Abel Gance (Parte IV): Napoleão até ao fim

Gance directed two films during the war, La Vénus aveugle (1941), a drama with feminist overtones, and Le Capitaine Fracasse (1943), an exhilarating swashbuckler, before the unsettled climate of a France menaced by the Germans forced him into a temporary sojourn in Spain, then ostensibly neutral. But there he encountered further difficulties, failing in his efforts to direct a film. Beset with hardships in postwar France, Gance struggled in vain to direct an epic film on the life of Christ, to be entitled La Divine Tragédie. After over a decade of absence from directing, he made La Tour de Nesle, a costume film released in 1954. He followed this with Magirama, a 1956 program featuring several shorts in which he revived his three-screen technique of Polyvision. For these experiments, he worked for the first time with Nelly Kaplan, a young admirer of his from Argentina who later became a prominent director in her own right. Kaplan also assisted him on his last two theatrical features, Austerlitz (1960) and Cyrano et d’Artagnan (1963). Although a return to the Napoleonic saga, Austerlitz fell victim to studio interference so that, despite characteristic Gance touches, the finished product was far below his expectations. But the visually striking Cyrano et d’Artagnan proved to be an outstanding late work. This stylish swashbuckler with dialogue in Alexandrine verse, philosophical and psychological insights, and another heroic dreamer in the person of the poet and inventor Cyrano de Bergerac, was by far the best of Gance’s postwar films.

In the years immediately succeeding Cyrano et d’Artagnan, Gance directed two films for French television, Marie Tudor (1966) and Valmy (1967), and in 1971 released a final revision of Napoleon retitled Bonaparte and the Revolution for which he shot new footage that was added to the original film. Even so, his opportunities in his old age were sharply diminished. While his period of greatest productivity had ended in the early 1940s, all through the lean years he continued to be caught up in plans for new cinematic innovations and dreams for fresh epic projects. The unrealized La Divine Tragédie had itself derived from a series of films on the founders of the world’s great religions, Les Grands Initiés, which he had conceived decades before as a means to promote peace and brotherhood. In 1939, he did extensive research for an epic film on Christopher Columbus, but the outbreak of World War II scuttled his immediate plans for the film. Nevertheless, he returned to the idea, writing an elaborate screenplay for the Columbus film. Indeed, in his last years, his attempt to raise funds to direct the film became his consuming passion. These later years of unfulfilled dreams were marked by persistent poverty. He continued to share his life with his third wife, Sylvie Vérité, whom he married in the 1930s and who died in 1978. His first marriage, in the 1910s, was to Mathilde Thizeau, who acted in several of his earliest films, and his second, in the 1920s, to Marguerite Danis, who also acted in films, including Napoleon and Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher (1928). There were no children by any of these marriages.

The adversities of his last years were somewhat alleviated by the work of film historians, especially Kevin Brownlow, who brought him to the attention of a new generation with his documentary on the director, The Charm of Dynamite, and his history of the silent film, The Parade’s Gone By. In a final twist of irony worthy of his films, Gance received his greatest recognition at the very end of his life, when Brownlow’s restoration of the silent Napoleon was theatrically revived around the world with live orchestras in 1980-81.

The Napoleon revival of the early 1980s, besides heralding a new-found public interest in silent films as a whole, seemed to augur a full, belated critical and popular recognition of Gance, particularly in the United States where the mutilation of his work by commercial interests in earlier decades had hindered his reputation. Yet, despite initial rhapsodic reviews of Napoleon in the popular press, some critics, instead of expressing regret that Gance had not received his due during his lifetime, sought to justify his treatment at the hands of the industry and earlier critics. They recycled the argument that his techniques were overblown self-indulgence, that he had little of real importance to say, and that his long career in the sound era was an unmitigated decline. Perhaps worst of all, these critics soon turned to the kind of ideological axe-grinding that had also damaged Griffith’s reputation. Although Gance was far from being a highly political artist and, as Steven Kramer maintained, was "only consistent within his own semi-mystical framework," the director’s critics, like Norman King, began inferring that his admiration for Bonaparte and other visionary heroes reflected some sort of protofascist agenda. The line of attack apparently succeeded in dampening enthusiasm for any sustained revival of Gance’s work in the United States. Although more of his films are now available on video, there has been no full retrospective of Gance’s work outside France in the two decades since his death and the Napoleon revival. The restored versions of his three silent epics--J’accuse, La Roue, and even the most complete Napoleon (expanded beyond the shortened Coppola version)--never became accessible to American film devotees in the late 20th century.

Abel Gance was a giant of cinema art, a genius whose artistic courage and humanist vision created masterpieces that inspired many other directors, from his silent film contemporaries in the 1920s to the French Nouvelle Vague of the 1950s and 1960s. The failure of much of the critical establishment in the 20th century to fully recognize or appreciate Gance’s artistry, a tragic oversight which succeeding generations will surely rectify, was perhaps the inevitable consequence of the director’s prescient conception of his medium. Constantly experimenting with new techniques to express his view of life on screen, Gance expanded the possibilities of film as an art beyond any of his contemporaries. Yet, while devising dazzling technical innovations to achieve what he called "the music of light," he never lost sight of humanity, inspiring his players to give intense and vital performances in narratives whose sweep embraced both epic grandeur and lyric tenderness. Gance’s vision was at once romantic and realistic, larger than life in its heroic and mystical dimensions, yet sensitive to historical documentation and location shooting, incorporating the details of actuality. His much-misunderstood conception of the heroic, a direct challenge to skeptics and naysayers, paid tribute to the aspirations of the human spirit for transcendence. For Gance, the hero was not a manifestation of elitism based on traditional views of group and caste, but rather an individual of tremendous creativity and insight whose tragedy resulted both from the fierce opposition of an entrenched establishment and the reality of his own human limitations. Invariably a man of the people voicing the need for radical change, the Gance protagonist was ultimately isolated from mass society because of his failure to adapt to its fundamental conservatism which is in constant tension with its simultaneous yearning for revolutionary transformation. Expressing these conflicts in his work, Abel Gance created films that are unique and timeless in their dynamic portrayal of the triumphs and dilemmas of humanity in its search for the ideal.

