Almost from cinema's beginning, recurring characters were popular with filmmakers and theatergoers alike. With the actor's persona—Chaplin's Tramp, for example—clearly established before the film had even begun, audiences knew what to expect and could make their choices with some confidence. Directors meanwhile could dispense with character exposition, which ate up precious film time, and get right to the action. And theater owners, who drove the development of film much more than people realize, knew they'd have a box office hit on their hands.

The progression from films featuring recurring characters to films with interlinked stories that starred those characters was a natural one, and the concept was as old as the serialized fiction that was sold in magazines, one chapter per issue, in the nineteenth century.

'Serials extended one story line through a dozen or more chapters,' Daniel Eagan wrote in America's Film Legacy, 'much like the daily and weekly comic strips that were growing in popularity around the turn of the twentieth century. A film that didn't end but continued on, that required viewers to return to theaters to find out what happened next, seemed like a gold mine to producers and exhibitors.'

Typically, any given chapter of a film serial would feature plenty of action, and end with the hero (actually, almost always the heroine) in danger, with their predicament not resolved until the next episode. In fact, so often was the heroine left hanging by her fingernails from a cliff at the end of a given episode, the term 'cliffhanger' came to mean a suspenseful situation left unresolved at the story's end.

Unless you want to count the multi-part Passion Play produced in 1903, the first serial may have been Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset's Nick Carter series, which ran in French theaters in 1908. Thomas Edison popularized the concept in the United States with his What Happened to Mary? series in 1912, George B. Selig's The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913) was the first to truly link episodes together into a single plotline, and The Perils of Pauline (available from ClassicFlix) and The Exploits of Elaine, both starring Pearl White, were among the most popular movies of 1914.

Serials were most popular during the silent era, but continued to be a staple of Saturday morning matinees until the advent of television.

The greatest director of serials—the one who turned genre escapism into lasting art—was the Frenchman Louis Feuillade. Beginning his career at Gaumont in 1906, Feuillade (pronounced 'Foo-yaad') directed hundreds of shorts, some of which may be seen as part of Gaumont Treasures: 1897 - 1913, a three-disc collection that also features work from Leonce Perret and the legendary female director Alice Guy.

Feuillade's first masterpiece, though, was 1913's Fantômas, five interlinked feature films based on a series of novels about a murderous master criminal, one of history's anti-heroes. While the criminal who gets away with it—Dexter, for example—may be a staple of modern day fiction, it was a radical development in 1913.

From the very first film in the series, Fantômas in the Shadow of the Guillotine, this master of disguise makes a fool of authorities and aristocrats alike. Played by René Navarre, Fantômas—alias Dr. Chaleck alias Loupart alias Nateuil alias Moche alias Tom Bob—steals, kidnaps, bribes and murders his way through the upper reaches of Parisian society with virtual impunity. That Feuillade cast the handsome and imposing Navarre as the criminal and the short, balding, doughy Edmund Breon as the detective chasing him tells you all you need to know about where Feuillade's sympathies lies.

Even better was Les Vampires (available from ClassicFlix in both the DVD and Blu-Ray formats), a ten-part, seven hour serial released in France between November 13, 1915, and June 30, 1916. Not only is it the best serial ever produced, it's on a short list of the best films of the silent era. Inspired by the vicious exploits of the real life Les Apaches and Bonnot gangs that terrorized Paris during the Belle Époque, Les Vampires (pronounced 'lay vam-peer') tells the story of a criminal organization, The Vampires, whose reach extends into the highest levels of French government and society, corrupting those it can, terrorizing and murdering those it can't.

With the justice system unable or unwilling to bring the Vampires to heel, an enterprising newspaper reporter, Phillipe Guerande, teams up with a turncoat member of the gang itself, and takes on the Vampires himself, first by exposing its secrets, then through direct confrontation.

'All the roots of the thriller and suspense genres,' film historian David Thomson wrote, 'are in Feuillade's sense that evil, anarchy and destructiveness speak to the frustrations banked up in modern society. ... Not only has Feuillade's pregnant view of grey streets become an accepted normality; his expectations of conspiracy, violence, and disaster spring at us every day.'

The first episode—ominously (and appropriately) titled 'The Severed Head'—finds Guerande framed for fraud and murder. The second episode sees his fiancée poisoned and Guerande kidnapped and sentenced to death by the Grand Vampire himself.

And this isn't even the good stuff.

Both episodes are slam-bang and lots of fun, but they barely hint at the inventiveness of the serial which doesn't hit its stride until the arrival in the third episode of the sinister, seductive Irma Vep, one of the greatest characters in the entirety of silent cinema.

Played by Musidora in the style of screen vamp Theda Bara, Irma Vep—which, as a lobby card outside a music hall reveals when it magically rearranges the letters of the name, is an anagram of Vampire—puts the fatal back in femme fatale. Although in terms of screen time, she fills what amounts to a supporting role, Irma Vep is, as Fabrice Zagury wrote in his essay 'The Public is My Master: Louis Feuillade and Les Vampires, 'the one pulling the strings,' using the power of seduction—and murder, too—to bend the putative leaders of the Vampires to her will.

