The Oxford History of World Cinema (45 page)

and instead displayed traditionally 'masculine' attributes, competences, and interests. They

tapped into a larger cultural fascination with the 'New Woman', a revised model of

femininity floated by the media (if not entirely adopted in practice) during the rise of

metropolitan modernity and the disintegration of the Victorian world-view. While still

fulfilling classic melodrama conventions of female imperilment, serial heroines in the

1910s were not simply objects to be saved by the hero. To be sure, they still needed to be

rescued with some regularity, but they also got out of plights using their own wits and

daring. And in the serial's system of polymorphous prowess, one is almost as likely to see

the heroine rescue the hero tied-to-the-railroad-tracks as the reverse.

In every serial, the conflict between villain and hero/heroine expresses itself in a back-

and-forth struggle both for the possessiolp of the heroine (whom the villain constantly

kidnaps or tries to kill) and also for the possession of a highly prized object -- what Pearl

White called the 'weenie'. The weenie took many forms: a blueprint for a new torpedo; an

ebony idol containing the key to a treasure trove; a secret document outlining the defence

of the Panama Canal; a special fuel to power a machine that disintegrates people; the

secret formula for turning dirt into diamonds, and so on. The capture and recapture of the

weenie afforded a sufficiently loose structure on which to hang a series of thrills.

Another constant in serial stories relates to the pivotal position of the heroine's father,

along with the total nonexistence of any mother characters (and, for that matter, most

other female figures as well). The heroine is always the daughter (often an adopted one)

of a powerful man (rich industrialist, army general, fire chief, explorer, inventor, or

newspaper mogul) who is assassinated by the villain in the first episode or (less

frequently) abducted and blackmailed. The serial hinges on the daughter's fight to gain

her inheritance while the villain and sundry henchmen try to kill her and usurp it.

Alternatively, the serial involves the daughter's fight to save her father from the clutches

of the villain, redeem his tarnished name, or simply aid the father (independent of his

supervision) in thwarting his, and the nation's, enemies.

Although when they hit they hit resoundingly, American serials had an erratic commercial

history. Information on box-office receipts is hard to come by, but tradejournal surveys of

film exchanges (rental offices) may tell us something about the serial's popularity among

audiences. Between 1914 and 1917, Motion Picture News conducted a number of in-

depth polls of exchangemen. In October 1914, to the question 'Do serials continue

popular?', 60 per cent said 'yes', while about 20 per cent said 'no' (the rest saying 'fairly').

A year later, however, the 'noes' had swelled to 70 per cent. But a year after that, at the

end of 1916, the serial's popularity had rallied again, with about a 65 : 35 percentage split

between 'yes' and 'no' responses. By the summer of 1917 the responses had levelled out to

exactly 50: 50. A number of factors explain the serial's mixed popularity among

distributors and (presumably) exhibitors and audiences. At least in part it reflected the

growing rift, on many levels, between a residual 'nickelodeon' cinema, geared toward

small-time exhibitors and lower-class audiences, and an emergent Hollywood model of

mass entertainment. It is also likely that many audiences simply tired of the serial's highly

formulaic stories, dubiously thrilling thrills, and low production values.

INTERNATIONAL SERIES AND SERIALS

Although an international history of series and serials has yet to be written, series and

serials were far from being just an American phenomenon. France's considerable

investment in series and serials is well covered in Richard Abel's history of silent French

cinema. Éclair pioneered the genre with the extremely popular series Nick Carter, le roi

des ditectives ('Nick Carter, king of the detectives', 1908), followed by Zigomar ( 1911)

and various sequels, all directed by Victorin Jasset. Louis Feuillade directed a number of

celebrated underworld crime serials for Gaumont: Fantômas ( 1913-14), Les Vampires

('The Vampires', 1915-16), Judex ( 1917), and La Nouvelle Mission dejudex ('Judex's new

mission', 1918).

While these and other domestically produced serials enjoyed considerable popularity, it

was Pathé's Americanmade serials that caused the biggest sensation among French

audiences. Released, as in America, in conjunction with massive newspaper tie-ins, Les

Mystères de New York ( 1916) (a repackaging of twenty-two episodes from The Exploits

of Elaine and its two sequels) was a smash hit and began a trend in ciné-romans (or 'film-

novels').

In Britain leading serials were, among others, The Adventures of Lieutenant Rose ( 1909),

The Adventures of Lieutenant Daring ( 1911), The Exploits of Three-Fingered Kate

( 1912). Films Lloyds in Germany made the Detective Webb series ( 1914), which, like

Feuillade's Fantômas, was comprised of featurelength instalments. In Russia, a few serials

followed after the huge success of imported American and French serials: Jay Leyda

briefly cites Drankov's Sonka, the Golden Hand, Bauer's Irina Kirsanova, and Gardin and

Protazanov's Petersburg Slums. Italy had Tigris and Za la Mort; Germany had

Homunculus (an early instance of the silent German cinema's fascination with stories

about man-made supermen); and Austria The Invisible Ones.

Third World cinemas also made serials, although extremely little is known about this

topic. A particularly fascinating implementation of the serial-queen formula is a group of

Hindi serials starring 'Fearless Nadia', an Australian actress of Welsh-Greek extraction.

Inspired by imported American serials, director Homi Wadis also made the feature

Hunterwali (The Lady with the Whip) with Fearless Nadia in 1935. Bombay's Kohinoor

Studios produced numerous follow-up serials, as did other Indian studios. The Diamond

Queen ( 1940) is among those still available from Indian distributors.

