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University of Kent / ARTS STUDIO
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Fantômas (1913) Louis Feuillade
Dr Frances Guerin
Fantômas is the turn-of-the-century equivalent of a soap opera, with five
one-hour episodes that don’t connect story-wise but have the same
characters. The Fantômas films were made before narrative was
standardised in cinema but after cause and effect narratives had been
around for a few years in the US.
As a film, or films, Fantômas still retains all the elements that so excited
audiences when the cinema first came to life in the early twentieth century.
This means students are able to enjoy the films, as well as have their
minds opened up to the possibility of alternative forms of cinema. In
particular, students appreciate the vast possibility of a cinema that doesn’t
demand a coherent, stable, or predictable viewing position. Thus,
Feuillade brings the otherwise ‘strangeness’ of silent and early cinema into
the student’s world.
And because Fantômas is filled with intrigue, suspense, shifting
identities, incompetent institutions (such as the police, the press), crimes
against rich people, jokes, impossible scenarios (that we nevertheless get
caught up in), students not only remain enveloped in the drama, but they
acquire critical insight into the uncertainties of the social fabric of pre-First
World War urban France.