Best French Films of the 1910s

The Decade in which the Cinema Craze Took Off

For its first 15 years, cinema had been a curiosity, a sideshow amusement at fairgrounds, but in the 1910s this curiosity rapidly developed into a full-scale industry on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, Gaumont and Pathé led the way in servicing the mushrooming demand for this new medium of mass entertainment. Louis Feuillade had hit after hit with his ambitious adventure-thriller serials, whilst Léonce Perret found an appreciative audience for his more sensitively crafted naturalistic dramas. Meanwhile, more artistically inclined filmmakers, such as Albert Capellani, André Antoine and Abel Gance, were actively exploring the bounds of cinematic expression with their unceasing experimentation in every aspect of filmmaking. Sadly, many works from this pioneering decade are lost to us, but what remains is a dazzling kaleidoscope of artistic bravado. Here are some of the highlights of French cinema from the 1910s. For a more complete list consult our best films index and complete films index.

Max victime du quinquina (1911)

Max, victime du quinquina is a short comedy masterpiece, full of hilarious comic set-pieces which amply demonstrate why Max Linder was a legend in his own lifetime. Linder's flair for visual humour was unrivalled and influenced many subsequent comedy giants, including Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. In the hundreds of short films he made, Linder was way ahead of his time and he virtually invented the language of film comedy.

Read full review...

La Tare (1911)

La Tare exemplifies the kind of quality melodrama that was a speciality of the film studio Gaumont and its star director Louis Feuillade in its early days. Showcasing the talents of the charismatic actress Renée Carl (a frequent collaborator of the director), the film deals with the concept of the 'fallen woman' to devastating effect, making this a savagely forceful critique of contemporary bourgeois morality.

Read full review...

Le Trust, ou les batailles de l'argent (1911)

Le Trust, ou les batailles de l'argent was an important milestone both for Gaumont and Louis Feuillade. A fast-moving, well-paced crime intrigue, it anticipates the massively popular thriller serials that the director would go on to make for the studio over the course of the decade, including Fantômas, Les Vampires and Judex Thanks to Feuillade's visual flair, and the charismatic presence of its lead actor René Navarre, the film manages to be remarkably compelling, in spite of its somewhat ludicrous plot.

Read full review...

À la conquête du pôle (1912)

À la conquête du pôle was the last commercially successful film to be made by Georges Méliès, arguably the greatest film pioneer of the previous decade. Adapted from Jules Verne's novel The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, this ambitious adventure-fantasy recaptures the magic of Méliès's earlier cinematic matvel, Le Voyage dans la lune, effectively telling the same story but with even greater visual flair. Its high-point is the dramatic appearance of a gruesome man-eating ice monster which oddly prefigures King Kong.

Read full review...

La Hantise (1912)

Until 1998, La Hantise was the earliest surviving film to reference the sinking of the Titanic. One of Louis Feuillade's more restrained films, it is quiet but engaging melodrama that sets out to debunk the then popular craze of chiromancy. Some incredibly dodgy model work (the Titanic looks laughably like a toy boat in a bath) is redeemed by the strong central performances, with the result that La Hantise manages to be an absorbing drama.

Read full review...

Le Chrysanthème rouge (1912)

One of Gaumont's foremost directors, Léonce Perret brought considerably charm and flair to his films, and this is more than evident in his enchanting short Le Chrysanthème rouge. The film has a very simple plot - a humorous variation on the Judgment of Solomon story - but in Perret's deft hands it becomes a wonderful little fable which manages to be poignant, hilarious and more than a little macabre. The film is worth noting for Perret's liberal use of close-ups, a device that was rarely used at the time.

Read full review...

Le Coeur et l'argent (1912)

Le Coeur et l'argent was a collaborative venture by Gaumont's two lead directors, Louis Feuillade and Léonce Perret. An unusually pessimistic melodrama, the film is distinguished by its extensive use of exterior locations and also some daring use of split-screen photography. The lead role was taken by the stunningly photogenic Suzanne Grandais who, one of Gaumont's biggest stars at the time, was considered the Mary Pickford of French cinema.

