Fantômas Over Paris
episode two: Juve contre Fantômas
First screened in September 1913.
1/ chez Juve & chez Lady Beltham
When the action of Juve contre Fantômas opens, as Fantômas had closed, with Juve brooding in his study over how to capture Fantômas, the big difference between the two films, topographically speaking, is not immediately apparent.
When the action of Juve contre Fantômas opens, as Fantômas had closed, with Juve brooding in his study over how to capture Fantômas, the big difference between the two films, topographically speaking, is not immediately apparent.
Most of the first film was interiors. No more than five of the first film's fifty-four minutes are shot outside, compared to almost half of the second film. Tellingly, then, it is in the second film that we see the exterior of Juve's apartment building, with also - from a new part of the interior, his bedroom - a view through a window onto an outside of sorts:
One other location from the first film is revisited in Juve contre Fantômas, Lady Beltham's villa in Neuilly. I've already shown (here) that a different location is used for the same setting, though I am no wiser now as to why, or indeed as to where the second villa is:
The rest of the second film is new territory. It is harder than with the first to enumerate its locations because the film has three different episodes centred on movement between places, indeed Juve contre Fantômas can be characterised in terms of this restlessness, as opposed to the more sedentary mode of its predecessor. (Had I but time I would count the seated and the standing in each film, in search of support for this differentiation, but I don't so I'll leave it as conjecture.)
One other location is, like Juve's apartment, a place of contemplation rather than action. Lady Beltham has taken refuge in a convent outside of Paris (the novel says Nogent, but whether that is Nogent-sur-Seine or Nogent-sur-Marne is not clear).
This is a one-shot sequence, a studio-shot interior with a view of a studio-created exterior. |
In memory of her habitual position in the first film, Lady Beltham is once again seated. However restless the mood around her, she will always find herself in a chair.
2/ traffic
Juve contre Fantômas is much more interested in travel than was Fantômas. After the Princesse's arrival at the Royal Palace Hôtel in a taxi, in the opening sequence, no one in the first film is seen travelling anywhere except by foot. Lady Beltham sits in an immobile taxi near the Prison de la Santé, but we don't see the vehicle arrive or depart.
More striking, when we compare with the second film, is the fact that we see almost no traffic of any sort in the first. Just as Valgrand opens the door of the theatre onto the rue Caulaincourt a car speeds past, and that's it. Juve contre Fantômas, on the other hand, is full of traffic:
Not only automobiles but also horse-drawn vehicles, bicycles, trams and trains:
(See Laura Spear, in her thesis Vanishing Vectors: Trains and Speed in Modern French Crime Fiction and Film, on the 'crisscrossing of vehicular traffic' in this film, and also on how the space of the railway carriage is used. Parts of this thesis can be read here.)
3/ Bercy
Before discussing the three movement-centred episodes, here is one more sequence centred on a single location, the shoot-out at Bercy. This is one of the famous sequences in the Fantômas cycle, one that situates the films not just in the real and recognisable world but also, since the demolition of the wine storage facilities at Bercy in the 1990s, in a lost world.
The Entrepots de Bercy were a village within the city, a labyrinth of streets and courtyards named after wine-producing areas of France, with its own port, its own railway station, its own cafés and auberges, even its own church:
Before discussing the three movement-centred episodes, here is one more sequence centred on a single location, the shoot-out at Bercy. This is one of the famous sequences in the Fantômas cycle, one that situates the films not just in the real and recognisable world but also, since the demolition of the wine storage facilities at Bercy in the 1990s, in a lost world.
