Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade

Zones of Anxiety

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES

TO FILM AND TELEVISION SERIES

A complete listing of the books in this series

can be found online at http://wsupress.wayne.edu

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Patricia B. Erens

Dominican University

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Peter Lehman

Arizona State University

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Robert J. Burgoyne

Wayne State University

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Anna McCarthy

New York University

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Zones of Anxiety

MOVEMENT, MUSIDORA, AND THE CRIME SERIALS OF LOUIS FEUILLADE

VICKI CALLAHAN

© 2005 by Wayne State University Press,

Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights are reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

09 08 07 06 05                5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Callahan, Vicki.

Zones of anxiety : movement, Musidora, and the crime serials of Louis Feuillade / Vicki Callahan.

          p. cm.— (Contemporary approaches to film and television series)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-8143-2855-5 (pbk : alk. paper)

1. Feuillade, Louis, 1873–1925—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series.

PN1998.3.F48C35 2005

843’.912—dc22

2004013600

∞The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For the beloved Finnegan

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Writing a Feminist Poetic History through the Cinema of Uncertainty

1. Louis Feuillade and the Cinema of Uncertainty: Scenes of Dislocation in Early Cinema/History

2. The Fantômas Series: Cinematic Vision and the Test of Immediate Certainty

3. Qui? Quoi? Quand? Où?: Interrogating Woman in Les vampires and Judex

4. Stigma and Stigmata: The Cries and Cure of the Fantastic Narrative

Afterword: The Cinematic Legacy of Feuillade and Musidora and a Different Way of Knowing

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

An evening’s screening of Louis Feuillade’s Juve contre Fantômas set in motion a rather remarkable sequence of events for me. The viewing produced an essay for a course on French cinema, and in turn an enthusiastic suggestion from the professor, Judith Mayne, that I pursue Feuillade’s films as a dissertation topic. Due to this generous advice, the path to Feuillade and Musidora was opened to me, a path that brought me in contact with a series of wonderful scholars and archivists and even led to a number of long-lasting friendships.

The early stages of this project benefited enormously from members of my UCLA dissertation committee, Steve Mamber, Lucia Re, and Peter Wollen, and the suggestions of Noël Burch, Dudley Andrew, and Richard Abel. Richard Abel has been a particularly strong influence on this book in terms both of his own exemplary scholarship and his ongoing and generous commentary from the very beginning drafts of the research until now.

I am especially grateful to the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA for the Charles Boyer Research Fellowship and a travel grant, which provided essential support for extended research work. In the final stages, this research was supported in part by funds provided by the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. With regard to primary research material, I have benefited from the aid of numerous people. Kelley Conway deserves special thanks for introducing me to the French archives and for constantly helping with various archival mysteries, or rather, procedures. Sylvia Walker supplied wonderful oversight to my translations in the project’s early stages (with later aid on this task from both Kelley Conway and James Williams).

Tami Williams, Bernard Bastide, and Annette Förster provided not only helpful information on my research but also untold hours of wonderful conversations about French early cinema. Emmanuelle Toulet, Marianne Chanel, Jacques Champreux, Laurent Véray, and Tom Gunning have been extremely helpful in the Feuillade–Musidora quest. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to the following individuals and institutions: Sarah Choyeau, Corinne Faugeron, and the Musée Gaumont; the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal; the Vidéothèque de Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale; the Bibliothèque du Film; Katherine Oakes and the British Film Institute; Monique Comminges and the Roger-Viollet Agency; Clemence Tallandier and Zeitgeist Films; Margareth Verbakel and Cordon Art B.V.

For screening many of the Feuillade serials and other early films, I would like to thank the following individuals and institutions: the Archives du Film, Bois d’Arcy (Michelle Aubert, Eric Le Roy, and Daniel Courbet); the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, Brussels (Marianne Thys); the Cinémathèque Française (Claudine Kaufmann); the National Film Archive, London (Bryony Dixon); and the UCLA Film Archive.

In addition, I want to acknowledge the efforts of several individuals, particularly in the latter stages of this project. Jennifer Bean, Sumiko Higashi, Judith Mayne, Kelley Conway, and James Williams all generously agreed to read and offer suggestions to the draft in its final stages. Patrick Gonder, a Ph.D. student at UW—Milwaukee, read and re-read the final drafts far too many times to mention. Skillful and serene copyediting was provided in the latter stages of this project by Kathleen Fields, Alison McKee, and Adela Garcia. I found all this commentary incredibly thoughtful, useful, and supportive, particularly given the diversity of perspectives involved. Also, Jane Hoehner deserves acknowledgement for her steadfast support and unbelievable patience as I worked on this book through a series of different jobs, computer crashes, and even one cross-country move.

