The Sunday Intertitle: Auto-Bandits

Digging more into Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset’s wacky oeuvre. (PROTEA and BALAOO are the ones I know. Oh, and ZIGOMAR!) THE MAGIC SACK from 1908 proves to be a somewhat basic trick film, shot at a distance, almost in a Kinoshita manner. But Jasset keeps making small strides (behind Griffith and others, no doubt). In 1912’s DANS LA CAVE — in this Eye Film Museum print, IN DEN KELDER, or IN THE CELLAR to us, we’re in a more realist vein.

Two crooks secret themselves in a pub cellar while the publican is dozing. Then they set about robbing the joint after closing time, and clobber the owner when he investigates their burglary-noises.

It’s somewhat diverting. The performances are big but not outrageously so. It’s a suspense movie which seemingly concentrates on the question of whether the crooks will escape with the loot, whereas I would think concern for whether they’ll assassinate the proprietor would be a better, more anxiety-provoking motif. After coshing the poor old duffer, they very gently carry him downstairs, which shows they’re really not keen to face a murder rap.

We’re still in a one-room-one-shot style of decoupage, not very helpful for suspense, which demands that when the situation changes, the shot should change. If you haven’t discovered this, the only way to generate suspense is by intercutting parallel actions, or by showing parallel actions in the same frame (a character hiding in the foreground while enemies search in the background).

BANDITES EN AUTOMOBILE from the same year is much tougher. Of course I can’t read the Dutch intertitles so perhaps my sense that this is a near-plotless parade of sensational outrages is partly due to my not understanding whatever nuances it has. But even if the story and characterisation were to turn out to be worthy of Dostoevsky, the mayhem unfolding is extraordinary and unrelenting. It helps that the transfer is so pristine, even if the frame is regularly invaded by great flickering nebulae of fungal decomposition. It also lets you enjoy the amusingly explicit acting. The gestures are tamped down, and they’re presented as being explanatory pantomime for the benefit of the other characters, rather than the audience, but everybody seems humorously anxious to be understood, constantly pointing — THIS, THERE, YOU, HIM, THESE — so we know whose benefit it’s really for.

This is the surviving first two episodes of a longer serial, so don’t expect closure, but do expect insane amounts of shooty-gun business. The movie serial is proof that the “cinema of attractions” never went away, and we can see it in the modern action movie. The narrative is important, but in a certain sense it’s merely a vine to grow setpieces from. And the setpieces are important, but in a certain sense what we really care about is story and characters. Both things are true. You certainly get movies where it’s purely about story and character and good acting, with minimal sensational content. But the quality of movieness seems to be a blendship of narrative drama with the attraction, even if the sensational element is of a subtler variety, say that of glamorous people in scintillating gowns on beautiful sets with swooning music.