Velvet Light Trap articles from March 1996

Velvet Light Trap archives from March 1996

Introduction.(history of film making)
March 22, 1996... IN HIS BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF THE Cinema, David Thomson refers to Louis Feuillade as perhaps the first genius of the cinema, the earliest filmmaker whose works are still immediately fresh and enjoyable today without the need to make...

The thrills of grande peur: crime series and serials in the belle epoque.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1996... I WANT TO OPEN BY PARAPHRASING SEVERAL lines from Jeffrey Week's Sexuality and Its Discontents: moral panics are not bounded phenomena but are repetitive and fundamentally serial. Moreover, they are energized and shaped by mass media and its...

La nouvelle mission de Feuillade; or, what was mise-en-scene?(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1996... AS LADY BELTHAM WATCHES APPREHENSIVELY from her box, the actor Valgrand performs in a play that depicts the hours before the criminal Gurn is executed (figure 1). Later in the scene, Lady Beltham's maid brings her a message, and the two women...

A tale of two prologues: actors and roles, detectives and disguises in Fantomas, film and novel.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1996... "Fantomas." "What did you say?" "I said: Fantomas." "And what does that mean?" "Nothing... Everything." "But what is it?" "Nobody... and yet, yes, it is somebody." "And what does the somebody do?" "Spreads...

Zones of anxiety: movement, Musidora, and the crime serials of Louis Feuillade.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1996... "The prefix Un is the token of repression," says Freud. Let us add this: any analysis of the Unheimliche is in itself an Un, a mark of repression and the dangerous vibration of the Heimliche. Unheimliche is only the other side of the repetition...

Serial killings: 'Fantomas', Feuillade, and the mass-culture genealogy of surrealism.(Louis Feuillade)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1996... IN THE HISTORY OF SURREALISM AND THE popular cinema, critics since Ado Kyrou have noted the surrealists' enthusiasm for the "primitive" era of silent movies. (1) The surrealists felt an affinity for the newly born cultural medium, which was...

Tih-Minh, Out 1: on the nonreception of two French serials.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1996... On the Issue of Nonreception What connections can be found between two French serials made almost half a century apart? Aside from the fact that both of them appear on my most recent "top ten" list, (1) I'm equally concerned with the issue...

Vendemiaire (1918): going beyond the serial and the Latin tradition.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1996... WHEN HE DIRECTED VENDEMIAIRE IN THE autumn of 1918, Louis Feuillade was one of the undisputed progenitors of the French serial film. Besides Fantomas and Les Vampires, the prototypes of the genre, he had made the two Judex serials and the...

Serial melodrama and narrative Gesellschaft.(Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1996... IN EARLY 1916, THE NEW YORK DRAMATIC Mirror ran a curious article entitled "The Serial Speaks." It opened with these lines: I am the serial. I am the black sheep of the picture family and the reviled of critics. I am the soulless...

Palaces and holes in the wall: conditions of exhibition in Paris on the eve of World War I.
March 22, 1996... BEGINNING IN 1906 TO 1907, CINEMA EXPERIENCED a tremendous growth which transformed it into a major industry in just a few years. Corporations multiplied rapidly in every arena, from production to exhibition. Much like the automobile and...