Le Mystère des roches de Kador (1912)
Directed by Léonce Perret

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...

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...