Part 1: In the Shadow of the Guillotine (A l'ombre de la guillotine) and Part 2: Juve vs. Fantômas (Juve contre Fantômas) Bruce Loeb on Piano We are delighted to present-for the first time here in its entirety-Louis Feuillade's Fantômas, restored by Gaumont and the Cinémathèque Française. Five mystery films featuring the elusive master criminal will be shown over three consecutive Saturdays. Fans of Feuillade's Les Vampires and Judex will not want to miss this rare event! From April 1913 through the winter of 1914, the arch criminal Fantômas strode across the movie screens of France. Based on the immensely popular serial novels written by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, the serial featured René Navarre as the "master of terror and torture, the emperor of crime," often disguised as a bourgeois gentleman. Louis Feuillade's Paris was marked by an atmosphere of what Richard Abel describes as "fantastic realism" in which the "mundane, reassuringly sober facade of daily life masks incredible, sometimes bloody exploits." (Fantômas murders Lord Beltham, stuffs his corpse into a steamship trunk, then takes Lady Beltham as his mistress. Disguised as the bourgeois Gurn, Fantômas is pursued by the policeman Juve, but is still able to hijack a train. He then returns to kidnap Lady Beltham from a convent, chloroforms a painter, has him stabbed in prison?) As spectators, we see a world as real as that recorded by he photographer Eugene Atget, but colored by underground violence as well as poetic reverie. Feuillade was a favorite of the Surrealists and this Gaumont series became the focus of a special club organized by the poet Apollinaire, the "Societé des Amis de Fantômas." Popular all over the world, in the U.S. it inspired Pearl White's adventures. French imitators include an 8mm version by Alain Resnais, made in 1936 when he was fourteen. For Resnais-and for any self-respecting French thriller director from Melville to Godard-Feuillade was a god.-Notes from Anthology Film Archives and PFA