His aura does not shine as bright as that of Méliès or the Lumière brothers, yet Louis Feuillade (1873-1925) is considered by historians of the 7th 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 into 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.

Upon his death, the local press would dedicate 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.

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. La Tare, a film by Louis Feuillade, is 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 as artistic director 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. “Bulimic for work, 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.

In May 1913, 80,000 spectators rushed to the Gaumont-Palace to follow the adventures of the masked criminal, hero of the serial novel by Souvestre and Allain, Fantômas. “Audiences are fascinated by violent and fantastical stories,” says 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! »

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 him 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 adventure film with episodes, The Mysteries of New York. »

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, consecrates her 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. “She is this close link between the poetry of Feuillade’s cinema and popular cinema, the meeting 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 whatever comes to mind is made to 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-Noël Grando, Fantômas falls 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.)