1  

"Never twice the same": Fantômas' Early Seriality

Ruth Mayer

(accepted by Modernism/Modernity)

When Fantômas, the futuristic master criminal and terrorist,

first enters the stage of modern mass culture in 1911, he

complies with the associations raised by his name and does not

really take shape. Phantomlike, he gives evidence of his

existence through his actions rather than personal

appearances. Like other famous creatures appearing on the mass

cultural scene of the day – Dracula comes to mind - Fantômas

proceeds through dispersal, diffusion, and distraction,

figuring forth a flickering presence, not yet here and already

gone. In keeping with this logic, the first Fantômas novel

famously opens with a dialogue between unidentified speakers;

a conversation that seems to float in space:

"Fantômas."

"What did you say?"

"I said: Fantômas."

"And what does that mean?"

"Nothing. … Everything!"

"But what is it?"

"Nobody. … And yet, yes, it is somebody!"

"And what does the somebody do?"

"Spreads terror!" (Souvestre and Allain 2006, 1)

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Much has been written about this remarkable beginning for a

pulp novel that would quickly spawn sequels in abundance. By

1913 – only two years after the master criminal's inception –

33 Fantômas novels were on the market, and a very successful

five-part film serial had been launched. As has been noted,

the epigraph exemplifies the series' strategies of suspense

management through indirection and uncertainty, and it

illustrates the narrative's intrinsic affinities to the

avantgarde aesthetics of the day (see Walz 2000, 42-58;

Gunning 1996a, 30; Callahan 2005, 50). But besides that, I

find this forceful beginning intriguing because like a

spotlight it captures the very principle of Fantômas' success

story; a principle which strikes me as remarkably unexplored

in its implications. After all, the intro communicates an

impersonal and unattributed trajectory of transmission,

dissemination, and expansion – a chain reaction: somebody does

something which then effects shock waves of dispersal and

diffusion. "What does this somebody do?" "Spreads terror" (my

emphasis). That is, at least, the accentuation in the English

translation of 1915. In the French original of 1911, the

wording of the last line was different. Here the question of

what Fantômas does was still answered with the identification

of a concrete agent: "il fait peur" (Souvestre and Allain

1911, 1).

By 1915, Fantômas had left his mark on France and was ready

to take the rest of the world. The master villain's mode of

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operation, informed by the dynamics of spread, may well count

as the most significant feature of his success story. Spread –

in the sense of expansion, takeover, proliferation, and

mutation – can for one be made out as the Fantômas narratives'

most prominent theme: the stories, which quickly availed

themselves of literary, filmic, graphic and other carrier

media, revolved around the master criminal's phantomlike

quality of being everywhere at once and his penchant for

masquerade, identity theft, and ultimately replication which

prompted the impression that "not one, but a dozen Fantômas

were at work" (Souvestre and Allain 2006, 236). This logic of

dissemination is explicitly ascribed to the workings of a

sensational print culture in the very beginning of the novel

series, when an indignant commentator attributes the craze

around the perpetrator in a metareferential turn to "the state

of mind produced in the younger generation by the newspaper

press and even by literature. Criminals are given haloes and

proclaimed from the house-tops" (Souvestre and Allain 2006,

9). Fantômas here appears like a creature born in print;

later, after exchanging his carrier medium, he will be made

out as an integral part of the cinematic apparatus – he is a

medial phantasm.

In any case, we never get to see the real, unmasked Fantômas

in the novels, and he makes his first indirect appearance in

the guise of a nightmare or vision, haunting a boy:

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If for an instance he dozed off, the image of Fantômas took

shape in his mind, but never twice the same: sometimes he

saw a colossal figure with bestial face and muscular

shoulders; sometimes a wan, thin creature, with strange and

piercing eyes; sometimes a vague form, a phantom — Fantômas!

(11)

It is of importance here that this is a dream – Fantômas does

not appear on his own but is conjured up by somebody else's

imagination, involuntarily, unconsciously, compellingly. And

not even as a fantasy can the criminal be fixed in place or

time. He is "never twice the same" – but he is always

Fantômas; the serial instantiations have at least this much in

common.

This particular scene does not make it into Fantômas I: A

l'ombre de la guillotine [In the Shadow of the Guillotine] of

1913 – but we experience a corresponding moment of

hallucinatory manifestation here. The film's last scene

depicts Inspecteur Juve, Fantômas' luckless opponent, at his

desk, in despair over Fantômas' escape which forms the

ineluctable ending of not only this installment. Suddenly the

figure of the villain in his characteristic outfit of cape and

domino mask dissolves in, to laugh at his persecutor and

tauntingly hold out his hands to be cuffed (fig.1). Once Juve

tries to apprehend him, the figure disappears in another

dissolve, proving to be a mere hallucination, a figment of

Juve's mind. But we have seen it too, and the effect of the

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scene rests to a considerable extent on the suggestion of

Fantômas' fantastic power to be everywhere at once (to the

point of taking over other people's identities, bodies, or

minds).

 

Fig. 1: Fantômas taunting Juve. From Fantômas I: A l'ombre de la guillotine

Here the flickering and protean figure of the novels becomes

concrete and visible – although not real; and indeed the

serial in general tends to abandon the novels' ghostly logic

of the "vague form" in favor of the criminal's iconic

manifestation, or rather, a whole range of iconic

manifestations. In both cases, the creature's evanescence is

juxtaposed to his visibility, so that the narrative is endowed

with the logic of the picture puzzle - "now you see/now you

don't," as Tom Gunning pointed out (2005, 75).

  6  

The film thus also maps the novel's prominent technique of

medial self-reflection onto its own mediality, since Fantômas'

appearance and disappearance acts call to mind the flickering

mode of cinematic representation in general. Indeed, the

analogies between cinematic representation and the

neurophysiological conundrum of the hallucination were

routinely invoked in the discourse about film in the 1900s and

1910s (Gordon 2001, 127-166; see also: Sconce 2000;

Andriopoulos 2000). In line with the contemporary tendency to

cross-reference cinematic mediality with perceptual disorders,

Fantômas' haunting and taunting manifestations on the screen

may seem like an illustration of the medium's darker side,

signaling the cinematic apparatus' routine unleashing of

unconscious drives and desires, as it were. But we shall see

that the film serial at large does not necessarily support

such a reading – there are multiple ways of reading Fantômas'

hallucinatory agency, and the surrealist celebration of

Fantômas' anarchy and subversion is only one possible response

(cf. Walz 2000; Dall'Asta 2004).

