Louis Feuillade

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Louis Jean Feuillade (born February 19, 1873 in Lunel ( Département Hérault ), † February 26, 1925 in Nice ) was a French film director during the silent era .

life and work

Louis Feuillade initially worked with his father and brother in the family's own wine shop. At the same time, he was literarily ambitious. In 1898 he went to Paris and worked in various journalistic activities.

His contact with film was initiated by Alice Guy , who commissioned him in 1905 to write screenplays for Gaumont . After her marriage to the later director and producer Herbert Blaché in 1907, Alice Guy went to New York and Louis Feuillade replaced her as artistic director at Gaumont. Feuillade held this position until his death - until 1918 in Paris, then in Nice - and made the film production company the second-largest French film studio after Pathé Frères with high-audience productions .

Feuillade became known in France with the series film series La vie telle qu'elle est (1911). He often shot with children and established them as series stars, including Clément Mary alias Bébé (more than 70 episodes, 1910-13) and René Poyen alias Bout-de-Zan (more than 50 episodes, 1912-16). He brought naturalness into the film and became the leading director of early French films , especially with his sequel films about criminals and detectives with a realistic (actually more pre-surrealistic) background .

Scene from Fantômas  (1913)

The series about the mysterious criminal Fantômas (5 episodes, 1913/14) with René Navarre in the lead role made the hero of the successful detective novel series even more popular. Feuillade then shot the ten-part series about the crime organization Les Vampires (1915/16), which thrilled the contemporary audience , not least because of the appearance of Musidora in a tight black full-body suit. With the actor René Cresté he cast the positive hero of the film series Judex , of which a sequel was filmed under the title La nouvelle mission de Judex (12 episodes, 1916/17). Cresté also appeared in other series films Feuillades: Tih Minh (12 episodes, 1918) and Vendémiaire (1918).

Musidora describes his working method as follows:

“Feuillade, always dynamic, chiseled the films, invented the scenario for the next day in the evening and used the exterior decorations according to taste and economic considerations: he selected streets, houses, wasteland with a rare intelligence. All of Paris arises in his films. "

- Musidora

Aftermath

The Surrealists saw in Feuillades Improvisations a counterpart to their écriture automatique and were so fascinated by his crime series that Max Jacob founded a "Société des Amis de Fantômas" , which the entire group immediately joined. The characters Fantômas and Irma Vep , the femme fatale and strategist of crime embodied by Musidora from the series Die Vampire , encounter in the collages by Max Ernst , poems by Paul Éluard and Robert Desnos (set to music by Kurt Weill ) and films by Jean Cocteau . The motif of transformation and disguise is omnipresent in surrealist film.

The Impressionist film school ( Delluc , Marcel L'Herbier , Gance ) abhorred Feuillades films, the directors of the late twenties soon regarded them as absurd and antiquated, and they were quickly forgotten by the public. Interest was only revived with the systematic collection of films by Henri Langlois from 1936 in the Cinémathèque française ; the performances since the 1940s made Feuillade's influence formative for the generation of Nouvelle Vague directors, especially Jacques Rivette and Alain Resnais ( “People say there is a Méliès tradition in the cinema, and a Lumière tradition: I believe there is also a Feuillade current, one which marvelously links the fantastic side of Méliès with the realism of Lumière, a current which creates mystery and evokes dreams by the use of the most banal elements of daily life. ” ).

Direct influences of the series can also be seen in directors as diverse as Fritz Lang (who had seen the Fantômas series in Paris before the First World War ), Alfred Hitchcock , Georges Franju ( Judex (1963) , Nuits rouges ) and Olivier Assayas ( Irma Vep ).

The media scientist Brandlmeier names film-language features: “[I] mage chock, déja vu, opalescent black tones, depth of field, deserted streets, threatening interiors, constant insect-like metamorphoses of people and things as well as technical catastrophe fantasy. Feuillade instinctively recognized and exploited the affinity of cinema to dreams, to the spiritual realm of shadows. ” He summarizes: “ Feuillade's ability to perceive the aesthetic necessities of the period is downright seismographic. It is a kind of cultural marshalling yard at the beginning of the 20th century. in his works the most advanced elements of fin de siècle culture find their way into the cinema. He separates the suitable from the unsuitable and sets the course without which film history would not have become what we know it to be. "

Filmography (selection)

Feuillade's filmography at imdb.com comprises (in February 2012) 649 titles, Lacassin currently offers the best overview and names a number of approx. 800 films between 1905 and 1925, which Feuillade directed.

The most important films and series:

literature

  • Thomas Brandlmeier: Fantômas - Contributions to the panic of the 20th century . Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-935843-72-0 .
  • Patrice Gauthier, Francis Lacassin: Louis Feuillade. Maître du cinéma popular. Gallimard, Paris 2006 (= Collection Découvertes Gallimard No 486). ISBN 2-07-031926-1 .
  • Vicky Callahan: Zones Of Anxiety. Movement, Musidora, And The Crime Serials Of Louis Feuillade. Wayne State Univ. Press, Detroit 2005. ISBN 0-8143-2855-5 .
  • Jacques Champreux, Alain Carou (cond.): Louis Feuillade. Revue 1895, hors série, octobre 2000.
  • Francis Lacassin: Louis Feuillade. Maître des lions et des vampires. Bordas, Paris 1995. ISBN 2-86311-271-6 .
  • Ute Wiegand (editor): Cinéma Muet. Materials on French silent films, part 2: Louis Feuillade - The fantastic realism. Film Institute of the State Capital Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf undated [1980].
  • Gilbert Lascault: Les Vampires de Louis Feuillade. Soeurs et Frères de l'Effroi . Editions Yellow Now, Crisnée 2008. ISBN 978-2-87340-230-3 .

Web links

Commons : Louis Feuillade  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from: Thomas Brandlmeier: Fantômas. Contributions to the panic of the 20th century. Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2007, p. 118.
  2. ^ Thomas Brandlmeier: Fantômas. Contributions to the panic of the 20th century. Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2007, p. 13. Interesting addition on p. 21: “Feuillade is a contemporary of Griffith, but aesthetically he is closer to David Lynch. His film »Erreur tragique« (1912) is like a warning to the viewer: a man sees his wife in the cinema on someone else's arm. The jealous one tries to murder her. When he finds out it's her brother, it's - almost - too late. The cinema as a dangerous game with reality that creates new, media-specific concepts. "
  3. ^ Thomas Brandlmeier: Fantômas. Contributions to the panic of the 20th century. Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2007, p. 33 f.
  4. ^ Francis Lacassin: Louis Feuillade. Maître des lions et des vampires. Bordas, Paris 1995, pp. 294-317.
  5. ↑ Complete holdings of films and documents in the Cinémathèque française and associated collections on Ciné-Ressources
  6. ↑ Program of the big Feuillade retrospective from March 1 to 13, 2006 ( Memento of the original from June 15, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the Cinémathèque française @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cinematheque.fr
personal data
SURNAME Feuillade, Louis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Feuillade, Louis Jean (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French film director
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Lunel ( Hérault department )
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 1925
Place of death Nice