Louis Feuillade: A Sampling of a Master

I'm going to miss it all, unfortunately, but the Museum of Modern Art in New York is featuring films from one of my favorite pioneers:

Louis Feuillade (1874–1925), a French filmmaker who wrote and directed approximately 800 shorts, features, and serials in his eighteen-year career, was a pioneer of narrative film. Together with his contemporary in America, D.W. Griffith, Feuillade developed a language for the modern art of the moving image. Feuillade’s cinema transcended the conventions of the proscenium stage; he exchanged theatrical artifice for both realism and the freedom of open-air shooting. As a journalist, he recognized cinema’s potential for storytelling and reportage. In 1905, he met Alice Guy, head of production at Gaumont. Within a year, he became Gaumont’s principal director. In addition to short social dramas, chase films, comedies, and popular series with the precocious child characters Bébé and Bout de Zan, he made mysteries that later evolved into fantastic serials like Fantômas (1913), Les Vampires (1915), Judex (1917), and Tih Minh (1919); shot on locations throughout France, they thrilled the Surrealists with their sense of menace and embrace of modern technology. The exhibition opens in February with four programs of shorts and feature films, and continues through June with four serials, shown one per month.

I've been watching a chapter of Judex every other night the past week, and while it doesn't quite equal Les Vampires, it's still an engaging work, one that has a jaded, 21st Century man wondering, at the end of each chapter, "What happens next?"