Abel Gance (Parte III): O sonoro e sempre a inovação

Gance pioneered the coming of sound in France in 1930 with another ambitious epic, La Fin du monde, an imaginative film in the science fiction genre with pacifist overtones in which a conflict-ridden world narrowly escapes destruction by an oncoming comet, with Gance himself playing the lead role of a scientist who foresees the catastrophe. After the film was slashed and reedited by the producers for its 1931 release, a discouraged Gance had to settle for directing and supervising less ambitious projects for the next few years. In 1934, he attempted to bring back past glories by dubbing dialogue onto a revamped version of his silent Napoleon, adding another innovation, stereophonic sound. Within a year, his cinematic fortunes began to turn around and he directed a series of films that demonstrated once again his mastery of cinema. Although Gance’s work in the sound era spanned over three decades, his talkies, made for various French production companies, have often been dismissed as a long decline from the heights of his career in the silent era. While it is true he never again created works as ambitious as La Roue or Napoleon, it is clear, as François Truffaut pointed out, that he continued to explore characteristic themes in highly accomplished works revealing him to be as great a master of film form as he had been in the 1910s and 1920s.

The first of his major sound films, Lucréce Borgia (1935), is an astonishing drama of the political intrigues of the Borgia family in Renaissance Italy, with scenes of full-frontal female nudity that were a striking departure from the prevailing cinematic codes of the time. In his depiction of Cesare Borgia’s brutal rule, Gance created an historical film whose figures stand in striking contrast to those in Napoleon. Whereas Bonaparte and the other French Revolutionary leaders pursue power in order to realize ideals, Cesare Borgia’s ruthless drive for domination reflects no more exalted idea than the satisfaction of his own lust and self-aggrandizement. The people’s aspirations for freedom, voiced by another farsighted leader, Savonorola, are also thwarted by the dictatorship of Cesare’s father, the corrupt Pope Alexander VI. In reflecting Gance’s deeply-rooted aversion to aristocratic rule, this portrayal of the Borgias’ intrigues may represent a cinematic response to the French rightists of the 1930s who still yearned for a restoration of monarchy and aristocracy.

The following year, Gance directed one of his two greatest sound films, Un grand amour de Beethoven, a fictionalized biography of the composer (memorably portrayed by Harry Baur), in which Gance returned to his theme of creative genius and his conviction that artists are forever misunderstood by their contemporaries. By far his most technically innovative film since Napoleon, Gance blended rapid montage with sound, creating striking effects new to the medium. In the scenes culminating in Beethoven’s composing the Pastoral Symphony during a stormy night, Gance conveys the sense of Beethoven’s oncoming deafness when the sound track is suddenly completely silent. Gance manifests his antipathy to aristocracy once again, contrasting Beethoven’s artistic dedication and purity of spirit amidst poverty and neglect with the unworthy dilettante nobleman, Count Gallenberg, who marries the woman the composer loves. Released in 1937 to widespread international critical acclaim, Beethoven established Gance as great a leader in the creation of sound films as he had been in silents.

Gance’s next film, a new version of J’accuse, was his other monumental artistic triumph of the sound era. Although he included some battle scene footage from the 1919 silent and based several of the protagonists on those in the earlier production, the new J’accuse was essentially a different film, a reworking with new plot elements rather than a remake. Released in 1938, the film’s hero is yet another seer, a World War I veteran who develops an invention intended to prevent war. His plans are sabotaged by an unscrupulous politician and manufacturer, part of the corrupt ruling establishment, who steals his invention and uses it not for peace but to foment war instead. In the awe-inspiring climax, Gance passionately denounces the coming Second World War, with his hero once again summoning forth the spirit of the war dead (played this time by mutilated veterans of the first conflagration) to indict the living at a time of renewed war hysteria.

In striking contrast, Gance’s two 1939 films, Louise and Le Paradis perdu, mark a nostalgic return to the pre-World War I Paris of the director’s youth. Louise, adapted from Gustave Charpentier’s opera, with Grace Moore in the lead, allowed the director to incorporate cinematic techniques during the operatic sequences, such as images of the working class singing superimposed over awakening Paris streets, or the subtle play of light and shadow when Louise’s father, gently swaying her back and forth, sings his aria. Le Paradis perdu includes both romantic lyricism and high comedy as it chronicles several generations. The story of a man whose happiness is destroyed by the First World War is especially poignant in its resemblance to Gance’s own life and career and that of his country, both soon to be affected by yet another war.

Abel Gance (Parte II): Os Épicos, Napoleão e a Polivisão

Gance's next work, J'accuse (1919), produced for Pathé, was his first epic film, a massive, deeply moving indictment of war. Profoundly affected by the horrors of the First World War, which had devastated France and taken the lives of many of his friends, Gance created a film that, upon its release soon after the Armistice, became the screen’s first cry of revolt against the organized slaughter that had ravaged modern civilization from 1914 to 1918. In the film’s famous climax, the hero, a poet, develops the mystic power to call back the ghosts of the war dead (played by real soldiers from the front, many of whom died in battle shortly after appearing in the sequence) to accuse the living and demand to know the reason for their sacrifice. Gance’s use of rapid cutting, superimposition, masking, and a wildly-tracking camera accentuates the intensely emotional blending of camera actuality and poetic drama. The film was a spectacular hit throughout Europe, and Gance, hoping for an American success, took it across the Atlantic, where he presented it at a special screening in New York in 1921 for an appreciative audience that included D. W. Griffith and the Gish sisters. But the U.S. distributors mutilated J’accuse for its subsequent general release, even distorting its antiwar message into an endorsement of conventional militarist attitudes.

Gance’s American journey was sandwiched in between his work on his second great epic, La Roue, which he filmed during 1919-20 and completed final editing in preparation for its 1922 release by Pathé upon his return from the United States. A monumental production 32 reels long requiring three evenings for its original presentation, La Roue is a powerful drama of life among the railroad workers, rich in psychological characterization and symbolic imagery. To dramatize his story of a railroad mechanic’s tortured love for his adopted daughter, Gance elaborated his use of masking and superimposition and perfected his fast cutting into the rapid montage that would soon be adopted by Russian and Japanese silent filmmakers for whom La Roue was a seminal influence. Complex in its thematics, the film’s images animate machines and the forces of nature with a life and spirit of their own while the wheel ("la roue") of the film’s title becomes a metaphor for life itself. Gance’s remarkable symbolism is exemplified in the film’s conclusion: as the old railway mechanic dies quietly and painlessly in his mountain chalet, his daughter joins the local villagers outside in the snow in a circular farandole dance, a dance in which nature itself, in the form of clouds, participates. Shot entirely on location at the railroad yards in Nice and in the Alps, La Roue remains a work of extraordinary beauty and depth. Jean Cocteau said of the film, "There is the cinema before and after La Roue as there is painting before and after Picasso," while Akira Kurosawa stated, "The first film that really impressed me was La Roue."

