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French films
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In this early short film, Georges Méliès uses his extraordinary range of talents to create a work of art which is both entertaining and, for its time, a huge technical achievement. This is Méliès’ first attempt at making a film with the narrative structure of a play and should be considered as the earliest example of the kind of plotted film we are familiar...
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Georges Méliès’ most famous film, Le Voyage dans la lune, is perhaps the best example of his remarkable imagination, artistic genius and talent as a film-maker. Not only did he write, direct and produce the film, he also had a hand in designing the sets and costumes. Although it may appear naïve and fanciful by today’s standards...
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In this hilarious short film, Georges Méliès shows his talent both as a lithe comic performer and as a master of the cinematic art of his day. Méliès uses the technique of multiple exposure (which he invented and used repeatedly in his films) almost to its limit – exposing the film no less than seven times to allow himself to appear seven times in the same...
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L’Assassinat du duc de Guise is a film of immense historic importance. One of the first films to use the narrative form, it proved to be an immense international success for its production company, Film d’Art, and, by dint of its popularity, helped to propel cinema from its early pioneering endeavours into a respectable and commercially viable industry...
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For this, one of his later films, Georges Méliès revisits the career that earned his reputation before he turned to filmmaking, that of the stage conjuror. Much of the film is taken up with an elaborate conjuring trick, with Méliès (playing the part of the diabolical lodger) pulling an improbable assortment of large objects out of a small travelling bag...
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As artistic director of the Gaumont film company, Louis Feuillade was keen to capitalise on the success of the Fantômas series of novels, written by Pierre Souvestre et Marcel Allain. These novels were a world-wide phenomenon in their day, their readership extending far beyond France, with 32 complete novels published between 1910 and Souvestre’s death on the eve of World War...
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The second instalment in Louis Feuillade’s five-part Fantômas serial sees a substantial shift towards the more familiar action thriller, making this a spectacular contrast to the first film in the series. Although perhaps less atmospheric and menacing than the first film, Juve contre Fantômas has other pleasures...
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Le Mort qui tue is the third, and in some ways the most sophisticated, of the five Fantômas films by Louis Feuillade. Not only is it an exemplary silent film for its time, it is also a masterpiece of suspense and intrigue, possibly the earliest example of what we would recognise today as the suspense thriller, or the true French polar...
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The plot thickens with this, the fourth instalment in Feuillade’s epic Fantômas cycle, based on the popular novels of Souvestre et Allain. Juve and Fantômas are suspected of being one in the same man (which is quite plausible given Juve’s clever subterfuge in the previous Fantômas film). Later the real Fantômas (or is it Juve after all?) sets up a fund...
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After the huge success of the Fantômas serial between 1913 and 1914, Gaumont were more than eager to produce another serial, mainly to fend off competition from the rival French film company Pathé (which had just acquired the rights to an American serial, Les Mystères de New York). Louis Feuillade delivered a crime serial in a similar vein...
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El Dorado was one of first popular successes for the avant-garde French director Marcel L’Herbier, who went on to make some of the finest films of the silent era (most famously his 1929 masterpiece, L’Argent). Despite its comparative obscurity, El Dorado is a mesmerising work and ought to be considered as one of the best examples of early French cinema...
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Jean Renoir, one of the greatest figures in French cinema, began his film-making career with this poignant little melodrama, an obscure film which deserves wider appreciation. Renoir’s multiple talents are revealed by the fact that not only did he co-direct the film, with Albert Dieudonné, but he also co-authored the script and produced it (with money inherited from his father’s...
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This extraordinary early film from director René Clair was originally made to fill an interval between two acts of Francis Picabia’s new ballet, Relâche, at the Théâtre des Champs- Elysées in Paris in 1924. Picabia famously wrote a synopsis for the film on one sheet of note paper, headed Maxim’s (the famous Parisian restaurant)...
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Although much has been written about L'Inhumaine's status as a showcase for 1920s avant garde art, this is true primarily for only the first half of the film. In reality, L'Inhumaine could be said to be two films in one, somewhat clumsily joined at the hip. The first half is indeed something of an artistic canvas which seemingly flaunts Cubist set design for its own sake...
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Jean Renoir’s first full length film, La Fille de l’eau, is an improbable yet compelling melange of melodrama, neo-realism, farce and surrealism. Although the film oscillates from one extreme to the other, between high drama and light comedy, between naturalistic and highly stylised photography, it manages to captivate its audience with its typically Renoir-esque blend of romantic...
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Of the numerous film adaptations of Victor Hugo’s celebrated work, Henri Fescourt’s four and a half hour epic is reputed to be the finest, remaining doggedly faithful to the original novel in terms of both content and atmosphere. The film is divided into four parts: (1) L’Évasion de Jean Valjean...
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Although lacking the maturity and stature of other silent films of the period, Paris qui dort is nonetheless one of the most important films in the history of French cinema. It is the first film of the great French film director, René Clair, and also - although it was not seen as such at the time – the first ever science-fiction movie...
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The 1925 version of Poil de carotte was Julien Duvivier’s first notable success. Although less well-known and far less regarded than his subsequent sound films of the 1930s and ’40s, this, the finest of Duvivier’s silent films, reveals a young filmmaker of immense talent and is a work of acute poetry and poignancy. The darker aspects that we see in the director's later films...
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Of the small handful of films which the great surrealist artist Man Ray made in the 1920s, Emak-Bakia is arguably the one which adheres most closely to the principles of Dadaist surrealism. It is also perhaps the most baffling of Man Ray’s films, involving some of his most extraordinary abstract visual imagery, with far less recognisable images than his other films...
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Jean Renoir’s second full-length film is this lavish and fairly faithful adaptation of Emile Zola’s classic novel, Nana. The film’s extravagances include spacious, overly decorated sets and two magnificent set pieces – a horse race and an open air ball (complete with a stunningly choreographed cancan sequence)...
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