The Entrepots de Bercy were a village within the city, a labyrinth of streets and courtyards named after wine-producing areas of France, with its own port, its own railway station, its own cafés and auberges, even its own church:
In 1981, Feuilladian filmmaker Jacques Rivette recorded vestiges of the site in Paris s'en va and Le Pont du Nord:
In 1913, the un-Rivettian Feuillade eschewed the picturesque and the enigmatic, representing the site through just two of its features, accumulated barrels and the proximity of the river:
Here is each shot of the sequence:
Despite the lack of any recognisable architectural detail, this is probably Bercy, given the quantity of barrels, but for the same reasons it could as easily be the Port aux Vins across the river, by the quai Saint Bernard:
Though smaller, the Halle aux Vins here operated in the same way as Bercy, and looked very similar:
If the place filmed by Feuillade is Bercy, as the film says, it is a Bercy reduced to the minimum required for dramatic purposes, reminding us that however much we treasure the record of Paris left by Feuillade's films, what we see of Paris in his films is there solely to serve one end, storytelling. Feuillade wastes little time sight-seeing (he is no cine-tourist).
4/ the chase
That said, in moving on to discuss the first of the three movement-centred sequences in the film, we come to a cherished moment in the history of Paris on screen. Georges Sadoul: 'Feuillade gave Paris and its banlieue a major role. There is as much poetry in the image of Yvette Andreyor, as a streetwalker, waiting by the metal pillars of the overhead métro, as there is in the décor of Carné's Les Portes de la nuit...':
That said, in moving on to discuss the first of the three movement-centred sequences in the film, we come to a cherished moment in the history of Paris on screen. Georges Sadoul: 'Feuillade gave Paris and its banlieue a major role. There is as much poetry in the image of Yvette Andreyor, as a streetwalker, waiting by the metal pillars of the overhead métro, as there is in the décor of Carné's Les Portes de la nuit...':
This sequence is a bifurcated chase. When Dr Chaleck (i.e. Fantômas) leaves his house, Juve and Fandor emerge from the shop across the street, summon a car and follow him:
This is all we see of the vicinity of Chaleck's home. The book and the brochure that accompanied the film have him living in the Villa Frochot, a private enclave with one entrance on the place Pigalle and one on the carrefour Frochot:
If Feuillade filmed here - and we shall see that he did film other scenes nearby - he certainly didn't exploit the Villa Frochot for its picturesque, 'country in the city' aspects.
The shop in which Juve and Fandor are waiting can't be opposite the place Pigalle entrance to the Villa Frochot, and it isn't the building immediately opposite the carrefour Frochot entrance, at 27 rue Victor Massé, though in the novel that is the place from which Juve watches Chaleck's house with a spyglass:
The shop in which Juve and Fandor are waiting can't be opposite the place Pigalle entrance to the Villa Frochot, and it isn't the building immediately opposite the carrefour Frochot entrance, at 27 rue Victor Massé, though in the novel that is the place from which Juve watches Chaleck's house with a spyglass:
'The Cité Frochot is shut in by low stone walls, topped by grating round which creepers intertwine. The entry to its main thoroughfare, shaded by trees and lined with small private houses, is not supposed to be public, and a porter's lodge to the right of the entrance is intended to enforce its private character. It was about seven in the evening. As the fine spring day drew to a close, Fandor reached the square of the Cité. For an hour past the journalist had been wholly engaged in keeping track of the famous Loupart, who, after leaving the saloon, had sauntered up the Rue des Martyrs, his hands in his pockets and a cigarette in his mouth. Fandor allowed him to pass at the corner of the Rue Clauzel, and from there on kept him in view. Juve had completely disappeared. As Loupart, followed by Fandor, was about to enter the Cité Frochot, an exclamation made them both turn. Fandor perceived a poorly dressed man anxiously searching for something in the gutter. A curious crowd had instantly collected, and word was passed round that the lost object was a twenty-five-franc gold piece. Fandor, joining the crowd, was pushed close to the man, who quickly whispered: "Idiot! Keep out of the Cité." The owner of the gold piece was no other than the detective. |
Then, under cover of loud complaint, Juve muttered to Fandor, "Let him go! Watch the entrance to the Cité!"
"But," objected Fandor in the same key, "what if I lose sight of him?"
