Film Review: Les Vampires (1915 - 1916)

In the first two decades of cinema, two French companies – Pathé and Gaumont – dominated the global market that would later be taken over by Hollywood. This was due to those studios being the first to be founded, but also their willingness to experiment with the new medium, which included new genres, techniques and new forms of films. Among the filmmakers that contributed to that, one of the best known is Louis Feuillade, a director who, like most of his colleagues during the period, began with short films before switching to the longer form of serial films. The best known among those is Les Vampires, a 10-part serial produced by Gaumont and originally released between 1915 and 1916, which is today considered one of the most influential films of the silent era.

Despite the title that suggests supernatural or gothic horror, Les Vampires belongs to the crime genre. Feuillade, who also wrote the script, actually found inspiration in some of the real-life events and personalities that had caught the attention of the French public and sensationalists in previous years. The first were "Apaches", Parisian street gangs with a specific subculture, and another was the Bonnot Gang, a small group of militant anarchists whose violent exploits featured the first use of motor cars and similar wonders of new technology. The protagonist, played by Édouard Mathé, is Philippe Guérande, a reporter for the Paris Chronicle who investigates the mysterious and vicious "Apaches" gang known as the Vampires. The plot begins when Guérande learns about the discovery of a decapitated corpse belonging to a police inspector who also investigated the Vampires. He travels to the scene of the crime and gets subjected to a campaign of intimidation by the Vampires and later gets captured by them. There he finds out that one of the Vampires happens to be Oscar-Cloud Mazamette (played by Marcel Lévesque), one of his colleagues from the newspaper. Mazamette decides to turn against the Vampires, set him free and becomes his trusted sidekick. Guérande tracks down the Vampires towards their popular hangout, the "Howling Cat" nightclub, where he meets Irma Vep (played by Musidora), a beautiful singer who is actually the most dangerous member of the gang and Guérande's sworn enemy. Things get further complicated with the arrival of Juan-José Moreno (played by Fernand Herrmann), an Argentine businessman who is actually a professional criminal who uses his hypnotic skills to set up his own gang that would rival the Vampires.

Les Vampires wasn't the first serial in Feuillade's career. A year earlier, he directed Fantômas, an adaptation of popular crime novels by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre in the form of five feature-length episodes. The episodes of Les Vampires were shorter, ranging from 15 to 60 minutes, and the total running time of the serial was over six hours. The budget given by Gaumont was actually rather low, and Feuillade during production had to employ all kinds of clever schemes to save money and shoot the film very quickly. Another difficulty during production was caused by the still ongoing First World War, which led to some of Feuillade's most valuable collaborators being mobilised into the French Army and forced Feuillade to make films with less experienced cast and crew.

Even with some of those difficulties taken into account, Les Vampires is unlikely to make an especially positive impression on an audience unwilling or unable to put it in its proper historical context. Apart from the obvious limitations, like the lack of colour and sound, a modern audience will see Feuillade's style as stale and limited. Feuillade, mostly because of expediency, made the film almost entirely in static shots with only a few close-ups to emphasise certain details. This also meant that the style of the acting was, like with most early silent films, over-theatrical. The only scenes where Feuillade did more than a solid job were the action scenes, which featured good stunts and some special effects that were quite decent for their time.

What Feuillade did very well in Les Vampires was the script. The plot is extremely complicated with plenty of different characters and numerous twists, but it is nevertheless easy to follow because each of the episodes, although connected to each other, makes a coherent whole. Unlike in most silent serials, the episodes of Les Vampires didn't end with a cliffhanger. Feuillade also had a very good cast at his disposal. Édouard Mathé is more than solid as the protagonist, and Marcel Lévesque functions well as his sidekick and something of a comic relief. But the most impressive part of the cast is Musidora, an actress whose character of Irma Vep appears for the first time in the third episode and ends as the most memorable. Musidora, whose character often has to deceive and seduce people or use impersonation, acts very well and functions as a formidable "Vamp" or the stereotype of femme fatale that was popular in silent films. Even better are her action scenes, with Musidora, who was a trained acrobat, performing all of her stunts. The dark cat burglar suit she uses in some of her scenes makes Irma Vep one of the most iconic characters in the history of French cinema.

Les Vampires turned out to be a great success in French cinemas, which could be attributed to Gaumont's effective marketing campaign and also to the French people's desire for simple escapist fun that would make them forget the bloody and seemingly unending war. Critics, on the other hand, weren't enthusiastic. Many attacked Feuillade for his lack of stylistic or technical innovations, while some complained about the film being about crime. Many critics were as snobbish then as they are today, and the idea of a new medium being used for something that looked like an exploitation genre looked insulting. Feuillade also had to deal with politicians who considered the depiction of criminals as omnipotent and "cool" like Irma Vep to be a celebration and endorsement of crime. Because of that, Les Vampires barely escaped censorship. Feuillade tried to respond to critics in Judex, his next serial, in which the protagonist happened to be a reformed criminal using masks and colourful sidekicks to fight crime. Some French intellectuals and artists, namely poets André Breton and Louis Aragon, liked the film. In the 1920s, Les Vampires influenced other filmmakers, most notably Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, who would use its themes and narrative technique to further develop the genre of the modern crime thriller. The film remained highly respected and referenced by many future filmmakers. One of them is Olivier Assayas who, in 1996, paid it homage with Irma Vep, a semi-satirical film starring Maggie Cheung about a fictional modern remake; the same film in 2022 received a Netflix-produced remake in the form of a miniseries starring Alicia Vikander.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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