Gance climaxed his work in the silent era with Napoleon, an epic historical recreation of Napoleon Bonaparte’s early career during the French Revolution. A superspectacle, the film advanced the technique of cinematic language far beyond any single production of the decade. The definitive version originally ran over six hours in length, and its amazing innovations accomplished Gance’s intent of making the spectator part of the action. To create this effect, Gance utilizes rapid montage and the hand-held camera extensively. An example of his technique is the double tempète sequence in which shots of Bonaparte--on a small boat tossing in a stormy sea as huge waves splash across the screen--are intercut with a stormy session of the revolutionary Convention, at which the camera, attached to a pendulum, swings back and forth across the seething crowd. For the climax depicting Napoleon’s 1796 Italian campaign, Gance devised a special wide-screen process employing three screens and three projectors. He called his invention Polyvision, using the greatly expanded screen for both vast panoramas and parallel triptych images. As with La Roue, the film’s unusual length enables Gance to develop his narrative fully, peopled with numerous characters, both historical and fictional, who bring to life the epoch of the late 1700s.

The director began filming Napoleon in 1925 and finally unveiled his masterpiece to the world at a gala premiere at the Paris Opera in April 1927. Although many of those who saw Gance’s original cuts (both the six-hour version and a shorter one he supervised) recognized Napoleon as an unequaled artistic triumph, the film ultimately proved too technically advanced for the industry of its period. Napoleon was financed by private backers, including several wealthy Russian émigré industrialists in France. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which bought international distribution rights, presented the film in Europe in various mangled and mutilated versions. Their American release, shown as sound was sweeping the industry in 1929, ran only 72 minutes and eliminated all of Gance’s pyrotechnics. Film historian Kevin Brownlow’s later restoration would eventually establish for many Napoleon’s artistic preeminence. However, the film remains one of the cinema’s more controversial masterworks--and not only due to a technique and scope that broke all the rules of filmmaking, but also to Gance’s admiring depiction of the young Bonaparte. He portrayed him as an idealistic, visionary leader championing the French Revolution, an interpretation often characterized by critics as "fascistic," but a conception that belies an informed consideration of Gance’s personal history and beliefs, and one that ignores the fact that his 1927 film was only the first of a planned series of films on Napoleon’s life. In the succeeding films, he had intended to depict Napoleon drifting more and more away from his revolutionary beginnings when he became an emperor. The heroic portrayal of the young Bonaparte in the film he did make is very much in the democratic Romantic tradition of great writers like Byron, Hugo, and Heine, who had exalted the Man of Destiny as the very embodiment of revolutionary energy. That Gance should view with sympathy a leader who did much to liberate European society from aristocratic and feudal privileges should come as no surprise, given the director’s own "outsider" background. Gance’s radical technique is thus wedded to a radical vision of history at odds with the classical restraint which had long held both social organization and aesthetics in check. Further underscoring the director’s philosophy is his own memorable performance in the film as the "Archangel of the Revolution," the left-wing Jacobin leader, Saint-Just.

Abel Gance (Parte I) : Experimentalismo e Cinema Social

One of the most important figures in the development of cinema as an art, Abel Gance was born on October 25, 1889, in Paris, France. Until his death in Paris on November 10, 1981, at the age of 92, the director’s account of his background as a child of the well-to-do French bourgeoisie was accepted as accurate. Subsequent research revealed that Gance was the illegitimate son of Abel Flamant, a prosperous Jewish physician, and Françoise Pèrethon, who was of the working class. The stigma of being illegitimate, part-Jewish, and proletarian in a France where anti-Semitic and class prejudices still persisted, despite the revolutionary heritage, may help explain the rebellious, anti-aristocratic sentiments that would color much of his film work. Abel was raised by his maternal grandparents in the village of Commentry until he was eight. When his mother married Adolphe Gance, a chauffeur and mechanic who later became a taxi driver, Abel moved to Paris to live with them. Although he adopted his stepfather’s surname, his natural father continued to provide for him and gave him the benefit of an excellent education despite Abel’s proletarian childhood. Given this stimulus, the youth began reading omnivorously and developed literary and theatrical ambitions at odds with his father’s desire that he should take up the law.

Although he worked for a time in a law office, by the time he was 19, Gance had become an actor on the stage and in 1909 began working in the new medium of cinema as an actor and scriptwriter. In 1911, with the help of friends, Gance formed a production company and directed his first film, La Digue (ou pour sauver la Hollande), a one-reel costume drama. His early sense of isolation from society first found cinematic expression in his second film, Le Nègre blanc (1912), an anti-racist story about a black child mistreated by white children. He followed this with several other successful short narrative films noted for their rich lighting and décor. As with all of his silent features and a majority of his sound films, Gance also wrote the scripts. Yet he had not lost sight of his theatrical ambitions and authored Victoire de Samothrace, a play intended to star Sarah Bernhardt. But the outbreak of the First World War prevented its production and Gance returned to filmmaking with the startling short, La Folie du Docteur Tube (1915). Working for the first time with cameraman Léonce-Henry Burel, Gance employed mirrors for the distorted effects in this avant-garde comedy about a mad doctor who is able to transform people’s appearances through a special powder he has invented. In embryonic form, the film, however playfully, marks Gance’s first excursion into the conception of a visionary able to transform reality and can also be read as an allegory of the cinema’s special magical properties. Gance's next films were feature-length thrillers for Film d’Art in 1916, in which he introduced into French cinema the kind of editing style that had been developed in America by D. W. Griffith. And in some of them, like Barberousse (1916), he began devising his own technical innovations, including huge close-ups, low-angled close-ups, tracking shots, wipes, and the triptych effect.

In 1917, inspired by the French success of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat, Gance turned to society dramas in which the narrative centered on human emotions and psychological conflicts. The first of these works made for Film d'Art was Le Droit à la vie, followed by Mater Dolorosa, the story of a woman’s troubled marriage to a doctor. With its striking chiaroscuro photography, Mater Dolorosa scored a major box-office success, both in France and other countries, including the United States. The series of society dramas culminated with a masterpiece, La Dixième Symphonie (1918), in which a composer’s marital problems inspire him to write a symphony expressing his sufferings. Establishing the director as the new artistic leader of the French cinema, the narrative enabled him to comment on the nature of genius. The shots of enraptured listeners during the first performance of the composer’s new symphony illustrate Gance’s belief in the transformative power of art.

"Mater Dolorosa", Abel Gance (1917)

Em 1917, inspirado pelo sucesso em França de "The Cheat" de Cecil B. DeMille, Abel Gance virou-se para a realização de dramas sociais, onde a narrativa centra-se nas emoções humanas e nos conflitos psicológicos. O primeiro destes trabalhos produzido para a Film d'Art foi "Le Droit à la Vie", seguido dete "Mater Dolorosa", a história do conturbado casamento de uma mulher de um médico. Com a sua fotografia claro-escuro impressionante, "Mater Dolorosa" foi um sucesso de bilheteria tanto em França como noutros países, incluindo os Estados Unidos.