"No fear of that. The doctor's house is the second on the right." The hooligan, who had for a moment drawn near the crowd, was now heading straight for the Cité.
Juve went on: "In a quarter of an hour at the latest join me again, 27 Rue Victor Massé."'
"But," objected Fandor in the same key, "what if I lose sight of him?"
"No fear of that. The doctor's house is the second on the right." The hooligan, who had for a moment drawn near the crowd, was now heading straight for the Cité.
Juve went on: "In a quarter of an hour at the latest join me again, 27 Rue Victor Massé."'
On the other hand, I'm inclined to think that the shop from which Juve and Fandor spy on Chaleck is at number 31 rue Victor Massé, from which they would just have a view of the entrance to the Villa Frochot. Two things suggest that Feuillade may have filmed where the book and brochure say they are. The first is the architectural detail of the doorway to the right:
The second clue is the slight incline of the street, visible in Feuillade's film and on this recent photograph of the shop:
This is far from conclusive, I admit. Support might come from reference to a 1913 directory, to know if there was a chemiserie at that address. Watch this space.
To continue with the chase. Chaleck's car comes down the rue de la Chapelle into the place de la Chapelle, though a title only specifies that we are in a 'quartier populaire de Paris', a working-class district:
To continue with the chase. Chaleck's car comes down the rue de la Chapelle into the place de la Chapelle, though a title only specifies that we are in a 'quartier populaire de Paris', a working-class district:
In the course of the car ride Chaleck has changed into Loupart, an 'apache'. He goes to meet Joséphine further along the boulevard, under the overhead métro, still followed by Juve and Fandor:
At this point the chase bifurcates. Juve will follow Loupart and Fandor will follow Joséphine. Loupart returns to his car, which is waiting at the corner of of the rue du faubourg Saint Denis, just in front of the Théâtre Molière:
Juve follows Loupart's car in a taxi, and is spotted by a member of Loupart's gang. His moment of cool observation before springing into action - while a no. 9 steam tram slowly trundles past on its way from the Jardin des Plantes to the Porte de la Chapelle, and passers-by look on at the spectacle of men and a movie camera - is one of Feuillade's most beautiful street scenes:
The pursuit of Loupart by Juve and of Juve by Loupart's associate (who jumps onto Juve's taxi and punctures its tyre) takes us down two streets, firstly the rue Louis Blanc, which heads south-east from the boulevard de la Chapelle, and then the rue Jacques Kablé, north of the boulevard de la Chapelle:
Though in the first street the cars are heading south and in the second they are heading north, the itinerary is not unfeasible if Loupart is attempting to shake off his pursuer (we don't know if he knows Juve is on his trail, but we cannot assume he doesn't). After turning right from the boulevard de la Chapelle, Loupart can have taken the second left from the rue Louis Blanc, gone up the rue Philippe de Girard, across the boulevard and then right into the rue Jacques Kablé:
Certainly in watching the film all we register is a succession of streets, so that the topographical coherence of these movements is irrelevant. But the cine-tourist's lot is irrelevance.
I don't think it would have made a difference to the impression of a chase if the order in which the streets are seen had been unfeasible (below I shall discuss a sequence where the order of streets is quite impossible).
With his tyre punctured Juve has to give up the chase halfway along the rue Jacques Kablé. Meantime, Fandor has been following Joséphine, up the stairs at La Chapelle métro station, into the first-class carriage of an eastbound train on ligne no. 2, and out at another métro station:
I don't think it would have made a difference to the impression of a chase if the order in which the streets are seen had been unfeasible (below I shall discuss a sequence where the order of streets is quite impossible).
With his tyre punctured Juve has to give up the chase halfway along the rue Jacques Kablé. Meantime, Fandor has been following Joséphine, up the stairs at La Chapelle métro station, into the first-class carriage of an eastbound train on ligne no. 2, and out at another métro station:
I'm not absolutely certain in my identification of the first of these, since there is the same kind of entrance at three of the four overhead stations along this stretch of the métro:
Logically Joséphine would get on at the nearst station, La Chapelle, but that is not an over-riding logic.
