Figures de cire (1912) - film review

At a party one evening, Pierre and his friend Jacques get into a heated discussion about the nature of fear.  Rashly, Pierre accepts a bet from his friend that he can spend an entire night in any place, and he is undaunted when Jacques chooses a waxworks museum.  In a deserted gallery populated by immobile, sinister wax figures, the night passes slowly for Pierre, and he begins to feel afraid.  Then he sees a shadow of a man coming towards him.  Pierre attacks the ghostly vision with a dagger, not realising that it is Jacques, who has slipped into the museum to frighten him..  The next morning, Pierre has lost his mind, and the museum has gained another motionless body...

One of Maurice Tourneur’s earliest films, Figures de cire is an unsettling work which strangely prefigures his later, and probably best known, film, La Main du diable (1943).  The most memorable sequence from that later film is the enlarged shadow of a hand projected onto the back of the set, and Figures de cire uses shadow play just as effectively to convey a sense of unremitting terror in the mind of the character who sees it.  Tourneur’s use of shadows to suggest hidden menace pre-dates the German expressionists by a decade, and his later films (particularly those of the mid 1930s) have a stark visual style which relies on heavy use of shadows and which is recognisably film noir.

© James Travers 2008

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