Notre-Dame de Paris (1911)
Directed by Albert Capellani

Film Review

Within a few years of its initial publication in 1831, Victor Hugo's Notre-dame de Paris (known to the English-speaking world as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) founds its way into popular culture in a series of operas, ballets and plays based on the famous literary work.  Its adaptations for the big and small screen are legion and include a Disney version which, surprisingly, does not gloss over the darker aspects of Hugo's sordid tale of lust and depravity.  Albert Capellani's Notre-Dame de Paris (1911) is the earliest surviving film version, one in a series of impressive adaptations of important works of literature that Capellani undertook in his capacity as artistic director of Pathé's recently created subsidiary Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres (S.C.A.G.L.).

As he had done on his earlier adaptation of Émile Zola's L'Assommoir (1909), Capellani takes a lengthy tome (this time a novel running to just under a thousand pages) and turns it into a compelling film narrative that is remarkably faithful to the original work and yet drastically compressed.  By concentrating on the four principal characters in the story and discarding all of the secondary storylines, the film retains the essence of Hugo's popular novel, in spite of the fact that its runtime is a mere 36 minutes.  This was the first time that cinema had taken on the challenge of visualising the plot of Notre-Dame de Paris in its entirety, although Alice Guy and Victorin Jasset had directed an earlier short film, Esméralda (1905) (now lost), featuring two characters from the novel, Quasimodo and Esmeralda, played by Henry Vorins and Denise Becker.

Capellani's film was an extraordinary achievement for its time and helped raise his profile on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was massively overshadowed by the blockbuster American version The Hunchback of Notre Dame made by Universal Studios in 1923, directed by Wallace Worsley and starring Lon Chaney in one of his signature roles, Quasimodo.  Charles Laughton played the hunchback to great acclaim in the first sound film adaptation, another lavish production from RKO in 1939.  These American films tended to dwell heavily on the more patently horrific elements of Hugo's classic tale, and it wasn't until Jean Delannoy's 1956 Notre-Dame de Paris (the first colour version) that cinema audiences had a serious character-centric dramatisation of the novel, along the lines of Albert Capellani's 1911 film.

As befits the somewhat Grand Guignol nature of the subject matter, the film shows a marked departure from the stark realism of Capellani's earlier literary adaptations and pioneering attempts at social drama.  In both its set designs and acting style, there is a readily discernible foretaste of the bold expressionism of early German cinema.  Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) may well have been influenced by the film, the central villains of both of these horror masterpieces bearing more than a passing resemblance to Henry Krauss's attention-grabbing portrayal of Quasimodo.  Despite the heavy make-up and convincing display of extreme physical deformity, Krauss's portrayal has more heart-wrenching pathos than genuine menace, and it is hard not to sympathise with the crookbacked, knock-kneed pariah as he is exploited by the real villain of the piece - the monstrously hypocritical archdeacon Frollo - and savagely ridiculed by the mob.  Here we have the beginning of a long trend in cinema in which the advertised monster turns out to be far less monstrous than the society from which he is permanently excluded and which ultimately drives him to destruction - a stark metaphor for the tribalistic intolerance towards 'the other' that has blighted the entirety of human history.

Just as impactful is Stacia Napierkowska's mesmerising portrayal of Esmeralda, the archetypal noble heroine who alone can see the tortured soul within the monstrous exterior of the deformed bell-ringer.  Before becoming an actress Napierkowska had pursued an impressive career as a dancer, performing at such prestigious venues as the Folies Bergère in Paris.  She began appearing in films in 1908, most notably opposite the comedy superstar Max Linder in many of his films from 1910 to 1913.  She shows up in a dozen of Capellani's films but is probably best remembered for her prominent roles in Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires (1915) and Jacques Feyder's L'Atlantide (1921), which make effective use of her overpowering charisma and electrifying sensuality.  As the gutsy Esmeralda taking a heroic stand against the cruelties and injustices of her era, Napierkowska creates a solid template for the free-spirited modern screen heroine.  By contrast, Claude Garry's Archdeacon Frollo is irredeemably vile, the kind of morally depraved, self-serving cad that became another mainstay of popular cinema of the 1920s and '30s.  Frollo's dramatic death at the hands of Quasimodo right at the end of the film is the most horrific thing the film has to show us, but the character is so deserving of his fate that audiences would most likely have relished his brutal demise, perhaps even cheering at the comeuppance of such an immoral fiend.

