Judex - this week at Cinematheque

This Monday the 2nd of February sees the last in a special month long program dedicated to the motion picture serial. This week looks at the influence of the serial on successive generations of filmmakers and will include an introduction by film historian Barrie Pattison, a selection of trailers of recent films informed by the serial, Jan Lenica's animated short Fantorro, and Georges Franju's feature length Judex.

Fantorro

Germany/1971/Colour/12mins/16mm/NFVLS Dir: Jan Lenica.

Animated fantasy presenting episodes from an imaginary science fiction serial set in Paris in 1900.

Judex

France/1963/B&W/99mins/16mm/NFVLS Dir: Georges Franju.

Judex is a homage to Feuillade's serials made in 1916. The characters - Judex the implacable avenger (magician Channing Pollock), the evil banker, his innocent daughter, the comic detective, the adventuress and the glamourous, acrobat-battling vamp, Irma Vep - are derived directly from the serial. Surreal set pieces abound, including a murder at a masked ball filmed in the contrasty black and white of early cinema. On the surface Franju's atmospheric nouvelle vague film seems to foreshadow postmodern pastiche but the difference lies in the gap between the random stylistic allusion of the latter and Franju's loving immersion in the 'surreal innocence' of an earlier time. One of Maurice Jarre’s groundbreaking scores adds to the atmosphere of menace and wonder.