"Joan the Woman", Cecil B. DeMille (1917)

A guerra continua a influenciar o Cinema neste período. Desta feita, Cecil B. DeMille moderniza com a sua poesia cinematográfica a história da dama de Orleans, Jeanne D'Arc.

"Joan the Woman" mostra-nos a visão de um oficial francês, numa trincheira em plena batalha da I Grande Guerra, da heroína de Orleans (interpretada por Geraldine Farrar).

"Verdens Undergang" (The End of the World), August Blom (1916)

Interessantíssimo filme de ficção científica dinamarquês, inspirado pelo medo gerado pela passagem do cometa Halley em 1910, mas sobretudo um filme dirigido a um público em contexto de guerra e de colapso da velha ordem.

O trabalho de Blom revela grande mestria, com movimentos de câmera arrojados e elegantes. Perante a quase inexistência de meios técnicos para reproduzir o fim do Mundo, Blom sai-se bem com uma chuva de fogo e de fumo. Convincente.

"The Battle of the Somme", William F. Jury (1916)

A guerra em directo, antes da CNN.

"Snow White", J. Searle Dawley (1916)

Muitos acreditam que foi neste filme de Dawley que Walt Disney se inspirou quando estava a montar a sua particular visão deste conto de fadas. As semelhanças são mais do que muitas, começando pela actriz Marguerite Clark como Branca de Neve.

"20.000 Leagues Under the Sea", Stuart Paton (1916)

O visionarismo de Jules Verne materializavou-se 50 anos após o sonho escrito. Ganha vida a história do capitão Nemo e do seu fantástico submarino para cumprir a sua missão de vingança, atravessando 20 mil léguas à procura de Charles Denver, o homem que matou a princesa Daaker.

Este "20.000 Leagues Under the Sea" destaca-se ainda pelo facto dos efeitos especiais não serem apenas feitos em estúdio, com a realização das primeiras filmagens subaquáticas.

"Intolerance", D.W.Griffith (1916)

A grande obra-prima do Cinema Mudo! Uma visão da conduta intolerante da humanidade através da História e as suas sempre terríveis sequelas. Griffith leva em "Intolerance" a técnica da montagem paralela até às últimas consequências, acompanhando em simultâneo quatro histórias unidas pela figura de uma mãe a embalar o seu filho: a queda de Babilónia no ano de 539 a.C.; a Judeia e o martírio e morte de Jesus Cristo; a França no séc. XVI, no Massacre da Noite de São Bartolomeu e a época moderna, em 1916, das moralistas sociais.

Cada momento do filme tem uma coloração específica, de acordo com um código de cores implementado por Griffith: azul (noite, melodramático), vermelho (guerra, paixão) verde (campos, serenidade) e sépia (interiores).

Como dito atrás, as quatro histórias são intercaladas pela mãe a embalar o bebé. Simbolicamente é uma imagem de continuidade, onde Griffith expressa que no fundo temos todos as mesmas características e apenas continuamos a vida de quem veio antes de nós.

Do ponto de vista do acolhimento público o filme foi um fracasso total. Por um lado, a montagem do filme confundiu completamente os espectadores, pois a narrativa não era contínua; por outro, trata-se de um filme demasiado longo, com mais de três horas e meia (embora originalmente tivesse cerca de oito).

"Judex", Louis Feuillade (1916)

Depois de "Fantômas" e "Les Vampires", Louis Feuillade cria uma nova série (10 episódio): "Judex", de novo com acção, suspense e mistério. Mas desta feita com uma pequena grande alteração, o héroi de Feuillade passa a ser um indivíduo que está do lado da lei, não usa armas e não derrama sangue ... eventualmente o primeiro vingador da história do Cinema, de onde derivariam personagens como Batman e Superman.

"Der Golem", Paul Wegener e Henrik Galeen (1915)

O Expressionismo Alemão chegava ao Cinema.

"The Tramp", Charlie Chaplin (1915)

O nascimento de um ícone chamado Charlot/The Tramp. Apesar da personagem do vagabundo já ter aparecido em filmes anteriores, é neste que ficam delimitadas as suas características tal como aparecem nas obras posteriores.

Theda Bara - A primeira "Vamp" do Cinema

The woman who was the epitomé of the "vamp" persona in cinema history, Theda Bara, was born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 29th, 1890. She was given her new name by Hollywood, and billed as the daughter of an Eastern potentate (though her father was actually a simple tailor). Theda had a conventional upbringing and schooling. She went to New York to do a play after graduating from high school, and then she traveled to Hollywood to pursue a screen career.

Theda Bara's fabricated screen name was an anagram for "Arab death." She was called a "vamp" because of her absurd, vampirish personality, on and off screen. In her famous film "A Fool There Was" (1916), Theda supposedly hissed to the character who played her sweetheart: "Kiss me, you fool!" (the line actually was "Kiss me, my fool!" - which somehow is funnier). For publicity purposes Theda was often photographed with skulls and snakes, wearing beaded, fringed clothing which looks ridiculous today, but which obviously served as titillating shock value back in the 1910's.

Most of Theda's vamp films were made during a mere four year period. When her contract was dropped by Fox, and her film career was essentially over, Theda tried to make it on Broadway for several years, but was not successful. The public's tastes had changed. Vamps were out, and the innocent virgin heroines played by Mary Pickford and Marguerite Clark were in. In 1925 Theda returned to Hollywood to try and resurrect her career, but ended up playing caricatures of her former screen personality. She retired completely from films in 1927. Theda was married once, to director-writer Charles Brabin, from 1921 until her death from abdominal cancer on April 7th, 1955, in Los Angeles, California. Although her most popular films were made over 80 years ago, Theda Bara has not been forgotten by fans of silent film history, even though few of her movies have survived

"A Fool there Was", Frank Powell (1915)

O primeiro grande filme da primeira "Vamp" do Cinema, Theda Bara (acrónimo de "Arab Death").

O filme narra a história de John Schuyler, um advogado de Wall Street que é apontado para uma representação diplomática em Inglaterra. Por um mero acaso a sua mulher e filho não o podem acompanhar, mas no navio que o leva a Londres vai "The Vampire, uma "viúva negra". Schuyler cai nos braços de Theda Bara, mas será que lhe acontecerá o mesmo que os seus predecessores?

"Regeneration", Raoul Walsh (1915)

Mais um mestre a iniciar-se nas lides da Sétima Arte. Desta feita, Raoul Walsh.

"La Folie du Docteur Tube", Abel Gance (1915)

Primeiros passos do mestre francês, Abel Gance, que nesta curta-metragem brinca com a distorção da imagem em cumplicidade com a narrativa da história.

