The Eyes That Fascinate

The Fantômas series of 1913–14 represented something completely new. In five films, Feuillade adapted the first few of the thirty-two-novel series by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, which galvanized the entire nation when it started appearing in 1911. Indifferently written, absurdly and sometimes incoherently plotted, the books managed to kindle the imaginations of just about everyone, from laborers to the avant-garde. Fantômas was the very genius of crime, the manifestation of evil, virtually the Antichrist, who staged his epic misdeeds—making Métro cars vanish, stripping the gold from the dome of the Invalides, causing a chandelier to fall on the customers of the most fashionable department store, where he had filled the perfume dispensers with sulfuric acid—to pursue some aesthetic satisfaction rather than for mere material gain. Feuillade could not hope to replicate such effects, but what he could do was situate the stories in a real, recognizable environment: the streets of La Villette, the aerial Métro from La Chapelle to Pigalle, the wine depot at Bercy, where he staged an elaborate gun battle among the casks (Lacassin notes that Feuillade’s father was a wine wholesaler).

Meanwhile Feuillade went right back to making baby pictures, sentimental comedies, and patriotic dramas until, in the spring of 1915, he was called to the front. Four months into his term (he was assigned to a cinematographic detail) he suffered a heart attack and was sent home. During this period of convalescence, the Paris movie world was shaken to its foundations by the tumultuous success of an American serial film, The Perils of Pauline, starring Pearl White, which led French producers to recut an earlier White vehicle that they named Mysteries of New York. Their effort proved even more wildly popular. Gaumont needed to respond, so Feuillade was instructed to make a serial. His script for Les Vampires has survived, much of it in the form of a chronological list of settings with one- or two-sentence descriptions of what takes place in each one. But he apparently left no notes or correspondence accounting for how he came to create an entire dense world, with three-dimensional characters and a thorough grounding in verisimilitude, that is haunted by an operatic succession of crimes.

Musidora, the star of Feuillade’s movie, spent much of her later life arguing that she, not “La Bara,” deserved to be remembered as the first and most enduring vamp. She was born Jeanne Roques in Paris in 1889; her father was a composer and a socialist theoretician; her mother, a painter and a pioneering feminist. As an adolescent she renamed herself “Musidora” after the heroine of Théophile Gautier’s 1837 novel Fortunio; the name means “gift of the Muses.” She took to the stage early and enjoyed her first success in a 1908 revue alongside her lifelong friend, the future novelist Colette. Not long after that, a critic was able to discern, in a Folies Bergères revue, that Musidora was “adorable in her intelligent perversity,” and it was on another such occasion that she was spotted by Feuillade, who initially offered her the part of the Virgin Mary in a film to be shot in Palestine. That idea was scotched, but they went on to make eighteen pictures together before Les Vampires; he called her Musi.

It was a cinch that the Surrealists would make her an icon; André Breton and Louis Aragon even wrote her a play. In 1916, she played a very different but equally dark role in Judex, which went on to be Feuillade’s biggest success. She made ten more movies with Feuillade, but when that era ended after 1917, her career slacked off; she collaborated with others on six more pictures before quitting in 1925. She also, however, appeared in her own movies, directing ten films, the last of which came out in 1950. She wrote screenplays for others, as well as novels, poems, stories, and songs, even illustrating some of her own work; she directed and acted in the theater and wrote twenty-six plays. Her last job, as of 1946, was as director of information services and press relations at the Cinémathèque française.

All of this somehow coheres into a singular spectacle, which exudes a kind of perfume that mesmerizes and immerses the viewer in its patient rhythm. True, the picture does have its longueurs, notably around the middle when Feuillade begins to engage in overplotting. You sense that the best parts of the movie were basically improvised, or maybe Musidora just makes them feel that way. Certainly Feuillade was not hampered by a master plan; when the first actor cast as the Great Vampire was consistently late on the set, Feuillade simply had Musidora shoot his character in the last scene, then told him to clear out his locker. This time around, the authorities were fully alert to the public menace posed by the picture’s arrant disregard for order and authority, and the Police Prefect, Louis Lépine, moved to ban screenings nationwide. Gaumont and Feuillade appealed and pleaded to no effect until finally, in desperation, they sent Musidora to talk to him. She gave him the “jobs” argument—a serial employs a great many people—and the nationalist one: would he prefer that the Americans rake in all of France’s movie money? She won the day: Lépine unbanned Les Vampires.