Read full review...

Le Mystère des roches de Kador (1912)

Le Mystère des roches de Kador represents the artistic pinnacle of the pioneering filmmaker Léonce Perret. An obvious precursor to Feuillade's thriller serials, this remarkable film has a surprising modernity with its generous use of real locations and slick deep focus photography. It was one of the first French films to make effective use of the raw Brittany landscape, but what is more interesting is its flagrant self-referentialism. This could well be cinema's first example of a 'film within a film', a first stab at what we now term metacinema.

Read full review...

Sur les rails (1912)

Léonce Perret demonstrates his skill for combining everyday incident with fantastic intrigue in his stylish short Sur les rails. Using his trademark split-screen device, Perret manages to get us inside the head of a potential murderer and then shocks us with a horrifying realistic staging of a scene in which one railworker attempts to kill his rival. The film ends with one of the most daring stunts ever recorded on celluloid.

Read full review...

Fantômas - À l'ombre de la guillotine (1913)

The most famous of Louis Feuillade's thriller exploits, Fantômas was such a big hit for Gaumont that the director followed it up with four sequels and a succession of incredibly ambitious thriller serials. Adapted from a popular series of novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, Feuillade's Fantômas differs from subsequent versions in that it sets the intrigue in a tenebrous landscape that has a weirdly dreamlike feel to it. A defining example of réalisme fantastique the film takes us into a dark place where horrifying murderous crimes are dispatched with cold and ruthless efficiency, not by your average mastercriminal but by a truely terrifying phantom of the night.

Read full review...

Germinal (1913)

Pathé's response to the commercial success of its rival Gaumont was to up its own game by creating a subsidiary (SCAGI) that was devoted to making prestigious adaptations of French literary works. Albert Capellani, Pathé's star director, took charge of this subsidiary and oversaw the making of many ambitious masterworks, one of the finest being his dazzling adaptation of Zola's classic novel Germinal. Running to two hours, this kind of superproduction was virtually unheard of at the time and helped to make the feature film cinema's main attraction. Capellani shows great daring and innovation in realising the novel's famous set-pieces, notably the flooding of the mine at its apocalyptic climax.

Read full review...

L'Enfant de Paris (1913)

Léonce Perret's place in film history was assured when he was invited by Gaumont to direct the company's first feature-length film, L'Enfant de Paris. With a plot that borrows freely from literary sources that include Oliver Twist and The Little Princess, this was the fore-runner for the episodic crime-adventure film that was to prove so successful for Gaumont over the next decade. In contrast to his rival Feuillade, Perret brought a striking naturalism to his films, giving them more emotional depth and human interest. This is more than evident in his absorbing masterpiece L'Enfant de Paris.

Read full review...

L'Agonie de Byzance (1913)

L'Agonie de Byzance was one of a series of more artsitically inclined films that Gaumont made to compete with the recently founded company Le Film d'Art. A lavish depiction of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in the mid-15th century, it was a mammoth production (even though the film runs to just 30 minutes), directed by Gaumont's most prolific director, Louis Feuillade. Its main point of interest are the impressively choreographed battle scenes, which are among the most ambitious depicted in cinema up until this time.

Read full review...

Les Dents de fer (1913)

If Louis Feuillade had directed Les Dents de fer it would most probably have ended up as a mix of full-blown melodrama and suspense thriller. Instead, it was helmed by Feuillade's close colleague at Gaumont, Léonce Perret, who eshews such crass sensationalism and instead delivers a far more subtle kind of film - a humane morality tale that appeals to our nobler instincts. Most interesting is Perret's use of deep focus photography to extend the depth of field. This endows the film not only with a heightened sense of reality but also a striking modernity.

Read full review...

