Jon Mirsalis on Piano Louis Feuillade was one of the great early masters of the cinematic art; he made literally hundreds of films in the early years and by 1913 had established himself as a preeminent entertainer with the wonderful Fantomas serial. In 1915, with Les Vampires, he made "one of the first great films in the history of cinema" (Richard Roud). But he was largely dismissed by the critics; only the Surrealists appreciated the exquisite mixture of the bizarre and the everyday-and the pure visual poetry-in these mystery serials. Feuillade died forgotten and it was Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque Française, who, in the thirties, resurrected his reputation for posterity. Langlois not only reinstated him in his proper place in film history (Francis Lacassin has called Feuillade the "Third Man" between Méliès (fantasy) and Lumière (realism)); he brought out his films to inspire a new generation of film artists, most particularly Alain Resnais, Georges Franju and Jacques Rivette. Vendémiaire offers us another side of Feuillade: it is a tragic, lyrical melodrama set among the refugee communities created by the holocaust of the First World War. But only its intrigue involving two German spies passing themselves off as Belgians, and in its use of natural locations does it recall the Feuillade of the serials. Opening with a beautiful sequence of refugees escaping south along the Rhone, the film develops two separate, but related, strains: that of the Larcher family-a father and two young daughters-in exile in the South of France; and the story of Larcher's third daughter, Louise, who has stayed in the German-occupied North.