1,001 Films: "Les Vampires" (1915)

There would be other, more prominent, more successful serials in the cinema's formative years, but something was very definitely stirring in Feuillade's ten-part effort Les Vampires, stretching as it did over the course of 1915: the beginnings of sustained, long-form cinematic storytelling, as evinced by the manner in which running times for individual instalments gradually push north of thirty minutes towards the hour mark. This is the work of a filmmaker who finds himself with more to do and to show than the modular form allows him - who clearly wants to make blockbusters rather than shorts.

A plucky journalist for a Parisian daily (Edouard Mathe, displaying the Keatonesque look favoured in leading men of the period) sees his actress girlfriend killed in episode two, his poor mum kidnapped in episode three, and both the latter and a new fiancée made subject to a mass poisoning attempt in episode nine, all while he investigates a series of daring heists committed by a shifting cabal of bankers, estate agents and other high society types, shown carousing the nights away in ballrooms and dancehalls. While these fatcats make somewhat unlikely catburglars (wouldn't they have flunkies to do these things for them?), you can see how audiences of the time would have enjoyed booing the sight of the predatory rich stealing from the poor to get even richer, and cheering the journo and his (mugging, mildly annoying) sidekick as they make fresh breakthroughs with the case.

There's evidence of early-cinema nerves: each episode ends with our heroes safe and well and the police there or thereabouts, even if the miscreants have just slipped through the net again. And while there's nothing out of the ordinary in terms of camerawork and performances, the mise-en-scène displays flickers of invention: Feuillade proves repeatedly drawn to slats and peepholes, false walls and doors, that become effective surrogates for the screen itself; we even get, in the unfortunate clerk M. Metadier, murdered on his way back from a matinee at the local picture palace, one of the first characters in the movies to be obsessed with movies - meta, indeed.

No sooner has each episode solved its particular locked-room mystery than another is set in its place; viewed today, it's primitive and vaguely repetitious (the middle segments, as the running time and cast of characters expands, get especially ploddy - as would so many blockbuster sequels that followed), but still possessed of the capacity to surprise and even thrill. (The concluding parts, in which producers Gaumont evidently bequeathed Feuillade a budget to get off the studio lot, go wild, with characters jumping onto moving trains - no CGI here, of course - and abseiling down buildings.) You could probably rattle through the box set in a weekend, and spot how its influence came to spread far and wide - on Lang, who similarly made his rogue banker Mabuse a master of disguise; on Olivier Assayas, who named his Irma Vep after Musidora's feline villainess; hell, even on another cat, Zeta Jones, slinking under laserbeams in very Musidorean skintight latex in Entrapment, which - like it or not - was exactly the kind of cinema Feuillade brought into being here.

Les Vampires is available on DVD from Artificial Eye.