February 15: Les Vampires (1915 -- Louis Feuillade)

★★★★★

Lou and I watched Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade over several nights, an internet age way to enjoy this 1915-1916 silent serial.  While some of the elements here are outdated, if you grant this serial a little of its historical context, it’s fun and engaging.

The flat-out, fifth-gear story in all the episodes is one of the major reasons we can still enjoy Les Vampires some hundred years after it was made.  People die, dare and make so many spontaneous decisions that, though some moves are clearly telegraphed ahead, you often don’t foresee how an element will be used until it is actually exploited.  And throughout, we’re involved in what’s going to happen to Philipe, Mazamette, Philipe’s mother, Irma and whoever happens to be the Grand Vampire.  Accidents and unlikely coincidences prevent you from getting complacent since storylines and characters can cross at any moment and send the plot off in an unexpected direction.  The story is fun.

There’s also a no-holds-barred element to the violence and daring in the series that keeps the audience on edge.  The severed head of an inspector makes a sudden appearance in the first episode, setting up not only the ruthlessness of the Vampires but also an expectation in the audience that anything can happen.  And it does happen.  There’s a murder by hatpin, a gassing of the social elite of a city, the poisoning of an innocent and several accidental killings or killings of innocents.  The Vampires are not Buster Keaton bad guys; they are brutal and ruthless.  These episodes don’t dwell on violence and enjoy it the way today’s film does, but the blunt brutality here is affective in a different way.

There’s a modern element here, too, in this serial before the time that audiences and filmmakers had worked out movie conventions.  I was struck that characters sometimes look directly at the audience and even play to camera.  In the very beginning, Mazamette winks at us as he tries to wiggle out of being caught stealing some of Philipe’s material, and later in the same episode, the inspector does the same.  A kid mugs for the camera in one of the latter episodes, too.  Most of this breaking the illusion of the movie is done for comic purposes, which is comedy being its irreverent self.  Les Vampires also tosses in some self-referentiality.  Characters go to movies for fun several times, and on one trip, a character in Les Vampires appears as a real woman in a news reel, thus playing with several levels of realism.  Gestures like these have a very modern feeling to them.

There’s interest in the contemporaneity of Les Vampires, too.  Unless Feuillade mounts it on a car to get a chase scene or action shot, the cumbersome camera of 1915 stays rock still, yet Les Vampires manages to engage us.  And the special effects here recall those we see in later silents by the likes of Buster Keaton as we watch real people climbing real walls, gutters and ropes, making real effort in real time.  There’s a thrill in recognizing that Musidora is at one point lying under a real train that pulls out over top of her.  We also get a few peeks into the social environment of early 20^th century Paris.  We see that today’s Parisian suburbs were quite undeveloped at that time, and we get to experience the small boxes of a turn-of-the-century theater and to review the menu for a fancy bourgeois dinner.  And the historical context touches this serial in other ways, too.  Filming in the middle of WW I, Feuillade brings in gas, canons and terrorism.  And if we keep losing the Grand Vampire through the series, that’s partly because young men were being conscripted for the trenches.

Although this serial is far removed from us, it still holds elements of life that span the century and touch us.  French body language has apparently changed little since 1915; even today, a perplexed Frenchman will hunch his shoulder an say “bof” with exactly the same expression as we see Philipe do.  And Feuillade flounders in front of the same paradox as English poet Milton and many after him: Evil is more interesting and fun than good.  To see this contrast, one only has to consider the extravagant energy of Irma’s wedding to Venomous – with its fun spontaneity, irreverent games, creative play and passionate dance – with the boring affair that is Philipe’s marriage to Jane.  And that’s how the serial ends.  Irrepressible Irma will no longer wear her sleek signature tights, and the Vampires will no longer terrorize Paris.  But despite the triumph of law and order, something has been lost.