You can't take your eyes off her.

'Musidora,' wrote Tom Gunning in his essay The Terrifying Yet Scintillating Origins of IRMA VEP, 'clothed in her close-fitting black bodysuit, her maillot de soie, robbed, kidnapped, and murdered, and seized the imagination of a generation. For the devotees of Musidora’s silent films, that fascination survived for decades. The surrealists worshiped her amoral sexuality, and the revolutionary poet Louis Aragon later claimed that Irma Vep’s dark bodysuit inspired the youth of France with fantasies of rebellion.'

Indeed, Feuillade consciously subverts the morality of his cops and robbers tale by casting against the alluring Musidora the dullest of dull actors, the blandly handsome Édouard Mathé, as the putative hero, and the delightfully hammy Marcel Lévesque as his bumbling, Clouseau-like sidekick, Oscar Mazamette. Only because you'd hate to see any harm come to Mazamette can you sympathize with the heroes at all.

That Feuillade's criminals were sexier, more intriguing and, perhaps more to the point, more successful than their law-abiding counterparts was not lost on French authorities. Paris police halted production and banned release of the serial on the grounds it glorified crime (which it most certainly does), a decision that wasn't reversed until Musidora herself showed up at the chief of police's office to do a little one-on-one lobbying.

Perhaps to placate the authorities, Feuillade focused his next serial, Judex, on the good guy. It turned out to be a case of be careful what you wish for because Judex (Latin for 'Judge') is hardly a model of jurisprudential restraint—more Jack Bauer than Joe Friday, he's a vengeful vigilante who's perfectly willing to take the law into his own hands and not just bend it but break it.

Equipped with a secret lair, cutting-edge gadgets and a variety of identities and disguises, Judex was a forerunner of the comic book superhero still popular today. And with Musidora rejoining the action, this time as the slippery thief Diana Monti, Judex turns out to be nearly as much fun as its predecessors.


(Judex - 1916)
Surrealists such as André Breton and Luis Buñuel loved Feuillade—his Paris is simultaneously whimsical and deadly, a place where you can lean out a second-story window and wind up with a lasso around your neck, where every cupboard hides a body, every hatbox a head, and your neighbor's loft conceals a cannon. There's no sense of safety—or sanity—anywhere. People are murdered on trains, in cafes, and even in their own beds. Perhaps that's why I, as a 21st century movie fan, find Feuillade's work so engaging—he anticipated the anxieties that came to define the 20th century and continue to plague us to this day: violence, paranoia, alienation, conspiracy, terrorism.

It also has a wonderfully nutty quality, the sense that anything could happen and often does.

'Feuillade's cinema,' said Alain Resnais, 'is very close to dreams—therefore it's perhaps the most realistic.'

'[T]he originality of Lang and Hitchcock' (Thomson again) 'fall into place when one has seen Feuillade: Mabuse is the disciple of Fantômas; while Hitchcock's persistent faith in the nun who wears high heels, in the crop-spraying plane that will swoop down to kill, and in a world mined for the complacent is inherited from Feuillade.' Both Lang and Hitchcock (as well as Buñuel) were directly influenced by Feuillade's work.

Feuillade continued to direct right up to his death in 1925, including one more masterpiece of the crime genre, Tih Minh, which has not been restored but which occasionally shows up on the classic film circuit (if you get a chance to see it, I recommend it).

Feuillade began his career as a reporter, and after he made the jump to movies, he drew on his own experiences to shape his stories. Feuillade was a workaholic, writing and directing over 700 short films between 1906 and 1924, working like a man chased by some unseen demon. 'I haven't a minute to lose,' he often said while turning down requests for interviews.

Although convinced film was an art form rather than a pure novelty, Feuillade believed his first duty was to entertain. 'I consider cinema as a place for rest, cheerfulness, soft emotions, dreams, forgetfulness. We don't go to the movies to study. The public flocks to it to be entertained. I place the public above everything else.'

His attitude did not endear him to the generation of French filmmakers who followed him. 'The interest of the young filmmakers of the time,' René Clair said later, 'was diametrically opposed to commercial entertainments made by the prolific author of Judex of which they talk mostly with disdain.'

As a result, Feuillade was largely forgotten after his death in 1925 until Henri Langlois—the same film historian who helped make Louise Brooks famous—resurrected his reputation. Along with the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, Feuillade is now revered as one of the founders of French cinema.

His classic serials, Fantômas, Les Vampires and Judex, are also proof that no matter how old, a great movie, like all great art, is timeless.

Stuffed with fluff with buttons for eyes, the Mythical Monkey writes about classic movies as often as a blog-typing sock monkey can. Check out his website, A Mythical Monkey Writes About the Movies.