The one shot in the actual métro carriage is another of Feuillade's remarkable moments, thirty-five seconds of dead time. Three people, just doing nothing (it is three: a woman - I think it's a woman - in a wide-brimmed hat is seated opposite Josephine). Fandor is trying not to look at Joséphine, so he looks out of the window or around him. Josephine ignores him, looking vaguely out of the window and around her. If anything happens in this shot it is the brief look she gives him, perhaps suggesting that she knows he is following her, perhaps not:
The one shot in the actual métro carriage is another of Feuillade's remarkable moments, thirty-five seconds of dead time. Three people, just doing nothing (it is three: a woman - I think it's a woman - in a wide-brimmed hat is seated opposite Josephine). Fandor is trying not to look at Joséphine, so he looks out of the window or around him. Josephine ignores him, looking vaguely out of the window and around her. If anything happens in this shot it is the brief look she gives him, perhaps suggesting that she knows he is following her, perhaps not:
Other 'events' include a glimpse of a man in the next carriage, at a moment when the alignment of the carriages is propitious, and a quick glance behind her from the woman opposite Joséphine, including what looks like a look at the camera:
This inaction is what we are here for. Again, Feuillade declines to relish the picturesque in the situation, taking no notice of the city that his characters observe from this vantage point. This is not Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant, thirteen years later, filming in a train a little further west on the same stretch of the overhead métro (crossing the pont de la Chapelle):
Feuillade's camera doesn't take in the scenery, even if we can guess from the bending of the train which part of the métro he uses (just before the station Rue d'Allemagne - now Jaurès). Even less does Feuillade make this a phantom ride, like Kirsanoff again, or like Henri Chomette in Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (1925), on a different part of the overhead métro:
There are train carriage scenes elsewhere in Feuillade's work, where the movement through and glimpses of a locale give a frisson of reality, but the interest is in what happens within the confined space of the carriage. Usually that is robbery and murder, but still this eventless métro scene is of a kind with those other train carriage scenes. (We shall be seeing one shortly, in the next section of this piece.)
Joséphine emerges from a métro station somewhere on ligne no. 2. This we know from the map of the line positioned over the exit, the only map in Feuillade's five Fantômas films:
Which station this is, however, is difficult to determine. Since she is emerging from underground, it is obviously not one of the stations of the line's overhead section (between Barbès-Rochechouart and Jean Jaurès, inclusive). That leaves twenty one to check:
Since they seem to be heading east, I started at the furthest possible destination, Nation:
This is the right type of exit, with the right map, but the background's not right. There may be other exits from this line at Nation, and other stations may also have multiple exits. There won't be period postcards of all of them, and many may have changed in aspect over the last hundred years. I don't think I'll be able to check every station one by one.
The alternative is to go back to the evidence of the exit in the film:
The alternative is to go back to the evidence of the exit in the film:
Going from the postcard of the entrance at Nation, we should be able to read the station's name above the map of the line, but here it seems to have been blacked out. Still, if we look hard enough we can still read the name:
If you can't see it there, try here:
Six letters, begininning with A... I had to check the map of the line, but this is Anvers, the first station after the métro goes back underground, two stops along from where they got on, but in the opposite direction from the one it seemed they took.
Here is a photograph of Anvers station, taken a few years before the film was made:
Here is a photograph of Anvers station, taken a few years before the film was made:
One detail seems to go against the identification of the station in the film with the station in this postcard: where is the panel bearing the name of the station, and where is the map of the line? The explanation is that only in 1911 was it decided that métro stations would have their names displayed at the entrance, and that there would be maps of the relevant line showing the direction to take and where to make connections. Guimard's original entrance design was modified to accommodate these features (they are known after René Gobert, the craftsman who designed them), and by 1913 most stations had them.
