Please note: Episodes 5-7 will be presented Saturday, May 14 at 4:30; Episodes 8-10 will be presented Sunday, May 15 at 4:30.
Until the mid-Sixties, Louis Feuillade's 1915-1916 serial, Les Vampires, remained a tantalizingly mythical film, unseen outside of Paris. But Feuillade's manner of combining fantasy, realism, comedy and a singularly poetic use of urban landscape had the French art world in complete awe: André Bazin, dean of film theoreticians, had placed it at the top of his “best ten” list; Alain Resnais had claimed Feuillade as one of his gods; and the entire Surrealist movement hailed it as the supreme masterpiece of cinema. On its 1965 U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival, Richard Roud wrote: “So great is Feuillade's narrative skill that even though the original inter-titles no longer exist, the mysterious disappearances, the false identities, the thousand and one twists of plot are easy to follow.” Our screening of this 10-part serial is accompanied by a detailed written English synopsis of each episode provided by Stephen Harvey of the Museum of Modern Art.
Having nothing to do with vampires, the intricately woven plot revolves around a gang of criminals who hold all France ransom through a series of brilliantly executed crimes in which each gang member takes on a different persona. Led by the fetching Musidora, the ingenious Vampire Gang are the true heroes of the series; the Le Mondial reporter who tracks them down is but a clever straight man for them. Feuillade's anarchic celebration of jewel thieves exploding into the world of their bourgeois victims was not lost on his contemporaries. A great furor of protest arose against his glamorization of crime--and Surrealist André Breton dubbed the film “a masterpiece of 20th Century art.”