Running to three reels, Notre-Dame de Paris represents a significant step in the transition from the short to the feature-length drama, in which Capellani's role cannot be overstated.  Across the director's shorter films from 1905 to 1910 there is a clear trend towards increasing narrative complexity, paving the way for his epic dramas Les Misérables (1913) and Germinal (1913), the films that helped to establish the feature as the dominant format in modern cinema.  Crucial in this progression was the need to break away from the approach to film drama that was prevalent in this period, namely single-shot tableaux in which actors would perform whole scenes in front of a fixed camera as if they were performing in a conventional stage play.

Capellani's pioneering innovations with scene transitions and continuity-editing would break the connection between theatre and early cinema and effectively establish the conventions on which modern cinema is based.  One way he does this is by linking shots in such a natural way that the audience scarcely notices the break between them.  Notre-Dame de Paris offers a supreme example of this, with a shot set in an inn showing Esmeralda and Phoebus embracing one another immediately followed by one located in the street outside the inn.  For the latter, the couple's embrace is visibly seen through a window by Frollo, whose reaction is all too predictable.  The shift in perspective - from that of a disinterested onlooker on the inside to that of the lusting archdeacon on the outside - is more apparent than the change in location.  Other examples of continuity of action across multiple shots can be found throughout the film, which no doubt explains why it is such a compelling, smoothly flowing work, despite the length of the shots and the primitiveness of the editing techniques employed.

Capellani's other marked break from theatrical convention was to extend the ways by which his actors enter and leave the frame.  Many of the director's contemporaries were happy to stick with the tradition whereby actors enter the set from the left or right, as they would do in a stage production via the wings.  In Capellani's films, it is is just as likely that an entrance will be made in the middle of the frame, through a door or from behind a piece of scenery centrally placed.  Actors also enter and exit a shot from the bottom or top of the frame.  The most spectacular example of this is Frollo's dramatic demise.  After Quasimodo throws him off a cathedral balcony, the unfortunate archdeacon disappears through the bottom of the frame.  There is a short pause and then a cut to the cathedral steps.  There is another brief pause and then Frollo's body suddenly comes crashing down from the top of the frame.  Such is the sheer shock-value of what we have seen that the cut is scarcely noticeable, and there is just enough of a gap between seeing Frollo fall from the balcony and the sight of him hitting the ground for the gruesome reality of the situation to hit home - with an almighty thud.  This is conceivably the most brazenly violent ending seen in any film up until this point, a real audience shocker.  Is this what set the whole horror bandwagon in motion, catering for an audience's insatiable thirst for nightmarish fiends, grisly killings and jolting thrills?  If so, Albert Capellani has a lot to answer for.

Film Synopsis

Paris, 1482.  In the streets of the capital, the common folk are enthralled by the sight of the beautiful gypsy girl Esmeralda as she performs exotic dances for their entertainment and for the few meagre coins they offer her in return.  One day, whilst dancing in the atrium of Notre-Dame Cathedral Esmeralda attracts the attention of the cathedral's supposedly virtuous archdeacon, Claude Frollo.  So strong is Frollo's attraction for the nubile young woman that he immediately abandons his experiments in alchemy and yields to an obsessive desire to possess her.  He does not yet know that he has a determined rival in Phoebus de Châteaupers, a handsome city guard who is as powerfully drawn to Esmeralda as she is to him.  Consumed with desire, Frollo orders his deformed bell-ringer, the deaf and mute hunchback Quasimodo, to kidnap Esmeralda and take her to the cathedral.  The attempt is thwarted by Phoebus, with the result that Quasimodo is arrested and publicly humiliated in the pillory.  The only person who is moved by the hunchback's plight is Esmeralda, who sees not a deformed monster but a poor soul in torment.

Now lovers, Phoebus and Esmeralda arrange to meet in secret at a quiet inn, but Frollo sees them together and stabs the guard to death in a violent tussle.  The archdeacon promptly denounces the gypsy girl as the killer and she is arrested, tried and sentenced to death.  Quasimodo repays the kindness the gypsy girl once showed him in the pillory by coming to her rescue and whisking her away to his den in the North Tower of the cathedral. Violating the holy sanctuary of Notre-Dame, Frollo leads the city guards to Esmeralda and she is taken away to be hanged before a milling throng.  In a wild delirium of rage, Quasimodo seizes the wicked archdeacon and hurls him to his death on the steps of the cathedral.