"The Cheat", Cecil B. DeMille (1915)

The Cheat" é considerado por muitos críticos a obra-prima absoluta da estética de DeMille, estatuto que foi ganhando com o passar dos anos e como reconhecimento da coerência da sua linha narrativa, como pelo extraordinário uso contrastante da luz.

Trata-se também do primeiro filme que influenciou outras artes, "The Cheat" deu origem a uma peça de teatro e a uma ópera.

"Martyrs of the Alamo or The Birth of Texas", Christy Cabanne (1915)

No mesmo ano de "The Birth of a Nation", Griffith continua a sua saga de registar em Cinema a história da construção dos Estados Unidos. Aqui como produtor.

"The Birth of a Nation" - crítica por PAULO ALCARVA
Realização: David Wark Griffith
Fotografía: G.W. Bitzer
Montagem: D.W. Griffith, James Smith
Interpretações: Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Henry B. Walthall, Miriam Cooper, Mary Alden, Wallace Reid, Walter Long, Joseph Henabery.

Antes de falar da polémica racista que marcará para sempre "The Birth of a Nation", como cinéfilo, importa afirmar que se está na presença de um marco incontornável da construcção da indústria do Cinema. Trata-se do filme mais caro do seu tempo (e um dos mais caros de sempre, se se considerar preços constantes), um verdadeiro sucesso de crítica e de público e a obra mais famosa de Griffith. Mas acima de tudo isso, trata-se de uma obra sminal e inovadora em multiplas áreas e sentidos, com a introdução do "close up" dramático, a montagem paralela e a possibilidade de se rodarem filmes de muito longa duração.

Agora um olhar sobre o polémico conteúdo, mas sem usar o monóculo da sociologia que é uma redutora corrente de análise do Cinema, onde se abordar a arte cinematográfica tendo como ponto de partida a ideia e ideologia que coabitam em cada obra e como ponto de chegada o seu presumível impacto influenciador na sociedade; na minha opinião, tal abordagem é pura e simplesmente fugir à essência do próprio Cinema (e isto aplica-se a qualquer outra arte).

Contudo, não me imiscuío de afirmar que a propaganda ultra-racista, pesadíssima e até embaraçosa, é impossível de aceitar nestes tempos contaminados pelo politicamente correcto. Mas não é suficiente para fazer esquecer que "The Birth of a Nation" trata-se de um passo fundamental no percurso do Cinema, onde o cineasta maldito constrói uma epopeia que cativa pela sua simplicidade. Balanceando momentos suaves e delicados das histórias de amor, com momentos arrepiantes de brutalidade, Griffith sublinha o pior e o melhor do ser humano. A primeira meia hora é extraodinária, com uma nostalgia quase material a pairar sobre o Sul pré-Guerra Civil, território campestre de fortes ligações familiares, valor essencial na vida de Griffith (também ele um Sulista).

Com "Intolerance" e "The Birth of a Nation" Griffith, se não inventou a linguagem cinematográfica, seguramente que sistematizou essa gramática. E mais, fez do cinema narrativo o cinema hegemónico.

"The Birth of a Nation" inaugura também toda uma iconografia sobre a América, que será retomada, re-explorada, homenageada ou contestada por cineastas como John Ford e Martin Scorsese.

A melhor definição de Griffith foi dada por Spike Lee: Griffith era um racista filho da puta, mas, como cineasta, foi um génio.

"The Birth of a Nation", D.W.Griffith (1915)

O grande, polémico e revolucionário fresco histórico de Griffith.

O filme é apresentado em duas partes divididas por um intervalo. A primeira parte apresenta duas familias pré-guerra da Secessão: os abolicionistas do Norte Stoneman, que consistem no congressista Austin Stoneman (baseado no real senador da reconstrução, Thaddeus Stevens), os seus dois filhos e a filha Elsie; e os esclavagistas do Sul Camerons, uma família que inclui duas filhas (Margaret e Dora) e três filhos. Os filhos da família Stoneman fazem uma visita aos Cameron na propriedade deles do sul. O mais velho dos Stoneman apaixona-se por Margaret Cameron, e o filho Cameron idolatra uma fotografia de Elise Stoneman.

Quando a Guerra Civil começa, os rapazes unem-se aos seus respectivos exércitos. Uma milícia negra (com um líder branco) saqueia a casa dos Cameron, e quase desvirginam as Cameron, que são salvas quando os soldados confederados derrotam a milícia. Enquanto isso, o mais novo dos Stoneman e dois dos Cameron são mortos na guerra. Ben Cameron é ferido e levado para um hospital do Norte onde ele reencontra Elsie, que trabalha lá como enfermeira.

A guerra acaba e Abraham Lincoln é assassinado no Teatro Ford, permitindo que Austin Stoneman decida com outros congressistas radicais punir o Sul pela secessão, deixando-os com a difícil tarefa da reconstrução.

A segunda parte começa descrevendo a reconstrução do Sul. Stoneman e o seu mulato guarda-costas Silas Lynch vão a Carolina do Sul para observarem pessoalmente os negros a perderem as eleições por fraude. Enquanto isso, Ben Cameron, inspirado por crianças a brincar aos fantasmas, formula um plano para reverter a situação de perda de poder dos brancos sulistas perante a emancipação dos negros. Ele forma então a Ku Klux Klan.

Gus, um assassino profissional, antigo escravo que sente atracção por brancas, pede Flora Cameron em casamento de maneira rude. Ela foge para a floresta, sendo perseguida por ele. Encurralada num precipício, Flora prefere suicidar-se a deixar um homem negro tocá-la.

Em resposta a esse incidente, o Ku Klux Klan persegue Gus e lincha-o, deixando o seu corpo à frente da casa do tenente Silas Lynch. Em resposta, Lynch ordena a perseguição do Klan. Os Cameron, temendo a formação de uma nova milícia negra escondem-se numa pequena cabana, lar de dois soldados da União, que concordam em ajudar os teoricamente inimigos sulistas a defender o seu direito ariano.

Enquanto isso, com Austin Stoneman fora, Lynch tenta forçar Elsie a casar-se com ele. Transtornados, os homens do Klan descobrem e vão à procura de reforços. Os homens do Ku Klux Klan vão em socorro de Elsie. Silmultaneamente, a milícia de Lynch cerca a casa de campo dos Cameron, mas são retaliados pelo Klan. Vitoriosos, os homens do Klan celebram nas ruas e o filme mostra na próxima eleição o Klan a sair vitorioso sobre os votantes negros. O filme conclui com a dupla lua-de-mel de Phil Stoneman e Margaret Cameron e Ben Cameron e Elsie Stoneman.