Last, I need to give special thanks to three people who have been instrumental, each in different ways, to the completion of this book. Janet Bergstrom has been a wonderful teacher, mentor, and good friend as I worked through this seemingly endless task. She provided a number of key archival contacts that were essential to the completion of this project. James Williams, my former colleague at the University of Kent, has been an ongoing source of intellectual encouragement, scholarly projects, and general good cheer. John Callahan has truly seen this project from beginning to end. Certainly, he has seen and read more about Louis Feuillade and Musidora’s films than he ever thought possible. It has been my family in its most extended sense—husband, relatives, friends, and animal companions (especially Finnegan)—that has kept me going throughout it all and for whom I am the most grateful. Given this stellar cast of scholars and friends, any errors or infelicities in the text that remain are, of course, my own.

Portions of chapters 3 and 4 were published as Vicki Callahan, Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade, in Velvet Light Trap 37 (spring 1996): 37–50. Copyright 1996 by the University of Texas Press.

Portions of the introduction and chapter 4 were published as Vicki Callahan, Screening Musidora: Inscribing Indeterminacy in Film History, in Camera Obscura 48 (February 2002): 59–81. Copyright 2002, Camera Obscura. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.

Introduction

Writing a Feminist Poetic History through the Cinema of Uncertainty

And let us imagine a real liberation of sexuality, that is to say, a transformation of each one’s relationship to his or her body (and to the other body), an approximation to the vast, material, organic, sensuous universe that we are. This cannot be accomplished without political transformations that are equally radical. (Imagine!) Then femininity and masculinity would inscribe differently their effects of difference, their economy, their relationship to expenditure, to lack, to the gift. What today appears to be feminine or masculine would no longer amount to the same thing. No longer would the common logic of difference be organized with the opposition that remains dominant. Difference would be a bunch of differences.

But we are still floundering—with few exceptions—in Ancient History.

Hélène Cixous, Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays

What would it mean to write a feminist history of the cinema? A number of studies have influenced my thinking on this question since I first began working on the crime serials of Louis Feuillade: for example, Sumiko Higashi’s Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture, Judith Mayne’s Directed by Dorothy Arzner, Annette Kuhn’s Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, Lynne Kirby’s Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema, and Patricia White’s The unInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability.¹ These works all present very different kinds of history, but each challenges the boundaries of writing film histories, and all elegantly incorporate textual analysis with a specific engagement of spectatorship issues (though these are mapped out quite differently by each author).

The question of spectatorship, or rather the possibility of female spectatorship, has been central to feminist engagement with the cinema since Laura Mulvey’s classic essay, Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema. Mulvey’s essay is primarily a critique of Hollywood film, but it also extends the debate on cinematic apparatus and codes of vision to questions of gender. If Mulvey’s analysis of (mainstream) cinema as structurally phallocentric is correct, then why did feminists—and women, more generally—go to the cinema? Because experimental and non-narrative films could not guarantee an enlightened approach to the representation of women either, the question of an alternative film form became only one part of many feminists’ critiques. Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema launched a torrent of responses; most endeavored to come to terms with women’s place (or seeming theoretical absence) in front of the cinema screen.

In many ways, the methodological turn in film studies to history was an effort to answer the seeming paradox of female spectatorship raised by Mulvey’s critique. Surely, women were at the cinema for some reason, perhaps not textually inscribed as willful and autonomous agents, but clearly they were physically and perhaps even subversively present in the audience. Heide Schlüpmann notes that the early years of cinema produced an alternative public space for women that countered traditional gender roles. Potential new identities for women emerged both through the kinds of stories addressed but perhaps most important through the very presence of the female star and the possibilities her performance represented, regardless of the plot’s particulars.²

Shelley Stamp’s examination of silent serials in Movie Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon finds not only high numbers of women in the audience during the early cinema era but also the opportunity for agency for female fans of the cliff-hanger format. Utilizing both extratextual material on movie-star culture and the physical plights of the action-oriented serial queens, Stamp argues that these early films allowed women spectators a variety of highly pleasurable and nontraditional models of femininity.³ However, as Stamp points out, all is not feminist utopia in these films, for to gain agency the heroine must face countless physical hazards as well as the more nebulous risks presented by the inevitability of marriage.⁴

