A Film Canon

Judex doesn't thematise the serial format quite as artfully as Fantomas and Les Vampires, replacing their potentially infinite narrative play with a (relatively) bounded, determinable sequence of events, and their amorphous, elusive, amoral criminals with a well-rounded superhero, replete with a back-story, introspection and character development. Concomitantly, Feuillade's earlier fascination with the continguities of the rural-urban fringe gives way to a sharp distinction between city and country, and prioritisation of the latter, as evinced in the proliferation of castles, villas, estates, mansions, meadows, forests, and streams, as well as the preference for daytime shooting; or, rather, the transformation of moonlight into a more bucolic daylight, culminating with a honeymoon set against an expansive ocean that ensures that "the nights are made of silver and velvet". To this end, Feuillade imbues the journey between city and country - and, more generally, transportation itself - with a hyperbolic dislocation encapsulated in the extent to which it becomes synonymous with abduction, substituted for the disguises and hidden passageways of the earlier films as the central source of excitement. This creates a quite different, less spatialised form of paranoia, as evinced in a physical closure that would never have occurred in those films - a completely secure prison cell - but that is simultaneously paired with a new, electronic openness, in the form of a surveillance device resembling a television screen, computer interface or digital brain of an imminent Mabuse.