Finally finished this after making my way through it the past couple weeks. Between this and Les Vampires, I feel like I enjoyed this more than the other. But watching Feuillade's serials is such an interesting situation for me. On one hand, they are utterly fascinating. These over century old epics are so incredibly inventive for their time. The imagery in these films is utterly astounding (especially the Kino Blu-Ray of Fantomas, how the hell does this 109-year-old film look so freaking clean?). You find yourself searching among the frame, trying to find Fantomas in disguise, but hey may not even be there! On the other hand, THESE FILMS ARE SLOW. I'm not even talking about the full runtime; I typically watch these just one episode at a time. The pacing is so epically slow, it makes your average silent film feel like action movies. Of course, this is mainly because of how early in film history we are in here. But you really have to have a tremendous amount of focus to get through each episode of this, and then you might just find yourself get absolutely lost in the long still takes of these films. And reading. A lot of reading.
Finally finished this after making my way through it the past couple weeks. Between this and Les Vampires, I feel like I enjoyed this more than the other. But watching Feuillade's serials is such an interesting situation for me. On one hand, they are utterly fascinating. These over century old epics are so incredibly inventive for their time. The imagery in these films is utterly astounding (especially the Kino Blu-Ray of Fantomas, how the hell does this 109-year-old film look so freaking clean?). You find yourself searching among the frame, trying to find Fantomas in disguise, but hey may not even be there! On the other hand, THESE FILMS ARE SLOW. I'm not even talking about the full runtime; I typically watch these just one episode at a time. The pacing is so epically slow, it makes your average silent film feel like action movies. Of course, this is mainly because of how early in film history we are in here. But you really have to have a tremendous amount of focus to get through each episode of this, and then you might just find yourself get absolutely lost in the long still takes of these films. And reading. A lot of reading.
