A Film Canon

Feuillade's five Fantomas serials - Fantômas: In The Shadow Of the Guillotine, Juve vs. Fantômas, The Murderous Corpse, Fantômas vs. Fantômas and The False Magistrate - are the first to properly thematise that genre, and its curious mixture of theatrical and cinematic language. The former is clear in the overwhelming reliance on stage-like tableaux, stationary camera, and melodramatic acting, such that even the gravitation towards on-location shooting tends to partake of a preoccupation with multiple vanishing-points that subsumes it into the orienting co-ordinates of the theatre. Yet the  omniscience of the eponymous criminal (Rene Navarre) breaks down the curtained distinction between these tableaux - or, rather, embodies the liberating potential of the cut, clarifying that Feuillade's narrative ingenuity is primarily a matter of editing, and ensuring that every space partakes of an unexpected porosity, even - or perhaps especially - when it seems most restricted. At its strongest, this reinvention of the vanishing-point gestures towards a number of evocative contiguities - of the Parisian underworld, of the nascent Parisian suburban sprawl and, most obliquely, of the new distribution of capital bound up in the emergent stock market, gesturing towards the concerns of Lang's Mabuse serials. By the same token, this continguity is extended from spaces to bodies and objects, respectively encapsulated in the astonishing, exponential focus on identity games - to the extent that it is ultimately questionable whether we are meant to have a clear idea of any character's true identity, even at the moment of its ostensible revelation - and the poetic sequence, in Juve vs. Fantômas, in which the connection between investigative journalist Fandor (Georges Melchior) and his quarry is reduced to a series of linear objects (fence, pillar, pulley, well, ladder); a sustained extrapolation of the pneumatic tube that opens the series.