Vampires Over Paris
'Paris est un cryptogramme dont j'attends je ne sais quelles révélations.'
- Didier Blonde, Les Fantômes du muet (2007)
- Didier Blonde, Les Fantômes du muet (2007)
In 'Le Maître de la foudre', episode 8 of Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires (1915-16), the investigative journalist Philippe Guérande studies a map of Paris found in the Vampires' secret notebook. The lines, letters and numbers correspond to the trajectories of bombs to be fired from somewhere in Montmartre, represented by a drawing of the Sacré Coeur. Philippe works out some of the places represented by letters: |
Though the directions and distances aren't topographically accurate, to his Etoile, Elysée, Grand Palais and Opéra I would add Madeleine, Montparnasse, Panthéon, Notre Dame, Louvre, (Gare du) Nord, Bastille, (Gare de l') Est and (Gare de) Lyon. This map shows the terrible damage the Vampires might wreak on Paris under the leadership of Satanas, the 'master of lightning'. It is not a map of their crimes so far.
This map, right, shows where the Vampires can be found, in Paris and the surrounding region, across the series.
Most of the series' locations are identified in these posts: |
A map such as this is shows neatly enough the pro-filmic topography of the series, highlighting the concentrations within Paris - Montmartre, Passy, the Buttes Chaumont - and the excursions into the surrounding region - west to Reuil and Vaucresson, east to Chennevières and Nogent, south to Brunoy and Fontainebleau.
It doesn't show the imagined parts of its narrative topography, in which the reach beyond Paris is greater: to a fictional town on the river Cher, somewhere in central France (represented in the film by Reuil and Vaucresson); to the real Port-Vendres, on the Mediterranean coast near Spain (represented by studio-made interiors).
And it also can't show the real but unidentified locations used, including both streets in the city and featureless places in the surburban hinterland:
Between the city and its suburban other are the fortifications, that non-place unique to Parisian topography, at least until the 1920s:
Views of the fortifications occasionally include buildings that can be located, but I can't locate these. It is fair to assume that Gaumont productions would go to the nearest section, so probably the locations of these two views are somewhere on these maps:
But effectively a view of the fortifications could be taken at almost any point on the circle of slopes, walls and gateways enclosing Paris. The meaning of such a view derives not from topography but from the mythologisation of the fortifs as a site of lawless violence:
For more on the fortifications in the cinema of this period see A gateway out of Paris and the end of this post on L'Enfant de Paris.
Beyond this frontier there are two locations returned to in Les Vampires, each time for the locale's specific characteristics: Fontainebleau for the forest (episodes 6 and 10), and Brunoy for the railways (episodes 4, 8 and 9).
Within Paris there are two recurrent areas: Passy (episodes 3, 4, 5, 8) and Montmartre (episodes 5, 8, 10). Locations in the vicinity of the studio are regularly used, but they tend not to be either clearly identifiable, like Montmartre, or of a clear urban type, like Passy. An exception is the remarkably intensive use of the Rue Manin in episode 7, discussed below.
The Cité Malesherbes is used only once, in episode 9, but had been seen previously in Juve contre Fantômas (1913). There are several such recurrent locations across Feuillade's Paris-centred crime series, including Rue du Général Langlois in Passy (Les Vampires, Judex, Barrabas), Rue Manin (Les Vampires, Judex, Barrabas), Brunoy (Fantômas, Les Vampires, Barrabas), a villa in Vaucresson (Les Vampires, Barrabas), and Feuillade's own home in Villemomble (Fantômas, Judex).
These are generic spaces, returned to because they are convenient. Their anonymity is a dominant hue in our overall picture of Feuilladian Paris, across the four crime series, and is a particular factor in Les Vampires, especially when contrasted with Fantômas. I want to foreground here four differences between these two series in how Paris is presented.
The Cité Malesherbes is used only once, in episode 9, but had been seen previously in Juve contre Fantômas (1913). There are several such recurrent locations across Feuillade's Paris-centred crime series, including Rue du Général Langlois in Passy (Les Vampires, Judex, Barrabas), Rue Manin (Les Vampires, Judex, Barrabas), Brunoy (Fantômas, Les Vampires, Barrabas), a villa in Vaucresson (Les Vampires, Barrabas), and Feuillade's own home in Villemomble (Fantômas, Judex).
These are generic spaces, returned to because they are convenient. Their anonymity is a dominant hue in our overall picture of Feuilladian Paris, across the four crime series, and is a particular factor in Les Vampires, especially when contrasted with Fantômas. I want to foreground here four differences between these two series in how Paris is presented.
