Film Review
There are shades of
Fantômas (1913) in
Le Mystère des roches de Kador.
It's a similar kind of 'page-turner' thriller, well-paced, absorbing
and utterly grim in places, and yet it is directed not by Louis
Feuillade but by his associate at Gaumont, Léonce Perret.
There's a good chance that Feuillade was strongly influenced by
Perret's film when he started directing his thriller serials the
following year. Perret's extensive use of real locations for
exterior scenes and a penchant for deep focus photography certainly
have a Feuilladesque ring to them. By this time, still
early in his career, Perret had already emerged as one of Gaumont's
star directors, having directed over a hundred films and acted in
around fifty. Like Feuillade, he would play a crucial role in
popularising the new medium of cinema, whilst helping to develop the
language of a form of artistic expression that was still in its
infancy. Less productive than Feuillade, Perret brought more in
the way of artistry to his films and was one of the great pioneers of
the silent era.
Le Mystère des roches de Kador
was one of the first French films to make effective use of the raw
Brittany landscape, specifically its beautiful but strangely forbidding
coastline. The sequence in which the villain of the piece, Count
Fernand, stages the drowning of his niece Suzanne is cheekily
self-referential, as the villain is played by Léonce Perret
himself, who is, of course, also staging the entire sequence in his
capacity as the film's director. The self-referentialism is taken
one step further later on in the film when, in an attempt to bring
Suzanne out of a severe state of shock, a distinguished professor
arranges for her attempted drowning to be re-enacted by actors for a
therapeutic film. Not only do we witness the film being made - a
precise reconstruction of what we have already seen - but we also see
Suzanne watching it, projected on a screen. This could well be
cinema's first example of a 'film within a film', or at least a first
stab at what we now term 'metacinema'. The idea that watching a
film might have a therapeutic benefit was not Perret's but followed
from a theory put forward by Sigmund Freud.
This being a prestige production for Gaumont, it is fitting that the
part of the heroine should be played by the company's star actress,
Suzanne Grandais, who was not only discovered by Léonce Perret
(apparently as a performer at the Moulin Rouge) but also featured in
many of his films. The nineteen year old Grandais is captivating
here, as she was in all of her films, and you can see where she
acquired her likeness to Pearl White (of
Perils of Pauline fame) as she
narrowly evades death at the hands of the dastardly Count Léonce
Perret. As is typical of films of this era, the performances are
far from subtle, with most of the cast employing exaggerated gestures
and facial expressions to make up for their inability to express
themselves audibly. That said, Perret gives a convincing
portrayal of calculating evil - not a pantomime villain or two
dimensional monster, but a deeply flawed individual whose motives for
murder are readily apparent (greed and jealousy). You end up
almost sympathising with Count Perret as his well-planned scheme goes
horribly awry - thanks (ironically) to that infernal invention known as
cinema...
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Léonce Perret film:
Sur les rails (1912)
Film Synopsis
When the Marquis de Kéranic dies, he leaves his entire estate to
his niece Suzanne de Lormel. Under the terms of the will, Suzane
will only receive her inheritance on her eighteenth birthday and, if
she should die, go mad or enter a convent before this date, it will
pass to her cousin, Count Fernand de Kéranic. The latter
takes charge of Suzane's education at his house in Brittany, hoping
that he will one day be able to persuade her to marry him. With a
debtor threatening to ruin him, Count Fernand immediately asks Suzane
for her hand in marriage, but she refuses as she has already lost her
heart to a young military man, Jean D'Erquy. Desperation drives
the Count to drug his niece and place her unconscious body on the beach
near the Kador rocks. When the tide comes in, she will be drowned
and the Count will be a wealthy man - or so he thinks...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.