TSPDT

Key Production Country: France
Key Genres: Crime, Master Criminal Films, Short Film, Crime Thriller, Police Detective Film, Drama
Key Collaborators: Renée Carl (Leading Actress), Édouard Mathé (Leading Character Actor), Musidora (Leading Actress), Marcel Lévesque (Leading Character Actor), Yvette Andréyor (Leading Character Actress), Robert-Jules Garnier (Production Designer), Louis Leubas (Character Actor), René Cresté (Leading Actor), Georges Guérin (Cinematographer), Edmund Breon (Leading Character Actor), René Poyen (Leading Character Actor), Rene Navarre (Leading Actor)

"Given the mechanically reproducible nature of film as a medium, the enormous popularity of Louis Feuillade's films in their time, and what now seems their indisputable greatness, it hardly seems possible that a director of the stature of Feuillade could so totally have disappeared from the history of the cinema for so many years. In France, he was remembered as the director of Judex (1916) and a few other serials, nut until the Cinémathèque revival of Fantômas (1913) in 1944, he was never considered one of the great figures of the French cinema." - Richard Roud (Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980)

"Louis Feuillade, a French filmmaker who wrote and directed approximately 800 shorts, features, and serials in his 18-year career, was a pioneer of narrative film. Together with his contemporary in America, D.W. Griffith, Feuillade developed a language for the modern art of the moving image. Feuillade’s cinema transcended the conventions of the proscenium stage; he exchanged theatrical artifice for both realism and the freedom of open-air shooting… In addition to short social dramas, chase films, comedies, and popular series with the precocious child characters Bébé and Bout de Zan, he made mysteries that later evolved into fantastic serials like Fantômas (1913), Les Vampires (1915), Judex (1917), and Tih Minh (1919); shot on locations throughout France, they thrilled the Surrealists with their sense of menace and embrace of modern technology." - The Museum of Modern Art

"Louis Feuillade was one of the most solid and dependable talents in French cinema during the early twentieth century. He succeeded Alice Guy as head of production at Gaumont in 1906 and worked virtually without a break—aside from a period of war service—until his death in 1925. He produced some eight hundred films of every conceivable kind: comedies and contemporary melodramas, biblical epics and historical dramas, sketches and series with numerous episodes adding up to many hours of running time." - Roy Armes (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)

"Feuillade was one of the great directors. He had a fine comic touch, not only in the shorts featuring child players like Bébé and Bout de Zan but also in farcical two-reelers like Les Millions de la bonne (The Maid’s Millions, 1913). His dramas could be powerful too, epitomized for me in the two-part feature Vendemiaire (1919) and sentimental melodramas like Les Deux Gamines (1921) and Parisette (1922). Still, he’ll probably always be most famous for his crime films like Les Vampires (1915-1916), Judex (1917), Tih Minh (1919), and of course the first of them, Fantômas." - David Bordwell (David Bordwell's Website on Cinema, 2010)

"A pioneer of popular serials about seductively ingenious master criminals threatening bourgeois society, Feuillade delighted in complex narratives featuring all manner of sinister devices: subterranean hideaways, secret passages, rooftop escapes, obscure codes, fiendishly cunning disguises and severed heads. Yet he shot his exterior scenes on the streets of Paris and the Riviera, so that realism and fantasy combine to create a surreal, dreamlike universe where the familiar is literally and convincingly invaded by the extraordinary." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)

"Louis Feuillade was an important and extremely prolific director of early silent films… Feuillade is best remembered for directing the Fantomas and the Vampire series of fantasies and for being the first to utilize the camera techniques that would later effect the Nouvelle Vague directors of the late '50s. Feuillade's films were also instrumental in shaping the conventions of suspense films and thrillers and in inspiring the German expressionist filmmakers of the 1920s." - Allmovie