The birth of the crime drama

A name that seems to get lost in the silent directors canon today is the french filmmaker, Louis Feuillade, who hands down, made the greatest and most ridiculously captivating and entertaining films prior to the world knowing the names Chaplin, Griffith, Murnau or Eisenstein.

For someone looking to get more in to early cinema, I actually believe the films of Louis Feuillade are a great place to go if you’ve struggled before with other movies from the silent era. They’re extremely easy to digest, they’re absolutely suspenseful and keep you on the edge of your seat and despite the bulky length, they’re serialized in to shorter episodes, making it much easier to start and stop at your own pace, as if it were a TV show.

Fantômas, along with Feuillade’s most well-known film, Les Vampires (1915), is one of the earliest crime dramas ever made and it’s just so interesting to see the birth of this genre and it’s conventions play out before your eyes, consisting of plot twists and turns, the game of cat and mouse between the police and criminals each one step ahead of each other, buddy cop and police procedural, all here in its glory. Would Fritz Lang have made Dr. Mabuse or M Or Alfred Hitchcock during the silent era with The Lodger if not for these films?

Considering this is still early cinema, with the camera rarely moving and sticking to one place and having virtually no crazy, revolutionary Potemkin level editing, it’s still a genuine achievement in filmmaking for 1913 standards, not just in terms of it’s scope, it’s characters and it’s story but it’s length, because even Griffith, who would go on to make the lengthy works that are The Birth Of A Nation and Intolerance, was still making films of incredibly short length during this time. Whereas those films had a lot of substance in the stories they were trying to tell, this is just pure entertainment and suspense from beginning to end, playing out as if it were a pulp crime novel, which makes sense because that’s where the character of Fantômas first originated.