24. Judex (1963): Film Review by Cheryl S.
Our dear Louise says that she is expecting to receive a LinkedIn invitation any minute to be recruited as a spy for the Chinese government – and thus to become a double agent in ultimate service of U.S. counterintelligence. She had already volunteered herself to the N.S.A. to hack into the vast overseas surveillance network that allows Chinese officials access to their homeland crimes and misdemeanors; active espionage involvement on both sides would grant Louise even more valuable intel, especially since her associates, Belle and Madame Sesostris, stand ready as backup around the clock. And that would perhaps ingratiate her to the Trumps, toward their collaboration in realizing Louise’s movie projects. As Pippa puts it, who would have thought that our employer’s original plan to help extend the Belt and Road infrastructure across the Arctic would yield to her ambition to become the prima U.S. intelligence salonista? (Sandy and I think current tariffs have something to do with it.) Our Pippa will command computer and phones hourly to help her boss bring about the secret alliances. (Pippa conducts some enquiries in time-consuming international code, of course.) Our Louise certainly sees herself as a Player!
Master Raro invited me to a screening at Film Forum of Georges Franju’s 1963 film Judex, but he also suggested that I drop by the Ebersdorf Tower last Sunday night because he said he had “something to show me”. Intrigued, I agreed; little did I suspect. It seems that a week ago Master had checked out the 35th floor studio and noticed that a door into Albertine and Paco’s home lab was ajar. Normally, this would set off an alarm (to prevent Louise’s prize cats from escaping), but no bell had sounded. Knowing my interest in the progress of A&P toward ending their joint strike (they are my dancers, after all), Master suggested we investigate. It would have to be a secret enquiry because it would mean going across the studio dance floor and into the couple’s living quarters – or at least peering within. (I’ve rehearsed A&P pre-strike in the studio but had never gone labwards myself.) I agreed to scout out the situation with Master.
We met Sunday night and entered the darkened rehearsal area through the steel-doored reception room, as I had many times to set my Nekomata pas de deux. (Master guards the laser remote that opens the vault-thick door.) My guide urged caution and silence. It was dear of him to worry about me, but I thought I knew the territory. We removed our shoes and tiptoed across the studio to the lab entrance, where, indeed, its door was slightly open. Master pushed it wide, and in we went.
The lab was lit only by ambient light from the big window facing Central Park South. Unlit black candles were everywhere, and all twenty-one cats appeared to be asleep in their tiered domiciles along the walls. Quiet. No purring. No Albertine. No Paco. We carefully opened the door into an adjoining room, the pair’s living quarters, complete with single beds and kitchenette. No one at home. Beds made. A collection of various kinds of twine on a bureau. An odd unlived-in feeling about the space. We had just emerged back into the lab when a loud sound of impact – Baloom! – knocked me panting into Master’s arms. “Shhhh,” he whispered. It was probably an errant bird hitting the double-glazed lab window in its flight and undoubtedly obliterating itself in the process. But that was enough to send us hurtling out of the premises, back into the studio, but leaving its door in the position where we had found it. We grabbed our Nikes and headed down to street level. “Where are they? Where have they gone?” I panted to my Master, but he too had no idea. Mysteriously, by early Monday morning, he reported by telephone that the lab door had been closed when he checked on his rounds. And since Louise monitors A&P regularly with video surveillance and has mentioned nothing untoward, my guide assumes the cat-tenders must have returned to duty. Strange. (But I did get a passing hug from Master!) On the following Tuesday evening, we met at Film Forum.