"Carmen", Cecil B. DeMille (1915)

"Carmen" não é um dos clássicos de DeMille, mas evidencia a vontade que este pioneiro tinha de trazer as grandes peças de teatro (neste caso a ópera de Bizet) do palco para o cinema. "carmen" é mais um passo no caminho que faria de DeMille o grande cineasta do cinema popular.

Evgenii Bauer

A titan of the early Russian cinema, Evgenii Bauer was born in Russia in 1865. His father was a renowned zither-player, while his sisters became actresses. Bauer graduated from the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Over the years, he was an amateur actor, a caricaturist for magazines, a newspaper satirist, a theatrical impresario, and an artistic photographer. He was especially recognized for designing sets for theatrical productions, a talent that eventually brought him into the cinema when he designed the sets for Drankov and Taldykin’s commemorative historical film, Trekhsotletie Tsarstvovaniya Doma Romanovykh (The Tercentenary of the Rule of the Romanov Dynasty), released in 1913. Encouraged by Drankov and Taldykin, Bauer, then 48 years of age, graduated to directing for their company. After making four films for them, he went over to Pathé's Star Film Factory for whom he made an additional four films. Then in late 1913, he moved to the Khanzhonkov company where he remained for the rest of his career. As an artist, he quickly came to the fore, with his films proving very successful with Russian audiences and critics. He worked in a variety of genres including comedies, patriotic subjects, social dramas, and tragedies of psychological obsession.

Among his comedies were several starring his wife Lina Ancharova, whom he had met when she was a dancer in one of the theatre groups that employed him. She demonstrated genuine talent as a comedienne in her films for Bauer. In Tysiacha v toraia khitrost’ (The 1002nd Ruse), filmed in 1915, she plays a flirtatious wife who successfully outwits her husband’s attempts to thwart her infidelities by hiding her lover in the closet. Lina Bauer’s delightful facial expressions and roguish, knowing manner perfectly matched the mood of this well-crafted bedroom farce.

Bauer’s series of patriotic war pictures were made in response to the conflict with Germany and included Slava Nam, Smert’ Vagram (Glory to Us, Death to the Enemy), produced in 1914 with the great star of the early Russian cinema, Ivan Mosjoukin, in the lead. Perhaps the most outstanding of these topical films is Revoliutsioner (The Revolutionary), made in 1917 just after the February Revolution overthrew the Tsarist regime. It deals with a revolutionary who is sent into Siberian exile in 1907 and is liberated a decade later with the fall of the Romanov dynasty. He returns to a hero’s welcome but finds himself at odds with his son, a Bolshevik who opposes Russia’s involvement in World War I. Eventually, the father is able to persuade him that a successful prosecution of the war will aid the revolution and the two enlist. The film was ground-breaking because it was the first Russian production to dramatize the tyranny of the Tsarist secret police and the harshness of Siberian prison life. It also demonstrated Bauer’s technical virtuosity, as in the interior scenes between father and son in a darkened room with chiaroscuro lighting illuminating their faces, or the shots of the two in Moscow on a parapet looking out over the city.

However, it is in the fields of social dramas and tragedies involving psychological obsessions that Bauer reached his peak. These brooding works seemed to strike deep chords in Russian culture and offer penetrating insights into the mood of late imperial Russia. One of the earliest of these films, Sumyerki Zhyentsina Dusha (Twilight of a Woman’s Soul), made in 1913, straddled these genres and is permeated with the melancholy despair of the time. It concerns a noblewoman who tries to break from her idle class by helping the poor and unfortunate. She is attracted to a handsome laborer who rapes her when she visits his slum dwelling. Defending herself, she kills him but is rejected by her fiancé, a prince, when she tells him of the incident. Later, she becomes an opera star but refuses to reconcile with the prince. Experimenting with lighting and design to develop his narrative, Bauer uses this film to comment on the gulf between the classes while exploring the psychology of his tormented heroine.

Bauer’s dramas of social realism include Ditya Bol’shogo Goroda (A Child of the Big City) (1914), Nemye Svideteli (Silent Witnesses) (1914), and Leon Drey (1915). Ditya Bol’shogo Goroda’s female protagonist is a young woman whose soul has been tainted by grinding poverty. Orphaned from birth and toiling in a sweatshop, she escapes when a wealthy young man falls in love with her and makes her his mistress. But once his money runs out, she leaves him, spurning his suggestion that they live a modest life together. In the end, she has climbed her way to the top. When her former lover shoots himself on the doorstep of her mansion, she steps over him on her way to a fashionable restaurant, the final shot being a close-up of his body. In Nemye Svideteli, it is the callousness of the aristocracy that is exposed. The story relates the seduction of a maid by a wealthy idler in an upper class household who abandons her when he renews his relationship with a society woman. Leon Drey is concerned with an attractive Jewish man who uses his charms to advance in society.

This vein of social comment also appears in Bauer’s lavish 1916 drama of high life, Zhizn’ za Zhizn’ (A Life for a Life). Although based on a French novel by Georges Ohnet, the film, adapted to a Russian setting, perfectly conveys the decadence of the late Tsarist era. A fortune-hunting prince marries the wealthy daughter of a female industrialist while carrying on an affair with his wife’s foster sister who is married to a businessman she does not love. After spending much of his wife’s money, he forges promissory notes and is about to be arrested when his mother-in-law shoots him.

Bauer’s films on psychological themes brought a new maturity to the cinema and anticipated such later developments as German expressionism. At the same time, they have a uniquely Russian flavor, a brooding attitude linking sex and death. David Robinson, in his article on Bauer for Sight and Sound, points out it should not be assumed that these films with themes including necrophilia are projections of Bauer’s personal character. But they clearly reflect the Symbolist "Decadence" of Russia’s "Silver Age" of literature in the early 20th century, a time when, under the banner of sensualism, Russian artists sought to immerse themselves in describing any kind of thought or activity, no matter how shocking, as a means of liberating the individual from convention. Thus, in Bauer’s adaptation of a Symbolist story, Smert’ na Zhizn’ (Life in Death), released in 1914, a man (played by Ivan Mosjoukin) is so obsessed with the beauty of his wife that he murders her and keeps her embalmed body in his cellar. Grezy (Daydreams) (1915), one of Bauer’s finest works, relates the story of a widower who searches for a substitute for his beloved late wife. He finds an opera singer who resembles his spouse and marries her. But the singer becomes jealous of his insane worship of his first wife and begins taunting him. When she dares to desecrate his beloved’s braids he reverently keeps in a box, he strangles her with the sacred hair. Posle Smerti (After Death), also produced in 1915, was adapted from Turgenev’s story, "Klara Milich." It deals with a man who becomes obsessed with an actress he casually meets several times. When she commits suicide during a performance, he travels to her town to learn from family members the details of what had happened and to obtain her photograph. Returning to his home, he spends a terrifying night repeatedly dreaming of her and seeing her apparition before the shock finally kills him. Umirdyushchi Lyebyed’ (The Dying Swan), released in 1917, relates the story of a ballerina and her crazed admirer, an artist who keeps a human skeleton in his studio. He wishes to paint her in the role of the Dying Swan and, to achieve the perfect pose, he ends up strangling her.