In several respects, Fantômas' career needs to be seen as an

integral part of a serialized mass culture of modernity (see

Eco 1979; Abel 1996; Hagedorn 1988; Singer 2001; Mayer 2013),

but the figure also comments on and works with this media

environment – producing an intriguing and distinctive take on

the cultural and medial configurations of its day through its

plurimedial unfolding. The novels pry apart and totalize

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Fantômas' manifold manifestations by means of what could be

called 'parallel seriality' – a splitting up of the narrative

in numerous, disjointed but intersecting strands that do not

really allow for narrative harmonization. The film serial,

conversely, produces similar effects by means of its

idiosyncratic use of deep focus, its tableaux structure of

depiction and its narrative organization of the 'cependant'

(meanwhile): suggesting that everything is always there

(almost) at the same time and that detection is only a

question of focus and attention. We shall see that Fantômas,

in spite of what has been called an aesthetics of

"abstraction" pertaining to the figure (Callahan 2005, 62),

gains an amazing concreteness in these enactments – or rather,

one should say, he morphs into an assortment of remarkably

concrete forms and shapes, all of them struggling for

simultaneous manifestation, sprawling in sheer endless

iteration.

Fantômas, both in literature and in film, embodies the

contingency of modern mass culture – and I argue that the

narratives around the figure aim to chart paths through the

maze that is the modern experience, rehearsing their audiences

in coping manners rather than pulling them into the web of

terror that is laid out diegetically. Fantômas may be a figure

of disorientation and subversion, but the Fantômas stories can

well be read in terms of affordances of order, or – to resort

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to the emerging vocabulary of the day – as ventures into

social optimization and self-management.

Serial Production

There were serial formats of narration and dissemination

before the nineteenth century, but the machinery of popular

seriality could only come into its own by means of the

infrastructure of industrial mass production, the mass

entertainment market, and the transnational circuits of

communication and distribution that emerged in the trans-

Atlantic world during the nineteenth century and gained full

swing and scope at the turn of the century (Kelleter 2012).

Fantômas is the self-conscious product of the early twentieth

century media economy that thrives on sensational effects and

hyberbolic gestures of outbidding; an economy which is not

controlled by individuals but by networks with multiple –

human, institutional, or technical - agents and a conglomerate

of intersecting interests. As the creators of Fantômas we thus

need to think not only of the authors Pierre Souvestre and

Marcel Allain, but a much larger 'team' or web of producers,

including the illustrator Gino Starace, who designed the

sensationalist colorful covers for the book series (Alfu,

Ducos, and Starace 1987); the publishing house Fayard, which

used Fantômas as one staple element to boost its series Livre

populaire with which it had "ushered publishing in France into

the mass market" in 1906, offering books at 65 centimes and

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with an original print run of 50,000 or 60,000 (Renonciat

2008); the Gaumont film studio which acquired the rights to

the figure as part of its effort to gain predominance in the

French and European film market over Pathé; Louis Feuillade,

Gaumont's principal director for whom the adaptation of the

Fantômas material served to further precision and promote his

characteristic cinematic style (Lacassin 1995; Bordwell 1996);

the actor René Navarre who was propelled to stardom by the

role of Fantômas (Navarre 2012) – and the list could go on.

In fact, the terminology of 'production' or 'manufacturing'

seems more appropriate to capture the processes of Fantômas'

inception and dissemination than the artistic vocabulary of

authorship and creation. After all, already the novels were

churned out with industrial efficiency by the former

journalists Souvestre and Allain. A contract with their

publisher Fayard compelled them to produce over 300 pages a

month for the duration of a year – and they ended up

overfulfilling this quota. Between 1911 and 1913, the two

authors spun forth more than 12,000 printed pages. To achieve

this amazing output, they had to implement a rigid plan of

operation which involved dictation on waxroll phonographs and

secretaries that transcribed the recorded material on

typewriters. Relying on technology and a system of labor

division, Souvestre and Allain systematically uprooted the

principles of authorial sovereignty and originality,

segmenting their work into plot clusters which were later

  10  

fitted together, and drawing heavily on plot contrivances of

the grand guignol and other sensationalist fiction. Robin Walz

pointed out that one of the most important steps in the

production process was not the final revision but an earlier

appointment with the illustrator Starace (2000, 52-53).

Indeed, images proved to be as effective as words in Fantômas'

career that quickly took a transmedial turn, crossing over

from literature to film and to graphic media (Walz 2000, 53;

Gunning 1996a).

Fantômas' filmic remediation first took the guise of a five-

part film serial, directed by Louis Feuillade, which latched

onto the literary success story that was in full swing at the

time, concocting spectacular scenes and ideas from the novels

into a "combustible mix of visual control and narrative

anarchy" (Axmaker 2013). The popular novels were not so much

adapted for screen, but rather scenically raided and inflated.

The serial thus not only experimented with cinematic

techniques to create a sense of narrative continuity across

reel breaks or to heighten suspense toward the end of an

installment (Abel 1998, 377), it also produced a narrative

continuum of a different sort when it routinely gestured

beyond its medial boundaries, calling up the plots of the

popular serial novels in the cursory and sensationalist manner

of a vaudeville program, as a series of acts in climactic

accrual rather than a closed narrative in its own right.

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Simultaneously, Fantômas went transnational, quickly

becoming a popular success all over Europe and later also in

Latin America (Pagello 2013). Before World War II, Fantômas

was also well-known in the United States, where the novels

first came out in serial format in newspapers, then as books

(White 2007). The film serial opened in the United States

within the year of its release in France, appearing in an

irregular pattern over a period of one year. In 1916, it was

then re-released in a regularized format, which apparently

corresponded better with the local needs of exhibitors and

audiences (Canjels 2011, 16; see also Delahousse 2013). In

1921, a 20-part serial loosely based on the French novels and

the Feuillade serial was produced by William Fox Films; it is

now lost (White 2013).

