Specters and Spectacles: The Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade Open Access
Levine, Matthew Cole (2010)
Published
Abstract
This thesis stems from a basic question: why were Surrealist writers and thinkers in the early twentieth century so entranced by the crime serials of Louis Feuillade? These shocking, violent serials- Fantômas (1913-4), Les Vampires (1915-6), and Judex (1916)-were decried by some as witless, torrid popular entertainment, but were enshrined by the Surrealists as awe-inspiring embodiments of cinema and of the modern age. In characteristic Surrealist style, such writers and thinkers lauded Feuillade through grandiose prose, but provided scant explanation for their infatuation with him. While this thesis, at the most general level, attempts to answer that question, it will do so by venturing down several related paths. "Specters and Spectacles" will place Feuillade's crime serials within the context of a cinematic transitional period that spanned the 1900s and 1910s-a period that often teetered between the shocking, exhibitionist displays of a "cinema of attractions" and a rapidly coalescing narrative cinema that would soon come to dominate international filmmaking.
This project will also relate Feuillade's crime serials to the "modernity thesis," which hypothesized that the cinema in general manifested the numerous social, cultural, economic, technological, political, and artistic transformations engendered by the onset of industrial modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, this thesis will attempt to link together these interrelated concepts through the broad theory of a "cinematic mode of uncertainty"-a broad paradigm that essentially forces us to question the veracity of cinematic vision and knowledge, to recognize the heavily mediated nature of all cinematic production, and to reconsider the generic, narrative, and conceptual taxonomies that tend to dominate the field of Film Studies.
Table of Contents
Introduction: History written by a phantom 1
The Modernity Thesis and Louis Feuillade 11
Transitions 25
A Legacy of Crime 35
One: Specters and Spectacles 49
Visions of the Fantastic 55
Common Objects 60
Dastardly Plots 63
Actuality and Impossibility 67
An Ominous Architecture 74
Typography and the Body 82
Conclusion: Framing France: Louis Feuillade and Irma Vep 91
National Systems of Signification 108
Uncertainty 124
New Phantoms 142
Works Cited 148
Films Cited 151
About this Master's Thesis
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