Coming Soon
LES VAMPIRES CHAPTERS 8-10
1915
Director
Louis Feuillade
Starring
Édouard Mathé
Musidora
Marcel Lévesque
Runtime
160 minutes
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A secret organization of ruthless criminals known as The Vampires haunts the streets and ballrooms of Paris. Journalist Philippe Guérande seeks to unravel their nefarious plot. At the center of it all stands the mysterious and elusive muse to the criminals, Irma Vep, brought to life with a dangerously seductive glamour by the legendary Musidora.
The undisputed master of the serialized thriller, Louis Feuillade crafted films with labyrinthine plots and unforgettable characters that influenced multiple generations of filmmakers. Comprised of ten episodes, and clocking in at nearly seven hours in duration, LES VAMPIRES is an unqualified masterpiece. Shot largely in the streets of Paris and its suburbs, in dingy shacks and basements, and in ornate Belle Epoque interiors, the film revels in the familiar and the everyday, only to explode with unexpected eruptions that transform this peaceful world into a charged universe of unlimited evil and corruption.
Join us over the course of three Wednesday evenings as we undertake an investigation into the sprawling film that hovers like a sinister ghost over the entire history of cinema!
“One of the supreme pleasures in all of cinema, LES VAMPIRES, a thrilling ten-part serial released in France in 1915 and 1916, came out during the same period as THE BIRTH OF A NATION and INTOLERANCE. Yet the odd thing about this conjunction is that, far from being contemporaries, D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) and Louis Feuillade (1873-1925) seem to belong to different centuries. While Griffith’s work reeks of Victorian morality and nostalgia for the mid-19th century, Feuillade looks ahead to the global paranoia, conspiratorial intrigues, and SF technological fantasies of the current century, right up to today. Alone among cinema’s pioneers, Feuillade implies that the past 70-odd years of moviemaking may be far less essential than most of us have supposed. As critic David Thomson puts it, he is ‘the first director for whom no historical allowances need to be made.’ Come to think of it, he is probably one of the last as well.” - Jonathan Rosenbaum
The undisputed master of the serialized thriller, Louis Feuillade crafted films with labyrinthine plots and unforgettable characters that influenced multiple generations of filmmakers. Comprised of ten episodes, and clocking in at nearly seven hours in duration, LES VAMPIRES is an unqualified masterpiece. Shot largely in the streets of Paris and its suburbs, in dingy shacks and basements, and in ornate Belle Epoque interiors, the film revels in the familiar and the everyday, only to explode with unexpected eruptions that transform this peaceful world into a charged universe of unlimited evil and corruption.
Join us over the course of three Wednesday evenings as we undertake an investigation into the sprawling film that hovers like a sinister ghost over the entire history of cinema!
“One of the supreme pleasures in all of cinema, LES VAMPIRES, a thrilling ten-part serial released in France in 1915 and 1916, came out during the same period as THE BIRTH OF A NATION and INTOLERANCE. Yet the odd thing about this conjunction is that, far from being contemporaries, D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) and Louis Feuillade (1873-1925) seem to belong to different centuries. While Griffith’s work reeks of Victorian morality and nostalgia for the mid-19th century, Feuillade looks ahead to the global paranoia, conspiratorial intrigues, and SF technological fantasies of the current century, right up to today. Alone among cinema’s pioneers, Feuillade implies that the past 70-odd years of moviemaking may be far less essential than most of us have supposed. As critic David Thomson puts it, he is ‘the first director for whom no historical allowances need to be made.’ Come to think of it, he is probably one of the last as well.” - Jonathan Rosenbaum