To develop his narratives, Bauer created a specific visual style that paid careful attention to scenic design and lighting effects while employing camera movement and dramatic close-ups. The sets he designed, famous for their columns, were spacious but freed from the overly ostentatious decorations of earlier Russian films. Ivan Perestiani, who played leading roles in many of Bauer’s films, said that "A beam of light in his hands was an artist’s brush." In film after film, the director demonstrated his innovative mastery of lighting for dramatic effect, as in the opening shot of Posle Smerti with light illuminating the face of the brooding hero sitting alone in his parlor reading a book. Bauer continually used gauzes and curtains to alter the image on the screen. Appearing in a number of his films is what could be termed a signature shot with dark curtains on both sides of the frame and, in the center, a glimpse of the actors and scenery in the background. In Nemye Svideteli, he uses the split screen to show the society girl and her clandestine lover, a baron, talking on the telephone, while the scene depicting the girl’s engagement party is taken entirely from a high angle shot looking down on the throng of guests below.

Bauer also made effective use of the moving camera and close-ups throughout his work. In Nemye Svideteli, when the maid is humiliated by the society girl having her remove her boots in the presence of her seducer, the camera intensifies the mood by tilting down to reveal this action. In Posle Smerti, Bauer continually tracks with the camera to depict the crowded reception in which the hero first meets the female protagonist. Later, when he attends her dramatic recital, Bauer intercuts long-shots of the theatre with close-ups of the hero and heroine, including a huge close-up of her face filling the entire screen. In Umirdyushchi Lyebyed’, he uses the moving camera for a remarkable psychological effect, tracking back from the heroine sleeping restlessly on her bed during a storm as flashes of lightning plunge the image into alternating lightness and darkness. This shot then cuts to a dream sequence in which her own death is anticipated by her encounter with a spectral figure, and she is seen in a close shot being menaced by many outstretched human hands.

Despite Bauer’s incorporation of theatrical techniques into his films, his style and those of other pre-Revolutionary Russian filmmakers like Yakov Protazanov were uniquely cinematic in contrast to such stagy early features as Sarah Bernhardt’s 1912 Queen Elizabeth. At the same time, Bauer’s work was distinctly different in tempo from his American contemporaries. In his Biograph years, Griffith was in the forefront of those who sought to break with the first primitive narrative films by positioning the camera closer to the actors for a new cinematic and naturalistic style of performance. Russia’s pre-Revolutionary filmmakers like Bauer built on Griffith’s early Biograph experiments to create an alternative cinema of their own with a slower pace of acting and editing as they explored in depth the tortured psychology of their characters and the decadent social milieu. Bauer effectively used cutting within scenes and striking close-ups throughout his career but always within the context of a style that placed primary emphasis on detailed mise-en-scène and measured performance rather than the blending of rhythmic, dramatic editing with dynamic acting characteristic of Griffith’s films.

At the beginning of 1917, Bauer was at the top of Russia’s film world. He was earning the extraordinary salary of 40,000 rubles and was a major shareholder in the Khanzhonkov company. In the spring, he went to the Crimea to shoot on location and oversee a new studio planned by his company. Bauer intended to act the part of a lame artist in a forthcoming film--one he was destined never to make. While practicing his limp near Yalta, he slipped and fell from an embankment onto the shore, breaking his leg. Despite being confined to a hospital bed, he was brought out to the set to direct Za Shchast’em (For Happiness), the tragic story of a frail girl who falls in love with an attorney. Unknown to her, the man is courting her widowed mother. When the girl learns the truth about the relationship and that she can never marry him, she is so overcome with despair that she loses her sight. Under Bauer’s sensitive direction, the acting in this scene is heartbreaking in its poignancy. The melancholy beauty of Za Shchast’em seems to convey a foreboding of Bauer’s own imminent fate. After completing the film, he began work on Korol Parizha (The King of Paris), but when his bedridden condition caused him to develop pneumonia, the direction was taken over by the actress Olga Rakhmanova. On June 9, 1917, by the traditional Russian calendar (June 22 in the West), Evgenii Bauer died of his illness at the age of 52.

Upon the news of his passing, the Russian film journals of the period published many tributes to the prolific artist who had directed 82 films in four years, becoming Russia’s most renowned director. But a few months after his death, a second, far more radical revolution began sweeping away the remnants of the old society whose agonizing decline Bauer had so powerfully chronicled in his works. The emerging Soviet cinema sought other cinematic models more in keeping with the revolutionary fervor of the new epoch. Ironically, the films produced by the Soviet Union’s capitalist rival, the United States, with their rapid editing style and usually positive outlook on life, seemed a more appropriate example than the despairing, often mystical filmic narratives made during the old regime. While Bauer’s mastery of cinema left its mark on those of his co-workers, Lev Kuleshov, an actor and art director on Za Shchast’em, and Ivan Perestiani, both of whom continued on as directors in the Soviet era, for the most part, Bauer and the pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema were identified with the former Tsarist period. In the 1920s, with the exciting new Soviet silent montage classics introducing a style that was the diametric opposite of Bauer’s, the earlier artist’s work was largely forgotten. During the succeeding Stalinist era, Bauer’s work was even more out of step with the prevailing trends. His depiction of a societal corruption that warped members of all classes from the highest to the lowest would have been inherently anathema to a regime promulgating the heroic style of "Socialist Realism" celebrating peasants, proletariats, and national leaders as paragons of virtue. Similarly, Bauer’s exploration of disturbed psyches was far removed from an official policy which despised introspection, denounced Freud, and banned the second part of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, the most Baueresque of the later Russian master’s works in its dark mood and emphasis on psychology.

"Deti Veka" (Children of the Age), Yevgeni Bauer (1915)

Filme de referência do primeiro grande cineasta russo: Yevgeni Bauer.

Louis Feuillade

"It has been said that in cinema there is both a Méliès and a Lumière tradition. I also think that there is a Feuillade school, which makes marvelous use of Méliès' fantastic and of Lumière's realism.", Alain Resnais.

