Capellani's adaptation of Les Misérables was an enormous success. He made use of Old Paris locations for exterior shots in one of the cinema's first great realist feature productions. "Albert Capellani (1870-1931) was artistic director of Pathé's Societé Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres, designed to secure the bourgeois Film d'art market. While the system of representation developed by the Film d'art was derived from the theater, it also sought to adapt its conventions to film. Capellani was among the first to experiment with the possibilities offered by cinema. As early as 1906, Capellani inserted shots of details in the filmic continuity. Jean Mitry remarks that such a deliberate violation of the medium-shot format rigidly imposed by the Film d'art could not be tolerated in films with 'realist' pretensions. (By fragmenting the spatial unity of the scene, close-ups threatened its 'reality effect'.) But Capellani continued to insert 'significant details' (i.e. not merely descriptive ones) in the films he made in 1908 in an attempt to achieve an 'analytic construction' of the narrative. He was apparently reprimanded by Charles Pathé and thereafter conformed to the desired style of photographed theater characteristic of the Pathé productions. "Capellani began his career as an actor in André Antoine's Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 to present modern plays in a naturalist style inspired by Zola (and deliberately violating all the conventions of contemporary theater). In 1906 he began to work for Pathé, directing mostly melodramas. Among his most important productions, L'Assommoir (1909) was the first genuine feature film made in France. Notre Dame de Paris (1911), Le Courrier de Lyon (1912), La Glu, Germinal (1913), Quatrevingt-treize (1914) were among his most successful productions. But his masterpiece is unquestionably Les Misérables (1913). Perhaps his most significant contribution to the history of cinema is to have encouraged André Antoine to make films. Antoine's masterpiece The Swallow and the Titmouse is shown January 30." Bertrand Augst