My movie date pointed out that Judex (the title means “judge” or “avenger”) is French filmmaker Georges Franju’s tribute to the silent crime serials of Louis Feuillade (Fantômas, Les Vampires, Judex, Tih Minh, Barrabas), from the early 1910s. Years ago, my Mute Simulation coach at HSPA showed us excerpts from Les Vampires, so I knew something about the genre. (I have yet to see Feuillade’s original Judex.) I’ll never forget my first glimpse of the ballerina Stacia Napierkowska in her vast winged vampire bat costume (rigged for flight), descending on a theater stage to attack her sleeping victim. And I was immediately fascinated by the actress-filmmaker Musidora as gang leader Irma Vep (an anagram for “vampire”), with her black catsuit and those chic heeled shoes! Master explained that Feuillade had a unique way of placing a single fantastic visual element in an otherwise photorealistic scene, so the livid detail contradicts our assumptions about the mundane. Causal logic is suspended toward the achievement of an early cinematic surrealism. (The term had yet to be invented in 1915.) The black and white photography by Georges Guérin and Manichoux is especially hypnotic in showing the streets, apartments, and offices of Paris, and once Feuillade has your fascinated focus, he hits you with his surprise trapdoors and severed heads. So wittily disorienting! I have to watch all six hours-plus of the complete Les Vampires asap.
Franju’s ninety-eight minute Judex imitates the documentary style of the Feuillade originals, although he uses not only sound but a variety of camera angles in the interior scenes – a concession to modern demands for a more subjective approach. There is a wonderful scene where Edith Scob (as Jacqueline) walks down a corridor saying goodbye silently to the rooms of the home where she has been raised by her swindling banker father, Favraux. That private moment (so “privileged”, as the French say) has an eerie quality I don’t think I’ve ever encountered in a movie. Scob and Franju take us into the young girl’s mind with the most economical of means. That economy is very Feuillade even though the close-ups and travelling shots derive from a later style of filmmaking. Modern movie detail revives a long past spirit!
Franju’s Judex replays many of the conceits which the master Feuillade employed throughout his five major serials. (He made around 800 films, most of them now lost like so many silents.) In the 1963 tribute, we observe a decadent banker’s world (very 2008, this) from “inside” thanks to a disguised Judex, a cloaked and masked underground avenger of wrongs against the French populace. His adventures involve gangland chases, corpses that come to life, underground hideaways, canine guards, a boy detective, and fleet carrier pigeons. Narrative logic is sacrificed to lyric suspense, dagger-to-throat paranoia, and magical transformations.
Francine Bergé has the Irma Vep role (here named Diana Monti), and the actress accomplishes a great deal in her black body suit and mask atop a roof. But my favorite moment is when Diana and her boyfriend dance together at a bal musette, complete with solo accordion accompaniment. The lovers are shown in close-up, bobbing together rhythmically within the frame. (The director generously grants the club’s musician a single static shot.) That dance scene neatly collapses time, which is what Franju intended. Bergé’s eyes are ice-cold during the duet, which adds an erotic frisson to her relation with her lover. You can see the only intimacy this brilliant cat burglar allows him would be in bed. Now that is evil!
One big shock in Franju’s film is a sequence devoted to electronic surveillance, something we think is our contemporary invention since now entire nations lie under scrutiny by their own governments. We discover an underground retreat where Favreau is punished for his crimes by Judex with “la réclusion perpétuelle.” Franju introduces a proto-television device and an overhead screen that allows Judex to write a message to his captive on the ceiling of his cell, very Eye of God, very “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin”. It is interesting how that ancient conceit can still send a chill up the spine.
Does Franju’s Judex have a sequence equivalent to the flown vampire bat scene in Les Vampires? Yes, Franju arranges an early masked ball that is unforgettable. Wearing a mask that transforms Judex into a predatory bird (a Max Ernst eagle), he enters the ballroom where Favreau will announce his daughter’s betrothal to a fortune-hunter. The party-goers sport masks which suggest yet other predatory avians and winged insects, and the entire assembly dances to a mechanical waltz. Here is a society that is decadent by its association with the swindling banker. How is it to be saved from living death? Judex enters the assembly holding a dead pigeon before him, like an eagle’s sacrificial victim. When he catches the crowd’s attention, Judex magically revives the little bird, which flies away above its audience. Still masked, the ball’s celebrants come almost alive with gasps and cries of wonderment. (Judex is played by a skilled magician, Channing Pollock.) Franju thus creates a metaphor: the spiritual rebirth of this society imaged in the resurrection of a slaughtered pigeon.