Fantômas was developed serially, across different media,

almost from the beginning. But also the individual narrative

approaches to the figure took a serial form. The Feuillade

films came out as sequels at irregular intervals. By contrast

to Feuillade's later experiments with the serial mode such as

Les vampires (1915-16) or Judex (1916), however, the

individual installments of the Fantômas series held together

at best loosely. There is no coherent storyline that would

organize the serial as a whole, apart from the fact that two

persecutors keep coming across the villain while failing to

detain him. There is one famous cliffhanger, of sorts, at the

end of the second installment, otherwise the individual parts

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seem to follow the logic of the blank slate – every time we

encounter the same cast or characters plus numerous others in

the exact same basic situation that then branches out in a

seemingly endless array of options. Still, it makes sense to

address the films as a serial, since they do rely heavily on

narrative modes of condensation and iteration, even if they do

not lend depth to their characters and clearly fail to achieve

any effect of epical complexity (on definitory debates

regarding the format of the film serial in general, and the

Feuillade Fantômas in this context, see: Singer 2001; Streeby

2002; Callahan 2005; Canjels 2012).

Like other phenomenal popular successes, Fantômas' story

cannot be deduced to one cause or trigger effect, but it is

obvious that the narratives' serial format plays an

instrumental role here. In her approach to Feuillade's take on

Fantômas, Vicki Callahan notes that in many respects the

serial lent itself to what Umberto Eco called a "sinusoidal"

pattern of reading in his reflections on the feuilleton novel

(qutd. in Callahan 2005, 60). In sinusoidal fashion, that is

in a smoothly repetitive oscillation, such serial storytelling

lines up "a number of minor narratives […] in, out, and around

a broad moral schema and larger narrative event, which itself

has a circuitous trajectory" (Callahan 2005, 61, see also

Lacassin 1993; Letourneux 2013). However, while the feuilleton

novel tends to revolve around a family mystery or crime that

will find its resolution at the end of the narrative, the

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Fantômas narrative followed a different narrative pattern.

Neither romance nor detection provide a satisfactory grid for

approaching the narratives with their haphazard plot logic and

shifting strategies of steering the audience into sympathetic

alignment or distance (61).

Callahan comes to the conclusion that it must be "the

uncanny that provides the primary narrative drive" (62). She

may be right to read Fantômas in the spirit of a ghost story

rather than crime plot, but I do not think that the

narratives' enormous popular success and spectacular

historical effect hinge as exclusively on an aesthetics of

"abstraction" as Callahan holds when she reads them as an

almost philosophical engagement with questions of "recognition

and knowledge" (62). After all, there is one striking and very

concrete element that manages and organizes the series,

providing a focus and anchor: Fantômas, the character. Or

rather: Fantômas, the figure; since Callahan correctly

contended that the serial generates "a diminution, or indeed

almost absence, of character" (50). I associate the depletion

of character and plot continuity in the Fantômas narrative at

large (which goes far beyond the film serial and stretches

into the 1960s and 70s) with the particular serial principle

that it thrives on: the principle of the serial figure.

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The Serial Figure

By the time of Fantômas' appearance on the scene of popular

culture, the serial figure was firmly established as a staple

element of serial narration. Dracula and Sherlock Holmes,

Tarzan and Fu Manchu – all of these figures rely on the same

operative system as Fantômas. Long before the advent of the

comics superhero, who follows in their footstep, they attest

to the pattern of action – undergoing the same trials and

tribulations in ever new settings and frameworks in every new

installment and starting from a "virtual new beginning" with

every episode of their reenactment, as Umberto Eco wrote about

Superman (Eco 1979, 117; see also: Gaines 1990, 178-179).

These are figures that lend themselves extraordinarily well to

the implementation and performance of media changes. They are

flat, familiar, and iconic, and they allow the medium that

takes them up to foreground its own workings and possibilities

in a manner which an unfamiliar storyline or complex character

would never permit (Denson and Mayer 2012; Mayer 2012/2013).

Serial figures are in-between creatures, marking

transitional states between elementary conditions, categories,

or concepts. And even though many of them stem from the

generic territory of gothic or horror, all are at some point

or other implemented in and marketed by means of detective or

crime plots. This attests to the fact that the serialized and

serializing market of popular narration found a particularly

fertile ground in the literary genres of detective fiction and

  15  

crime narration that underwent a dramatic transformation of

scope and structure in the second half of the nineteenth

century. Where early detective narratives (E.T.A. Hoffmann's

Mademoiselle de Scudery, Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin tales, or

Émile Gaboriau's stories around inspector Lecoq) zoom in on

intriguing phenomena which are then taken apart by means of

ratiocination and systematic probing, analytic precision and

the dazzling performance of intellectual brilliance, the

detective stories of the feuilleton and the pulp market reach

out and push ahead; they sprawl, spatter, and spread: "Within

the feuilleton, the detective's logic and systematic

investigation no longer supplied the armature of narrative

development and closure, but simply became one episode in the

feuilleton's ongoing rush of sensations," writes Tom Gunning

in close reference to Régis Messac (Gunning 2005, 78). With

regard to Sherlock Holmes, Michael Chabon identifies an

endlessly 'looped' logic of folding or 'nesting' as the

prominent pattern of narration(2008, 47).

Chabon identifies this principle of storytelling very

closely with the particular genius of Conan Doyle, but it is

at least as contingent with the parameters of the trans-

Atlantic periodical market in which Conan Doyle knew to

inscribe himself expertly. His stories are tightly coiled, but

they also offer innumerable points of departure for other

stories – backstories and corrections, revisions and

alternative versions (Chabon 2008, 48), not to mention the fan

  16  

fictions which still regularly take off from Baker Street many

years after Sherlock Holmes's inception.

Chabon associates this format of dissemination with the

"business of Empire" - with a political and economical logic

of expansion that by the time of Conan Doyle's career had

already manifested itself as by no means uni-directional (50).

Thus, the spirit of the 'imperial gothic,' of a haunting that

spread back to the familiar world from the world 'out there,'

'overseas,' may well be the most incisive legacy of the turn

of the century literature in Europe (Brantlinger 1988, 227-

254; Mayer 2013, 27-58).

