ouis Feuillade occupies a singularly peculiar place in film history. Perhaps this is because for several generations of cinephiles, his work has always seemed just out of reach. His five-part, 330-minute serial (1913) was, for many years, far more read about than seen. It was enough of a mainstay of the Cinémathèque française that patrons of the institution’s golden era got plenty of chances to see the whole thing, but like so much from that time- and placebound cinephilia, it didn’t last. The post-cinémathèque and pre-DVD generation would have encountered Feuillade via the Museum of Modern Art’s Circulating Film Library, which circulated a copy of episode two on 16mm, making those 60 minutes something of a film studies classroom staple. That’s how I first encountered the French crime master’s work at the University of
