The best French films of the 1910s

In the years before the First World War, French companies dominated cinema. Pathé and Gaumont made, distributed and showed films around the world, and the film serial, the screen comedian and the crime thriller all took shape in Paris. The war broke that lead: studios lost their staff to the front, and Hollywood took over the world market. The films below show both the confidence of the early years and the darker mood of the war.

Fantômas (Louis Feuillade, 1913-1914)

Five feature-length episodes about a master criminal who can be anyone, and the detective Juve who hunts him. Feuillade shot in the real streets of Paris, and the mix of everyday city and impossible crime fascinated the surrealists.

Les Misérables (Albert Capellani, 1913)

Capellani was Pathé's great director of literary adaptations, and his long version of Victor Hugo's novel was one of the most ambitious films of its time. He also directed Germinal (1913), from Zola.

Max Linder's comedies (1910s)

Max Linder, the elegant, moustached gentleman of dozens of Pathé shorts, was the first international film comedian. Charlie Chaplin called him his teacher. His shorts, often only ten minutes long, are still funny.

Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915-1916)

Ten episodes about a gang of Paris criminals, with Musidora as Irma Vep in a black bodysuit. Made quickly and cheaply during the war, it is Feuillade's masterpiece and an ancestor of the modern thriller.

Judex (Louis Feuillade, 1916)

After the criticism of Les Vampires for glamorising crime, Feuillade made a serial whose hero is a masked avenger on the side of justice. It is more moral and less wild, but beautifully filmed.

Mater Dolorosa (Abel Gance, 1917)

A melodrama about a doctor's wife and a secret, in which the young Gance began to use lighting and close-ups to express emotion. It was a great popular success.

La Dixième Symphonie (Abel Gance, 1918)

A composer writes a symphony out of his private grief. Gance tries to show music in images, an idea he would push further in the next decade.

J'accuse (Abel Gance, 1919)

Gance's anti-war epic, made as the war ended, with a famous final sequence in which the dead rise from the battlefield. Some of the dead were played by real soldiers on leave, many of whom were later killed.

Where to go next

The decade's experiments lead directly to the 1920s, when French filmmakers turned cinema into an art of the avant-garde. See the best French films of the 1920s, with Napoléon and L'Argent, and our short history of French cinema.