1/ landmarks
When, in episode 8, Mazamette and his son go to Montmartre in search of Satanas, they climb an unmistakeably Montmartrois stairway towards the Sacré Coeur, recognisable even if we do not see its dome. This is one of only two landmark moments in Les Vampires. The other was in episode 3, when Irma Vep and a male Vampire escaped from Philippe Guérande's apartment onto rooftops overlooking Paris, showing firstly the Tour Saint Jacques and then a view over the Seine towards the Pont-Neuf. Between them, symptomatically, is a view with no localising monument, only anonymous rooftops:
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The Gaumont Palace, seen in episode 4, is a landmark of sorts, even if its function in Les Vampires is to serve as reflexive self-advertisement. The one other recognisable place is the Saint Lazare prison:
It is curious that the map showing the Vampires' reach over Paris identifies landmarks that they have the capacity to destroy, but of the Arc de Triomphe, Elysée palace, Grand Palais, Opéra-Garnier, Place de la Madeleine, Panthéon, Notre Dame, Louvre or Place de la Bastille we see nothing in Les Vampires.
There are four railway stations indicated on the map, the Gares du Nord, de l'Est, de Montparnasse and de Lyon, but when in episode 4 a victim of the Vampires takes a train from Paris, the station he leaves from, shown schematically as a track with no platform, clearly isn't any of these (it is the station at Brunoy, I think). When a victim of Fantômas took a train we saw in detail the entrance to the Gare de Lyon, the exit from the Métro there, and the actual station platform.
Even if there are few obvious landmarks in Fantômas, the Paris shown is rich in distinctive detail and signage that for Parisians at least make the city recognisable and readable:
Even if there are few obvious landmarks in Fantômas, the Paris shown is rich in distinctive detail and signage that for Parisians at least make the city recognisable and readable:
Fantômas does have its share of anonymous Parisian spaces:
But in Les Vampires spatial anonymity is the city's dominant mode:
2/ crowds
I haven't done an exact body count, but in Fantômas we see streets full of people, whereas the city in Les Vampires is mostly deserted. There are only two crowded moments in Les Vampires, outside the cinema and outside the prison:
(In Les Fantômes du muet (2007), Didier Blonde writes evocatively of 'Le figurant du Gaumont-Palace', the passer-by or paid extra who lingers by the cinema entrance.)
In the Paris of Les Vampires, it is in interiors that bodies congregate:
We can see the difference in how the streets are shown in two letter-posting scenes. When, in Fantômas: Le Mort qui tue, Elisabeth Dollon puts her letter in a pillar box on the Rue des Pyrénées, she is observed by three people, and in that eight-second shot there are eight passers-by; when, in episode 8 of Les Vampires, Irma Vep posts her letter on the Boulevard Bessières, in those twenty-two seconds the only passer-by is a stray dog, who pays her no attention:
(For more on Irma Vep's letter-posting see here.)
3/ journeys
Beyond the city confines, Les Vampires is full of interesting and sometimes dangerous journeys - by ship, train, motor-vehicle, bicycle and horse:
Most of these are dramatically staged in extensive sequences. By contrast, journeys within Paris are presented minimally, as if merely functional. In episode 4 the Grand Vampire follows Moréno, disguised as Métenier, when he comes out of the bank, which is at 3 Rue du Général Langlois - the building which in the previous episode was used to represent the home of Philippe Guérande. The chased and chasing cars turn right into Rue Eugène Delacroix. The next shot shows the cars on Rue Eugéne Delacroix, from which they turn left, back into Rue Général Langlois, where Moréno escapes down a manhole on the pavement in front of no. 3:
There is no suggestion that this endpoint is supposed to be the same place as the starting point; the filmmakers are just minimising the locational effort they put into staging a car chase.