Silent cinema has become a central concern of feminist film history, possibly due to the seemingly simultaneous emergence of so many other key issues during this period—the modern woman, consumerism, the rise of new technologies and the urban space, modernism’s visual problematics, and the beginnings of psychoanalysis—that circulate around or intersect with questions of gender. Lauren Rabinovitz argues in For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago that the formal contradictions of early cinema, which framed and indeed regulated female spectators’ agency, must be seen in light of these larger cultural upheavals, all of which function as ambivalent and disputed rather than as clearly hegemonic or liberatory practices. For Rabinovitz, early cinema is not a utopia or dystopia for feminists, but rather a contested area.⁵

While recent interrogations of female spectatorship have opened up many possibilities, the turn to history in pursuit of answers to this question presents a mixed blessing for feminist scholars. On one hand, the archive provides a real material base from which to begin an investigation. On the other hand, there are problems implicit in what counts as the archive, and a document’s evidentiary obviousness can obscure our very presence in this process, that is, our own investment in the investigation. Moreover, the thrill of discovering various archival texts, of finding the hidden history, sometimes blinds us to the other text that sent us on this journey—the film itself. The examples of feminist film history previously noted have been ideal for my process of thinking about the creation of a countermodel in that each writer employs explicit attention to political and aesthetic issues. For me, this linkage of text, cultural analysis, and social change is the essence of feminist film history, no matter what framing device is employed (autobiography, cultural studies, reception studies, psychoanalysis, etc.).

My own intervention in this area of feminist film studies through this book is to try to sketch out a feminist poetic history. My hope is that the poetic might also address why women—as well as men—would sit in front of the cinema screen. Here, I am invoking a certain conventional usage of the term poetic, that is, a history with an attention to the formal properties of the cinema. I am also using the term in a manner consistent with the feminist theorist Hélène Cixous, whose writings, as will be obvious throughout this book, have been crucial to my thoughts on film history. Cixous has been a writer of some controversy within feminist theory; her work is often labeled as antimaterialist, utopian, and individualistic. In particular, her division between the political and the poetic provokes some critics to label her an essentialist.⁶ But terms like political or theoretical are, for Cixous, fixed points of reference for a particular hegemonic discourse. The poetic is radical in that it recognizes or exposes the arbitrary and privileged nature of these fixed points, which masquerade as certainty. This truth is limiting; it prevents us from imagining an alternative or an elsewhere, which if it exists at all must exist out there, outside ourselves, and ultimately outside our ability to change.⁷ The poetic is a thing, or rather an event, in movement. Thus, for Cixous, any real change in dominant ideology/structures (and also ourselves) must be preceded by first a shift in point of view and then a thoroughgoing willingness to relinquish any attachment to immutable perspectives.⁸

The poetic constitutes materiality in its process of transformation. Perhaps no other term so clearly captures the essence of cinema, its ability to alter the truth from one frame to the next. The unique formal qualities of the cinema—often obscured, but most often highlighted in the silent cinema era—provide us with a model of historical rewriting. I propose a method of cinema history that is based fundamentally on the form of the cinema itself, which in turn opens up the kind of material applicable to our writing of history. Here, the importance of form is not a fixed product of technique; a 360-degree camera movement or a noncontinuity edit is not in itself a radical aesthetic (or nonpatriarchal). Rather, cinema as a process of knowing and, more important, not knowing is based on a thorough uncertainty, which is a function of film’s potential unpredictability from frame to frame. It is this cinema of uncertainty as an alternative mode in cinema history that demonstrates the possibility for a poetic method of writing cinema history.⁹

The crime serials of Louis Feuillade, due to their rather unique configurations, are a particularly appropriate group of films for this effort. In this study, I will focus primarily on six serials Feuillade made between 1913 and 1920: Fantômas (1913–14), Les vampires (1915–16), Judex (1917), La nouvelle mission de Judex (1918), Tih Minh (1919), and Barrabas (1920).¹⁰ Serialized films, especially in the crime or detective genres, were an important part of early cinema history. As I argue later when I examine the phenomenon of recursion, the format of the serial, with its repetitive structure, is a crucial factor in the mode of uncertainty. The first two titles, Fantômas and Les vampires, are technically series films since the link between episodes is tangential. The story line of a series film is not continuous in any meaningful sense, whereas its related format, the serial, often uses a cliff-hanger device to connect episodes and to entice the audience to return for an episode’s resolution.