It is against this backdrop that the figure of the master

criminal (or criminal monster) enters the scene of a

serialized mass culture of modernity. The master criminal is a

serial criminal, even though the format that his criminal

activities take tends to thrive on variation rather than the

obsessive repetition complex that inspired serial criminals

from Jack the Ripper to Hannibal Lecter (Seltzer 1998). All of

the serial crime stories of the turn of the century are in

some way or other connected to the Sherlock Holmes plot as the

master plot of the preceding century. But at some point around

the turn of the century, it seems, the fascination with the

criminological plots which inspires the Sherlock Holmes

narrative seems to have switched into a much more explicitly

disturbing fascination with the criminal principle and process

itself, especially as it manifested itself in the political

  17  

and economical metropolises of modernity – most importantly

the global metropolises Paris, London, and New York.

In 1912, Sax Rohmer modeled a series of short stories on the

Sherlock Holmes pattern, focusing on the detective figure Sir

Nayland Smith as a principle of law and order. But soon his

stories were taken over by the epitome of evil, the yellow

peril figure Fu Manchu which would prove so much more popular

and intriguing than the detective (Mayer 2013). And almost at

the same time, across the channel, "the professional detective

gave way to the master criminal of the modern city", too (Abel

1998: 355). Fantômas – preceded in France by Zigomar, and

followed a little later in Germany by Dr. Mabuse - would

manifest himself as the most spectacular version of this

substitution or shift, lodged somewhere in between the

thriller and the horror story.

Panoramas of Possibility

Etienne Rambert, who will turn out to be the first of many

cover identities of Fantômas in the novel series, is

introduced as "an energetic man who is always moving about"

(Souvestre and Allain 2006, 7). His biography seems tightly

conjoined with the project of global industrial expansion and

exploitation in the early twentieth century: "Although he is

quite sixty he still occupies himself with some rubber

plantations he possesses in Colombia, and he often goes to

America: he thinks no more of the voyage than we do of a trip

  18  

to Paris" (7-8). The other major cover identity that Fantômas

makes use of in the narrative's first volume, an Englishman by

the name of Gurn, takes the guise of a veteran sergeant of the

British army who had served in the Transvaal in the Boer War.

At first, thus, Fantômas, too, is associated with the imperial

world and its dark underside, with the uncontrollable passions

and perversities that the experience of the foreign unleashes.

In the further course of the serial narration, Fantômas shall

pile up many more covers and fronts, but only a few of them

continue to point to a foreign context or imperial setting -

in fact, this theme seems to retreat into the background as

the series proceeds. In their sheer multiplicity Fantômas'

identities now seem to suggest the perplexing and disturbing

insight that the spirit of the foreign need no longer be

introduced to the homeland which has long become strange,

unfamiliar, 'un-heimlich' in its own right.

Already in the first novel it is hard to reconcile the two

cover stories – how can Fantômas live the life of a plantation

owner and big business man and the life of a British soldier

at the same time? As sequel follows sequel in quick succession

and as the novels' biographical backstories become

increasingly more convoluted, it also becomes obvious that the

mesh of fake identities and invented pedigrees that is

projected back on Fantômas cannot possibly be upheld by one

person, even an incredibly energetic one like Fantômas. It is

physically impossible to be at two places at the same time,

  19  

let alone pursue multiple different lifelines simultaneously.

Seen that way, the Fantômas series unfolds what could be

called a panorama of alternative possibilities. Robin Walz

pointed out that this logic of parallel seriality does not

only affect the figure of Fantômas himself, but all of the

main protagonists of the series: "[…] the characters in

Fantômas are not merely 'disguised' as someone else. For the

practical purposes of the novel, they actually have to be

someone else" (2006, 58). In this light, the fearful

observation that "[s]uch a number of awful murders and crimes

are being perpetrated every day, that you would think not one

but a dozen Fantômas were at work" (Souvestre and Allain 2006,

236) captures a paradox that is at the core of the novels'

narrative logic.

"Mass culture," writes the sociologist Michael Makropoulos,

"is a culture of the 'sense of possibility' – as one could say

with an almost conceptual formulation by Robert Musil" (10, my

translation). According to Makropoulos, mass culture's

importance and attractiveness as a tool of social engineering

consists of its capacity to conceptualize contingency, this

basic condition of modernity, in terms of an array of options

rather than exclusively in terms of alienation and anomie. As

the most intriguing expression of this resemanticizing (and

reassuring) move, Makropolous identifies the trend to

fictionalize "self- and world-relations" (11). Makropolous

goes on to associate the mass cultural 'sense of possibility'

  20  

with the pervasive modernist processes of technization and

their "constitutive metaphysics of disposability" (11), which

figure both as the condition and the object of mass cultural

communication and expression.

When read against this backdrop, the Fantômas novels appear

highly self-reflexive: they perform the mass-cultural

operation of fictionalization through which options are fanned

out and multiple horizons of possibility projected as an open

series. The openness and contingency of the modern, urban,

mass cultural configuration is made out as both frightful in

its disruptive impact on the individual and exhilarating in

its disclosure of endless alternatives. Fantômas' anarchic

agency is deeply immoral, but it is too undirected to figure

forth a proto-Fascist fantasy of totality and too random to

suggest an aesthetic of the ornamental in Kracauer's sense: in

the fictional universe of the novels and the serial there is

no core and no heart, but there is also no desire to subjugate

or monopolize – modern life is shown here as a vast array of

optional paths and choices, many of them dangerous, some

tempting, which can all be taken: a panorama of possibilities.

Due to technical constraints and its media-specific

narrative economy, the Feuillade film serial could not copy

the novels' panoramic layout to achieve a similar effect of

parallel possibilities. In consequence the serial approaches

the spirit of the novels' meandering, serializing narration

and its logic of outbidding metonymically – by means of

  21  

convergences, condensations, or zooms; "playacting in the

guise of mise-en-abyme," as Richard Abel put it (1994, 378;

see also Gunning 2006). It arguably comes closest to indulging

in the pulp literary 'sense of possibility' in the much-

discussed prologues to three of the five films – when a close-

up of René Navarre "dans le rôle de Fantômas," as a first

intertitle announces, is dissolved into shots showing him in

all the roles and disguises adopted by Fantômas in the course

of the respective film. The prologue of the second serial,

Juve contre Fantômas, stands out because it ends with "the

ultimate image of Fantômas" (Gunning 1996a, 33) - the man in

black, pulling his hood over his face - and it is complemented

by a second series of shots introducing Edmund Bréon, the

actor playing Inspector Juve, in his respective disguises.

