One of the first true everlasting masterpieces in the history of cinema. Of those few films prior to 1920 that are now as attractive or even more attractive than 100 years ago, now that their narrative style is so different from the current one that it has to surprise us as much or more than to its contemporaries.
Fantômas may seem less technically innovative than The Birth of a Nation, which is filmed at that very moment or some months later: here there are none of those close-ups, nor those montage displays with which Griffith and so many pioneers created a new cinematic rhythm. But it is precisely that kind of minimalism, which so contrasts with the exuberance of the plot, that is so interesting to us. At Fantômas we realize how each shot responds to an intention and a director's choice. And of course, we find it infinitely more modern than any Griffith movie.
Fantomás is Feuillade's masterpiece, far superior to the currently best-known Les vampires (also a wonderful film). There is here a much greater artistic will, the planning of the sequences is much more ingenious, the atmosphere much more sinister and mysterious, the plots more interesting and the interpretation is infinitely superior (especially René Navarre as Fantomas, but in general the entire cast , which shows a measure totally removed from the histrionics unjustly associated with silent films, but which are so annoying in Griffith's cinema), the composition of shots much more suggestive. In addition, here you do not have to suffer the stupid comic moments of the unbearable Marcel Lévesque as Mazzamette in Les Vampires, or Georges Bicot in Tih Minh; here nobody make faces at the camera, and the characters move through the frame with ease and naturalness.
One aspect of Feuillade's style that seems essential to me is how he takes advantage of his own conventions to devise his most brilliant successes, to create beautiful moments of suspense.
For example, the viewer of Feuillade is used to those long still shots that always include a lot of information and where there is rarely an element that is not useful in the narrative. What can we think, therefore, in the room of the Bourrat pension where the young Elisabeth Dollon resides, of that huge wicker trunk that covers almost the entire lower right corner of the image? A trunk that is also large enough to hide a person.
The characters enter the room, pass by that trunk, look at it, turn their backs on it, sometimes open it. The scenes in the room follow one another, and as it usually happens with Feuillade, scene after scene, the shot is the same, and there is that trunk that we know at some point will serve a purpose.
Every time Elisabeth sits down to write with her back to that trunk, we hope that one of Fantômas's sinister hooded men will come out of it. But scene after scene, Feuillade deceives us. That huge trunk is useless.
It takes a quarter of an hour (and in Fantômas, a quarter of an hour is a long time and goes a long way) for us to know the function of that trunk; and in this case it is used by both the good and the bad: first the journalist Fandor hides in him when during his nocturnal investigations Fantomâs and his henchmen break into the room; and then Fantômas uses it to get all of Elisabeth's belongings out of the pension ... and poor Fandor as well.
But the trunk still stars in another scene, in this case one of the best shots of the entire series.
It is a general view of a room. The shot, unlike that of the pension, now shows an apparently empty room, with only one door. We see how the Fantômas team places the trunk in the middle of the room and leaves. There is a short shot of the hall so that we can see that they leave the apartment. Then we go back to the room. There is a difference that draws our attention in this shot, it is not pendicular to the back wall, but is directed at a corner of the room, so that we are aware that the frame has left an important part of the room out of the shot.
In detail, we see how Fandor cuts the side of the trunk with his knife to get out.
Again in the general view of the room we see how Fandor gets out of the trunk and sits on its lid.
It is a moment of relief, we think that Fandor is safe, since the criminals have left the apartment. Fandor calmly turns his gaze around him, looking at the entire space of the room to his left, in front of him (that is, behind the camera), without finding anything that bothers him, until turning his head completely to the right changes his expression. At the same time the camera makes one of the few very privileged movements that we will find in the film. And if Feuillade does not waste the smallest space in his frames, he does not waste the smallest reframing either.
That little movement of the camera uncovers Thomery's corpse, closing one of the several subplots of the film. And for greater filigree, we can understand now, if at first viewing we noticed, that gesture of Fantômas indicating something off-camera to his henchmen, when they deposited the trunk in the room.
It is a miracle that only three shots, the repeated general view of the room, a view of the hall when Fantômas's group enters and leaves the apartment, and a detail shot of the side of the trunk when Fandor cuts it with his knife, serve to create so much mystery and so much suspense.
Another prodigious moment in the film is the assassination attempt in the Paris sewers. One of those sinister shots that is repeated at various points in the film, always related to the criminal activity of Fantômas. A plane where everything is used again, the cat ladder that leads down to the Paris sewers from the basement of the criminal Toulouche's shop, the space where the missing corpse of the painter Dollon previously lay, the remains of the blood of the mutilated body on the ground, the tunnel through which the waters flow into the Seine in the background, where we see a very illuminated and inoffensive Parisian building and from where the scene is dimly lit. The film, with wonderful tints, bathes the shadows that move in the dark and that stand out against the sky of the enormous mouth with a bluish coloration.
Although this time there are few of the wonderful scenes shot outdoors (as always privileging them only makes them more interesting), there are mysterious investigations around the rooftops of Paris in the dark (in Les vampires, Feuillade will once again use the roofs of Paris), and a magnificent reunion on the banks of the Seine.
In short, a wonderful film, the best of the series (along with the second), and the masterpiece of one of the great masters of silent cinema. After three extraordinary films, the fourth and fifth are a very clear decline in quality.
Gaumont's restoration is impressive and includes an extraordinary soundtrack.
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