Le Diamant noir (1913)

Le Diamant noir is among the most noteworthy films that Alfred Machin directed during his term as artistic director of Pathé's Belgian subsidiary. The film has two stars, a young Albert Dieudonné, who would later become famous for his portrayal of Napoléon Bonaparte in Abel Gance's great biopic Napoléon (1927), and a highly photogenic leopard named Mimir, whom Machin adopted as a baby and who starred in many of his films. The story isn't much to write home about but Machin keeps us interested and maintains the tension by cross-cutting between the Belgian and African settings.

Read full review...

Le Roman d'un mousse (1914)

Léonce Perret's second feature for Gaumont, Le Roman d'un mousse feels spookily like a precursor to Fritz Lang's Mabuse films, having at its core a despicable villain who delights in the power he has over his victims. Perversely, Perret compels us to feel more for his villain than for the innocents he preys upon - an unfortunate woman who is about to be robbed of her fortune and a chubby little boy who is destined to end up as fish food. Perret's trademark use of deep focus photography brings a striking realism to its location sequences (in Biarritz, Saint-Malo and Le Havre) and the frantic courtroom scenes at the end of the film.

Read full review...

Les Vampires (1915)

Gaumont was not slow to follow up its massive success with its series of Fantômas films and Louis Feuillade was soon tasked with delivering an even more ambitious thriller serial, Les Vampires. In ten installments (each lasting about 40 minutes), the film follows the dastardly exploits of a gang of seemingly unstoppable master criminals, one of whom is Irma Vep, played by the seductively alluring Musidora, cinema's first fully fledged vamp.

Read full review...

Judex (1916)

Louis Feuillade's run of success with his extravagant thriller serials continued with Judex, which departs from the formula of previous serials by having a good guy - an incorruptible judge - as the central protagonist. Despite the lack of resources available to him (owing to the war effort) and escalating fuel prices, Feuillade manages to deliver another ambitious, fast-paced tour de force. With his wide-brimmed hat and flowing black cape, the heroic lead character has an iconic silhouette, which was inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec's famous portrait of the cabaret singer Aristide Bruant.

Read full review...

Le Coupable (1917)

After gaining a reputation as France's most respected theatre director, André Antoine went on to become a superlative filmmaker, noted for the greater sense of realism he brought to his films than his contemporaries. As Pathé's star director, he had the freedom to experiment and develop his own aesthetic, and with Le Coupable he delivered a compelling court-room drama that was much nearer to documentary than the melodrama of the time. Antoine uses close-ups brilliantly to humanise his characters and reveal their psychological torments, whilst real locations add greatly to the film's trenchant realism.

Read full review...

Tih Minh (1918)

Tih Minh was the last but one of Louis Feuillade's thriller serials, and the least well-known. A fast-moving escapist thriller, it distils the best elements of the director's earlier serials into one exciting adventure epic, but its real value lies in what it has to say about the crises facing humanity in the aftermath of the First World War. The film presents a lawless world in which the conventional figures of authority are either absent or else totally impotent, leaving it to the individual man or woman to fight a solo crusade against an inescapable nebulous menace.

Read full review...

La Dixième symphonie (1918)

Following his first success, Mater dolorosa, Abel Gance immediately turned out another similar marital melodrama, La Dixième symphonie, with Emmy Lynn again taking the lead role as the victimised heroine. The last film that Gance completed for Film d'Art, it feels modest compared with the director's subsequent achievements but it stands head and shoulder above most film melodramas of the time. Like Douglas Sirk in the 1950s, Gance elevates melodrama to a higher plain and gives it far more psychological realism and artistry than audiences of the time might have expected.

Read full review...

J'accuse (1919)

Taking its title from Zola's famous open letter in defence of the disgraced French officer Alfred Dreyfus, J'accuse was Abel Gance's spirited attempt to expose the folly of war by showing the terrible human cost of conflict, not just on those who are butchered and maimed on the battlefield, but also on those who had to endure the loss of fathers, sons and husbands. Cinema's first great anti-war film, J'accuse still has an incredibly powerful resonance through its compelling story and strong visuals. Most noteworthy is its final act where the war dead rise up in their multitude and demand whether any good came out of their seemingly pointless mass slaughter.

Read full review...