This doesn't explain why, in Feuillade's film, the name is only barely legible, indeed appears to be blacked out. There seem to be two possibilities:
This is just an accident, a trick of the light. If we look at the name panel at Nation station, on the postcard shown earlier, or at the Temple station panel, both look very dark, and it could be that in shadow the names might be as obscure as that of Anvers in the film:
This doesn't explain why, in Feuillade's film, the name is only barely legible, indeed appears to be blacked out. There seem to be two possibilities:
This is just an accident, a trick of the light. If we look at the name panel at Nation station, on the postcard shown earlier, or at the Temple station panel, both look very dark, and it could be that in shadow the names might be as obscure as that of Anvers in the film:
The other possibility is that the panel was blacked out deliberately, in order to keep audiences from knowing too exactly where we are in Paris at this point. Generally, I can't see Feuillade worrying about whether the audience is watching the film with map in hand, but perhaps in this instance there was an anxiety about having relocated the destination that the novel had indicated. In the novel Fandor follows Joséphine to the rue de la Goutte d'Or, in an insalubrious district just north of the boulevard de la Chapelle, a place where, in the novels, many of Fantômas's louche associates can be found.
Joséphine gets out at Anvers station and is next seen, still followed by Fandor, entering no. 59 rue des Martyrs, next to the cité Malesherbes (just below its second 's' on the map below). The topography is more-or-less coherent: she could have walked through the place d'Anvers and turned right into the avenue Trudaine to arrive at her home.
Joséphine gets out at Anvers station and is next seen, still followed by Fandor, entering no. 59 rue des Martyrs, next to the cité Malesherbes (just below its second 's' on the map below). The topography is more-or-less coherent: she could have walked through the place d'Anvers and turned right into the avenue Trudaine to arrive at her home.
Fandor settles to keep watch at the terrace of a restaurant opposite, on the corner of the avenue Trudaine:
Fandor sits just where the man is standing to far the left in this postcard. (The famous cabarets mentioned on the postcard are the next two establishments along from Fandor's restaurant.)
When Joséphine reappears an hour later, dressed as a woman of a better class, she heads north back to the métro and is next seen emerging from another station, at the Gare de Lyon, where she meets Martialle, the man whom Fantômas and his gang will rob:
When Joséphine reappears an hour later, dressed as a woman of a better class, she heads north back to the métro and is next seen emerging from another station, at the Gare de Lyon, where she meets Martialle, the man whom Fantômas and his gang will rob:
Here ends the first of the three 'restless' episodes in Juve contre Fantômas.
5/ the great train robbery
Though Juve has had to give up his pursuit of Loupart in the rue Jacques Kablé, not far from where the chase began on the boulevard de la Chapelle, Fandor's part of the chase continues, taking him out of Paris on the train that Joséphine boards with Martialle. Martialle's destination is Pontarlier, a town in a mountainous region near the Swiss border. The landscape in which takes place the accident engineered by Loupart suggests that the train gets close to that destination:
This a model, but other parts of the terrain around the site of the accident are real locations:
The railway sidings where much of the action is filmed are probably in the Paris region, though there isn't enough detail to determine where exactly. Perhaps it is Villeneuve-Triage, vast railyards near where the end of this section is filmed, or Brunoy, where Feuillade films train-related episodes in Les Vampires and Barrabas. The view from the bridge is a favourite with Feuillade, since three years later he returns there to film an engine coming the other way:
Fandor and Martialle have jumped from the train before the crash. Fantômas and his gang had done the same a little earlier, and it is their journey back that we are shown. We see them in two places, which are not identified and serve as generic locales on the way back to Paris. They meet up with a waiting car near the (now demolished) suspension bridge at Villeneuve Saint Georges, drive to a post office in Athis (now converted to flats), and cross back over the bridge at Villeneuve Saint Georges:
Much as I'd like to know where that bridge over the railway is, and much as I'm glad to know where Loupart and associates go after the robbery, the place that interests me most in the train robbery episode is the carriage. Already, at the station, in moving from the platform into the carriage, we have moved out of the everyday world of ordinary things and ordinary people - the world of those countless départs and arrivées de train:
We have moved into the world of sensational fiction, where shocking things happen, like robbery and murder:
And the space in which these shocking things happen is a real, ordinary and familiar space.