Both Fantômas and Les vampires accentuate the mode of uncertainty built into their narrative structures by their exhibition context. Although both were the feature attractions on theater bills that mixed film screenings with live performance in the same evening, the appearance of these two series is best described as erratic. Like the main protagonists of these stories, Fantômas and Irma Vep, the series seem to appear at random intervals, making their next appearance a moment of great anticipation and suspense. In the later films Judex, La nouvelle mission de Judex, Tih Minh, and Barrabas, more appropriately labeled serials, a continuous (albeit excessive and repetitive) story line can be traced, and the episodes are clearly linked sequentially. These films, shown weekly, were accompanied by various forms of print serialization (newspaper and booklets), and unlike Fantômas and Les vampires, the order in which one watches these episodes matters. However, in all Feuillade’s series and serials, the sheer volume of episodes contributes to a sense of chaos—the excess of plot produces disorientation. (Fantômas has a mere five episodes, but the rest of this group feature ten to twelve installments per serial.)

As a director, Louis Feuillade has had a rather mixed critical response throughout the years, but the recent miniboom in the literature on his films and various international retrospectives (combined with the DVD and video releases of Fantômas, Les vampires, and Judex) has raised the question of Feuillade’s work yet again for film critics.¹¹ Most of this critique has been within traditional authorship studies, and while Richard Abel meticulously situates these films in terms of cultural context and issues of representation,¹² Feuillade still awaits a feminist critique. The pathway to my critique travels through an investigation of the star, Musidora—actress, writer, and filmmaker. Musidora is referenced numerous times throughout the Feuillade crime serials despite the fact that the actress is cast in only two of these films. Musidora functions as an ongoing figure of uncertainty, the untamed poetic body.¹³

For many feminists, the poetic body and the mode of uncertainty might not seem to be ideal platforms for a model of film history, that is, a work driven largely by archival research, practical realities, and political change. If we think of Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s description of the poetic we can see how instability might inform and illuminate our understanding of subjectivity and, in turn, situate a spectatorship that begins to acknowledge social and cultural differences.

In poetical language, there is no I that just stands for myself. The I is there; it has to be there, but it is there as the site where all other I’s can enter and cut across one another. This is an example of the very strength and vitality of poetical language and of how it can radically contribute to the questioning of the relationship of subjects to power, language and meaning in theory. Theory as practiced by many is often caught in a safe place to theorize about others.¹⁴

In the poetic we do not have what Susan Bordo has derided in contemporary feminist theory as the dream of being everywhere,¹⁵ which obscures difference. Rather, we have what Trinh refers to as an empty subject position, one without a single process of centering.¹⁶ This position liberates us to imagine ourselves in very particular material and temporal positions. While this idea may sound incredibly naive and utopian, surely the cinema allows us to do this on a daily basis. It is this very mobility that makes Musidora such a powerful image, one we both desire and fear. In this sense, the poetic body offers a place to view the historical blind spots of film studies and feminist studies—race, class, and sexuality—and perhaps most important, a place to write new histories.

Writing a poetic history is, for me, consistent with a number of other feminist historical projects. Both the Women Film Pioneers project and the Women Make Cinema book series are efforts to destabilize past narratives in film history and to search out areas typically written out of past accounts of the cinema.¹⁷ Alison McMahan’s book on Alice Guy Blaché (part of the Women Make Cinema series) is an explicit rewriting of film history, this time carefully inserting the contributions overlooked or denied the first woman filmmaker.¹⁸ The Women Film Pioneers project, a collective effort of numerous film scholars, extends the discussion of authorship and agency during the early cinema years even further, asking historians to reconsider what counts as a site of creativity and significance in this era. The project, which has been instrumental in restorations, exhibitions, and research on early cinema, looks at the largely neglected or even unknown work of women who worked as screenwriters, stars, producers, and directors in international film. At stake in these efforts is not only a recovery of lost data, events, films, and artists but also the reinscription of women into the cinema space.

But the search for agency in feminist studies is, as noted earlier, a tricky one, and it often presumes that this term designates clearly defined terrain. In part, the rejection of psychoanalysis and its notion of the unconscious produced some understandings of agency, which defines any action as willful and good if consistent with the feminist (nonpatriarchal) project. The difficulties are in knowing what might in fact be willful (even leaving aside the unconscious, there are certain empirical limits to choice) and, more troubling, what in fact might be good. Both of these