Louis Feuillade

Biography

Louis Feuillade crashed into cinema like a man possessed, racking up more than 700 titles—most no longer than a reel or two—while steering the Gaumont ship as both director and, from 1907 onward, the studio’s all-powerful artistic boss. Serials became his playground: in 1910 he launched the fifteen-chapter “Le Film Esthétique,” an upscale gamble that critics applauded and cash registers ignored. Audiences proved kinder to “La vie telle qu’elle est” (1911), whose modern-day back-streets traded velvet costumes for knife-edge melodrama. Between bigger projects he kept the cameras humming on shorts starring mischievous tyke Bébé and scrappy René Poyen. Then came the blockbusters: “Fantômas: In the Shadow of the Guillotine” (1913) let the masked “emperor of crime” terrorize France in five addictive installments, while “Les Vampires” (1915) sent the slinky Irma Vep (Musidora) and her anarchic gang leaping across rooftops and through secret trapdoors, turning Paris itself into a living, breathing fever dream.