Fantômas

Feuillade's legendary Fantômas cycle, based on pulp novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, comprises five episodes, each divided into between three and six chapters: Fantômas (54 min), Juve versus Fantômas (59 min), The Death Which Kills (90 min), Fantômas versus Fantômas (59 min) and The False Magistrate (70 min). All of them concern the unending duel of wits between Inspector Juve of the Sûreté (Bréon) and the protean jewel thief Fantômas (Navarre), a master of disguise who exults in wrecking a train or dynamiting a villa to eliminate individual enemies. Because Feuillade filmed mostly on the streets of Paris and, melodramatic climaxes aside, got broadly naturalistic performances from his actors, his best work is the only cinema from the 1910s which still feels startlingly immediate and 'real'. And because he rooted the magical, the dangerous and the perverse in the everyday, he not only fathered the Lang-Hitchcock-Lynch current in cinema but also predicted a century of moral mazes, art terrorism and justified paranoia. The French DVD release offers Jacques Champreux' 1998 restoration (with captions to summarise lost footage), plus clips from a 1966 Franju interview with the elderly Marcel Allain.