A similar sense of economy informs a less dramatic journey in episode 7, when Guérande decides to call on his friend Mazamette at his new apartment. We see Guérande leave his building and get into a taxi, then see that the taxi has arrived outside Mazamette's building:
The first economy here is that they have not bothered to go all the way across Paris to where Guérande lives in other episodes (at 3 Rue du Général Langlois, 16e), but have filmed him leaving a much nearer building at 85-87 Rue Manin, 19e - three doors left of the number 93 at the right of this map:
The second economy is to have Guérande arrive at exactly the same building he left from, changing the camera angle slightly so no coincident features can be seen. To be fair, when Guérande leaves the taxi he heads the other way, across the street, but across the street there are no houses, just the Parc des Buttes Chaumont:
Episode 7 as a whole is a remarkable exercise in locational economy. Near the beginning Moréno goes to throw into the Marne the chest containing the body of the Grand Vampire. This excursion is presented in eighteen seconds, two shots - the car leaving his home in Paris and the car arriving on the bridge over the river:
The first external event in the episode was the 14-kilometre journey Moréno took to dump the body from the bridge at Chennevières. The last event in the episode is his journey with Irma Vep to Fleur-de-Lys's home, where a trap has been set for them. This last journey takes them literally across the street. They leave 89 Rue Manin, hail a taxi, and their taxi is then shown stopping opposite 89 Rue Manin. Like Guérande visiting Mazamette at 85 Rue Manin, they maintain the fiction by appearing to head somewhere on this side of the street (i.e. into the park):
This, then, in distilled form, is the mode of urban travel in Les Vampires. In these instances the difference between startpoint and endpoint is effaced because they are effectively the same. When there is actual movement between places in the city that movement is not shown. In four instances we see a departure and arrival, with nothing in between:
There are three departures with no arrivals shown and one arrival with no departure shown:
And there are four departures with arrivals outside of the city, in each case with nothing shown of the journey in the city:
The closest thing to an extended journey within Paris is the twelve-second shot of the taxi carrying a basket containing the kidnapped Guérande along Rue Azaïs in Montmartre, before stopping at the top of the Rue Foyatier steps - down which the basket will eventually tumble, to end up in Belleville:
The journey must have been a little longer than is shown because, although there appears to be a continuity match between the last two shots above, in fact the taxi has changed direction and is travelling west to east when before it was travelling east to west. It must have firstly gone past the top of the stairs, turned round and then come back. This was done so that the basket could be in the right position to fall down the stairs.
(See A staircase in Belleville, here, for the full escalographic details.) |
4/ women on the streets
The preceding laborious demonstration of how little travel through Paris there is in Les Vampires was mainly to point out the contrast with Fantômas, which features in its second episode a bifurcated pursuit across Paris involving taxis, the Métro and walking, creating a sense of the city as a complexly articulated network of differences, not only vehicular but also vestimentary. It is discussed at length in my Juve contre Fantômas post, but here are some visual highlights from that pursuit:
Didier Blonde, again in Les Fantômes du muet, has six wonderful pages on the pursuit in Juve contre Fantômas, in particular on the young woman followed by Fandor onto the Métro, then on foot to a hotel from which she emerges dressed as a respectable bourgeoise. Blonde notes that in the Métro, while still in lower-class attire (she is understood to be a pierreuse, a prostitute), Joséphine rides in a first-class carriage, fully at ease; happily Blonde doesn't call her a flâneuse - 'manifestly she knows where she is going'. |
For Vicki Callahan, Joséphine's mobility in the city makes her an agent of a transition towards the figure of Irma Vep in Les Vampires:
Joséphine's changes of attire anticipate the thirty-two different outfits worn by Irma Vep in Les Vampires, possible metonyms of that movement from urban to domestic space and to 'the criminal now figured in the body of the woman'. (See here for a post on Musidora with images of Irma's outfits.) Joséphine's mobility in the city, however, is not in the same manner exponentially refigured in Les Vampires. Though some claim she is, Irma is not a flâneuse. What we are shown of her mobility in the city is minimal - brief, mostly furtive or fugitive moments: |
Les Vampires lasts about six and a half hours. Irma Vep is outside in Paris, in the street or on the rooftops, for about four minutes.
The other women on the streets of Paris in Les Vampires are of two types, innocent and criminal. Of the innocent there are at least three: Guérande's mother; Lucie Machet, telephonist at the Park Hôtel; and Augustine, concierge of the building where Jane Brémontier lives with her mother, and then maid for Jane after she marries Philippe:
All three are attacked on the street, gagged and abducted:
The innocent Jane, fiancée of Philippe Guérande, steps out of her home with her mother to get into a taxi that will take them out of Paris. I'm not sure those few steps make them women on the streets of Paris.