The first shock come when we first see Fantômas in the train. He comes down the corridor past Fandor and towards us. Then he looks to camera and gestures with his thumb:
The first shock come when we first see Fantômas in the train. He comes down the corridor past Fandor and towards us. Then he looks to camera and gestures with his thumb:
I think that the gesture says, firstly: 'Fandor thinks he's clever, but we're onto him, and we'll deal with him', but it also says something to us about how close this fictional world is to our own world - about how close the danger is. I can't think of many examples from this time where the fourth look is something other than just comic bonding. Here, Fantômas's gesture isn't a reassuring familiarity with the audience, it's a threat:
Almost all of the action is filmed in an actual carriage, at first stationary at the platform, then on the move, sometimes with glimpses through the window of countryside or of the railyard where they are filming:
I don't know when a scene of fiction was first filmed in a real carriage, rather than in a studio-built simulation, but there is a sense here with Feuillade, and with some contemporaries, that the thing represented has become something quite different. I would compare it to the moment when the New Wave squeezed its small camera into the space of a real car, and so could film both the inside of the car and, through the windows, the world outside. It isn't so much that we see something different, but a different identification with the space of seeing becomes possible.
In the corridor and compartment, which are both interior spaces, the light comes through windows from outside and falls where it will, uncontrolled. This too feels like a New Wave moment, when that small camera started filming in real rooms, using only available light:
In the corridor and compartment, which are both interior spaces, the light comes through windows from outside and falls where it will, uncontrolled. This too feels like a New Wave moment, when that small camera started filming in real rooms, using only available light:
In L'Express matrimonial (1912), Léonce Perret makes similiar use of the light available in railway carriages:
Perret's film is a comedy and, in the sequence above, it is actually the change in available light, in a real carriage, that enables him to refresh an old film-comedy staple, the Kiss in the Tunnel.
Nonetheless, it is in comedies that the older-fashioned studio-set carriage persists in this period, and Perret himself switches to a set when the gag requires it:
Nonetheless, it is in comedies that the older-fashioned studio-set carriage persists in this period, and Perret himself switches to a set when the gag requires it:
Here, in Jean Durand's Calino chef de gare, another 1912 railway comedy, is another studio-built compartment. A set is a prerequisite if the space is going to be destroyed for comedic purposes:
Strangely, in Juve cotre Fantômas Feuillade abandons the real railway carriage for a studio set at a brief but key moment in the train robbery sequence, the actual robbery. This is doubly strange because we first see Martialle in an actual compartment, but two minutes later we are supposed not to notice that the space is entirely different. The light, also, has changed:
The set used by Feuillade is more or less identical to that used in Calino chef de gare:
I don't know why Feuillade switches to a studio at this point. It is true that, when the carriage crashes into the Simplon Express, it will be completely destroyed, but this set is not what we are shown as the aftermath of that catastrophe: it hasn't been set up for comedic effect.
The climax of this episode is a completely different visualisation of the space that the film has occupied. To represent the two destroyed trains, there is first a close, brief, slow shot tracking left to right, past mangled wreckage:
The climax of this episode is a completely different visualisation of the space that the film has occupied. To represent the two destroyed trains, there is first a close, brief, slow shot tracking left to right, past mangled wreckage:
This is followed by a longer, less close, equally slow tracking shot right to left, showing a wrecked carriage. As it tracks, two human figures run right to left in front of the camera, so fast you could miss them:
I don't know where this footage comes from, but it looks like actualité, thirty seconds from the real world irrupting into the spatial continuum of the fiction. It has great tragic force, and is unlike anything in the Fantômas series; it is one of Feuillade's remarkable moments.
