Les Vampires

Feuillades 10 episodes of the crime serial. 1915
Use of a static camera (few pans) for a square setting, theatrical. Often a door at the back, attention at one depth, but suspense created through the use of others. Complex staging of blocking, by people, doorways and others who at that moment are not meant to be the centre of attention.
There are cuts to frame differently, quite a few inserts (and intertitles; this is really very wordy, people talking in rooms), and analytical editing devices.
When seated, the actors are very low. Use of vertical space, climbing up walls, chimneys, towering over others. Connects to wider themes.
The limbic city, finding new spaces in it. In the bourgeois home, with explicit property ties, the maids and servants pop out of doors, walls, fireplaces. As though the bourgeois are under siege in their own house. Use of alternate spaces. Cinema’s connections with rooftops (here, obviously ‘Irma Vep’, ‘The Kid’, ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Va Savoir’). Cinema; empty streets, car chases (note the tracking on the moving car- before Vertov), trains (train roofs). At once subversive and a cinema of fear. Certain sensationalist pandering with pretty shocking violence; shooting, body parts. People chucked off buildings. Causal death. Disguise as constant. Police and criminals the same in creeping about and duplicity. Own methods come back to them haunt them. Confusioof identity. Vampires don’t know who are Vampires, same with the ‘goodies’.
As it goes on, the cuts are perhaps a little faster. What vertainly happens is that the shots become more free. There is more variety as the camera moves, outside, opting for more than theatrical tableaus. Long shots turn to medium shots, there is lot of above the waist stuff, with a few not too far away from close-ups, showing one emotion.
It’s the Vampires we love; the rather priggish police breaking in on their ‘orgiastic party’, which looks wonderful, naive fun, is the end of chaos and the joy that goes with that. What on earth will the (obsessive) editor do now? Settle into the completeness of his little bourgeois life, that was so disturbed.