Gunning, 'A Tale of Two Prologues: Actors and Roles, Detectives and Disguises in Fantômas, Film and Novel', Velvet Light Trap 37 (1996)
- Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, maître des lions et des vampires (Paris: Bordas, 1995)
- Alain Masson, 'Le Paris de Louis Feuillade', Forum des Images
The postcards used as illustrations were found on collector sites such as CPArama and delcampe.net