Review of The Vampires or, The Arch Criminals of Paris (1915) by Mike M — 09 Dec 2010

There would be other, more prominent, more successful serials in the cinema's formative years, but something was very definitely stirring in Feuillade's ten-part effort, stretching over the course of 1915: the beginnings of sustained, long-form cinematic storytelling, as evinced by the manner in which running times for individual instalments gradually push north of thirty minutes towards the hour mark.

This is the work of a filmmaker who finds himself with more to do and to show than the modular form allows him - who clearly wants to make blockbusters rather than shorts... Viewed today, it's primitive and vaguely repetitious (the middle segments, as the running time and cast of characters expands, get especially ploddy - as would so many blockbuster sequels that followed), but still possessed of the capacity to surprise and even thrill.

(The concluding parts, in which producers Gaumont evidently bequeath Feuillade a budget to get off the studio lot, go wild, with characters jumping onto moving trains - no CGI here, of course - and abseiling down buildings.

) You could probably rattle through the box set in a weekend, and spot how its influence came to spread far and wide - on Lang, who similarly made his rogue banker Mabuse a master of disguise; on Olivier Assayas, who named his "Irma Vep" after Musidora's feline villainess; hell, even on another cat, Zeta Jones, slinking under laserbeams in very Musidorean skintight latex in "Entrapment", which - like it or not - was exactly the kind of cinema Feuillade brought into being here.