The film serial was an early cinema format that is, honestly, more familiar today than ever, though through a different mechanism: Long, continuous stories broken down into episodes of varying length? The episodes can be watched individually or binged as a continuous whole? That, in a nutshell, is the format of streaming TV shows in 2021.
The Vampires a silent French crime serial from 1915 — also known as Les Vampires, also known as The Arch Criminals of Paris — is a lot more palatable as a 10-episode miniseries than as a 7-hour film — but is a compelling spectacle either way. Created by Louis Feuillade, master of the serial, it was conceived and marketed as pulpy, trashy fun, as opposed to the “artistic films” of the day e.g. DW Griffith. Critics panned it at the time. But it’s clear that this has aged better than The Birth of a Nation in many ways, even aside from the abhorrent racial content of the latter.
The story follows an investigative reporter and his bumbling sidekick who are tracing down the criminal conspiracies of a gang known as the Vampires (sadly non-supernatural; just a cool name). The Vampires are led by various disposable criminal overlords; their real star is Irma Vep (played by Musidora), the dangerous and sexy anti-heroine with a signature outfit of black tights.
Crime stories have a way of mirroring cultural values and concerns of the day. On that front, The Vampires is a tour de force: The bourgeois is frequently infiltrated by the Vampires, and nobody thinks much of it. Many up-and-up characters have double identities or dark secrets. It adds to a portrait of a culture dominated by a corrupt, amoral upper class — something that’s certainly still evocative in 2021.
The story is driven by crackerjack set pieces built around phenomenal indoor sets: Secret compartments, trap doors, hidden peepholes, and other insidious physical spaces are used frequently and creatively. There are a few outdoor chase scenes, but the fun is typically centered around stealth and double-crosses.
The plot itself is very twisty and expansive, with an ever-growing cast. New gangs enter the picture; familiar faces pop up unexpected. By the third episode, I needed a crib sheet to keep up with the characters and their various relationships (Wikipedia has a thorough plot summary, and this one is very good too — I confess I had it open on my phone most of the time while watching).
Despite its low-art aspirations, there’s something very postmodern about The Vampires. Feuillade uses film and entertainment as central plot points, and they almost always lead to danger or disaster: A dancer dies mid-performance; a large ballroom party is drugged by tainted perfume. It reads as a reckoning of the precariousness of mass entertainment, particularly ephemera that regards itself as realist or virtuous.
Formally, the film is fairly safe relative to innovation going on in cinema elsewhere at the time: The large majority of shots are unmoving medium shots, as if filming a stage play, with minimal cross-cutting. There are small snippets of experimentation, though: Background action sometimes steals the eye from foreground action, hinting at the sophisticated use of deep focus by other directors in the years to come. Some of the compositions are truly marvelous given the era, too: The aforementioned ballroom party looks like a Renaissance painting.
But even if it wasn’t especially groundbreaking in film language, there’s lots of boundary pushing in story and character content. It’s easy to see this serial’s influence on (or at least prediction of) future crime film subgenres: gangster movies, film noir, heist movies, etc. Familiar plot points to those genres appear in primitive iterations in The Vampires.
Other than the length and the stylistic limitations of the era, the main thing that prevents me from giving this a recommendation to anyone other than curious film historians is that the heroes are so damn bland and corny compared to the crafty Vampires. I was always rooting for Irma Vep.
On screen, at least, it’s good to be bad.
(I’m attempting to watch 1001 Films to See Before Your Die in chronological order. This is film number 4. Up next is another DW Griffith epic, Intolerance.)
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
A few words on "Is It Good?" ratings for early cinema.
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