6/ Pigalle
The last of the three 'restless' episodes in Juve contre Fantômas begins and ends in sedentary mode, in the one place, a studio constructed interior purporting to be a nightclub in Montmartre. (Montmartre is here understood not as just the hill with a church on top but more broadly as an area including Pigalle, at the foot of the Butte. )
Juve and Fandor are at 'Le Crocodile', where they come across first Joséphine and then Dr Chaleck. They arrest Chaleck outside the club and lead him towards a police station, but he escapes (in spectacular fashion). Ten minutes later he is back at his table in Le Crocodile.
Juve and Fandor are at 'Le Crocodile', where they come across first Joséphine and then Dr Chaleck. They arrest Chaleck outside the club and lead him towards a police station, but he escapes (in spectacular fashion). Ten minutes later he is back at his table in Le Crocodile.
The nightclub is an elaborate construction, comprising a main dining area, with stairs leading to a room at the back, plus a cloakroom and entrance.
The décor of the club has been assembled from stock elements, since we can recognise in La Tare, a Feuillade film from two years before, the tiled picture behind Chaleck's table, the stairs, the pillars and the French windows at the back of the room:
These elements are differently arranged, and the kind of place they represent is different - a bar frequented by loose women in the Quartier Latin. Another difference is the role played by Renée Carl. In the Fantômas films she is the aristocratic Lady Beltham; in La Tare she is the beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking Nana we see above.
The tiled picture appears in other films. Here, in Jean Durand's La Disparition d'Onésime (1913), it is part of the décor of a cabaret in which Onésime is found by his wife:
The tiled picture appears in other films. Here, in Jean Durand's La Disparition d'Onésime (1913), it is part of the décor of a cabaret in which Onésime is found by his wife:
When Chaleck leaves Le Crocodile, he emerges from the studio set onto the real streets of Paris:
Here Feuillade has been very helpful to the cine-tourist by including in shot the name plate of the establishment used for this exterior. The name can't quite be made out, but the address is clear: 77 rue Pigalle. This is Pigall's, a still extant nightclub (as Folies Pigalle) on the place Pigalle, with entrances on the rue Pigalle and the rue Duperré:
I think the entrance at which Juve and Fandor await is to the right, on the rue Duperré, since the entrance on the principal façade doesn't have steps, and the sign next to the entrance at which they wait wouldn't indicate an entrance at 77 rue Pigalle if that entrance was itself at 77 rue Pigalle. (Part of this building became a cinema in 1908. See here, at Ciné-Façades, for a detailed history.)
Pigall's was at the time a nightclub exactly of the kind depicted in the film. The club's logo, seen here in an advertisement from 1920, gives a sense of the place, and cannot but invite comparison with Fantômas himself (though I can't imagine him with a rose in his teeth):
After leaving Le Crocodile, Juve and Fandor lead Chaleck along two streets, in the second of which he escapes, and is then seen jumping into a car and waving as he disappears around a corner:
The other two streets (images 2 and 4 above) are actually the same street, the cité Malesherbes. That is enough to tell us that Feuillade is not presenting a coherent itinerary from the place Pigalle to the nearest police station (actually to the south, on the rue La Rochefoucauld, as the novel tells us). The cité Malesherbes is a gated street that I haven't found in any postcards of the period, nor is it possible to travel down it via Google Maps, so I can only illustrate it for you with these two pictures, from Thierry Cazaux's 2001 history of the cité:
The first is a 1909 watercolour, a reverse shot of the view below from Feuillade's film; the second is a photograph from 1958 showing the headquarters of the SFIO, draped in mourning after the death of Pierre Commin, Resistance fighter and eminent Socialist.
Actually I can show you other images of the cité Malesherbes, since Feuillade returned there three years later to shoot a sequence in Les Vampires:
(The use of the cité Malesherbes in Les Vampires, as well as several other Paris locations, is discussed here.)