The filmic prologues have been largely read in terms of

their difference to the narrative regime of the novels –

because they lay bare the workings of masquerade and make-

belief at the outset, while the novels systematically expose

us to the shock of discovery as we read along. But when seen

from the vantage point of a modernist and mass cultural 'sense

of possibility,' the prologues do, in fact, respond in kind to

the novels' poetics of proliferation and spread, offering a

cinematic variation of the same pattern rather than a break

with its logic.

  22  

Contingency Management I: Criminology

In the secondary literature discussing Feuillade's Fantômas,

the crime serial is routinely correlated formally with the

discursive field which feeds the serial's subject matter:

criminology. Especially the criminological methods established

by Alphonse Bertillon and implemented in France in the 1880s

are invoked as an important context. Tom Gunning was the first

to argue that the prologues to the individual installments do

not only aim at implementing medially specific techniques of

attention management and at familiarizing the spectator with

the logic of the cinematic star system. He pointed out that in

their display of facial close-ups, the prologues call to mind

the criminal archive compiled on the grounds of Bertillonage,

based on a meticulous cross-linkage of standardized

photographs ("mug shots") and anthropometrical data (Gunning

2005, 81/1996b; see also: Callahan 2005, 53-55; Bielecki

2013), in order to "break the professional criminal's mastery

of disguises, false identities, multiple biographies, and

alibis" (Sekula 1986, 27, see also: Cole 2001; Torpey 2000).

(Fig.2) The criminal's made-up identities are countered with

Bertillon's "portrait-parlé" – the standardized description

that hones down the individual's arbitrary appearance to a set

of committing and comparable numerical values which speak for

themselves so much more expressively than the crook's verbose

dissimulations and visual pretensions.

  23  

Like serial mass culture, Bertillon's system of

identificatory classification relies on iconization, as in

both cases "the multiple signs of the […] body [are reduced]

to a textual shorthand," as Allan Sekula wrote with regard to

Bertillon's system (56). Moreover, Bertillon's system chimes

with the workings of serial mass culture in several other

ways, as it relies on standardization and repetition (Brandes

1999; Schröter 2004) and as it also substitutes the notion of

individual ingenuity (the detective's or artist's) with an

idea of mechanical engineering (of a team, institution, or

apparatus). Sekula thus associates the approach mapped out by

Bertillon with the "encyclopedic authority of the archive," an

authority "which tended to relegate the individual

photographer to the status of a detail worker, providing

fragmentary images for an apparatus beyond his or her control"

(58).

With this, late nineteenth century criminology – alongside,

and at times in conjunction with serial mass culture -

responded to what could be seen as the most threatening

dimension of modernity: its fast turnaround of identities and

Fig.2: Aesthetics of the mug shot: From Fantômas I: A l'ombre de la guillotine

  24  

stories, or, as Makropoulos had it, its contingency.

Bertillon's ingenuity consisted in the recognition that there

was no need for an all-pervasive typology to counter the

proliferation of intersecting lifelines but that a committing

system of description would suffice: "he used anthropometry,

not to delineate group identity — races — but for the novel

purpose of individualization" (Cole 2001, 34).

A similar focus on, or perhaps: obsession with, individual

particularity rather than group identity manifests itself in

the Fantômas serial. Still, Fantômas' reliance on masks and

make-up, on disguises and cover identities, seems to run

counter to the practice of ignoring or abstracting from

"clothing and other clues to a person's social and local

identity, on which laymen focused for the purpose of

identification" (Becker 2001, 151). But a closer look at the

enactment and implementation of masquerade and make-belief in

the serial evinces that Fantômas does respond to the standard

criminological practice of identification of its day in a

manner that is not so much subversive of Bertillonage (as

Callahan [2005, 53-55] or Bielecki [2013] claim), but rather

brings criminology medially up-to-date: from the photographic

portrait-parlé to the filmic 'signifying sequence,' as it

were.

This comes to the fore in the prologues, when portraits turn

into shots that are then superimposed on each other, thus

putting appearances into relation and inviting us to first

  25  

appreciate and then penetrate the layers of make-up and

costume to discover the committing features behind and

underneath. Yet stronger still the logic of the signifying

sequence can be traced in the narratives themselves,

particularly in their self-conscious references to acts of

acting. Thus, in the first installment of the Fantômas serial

- Fantômas I: À l'ombre de la guillotine [In the Shadow of the

Guillotine] – we are most glaringly reminded of the

extradiegetic introductory sequence in its criminological

appeal when toward the end of a film we encounter a diegetic

actor by the name of Valgrand, who does what we saw René

Navarre do in the beginning: play Fantômas. To be more

precise: Valgrand is involved in some kind of second-order

performance: he enacts, on stage, the dramatic role of one of

Fantômas' alter egos: the infamous criminal Gurn, who is

awaiting his execution in prison at the other end of town. By

this time in the film, the audience – in contrast to Valgrand

- knows that Gurn is none other than Fantômas, and Fantômas

knows how to make use of Valgrand's acting skills. He lures

the actor in costume close to the prison, gets him drugged,

smuggled in and then pulls his famous last-minute escape.

Valgrand is rescued from being executed in Gurn's stead only

in the nick of time.

René Navarre plays Valgrand who plays Gurn who is Fantômas

(fig.3). Since the expository sequence of the prologue

introduces us to Fantômas' disguises in the film rather than

  26  

Navarre's range of roles, Valgrand's face does not appear

here. Then again, perhaps it does, since the diegetic actor's

beardless and well-groomed smooth face closely resembles the

face displayed at the very outset of the prologue as "M.

Navarre." Both actors, the real one and his diegetic

replicant, figure forth blank screens on which the props of

identity – beards and tousled hair, glasses and crooked noses,

wrinkles and scars – are then mounted. More glaringly than the

prologue, the Valgrand-episode depicts masquerade not so much

as an instance of deception but rather as an accomplishment or

talent – focusing on its enactment and application, rather

than exclusively displaying its effect. The ultimate master of

ceremony, however, is Fantômas (or Navarre), not Valgrand.

