#WTW: Judex

(deep breath — it's the inaugural #WhatThomWatched  . . . .)

Judex 

(Georges Franju, 1963; Criterion spine 710)

If a person already loves silent film, and is used to the damaged black-and-white frames and the sometimes mistimed playback speeds, maybe even has built up the patience to watch six- or ten-hour serials from the 1910's, then seeing Judex — Franju’s modern homage to famous French crime serials — is like watching that tiny flickering square expand to life-size: wide compositions, sharp contrasts, and of course full sound, and yet still with those period details: early-era clothes, cars, and drawing rooms, pulp-fiction guns, knives and subterranean cells, and the most obvious-seeming light and dark used symbolically for good and evil. 

But trying to suss out those light/dark beats shows surprising intricacies. Two women, both introduced on a sun-swept lawn, begin to circle each other with their blacks and whites: while the dutiful daughter is dressed in black to mourn the father she thinks is dead, his faithless lover is conspiring with her real partner in their modern street clothes; as night falls, the partners don black catsuits to sneak back into the man’s mansion, only to encounter the daughter in her white nightgown . . . . By the end the villain has disguised herself in a nun’s habit to kidnap the incapacitated daughter, whose unlikely champion — a circus acrobat in a white leotard — will fight hand-to-hand with the villain on a roof; they are abstracted in one shot to just their legs, two black, two white, struggling to keep a purchase on the sloping rooftop.

   

Reminds me of:

The five-film Fantômas serial, of course; the master criminal there has a thousand times more personality but can’t touch the 1960’s Judex for sheer style . . . . The relentless pileup of events is a kind of link between those serials, some of the earliest examples of popular film that we still watch, and the current need for thrillers to one-up themselves scene after scene, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility — yet the anachronistic camera irises and intertitles here invoke a kind of gentility . . . . And: Could Wes Anderson have possibly been thinking of Judex when he shot the meeting between Sam and Suzy in Moonrise Kingdom? It’s easy to imagine that he was. “No — I said, what kind of bird are you?”

But also — the guilt!

For years I’ve been too squeamish to watch Franju’s Eyes Without a Face — reviews always seem to use the word “grue” — but I need to grow up; the included short documentary Franju le visionnaire convinces me that I should see it. I also need to catch the original Feuillade serial from 1916; both it and Les vampires have been reissued in affordable DVD sets by Kino.

Pitch:

For those who adore a particular kind of surrealistic whammy, the scene where Judex is first revealed (from the feet up) is thirty seconds of perfection.

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