Louis Feuillade

Early life and career

Feuillade was born in Lunel (Hérault) to Barthélémy Feuillade, a modest wine merchant, and Marie Avesque. Just beyond adolescence, he showed a deep interest in literature and created numerous drama and vaudeville projects. His excessively academic poems were occasionally published in local newspapers, and he acquired a reputation for his articles devoted to bullfighting. At twelve he was sent by his parents to a Catholic seminary in Carcassonne, which has been credited for his gothic stylization in his later career. His biographer Francis Lacssin has suggested that "the strange, surrealist flashes of anarchy which spark through the work of this pillar of society can only be explained as some sort of unconscious revolt to which he gave rein in his dreams — that is to say, in his films." He then began his compulsory military service in 1891 until 1895, when he married Jeanne-Leontine Jaujou on 31 October 1895. After the deaths of his parents, he went to Paris in 1902 seeking literary success, but would suffer miserably for several years.

At the beginning of 1905, he started to submit screenplays to Gaumont, and Gaumont's artistic director Alice Guy-Blaché both bought his scripts and invited Feuillade to direct them himself. Concerned about his financial difficulties and family to support, Feuillade declined the directing job in order to continue working as a journalist. At his suggestion Guy-Blaché hired Étienne Arnaud to direct Feuillade's early screenplays at Gaumont. But by 1906 he had gained enough confidence to start directing his own scripts, which were mostly comedies. In 1907 Guy-Blaché moved to the United States and upon her suggestion Feuillade was made Artistic Director of Gaumont. He would work for Gaumont until 1918, while at the same time producing his own films, so that by 1925, the year of his death, he estimated that he had made around 800 films. (At the time he started in cinema, a film rarely lasted more than ten minutes). He made films of all types—trick films at the beginning, modeled on those of the great Méliès, comedies, bourgeois dramas, historical or biblical dramas, mysteries and exotic adventures—but he is remembered best for his serial films.

Serial films and fame

The Fantômas serial in 1913 was his first masterpiece, the result of a long apprenticeship—during which the series with realistic ambitions, Life as it is, played a major role. It is also the first masterpiece in what the modern critic, from both a literary and a cinematographic point of view, would later call "the fantastic realism" or the "social fantastic".

He is credited with developing many of the thriller techniques used famously by Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, and others.

Partial filmography