 

Fig.3: Comparing likeness: From Fantômas I: A l'ombre de la guillotine

  27  

In the prologue, Navarre's face fades filmically into the

faces of his roles – the transition is blurred and highlighted

at the same time. Valgrand's transformation from actor to

role, however, is considerably less sophisticated and subtle:

it can be witnessed on screen. We see Valgrand study a

newspaper report and photograph of Gurn to prepare for his

role, closely referring back to the photograph as he puts on

makeup, moustache, and wig, and after the show, when he is

surrounded by admiring visitors, he takes up the photograph

once more in a melodramatic pose – daring his audience to

distinguish original and copy. He is saved from the guillotine

because Inspecteur Juve notices that he is wearing makeup, and

proceeds to rip off his wig and moustache – something he never

gets to do to Fantômas, whom we do not see out of costume ever

in this first installment. But then, Fantômas' makeup never

shows. And neither does, of course, Navarre's.

In Fantômas, consequently, practices of masquerade and make-

believe tend to be represented with close regard to their

impact on others – the target audience, as it were. Time and

again, acts of deception and dissimulation are performed in

full view – and seem to aim not so much at responses of

surprise, but rather prepare the ground for a general

mobilization of attention and awareness, sounding a sort of

all-over and permanent red-alert. Again, the film serials are

in keeping with the novels, which systematically work at

establishing what could be called an epistemology of

  28  

suspicion, as the following emblematic descriptive passage may

illustrate:

Professor Swelding was certainly a remarkable figure. He

might have been sixty, but he bore very lightly the weight

of the years that laid their snows upon his thick and curly

but startlingly white hair. It was this hair that attracted

attention first: it was of extraordinary thickness and was

joined onto a heavy moustache and a long and massive beard.

He was like a man that has taken a vow never to cut his

hair. It covered his ears and grew long upon his forehead,

so that hardly a vestige of the face could be seen, while,

further, all the expression of the eyes was concealed behind

large blue spectacles. The professor was enveloped in a

heavy cloak, in spite of the bright sunshine […]. He spoke

French correctly, but with a slight accent and with a slow

enunciation that betrayed a foreign origin. (2006, 148, all

italics mine)

This entire description pulls into high relief the suspicious

signs of this man's fabricated appearance: Features are 'laid

upon,' they 'cover,' they 'conceal,' and they 'envelope.' The

wording of the passage alerts us pointedly to the fact that

there is not much to see of the person's face, that his traits

are hidden under layers and layers of hair. In the context of

this thick description, the final reference to the "foreign

origin," ironically, does not aim at suggesting a world in

which the familiar is threatened by the foreign, but rather

  29  

makes out the foreign as one other element of masquerade. The

passage invites us to imagine all characteristics of social,

cultural, even ethnic distinction as mere superimpositions.

'Identity' in the criminological sense, then, comes to the

fore only once the person is stripped of all of these

superficial marks. What is left is a smooth, non-descript,

inconspicuous, unremarkable emptiness, a "nothing" or phantom:

Fantômas.

The filmic prologue of Fantômas II: Juve contre Fantômas

[Juve vs. Fantômas] which ends with what is both Fantômas'

most basic disguise and the most unreadable of his costumes -

the black bodysuit with the cagoule – corresponds neatly with

this literary logic of identification. But it is important to

note that neither novels nor films stop short at the insight

that there is – in a very literal sense – nothing underneath

the mask, although this is certainly one message to be gleaned

from both series, and a message which may have been at the

core of the narratives' fascination for the artistic

avantgarde of the period (Walz 2001). Both series' popular

appeal, however, most likely owed more to the recognition that

there certainly are many interesting masks to look at, coming

complete with a vast array of exotic backstories and fantastic

circumstances of use. The films, thus, encourage us to keep

track of the activities of masking and the appearance and

disappearance of masks rather than directing us to probe

behind or underneath. In similar fashion, the novels quickly

  30  

abandon the melodramatic quest for an underlying meaning and

significance ("Who is Fantômas?"), and unfold, instead, an

endless series of identities and stories in breathless

circulation – panoramas of possibilities. The films too, prove

quite uninterested in the game of disclosure and clearance

that the first installment vaguely touches upon. Soon we get

to see Fantômas unmasked, and he looks exactly like René

Navarre at the outset of the prologue. Responding to this

exposure, the prologues are abandoned, and the narrative focus

moves on to trace the dynamics of masking on a much larger

scale of action and effect than first laid out (cf. Brasch

2013).

This logic culminates in the last installment, Fantomas V:

Le faux magistrat [The False Magistrate] (1914). The film

takes its time to even get to Fantômas. Unlike the earlier

films, this one is largely set in Saint Calais, thus leaving

Paris behind. At the outset of the film we are introduced to

what will quickly turn into a crime site, in an establishing

shot that shows two doors, side by side. A priest dressed in

cassock and hat exits on the right, before an intertitle cues

us in on the focus of attention: "[i]n the room next to the

one occupied by the priest …" Of course, at this stage in the

narrative, any person whose outfit or appearance stands out –

be it priest or bum, bearded magistrate or fat prison

inspector – calls up suspicions, so that it does not really

come as a surprise when the priest turns out a fraud and his

  31  

outfit reappears next in the film when it is thrown out of a

train after serving its purpose. It may come as a surprise,

however, that the person underneath the frock was not

Fantômas. In fact, the act of clever criminal plotting at the

beginning of the film turns out to have nothing to do with the

master criminal, although he knows how to profit from it later

on.

Fantômas takes to action much later, after his escape from a

prison in Belgium and return to France via England. On his

journey back he comes across the magistrate who is on his way

to Saint Calais to investigate the crime, and decides to kill

and impersonate him. With his large white beard, his youthful

face and darkly made-up eyes, this magistrate looks like an

impostor to start with (fig.4), so that Fantômas can easily

take his place. Again, we get to witness the act of

imposition, as Fantômas pulls out the "nouvelle trousse de

maquillage," which, as the intertitle informs us, he bought in

London, and sets out to put his face on, in an scene that

echoes the theatre scene of Fantômas I in its operational

aesthetics (Brasch 2013).