Louis Feuillade was born on February 29th 1873 in Lunel (Herault - France) in a family of modest wine merchants. Just beyond adolescence, he showed a deep interest in literature and created numerous drama and vaudeville projects. His excessively academic poems were occasionally published in local newspapers. He also acquired a reputation as a critic of bullfighting. He came to Paris in 1898 to acquire literary fame. Famished journalist, he would suffer miserably for a long time.

At the beginning of 1905, he started to regularly sell screenplays to Gaumont, and soon got the chance to direct them himself. In 1907, he was appointed artistic director of the company. He would occupy this position until 1918, while at the same time continuing to produce his own films, so that by 1925, the year of his death, he estimated that he had made around 800 films. (At the time he started in cinema, a film rarely lasted more than ten minutes). He made films of all types: trick films at the beginning, copied on great Méliès, comedies, bourgeois dramas, historical or biblical dramas, mystery or exotic adventures … But he showed his genius most clearly in his unforgettable serial films. The "Fantomas" serial in 1913, the result of a long apprenticeship - during which the series with realistic ambitions "Life as it is" played a major role - was his first masterpiece. It is also the first masterpiece in what the modern critic, from both a literary and a cinematographic point of view, would later call "the fantastic realism" or the "social fantastic".


In effect, Feuillade - undoubtedly one of the greatest aestheticians in the history of cinema - knew how to make the most absurd characters and the most bizarre situations believable, by putting them in the heart of everyday reality.

For him, everyday reality is only a mask behind which another reality is hidden, a much stronger, much truer, much more real… much more beautiful reality: the one of the wonderful, the dreamy, the fantastic, in short, the reality of film.

"I admire in Feuillade, once again according to Resnais, his prodigious poetic instinct which allowed him to do surrealism as others breathe. We owe extraordinary sequences to his flair for arrangement, for example "a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table." In "Fantomas", the gunfight in the middle of barrels is as beautiful as the struggle with the boa. The garden filled by mad women in "Tih-Minh", is as unforgettable as the living room of the family inn, where the Big Vampire tells the story of his grandfather, or as the installation of the cannon by a clergyman in a hotel bedroom. And all those images of streets, deserted roads crossed by mysterious cars, those parks with their iron bars, those fronts of town houses…"

Louis Feuillade was one of the most famous filmmakers in the world after the World-War I. Thousands of spectators rushed to see his series of "Fantomas" (1913), and his serial films "The Vampires" (1915), "Judex" (1916), "Tih-Minh" (1918), "Barrabas" (1919), etc… etc… in which the heroes would quickly become important popular myths.

Although they are less known nowadays because many are lost and only known from the screenplays, we should not neglect his comedies and vaudevilles. These films show, in the comical mode and with the same efficiency, his sense of absurd situations and suspense which made him famous for adventure films.

Although the surrealists profess the most vivid admiration for him, Feuillade had been forgotten with the arrival of talkies. His rehabilitation began after the World-War II, thanks to Henri Langlois who saved his films starting in 1936 when the French Cinematheque was created, and to filmmakers like Georges Franju (co-creator of the Cinematheque), Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Bunuel, and many others…

"Les Vampires", Louis Feuillade (1915)

10 episódios sobre Irma Vep e o mito do vampiro e o proto-surrealismo de Feuillade.

"Les Vampires" produzido pela Gaumont foi criado para competir directamente com a série norte-americana "The Mysteries of New York", com Pearl White (The Perils of Pauline). "Les Vampires" foi escrito e realizado por Feuillade depois de "Fantômas" e antes de "Judex".

O sucesso de "Les Vampires" ficou-se a dever em grande parte à personagem de Irma Vep, cujo nome é um anagrama de "vampiro", interpretada por Musidora, uma volumptuosa actriz de "music-hall". Musidora e os seus cabelos negros definiu a beleza feminina daquela época, e a sua personagem Irma Vep, identificada pelo seu fato preto e justo e a esgueirar-se felinamente pelos corredores e telhados, definiu o arquétipo de super-vilã e de "femme fatale" das décadas vindouras.

A seguir ficam os 10 episódios:

1: La Tête Coupée (The Cut-Off Head)

Philippe Guerande (Edouard Mathé), a reporter working for "Le Mondial", and his friend Oscar Mazamette (Marcel Levesque), investigate the muder of Inspector Dural, decapitated by the sinister gang known as the "Vampires". The leader of the gang, the "Great Vampire" (Jean Aymé), is unmasked but manages to escape.

2: La Bague qui Tue (The Poisoned Ring)

Dancer Marfa Koutiloff (Stacia Napierkowska) tells Guerande she will reveal the secrets of the Vampires, but the Great Vampire kills her with a poisoned ring.

3: Le Cryptogramme Rouge (The Red Cryptogram)

Guerande meets cabaret singer Irma Vep (Musidora); he also attempts to decypher a mysterious notebook he stole from the Vampires.

4: Le Spectre (The Spectre)

The Vampires fight another criminal, Moreno (Fernand Herrman), who tries to steal their loot, but Guerande engineers Moreno's arrest.

5: L'Évasion du Mort (Deadman's Escape)

Moreno fakes death and escapes from jail. Guerande is taken prisoner by the Vampires but escapes as well. The Great Vampire organizes a deadly ball to steal his guest's valuables, but is outwitted by Moreno.

6: Les Yeux qui Fascinent (The Mesmerizing Eyes)

The Vampires are after a treasure in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Moreno hypnotizes Irma Vep into killing the Great Vampire. Then Moreno takes over the gang.

7: Satanas

The heretofore unknown Lord of the Vampires, Satanas (Louis Leubas), reveals his existence. He kills Moreno by bombarding the restaurant where he was eating. He then try to steal the fortune of millionnaire Geo Baldwin (Emile Keppens) but is thwarted by Guerande and Mazamette.

8: Le Maître de la Foudre (The Master of Lightning)

Irma Vep is captured by the Police but Satanas arranges her escape; however he, too, is caught. He kills himself in his jail cell.

9: L'Homme des Poisons (The Man Who Knew Poisons)

Enter the new Lord of the Vampires: Venenos (Frederik Moriss). He tries to poison Guerande but his plot fails.

10: Les Noces Sanglantes (The Bloody Wedding)

Guerande finally marries his girl-friend (Louise Lagrange). The Vampires plot against the couple, but are thwarted by Mazamette. The gang is killed or captured.

"The Patchwork Girl of Oz", J. Farrell MacDonald (1914)

"The Magic Cloak of Oz", J. Farrell MacDonald (1914)

"His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz", L. Frank Baum (1914)

25 anos antes do imortal "Wizard of Oz" com Judy Garland, o mesmo autor, Frank Baum, produzia estas jóias do Cinema Mudo sobre o mesmo imaginário.