7/ return to Neuilly
Aside from the fact that the location that passes for Lady Beltham's Neuilly villa in Fantômas and in Juve contre Fantômas is each time a different place, each time also it is a quite different space. In
Fantômas we have just two views of the villa's exterior:
In Juve contre Fantômas, on the other hand, we have twelve, including views of the street, main and side entrances, grounds, caretaker's cottage and garden shed:
The bigger differences, however, are indoors. At some point after the events of the first film, and before she went into reclusion in a convent, Lady Beltham seems to have radically changed her tastes in interior décor, from Louis XVI to Art Nouveau:
The salon is all we see of the first villa's interior, with little variation in the ways it is shown:
Apart from the view of Lady Beltham looking out of the window, which seems to be of the actual villa used for the exteriors (the balconies match), the salon here is a simple studio set.
By contrast, the interiors of the second villa are more complicated. With Juve and Fandor, we visit three different levels, the ground floor reception area, a first floor salon and bedroom, and the basement:
By contrast, the interiors of the second villa are more complicated. With Juve and Fandor, we visit three different levels, the ground floor reception area, a first floor salon and bedroom, and the basement:
The connectedness of these different parts is emphasised. The central system that conducts heat from the basement to the other floors is explained to Juve and Fandor, so that we understand when later they use that system to eavesdrop through a vent on Fantômas and Lady Beltham in the bedroom, and when later Fantômas's boa constrictor is smoked out by a fire lit in the basement:
This is a different way of connecting the floors of a house from what we find in comedy, where most often there is business up and down flights of stairs, or more directly down through floors:
Already, in the first film of his Fantômas series, Feuillade had played with the cinematic sense of successive floors when, at the Royal Palace Hôtel, he sends a lift up from the reception through the first and second floors to the third, all the while using the same studio space, slightly adjusted, for each of the upper floors:
(David Bordwell discusses these adjustments, here.)
In Juve contre Fantômas, staircases are an index of the villa's spatial connectedness, best shown by Fantômas's rapid descent from first floor to basement, chased by hapless policemen:
In Juve contre Fantômas, staircases are an index of the villa's spatial connectedness, best shown by Fantômas's rapid descent from first floor to basement, chased by hapless policemen:
The basement is a new level in the architecture of Feuillade's Fantômas, which hitherto had kept to the ground floor and storeys above (Feuillade doesn't venture onto a roof until the next episode, Le Mort qui tue). This is not yet the subterranean fixation that will develop in later series like Les Vampires and Judex, but the basement already has a certain spatial potency. This is where, below the water's surface, Fantômas successfully hides from his pursuers, even while they can hear his breathing, and it is from here that he escapes,via an unsuspected exit:
There is one other part of the villa's interior shown, a utility room in which Fantômas places the bomb that will destroy the whole building:
The bomb is detonated from a shed in the grounds, a last sign of the connectedness informing the elaboration of the film's last location.
There is a final irony in the film having so carefully created this elaborate space out of real exteriors and studio-built interiors, only then to have the fiction destroy it all, utterly:
There is a final irony in the film having so carefully created this elaborate space out of real exteriors and studio-built interiors, only then to have the fiction destroy it all, utterly:
(And there is a further final irony in that the villa here destroyed by Fantômas is clearly neither the villa of the first film nor the villa of the second film, but a painted representation of a third villa, of slightly different architectural type.)
For the next instalment of these Feuilladian adventures , see Le Mort qui tue.
References
- David Bordwell, 'Feuillade, or Storytelling', in Figures Traced in Light (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)
- David Bordwell, 'How to watch Fantômas, and why' (November 2010): here
- Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, maître des lions et des vampires (Paris: Bordas, 1995)
- Alain Masson, 'Le Paris de Louis Feuillade', Forum des Images
- Laura Susan Spear, Vanishing Vectors: Trains and Speed in Modern French Crime Fiction and Film (dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 2007)
The postcards used as illustrations were found on collector sites such as CPArama and delcampe.net