Because the scene is so witty and surreal in the sustained development of its metaphor, Franju’s artistry forced me to examine how analogy works in the verbal and visual arts. In his essay on Franju, the French critic Gérard Leblanc identified three steps in this director’s surrealism. First, a recognized context is prepared (a dead pigeon is carried through a masked ball). Second, the surreal detail is isolated from its usual context (the pigeon is transformed magically in the cupped hands of Judex). Master says that this step is something like the “defamiliarization” or “making strange” concept of Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist. And third, the foregrounded detail is then repositioned in a new context (the revived pigeon escapes, flying over the heads of the fascinated guests at the ball). A spectacular cinematic metaphor transforms what we had thought we recognized into new potential: a social decadence can be led to a sensed idea of rebirth.
As my Master puts it, the decadent society around Favreau is in need of rescue. This is what literary critics would call the “tenor” of the metaphor. The flight of the miraculously revived pigeon above the ballroom is the “vehicle”. Paradoxically, the needed rescuer (Judex) is hidden beneath the mask of a predator. The magical revival of the pigeon allows us to see the partygoers not only as awakened in their unison awe but still held captive, self-enslaved behind those predatory masks. Underneath the image of social rebirth remain signs of a deadened citizenry. One kind of paradox (a “predatory” Judex as savior) is replaced by another (zombie celebrants briefly sense a potential for liberation). Beneath the immediate gestural image of freedom, the memory of captivity is sustained as a persistent afterimage, like a double exposure. Two paradoxes combine in one, their union delivering the metaphor’s complex and enriched message. A released avian is indeed a carrier-pigeon vehicle (pun intended).
The comparison of tensions -- and their eventual combination in one compound mental image – creates a heightened effect. The result is not a simple replacement of tenor by vehicle (as in most casual verbal metaphors and similes) but rather a metaphoric perception raised to a more complex, sensuous, even paradoxical level: visual poetry. A dead society’s rebirth is imaged precariously before our eyes.
Master insists that a visual metaphor like Franju’s spectacular magic act can also tell us something about the workings of vaunted literary metaphor. The verbal point of poetic analogies resides not only in simple comparison but in their tensed correlation. After all, a poetic tenor in literature can carry with it the many connotations of the linguistic culture, including complex and paradoxical resonances. The metaphoric tension between tenor and vehicle may hold, but the tenor is freighted with its own evoked details, delivered courtesy of immediate memory. Maintaining this recovered burden in suspension behind the newly found vehicle, the mind encounters a mental realm where tenor and vehicle co-exist and combine while maintaining an imaginative heterogeneity. The resultant enriched aesthetic realm describes a conceptual sur-reality, whether in verbal poetry or in the visual magic of a Franju.
You can find such mental licensing in the language of Homer’s Iliad, which we studied at HSPA in our Ideological Lit class (and where metaphor was sometimes described as a highly suspect tool of thought). When Odysseus argues against Achilles’ demand to send the Greek army into immediate battle without a sustaining meal, he marshals a metaphor: a warrior who has to postpone his reward for successful slaughter until after the battle (when bodies can be relieved of armor and weapons) is like an indentured laborer at harvest-time denied payment of one kind or another for his day’s work. A soldier must not be asked to wait for a pre-agonic meal in addition to delay in claiming booty, for if he is, the warrior is reduced in status in his own eyes. Hovering over the analogy is the idea of dead bodies and scattered grain as the remains of the day – and the need for carnage and subsistence as subsumed under the rubric of natural appetite. Two areas of experience have combined – behind the warrior stands the gleaner. There is a mental realm where both are seen as one. This idea may have been treated metaphorically prior to Homer, but perhaps not so vividly. The “real” is redefined through literary analogy: art as transport to an alternative reality.
What is striking about Franju’s masterpiece of poetic paradox is how many of its motifs are encapsulated and discovered in its narrative. It brings up issues that are relevant in today’s world of stock market fluctuation and reasserted nationalisms, with the consequent formation of independent power bases, political fetishisms, and secret societies. As Sandy puts it, we live amid alarums and excursions regarding a deep state, spying networks, AATIP, and Jeffrey Epstein. Paradox can be found beyond art, but perhaps not so well understood. In film, Feuillade got there first, and Franju distilled a further elixir. Metaphor is a key to prognosis.
C.S.
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