  32  

 

Fig.4: Suspicious authenticity: From Fantomas V: Le faux magistrat

At this stage in the serial, the criminological linchpins of

identification and detection have largely dropped out of

sight. Instead of unveiling criminal acts and agents, the

films now seem to be content to merely perform them –

presenting a ceaseless slippage of identities, a series of

impersonations without substance, provoked by chance

encounters and coincidences. Bertillon's portrait parlé comes

to be replaced by such signifying sequences that rehearse

processes of transformation – in which identities are shown to

be in constant transition, corresponding, resonating, feeding

on each other. With this, however, the films move away from

the spirit of criminology and take up a different

epistemological model of thought, this one very much steeped

in twentieth-century media culture: psychotechnics.

Contingency Management II: Psychotechnics

In the Feuillade Fantômas serial, the Bertillon system with

its emphasis on identification, recognition, and crime control

  33  

is referenced but also marked as dated. The world depicted in

the serial is a world in which crime cannot be erased.

Figuring as one of many other indices of social diversity and

deviance, crime becomes a basic condition of the modern

system; a nuisance that needs to be managed, but cannot be

rooted out. In the Feuillade serial, film, as the most modern

of representational media, is characterized as the best means

of bringing about such a managerial approach to modernity.

This is where psychotechnics, as another prominent discourse

of the day, gains scope. Where Bertillon's system responded to

the "intensifying desire of communities to apprehend the

stranger, the vagrant, and the deviant" by equipping the

institutions of surveillance and control with means to

identify, detect, and distinguish (Cole 2001, 49; Torpey

2000), pychotechnics aimed at endowing everybody with such

distinctive facilities. Bertillon relied on photography and

language. Psychotechnics, significantly, turned to film.

Psychotechnics evolved as a branch of applied psychology

aiming at the optimization of processes of labor and

production. In the United States, the term psychotechnics

never really caught on, although psychotechnical approaches

and methods did have a notable impact on theories of

industrial organization and marketing. The German-American

psychologist and theoretician of film Hugo Munsterberg acted

as a prominent propagator of psychotechnics, extolling its

potential in his study Psychology and Industrial Efficiency of

  34  

1913, and then setting out to apply its insights to the medium

of film in The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916). The

methodological arsenal of psychotechnics was quickly moved

from the specialized spheres of clinical psychology journals

to the broader sphere of intellectual and artistic

discussions, and finally took over media theory – as

exemplified in Munsterberg's influential work. Robert Musil's

aforementioned reflections on the "sense of possibility"

unfold against the backdrop of psychotechnical theorizing, and

so do large parts of the discussions on media of

representation and communication, and on the optimization of

processes of labor and production (Rieger 2001; Pethes 2004;

Krause and Pethes 2007; Vöhringer 2007).

In the wider sense, psychotechnics expounds a doctrine of

organization and management that responds to the processes of

proliferation, distraction, and dispersal characterizing

modernity not by trying to eliminate contingency, but by

trying to habituate the individual to these conditions.

Technical media play an immensely important role in this

context, both in their function as means of recording reality

and as tools to process reality's complexity without engaging

in reduction and abstraction. This is what Munsterberg found

so fascinating about the new format of the "photoplay": "There

is no limit to the number of threads which may be interwoven"

(1916: loc. 760), he enthused about the medium's

possibilities. The apparatuses of mass-cultural entertainment

  35  

– most importantly the cinema – were of interest to

Munsterberg because of their potential to prepare people for

the requirements of modernity in all of its complexity.

Munsterberg does not write about film serials, but his

understanding of film corresponds neatly with the focus of

serial studies. He sees film as a mode of panoramic

representation – unfolding endless variations of possibilities

– and distinguishes cinema's "spatial" logic of spread from

earlier, temporally bound formats of narration: "The temporal

element has disappeared, the one action irradiates in all

directions" (loc. 760, see also Rieger 2001, 129-131; Denson

2009).

Stefan Rieger pointed out that in their popular

repercussion, the psychotechnical theories led to a

valorization of short cultural forms which rely on fast

sequences, rhythmic forms of presentation, and recognizable

and replicable formats – Rieger mentions the aesthetics of the

vaudeville show or early film, one could also think of

magazine short stories or dime novels - as opposed to the

modes of the total, the large-scale, and the monumental that

came to be increasingly associated with an elitist and

detached high cultural sphere (Rieger 2001, 127-128).

Obviously, this preference for small and fast forms is

perfectly compatible with serial formats of representation and

narration such as the popular serial novel or the film serial.

The film serial, especially in its early stages of

  36  

development, relies heavily on narrative 'modules' to

establish serial coherence and continuity, and to manage the

audience's serial memory. As such modules we should not only

consider individual installments and episodes, but also

recurring plot patterns, character constellations, or

scenarios. In the Fantômas serial, the prologues to the first

three films need to be seen in this context - as modular

points in the organization of the narrative's overall

unfolding, or better: fanning out. The prologues serve to

provide orientation at the outset, but they are also called up

repeatedly in the films in order to tether the diverse strands

of narration to an increasingly tenuous narrative frame, to

ensure minimal coherence in a narrative that is based on the

principles of dispersal and ramification.

This is what the Valgrand-episode in the first installment

of the Fantômas serial does. Throughout the episode,

Valgrand's melodramatic theatrical performance is tacitly

contrasted to the unmarked, professional, and 'realistic'

acting of René Navarre as Fantômas and Valgrand, and thus

serves to distinguish the cinematic mode of representation and

impersonation from the older system of the theatrical grand

guignol and to draw the spectator's attention to the vast

scope of possibilities of the filmic medium. Thus, the stage's

limited and restricted sphere of action is juxtaposed to the

film's larger arena – exposed through Feuillade's much praised

exterior shots. Feuillade's serial should be read as "a

  37  

sinister variation of the 'city symphony' film," wrote Daniel

Gercke, "giving back to prewar Paris, in its own cultural

reflection, a deepened sense of its disjunctions and splendid

decay" (1997, 164). The exterior space is intricately

interlinked with interiors in the serial's spatial

imagination. For one, this interlinkage is brought about

through the serial's diegesis. The intertitles time and again

serve to constitute a sense of simultaneity or at least fast-

paced sequentiality. Events are correlated temporally by

placing them in the same time continuum. "Cependant, tous

Paris courrait au theatre du Grand Tréteau.." announces the

intertitle that initiates the Valgrand episode. The

conjunctional logic of the "meanwhile" (cependant) pulls

together the different sites of urban action: the prison in

which Gurn awaits his execution, the estate in which Lady

Beltham, Gurn's lover, orchestrates Gurn's escape, the theatre

where Valgrand prepares for his performance. As the episode

continues, Valgrand's body servant sits down to read the paper

– an epitome of simultaneity and concurrence in its own right

- and stumbles upon the news of Gurn's imminent execution at

dawn the next day: "Demain à l'aube… C'est tout à l'heure."