Later, after her marriage, Jane is lassooed at her bedroom window in Paris and pulled out, but she is caught before hitting the pavement so technically I'm still not sure she qualifies: |
There are more criminal than innocent women on these streets. Some are seen just briefly, alongside Irma, fleeing the scenes of crimes or arriving where more crimes are to be perpetrated:
Of these Hortense is the most visible:
It is she who rescues Irma when Mazamette has caught her poisoning the car to be used by Mme and Mlle Brémontier, and she who has the mobility to carry away Mazamette's unconscious body on her back, Apache style, dumping him for the police to find:
It is true that she appears to have carried him from the centre of Paris to a street corner in Brunoy, twenty-three kilometres away, but in gauging the representation of women's mobility in the city I include these rare occasions where what is not Paris passes for Paris.
When taking Joséphine's journeys through Paris in Juve contre Fantômas as a model for measuring female mobility in the city of Les Vampires, we should remember that all the while Joséphine is being followed by Fandor, and that, though he doesn't prevent the crime she has planned with Fantômas, being under constant surveillance is not the condition of a free woman.
In Les Vampires there are two comparable filatures of women, both by the same man, Mazamette. In 'Satanas', episode 7, Fleur-de-Lys goes to collect at a bank the money the Vampires have fraudulently obtained from an American millionaire. Mazamette spots Fleur-de-Lys and follows her home. Knowing where she lives, he is able to bring about her arrest and also the capture of Moréno and Irma Vep:
In Les Vampires there are two comparable filatures of women, both by the same man, Mazamette. In 'Satanas', episode 7, Fleur-de-Lys goes to collect at a bank the money the Vampires have fraudulently obtained from an American millionaire. Mazamette spots Fleur-de-Lys and follows her home. Knowing where she lives, he is able to bring about her arrest and also the capture of Moréno and Irma Vep:
The other woman followed in the streets of Paris is Augustine, one of the innocents. She is tricked by the Vampires into consulting a clairvoyant near the Avenue Junot in Montmartre. Mazamette follows her there and confronts her as she leaves:
It is from here that, after bringing the police to the clairvoyant's apartment, she is abducted by the Vampires and taken to a hideout in the countryside.
Augustine had kept her excursion to Montmartre a secret from her employers, but that does not make it an expression of liberated urban mobility. This shot, one of the most memorable in Les Vampires, expresses the desolation of the city and the isolation of the individual therein - Augustine, like Irma earlier, is ignored by the passing stray dog:
Augustine had kept her excursion to Montmartre a secret from her employers, but that does not make it an expression of liberated urban mobility. This shot, one of the most memorable in Les Vampires, expresses the desolation of the city and the isolation of the individual therein - Augustine, like Irma earlier, is ignored by the passing stray dog:
That impression is reinforced by other views of these streets:
But these images can be read differently. Behind Augustine on the Avenue Junot is a scaffolded block still under construction, nos 43-51; all of the areas behind wooden fences are terrains waiting to be developed. The building where Augustine goes for her consultation, and from the roof of which Irma Vep descends so spectacularly, had just been completed in 1913. In 1915 that street changed its name from the rustic Rue de l'Abreuvoir prolongée to Rue Simon Dereure, after a local Communard, militant worker and leading figure in the First International. |
Despite this expression of nostalgia for the Commune, in the area around the Avenue Junot was burgeoning a new, more bourgeois Montmartre; the war had delayed the process, but the transformation was inevitable. Some of those empty spaces wouldn't be filled until the 1920s, eventually resulting in the odd architectural mix of vestigial Hausmannism and vernacular Déco which now seems characteristic of the area.
The dramatic climax of the series, following this sequence, was filmed in a village near the forest of Fontainebleau. This area of Montmartre is, then, the last we see of Paris in Les Vampires. It seems to me apt that our last view of the city is of an anonymous space, a place that, had we to identify it just from this last view, would leave us, much like Mazamette, somewhat perplexed:
The dramatic climax of the series, following this sequence, was filmed in a village near the forest of Fontainebleau. This area of Montmartre is, then, the last we see of Paris in Les Vampires. It seems to me apt that our last view of the city is of an anonymous space, a place that, had we to identify it just from this last view, would leave us, much like Mazamette, somewhat perplexed:
We would probably not recognise it as the site of a garage from which, forty years later, a 1955 Plymouth Belvedere Convertible Coupe V8 pulls out, driven by a certain Bob:
References
Didier Blonde, Les Fantômes du muet (Paris: Gallimard, 2007)
Vicki Callahan, Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade (Wayne State University Press, 2005)
Vicki Callahan, Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade (Wayne State University Press, 2005)
For links to other pages on films by Feuillade see here.