These references to the temporal parallelity of action

resonate with the even more powerful visual evidence of

spatial parallelity throughout the serial. It has been often

pointed out that while D.W. Griffith busily explored the

narrative possibilities of editing in the United States,

  38  

Feuillade, alongside other European directors, continued to

rely on the panoramic mode of presentation, using tableaux

arrangements in static long takes rather than quick

successions of shots to enact his narrative (Brewster 1990;

Abel 1998; Bordwell 1996). Feuillade's strangely depthless

characters are enacted in settings that stretch out spatially

beyond the limits of ordinary vision, layered into intricate

spheres of foreground, middle ground(s), and background. David

Bordwell has rightfully argued that such deep staging need not

have an effect of disorientation or disjunction, as long as

intricate strategies of staging and attention management

direct the spectator's navigation through the shot (1996, 12).

As one example of such a skillful organization of space,

Bordwell discusses the theatre scene in Fantomas I, which

presents in one frame Valgrand's tiny figure on a scene in the

background, bowing to the theatrical audience as he makes his

exit, and the looming figure of Lady Beltham, the woman who

acts as the instrument of Fantômas' sinister scheme, in the

extreme foreground, overlooking the scene from her box

(fig.5). Lady Beltham turns away from the diegetic center of

attention, the stage, as the sequence unfolds, moving toward

the camera instead – and thus presents herself to the real

audience of interest in this scene, the cinematic audience.

Here and elsewhere, Bordwell concluded, manipulations of size

within the frame in addition to "differences of tonality,

overall composition, movement, character glance, and

  39  

informative features of human bodies (such as faces, eyes and

hands)" (11) serve to steer and guide the audience's attention

and to facilitate their journey through the film's narrative

universe. We do not know everything that is going to happen,

but we clearly know much more than the film's diegetic

audience, the theatregoers who are focusing on the wrong site

of action and see only bits and pieces of what is really going

on.

 

Fig.5: The real audience. From Fantômas I: A l'ombre de la guillotine

These strategies of attention management remain operative

throughout the serial. I argue that this technique

predominates even in scenes where the tableaux arrangement

seems to foster an atmosphere of disorientation or vertigo.

  40  

One often-referenced instance is the scene of a masked ball in

Fantômas III: Fantômas contre Fantômas [Fantômas vs. Fantômas]

(1914), where the ballroom is presented in a single long shot

organized through deep staging. Three men disguised as

Fantômas appear at the ball, one of them the real villain, and

all three can be seen in the crowd alternately throughout the

scene (fig.6). Clearly the scene is meant to relate "the

confusion of identities that lurk beneath the playful

multiplication of men in black," as Tom Gunning contended

(2005, 86). But at the same time, the confusion is held at bay

through the panoramic presentation of all three Fantômases in

action: we do not know who's who in this scene, but we do know

that they are there and who originally dressed up in this

guise – and again this is much more than the people at the

ball can possibly know at this moment in time.

  41  

 

Fig.6: The perfect costume: From Fantômas III: Fantômas contre Fantômas

With regard to the American film historical reconfigurations

of the mid- to late 1910s, Miriam Hansen pointed out that

cinematic modes of audience address and the representation of

social reality on screen have always been complicatedly

convoluted, but that the parameters and functions of their

conjunction change over time. The films of the transitional

period thus fashion their ideal audience as detached,

sophisticated, and media-savvy. The films proceed by inviting

their cinematic audiences to define themselves in sharp

distinction from the people – the assemblies, the crowds, the

masses, also the audiences – depicted on the screen. The

screen may act as a mirror screen when it comes to singular

  42  

constellations – love plots and conflicts of desire – but as

soon as large groups of people are involved, identification

tends to give way to critical reflection, nostalgic

projection, or distanced observation – modes of reception that

all rely on the awareness that the spectator is not part of

what is happening on screen.

This disjunction that complicates moments of apparent self-

reflection in film is often exemplarily marked by the

representation of theatrical audiences in film, but it is by

no means exclusive to such pertinent moments of apparent self-

reflection. When the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde

distinguished in 1898 between the constellations of 'the

public' (le public) and 'the crowd' (la follie), he took note

of a dynamics of dissociation very similar to the one

informing the regiment of film audience address a decade

later. Tarde presents crowds as physical, present, and real

entities – masses of people that meet in a concrete space,

visibly and tangibly. Publics by contrast are made, dispersed,

mediated - imagined, as Benedict Anderson would call the very

same phenomenon much later. Tarde attributes the public's

coherence to the power of print, which was later reinforced

and propelled by the "mutually auxiliary inventions" of the

railroad and the telegraph (1969, 281), to forge a sense of

community in the absence of physical or visual contact. It did

not take long for psychologists like Hermann Duenschmann or

Hugo Munsterberg to recognize the obvious affinities of

  43  

Tarde's concept of the public to the film audience. Film, with

"its possibility of mechanical reproduction" (Duenschmann, qu.

in Gamper 2012, 331) could forge innumerable parallel publics,

or audiences, and allow for all sorts of scenarios of

manipulation or education (Gamper 2012, 331-332), at best

providing a vast array of different audiences simultaneously

with the possibility to adjust and respond to the exigencies

of modernity.

In the Fantômas serial this distinction seems to be most

important. Fantômas may manipulate the masses in the film, but

the audience of the film is being trained to see through his

ruses – to be thrilled and entertained but also to enjoy its

own superior understanding and vantage point vis-à-vis the

duped victims. Contingency is made manageable in the process,

laid out as a series of options rather than a threatening

maze. Fantômas' world is not an epical narrative, and the

spectator – or reader – of this world should not even try to

pull all of its threads of parallel action back together into

one texture. Instead, the addressees of both the written and

the screened Fantômas are invited to conjecture and interlink,

to recognize and to compare, to detect correspondences and to

draw conclusions, - not in order to come to a larger

underlying truth, but to keep abreast of the troubled waves of

modernity without being pulled under.

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  44  

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