THE 1920S AND AFTER

In the United States, film serials lived out the 1920s, and survived to the rise of television,

as a low-budget 'B' product with limited distribution and an appeal primarily to

hyperactive children. To some degree, this had been the case from the very start, but after

the 1910s it became more obvious that serials were slapdash juvenile movies for 'Saturday

afternoon at the Bijou'. With the phasing out of prose-version tie-ins in the late 1910s,

serials never again enjoyed wide publicity and distribution. Furthermore, the

disappearance of the classical blood-andthunder stage melodrama, and a generational shift

that caused adult audiences to view overwrought sensational melodrama as ridiculous and

old-fashioned rather than exhilarating, solidified the serial's decline into a cartoonish

children's genre. The serial's essential formula (hero and heroine fight villain for

possession of weenie) remained unchanged throughout, but the genre underwent some

key transformations. The 'serial-queen' cycle faded away in the late 1910s and early 1920s

as emphasis shifted toward the adventures of traditional beefy heroes like Elmo Lincoln

( Elmo, the Mighty, 1919; Elmo, the Fearless, 1920; The Adventures of Tarzan, 1921),

Eddie Polo ( King of the Circus, 1920; Do or Die, 1921), and Charles Hutchinson

( Hurricane Hutch, 1921; Go Get 'Em Hutch, 1922). Evidently, the plucky New Woman's

novelty had worn off and it was incumbent upon serial heroines to resume the role of

damsel in distress.

The serial's intertextual links also changed. Serials became much more closely associated

with pre-existing characters in the Sunday comics, comic books, radio, and pulp

magazines. In 1936 Universal bought the rights to many comic strips owned by the King

Features Syndicate, and other studios made similar deals. Serials now fleshed out heroes

like Flash Gordon, Superman, Captain Marvel, Dick Tracy, Batman, Buck Rogers, The

Phantom, Captain America, Deadwood Dick, the Lone Ranger, and so on.

With Mutual's dissolution in 1918 and the purchase of the already hapless Vitagraph by

Warner Bros. in 1925, Path6 and Universal remained as the key serial producers in the

1920s. Pathé got out of the serial-producing business in 1928, when Joseph P. Kennedy

came in and reorganized the studio. An upstart company, Mascot Pictures, filled the void

left by Pathé's departure, and then in 1935 merged with a few other concerns to form

Republic Pictures. The quintessential 'poverty row' studio, Republic nevertheless made

the best serials, according to most collectors and nostalgia buffs. In terms of output,

Universal, Republic, and Columbia Pictures were the undisputed 'big three' in sound-era

serials, each studio offering three or four a year. Running weekly for between twelve and

fifteen weeks, serials filled up an entire exhibition 'season', one leading directly into the

next. An assortment of minor independent producers made one or two serials in the

1930s, but none at all ventured into this field thereafter. With serials falling even lower in

reputation and commercial importance, Universal bowed out for good in 1946, while

Republic and Columbia plodded along making serials until around 1935, when television

became the chosen medium for weekly adventure series.

In all, Mascot and Republic made ninety serials between 1929 and 1955; Columbia made

fifty-seven between 1937 and 1956; and Universal made sixty-nine between 1929 and

1946. Independents account for fifteen serials between 1930 and 1937. In addition to

these 231 sound serials, just under 300 serials were made in the silent era. All told, this

adds up to over 7,200 episodes. If serials are a minor footnote in the history of film as art,

they deserve recognition as an important phenomenon in the history of cinema as a social

and institutional commodity.

Bibliography

Barbour, Alan G. ( 1977), Cliffhanger: A Pictorial History of the Motion Picture Serial.

Kinnard, Roy ( 1983), Fifty Years of Serial Thrills.

Lahue, Kalton C. ( 1964), Continued Next Week: A History of the Moving Picture Serial.

Oberholtzer, Ellis P. ( 1922), The Morals of the Movies.

Singer, Ben ( 1993), "Fictional Tie-ins and Narrative Intelligibility, 1911-18".

Stedman, Raymond William ( 1977), The Serials: Suspense and Drama by Instalment.

Louis Feuillade (1873-1925)

The youngest son of a devoutly Catholic, anti-republican family from Languedoc, Louis

Feuillade arrived in Paris with his wife in 1898. He worked as a journalist before

becoming an assistant editor for the right-wing Revuemondiale. Engaged by Gaumont in

December 1905 as a scenario writer and first assistant to Alice Guy, by 1907 he had

advanced to head of film production and was active in writing and directing all of the

genres produced by Gaumont, from trick film (
L'Homme aimanté
, 1907), to domestic

melodrama (
La Possession de l'enfant
, 1909).

The popularity of the film series had been established in France by Éclair's Nick Winter

crime series ( 1908). In 1910 Feuillade introduced the
Bébé
comic series, starring René

Dary, which ran to nearly seventy films over the course of two years. In 1911. He wrote

and directed
Les Vipères
as the first of the successful
Scènes de la vie telle qu'elle est

series, view merged the popular traditions of melodrama and realism. The
Bout-de-Zan

series, starring René Poyen, replaced
Bébé
in 1912, eventually running to forty films by

the time of the war.

During these first six years, Feuillade's films were marked by sober, restrained acting,

solid narrative construction, a flexible editing style, and, together with his cameraman

Albert Sorgius, he created a masterful sense of composition and lighting. Many films in

the Vie telle qu'elle est series exposed the tragic, or at least pathetic, consequences of

unjustifiable social and sexual stereotyping.

In 1913 came the film for which Feuillade is best remembered, Fantômas, based on the

crime novels of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre and starring Navarre as an elusive

figure of amazing power and savoir-faire. The first of five feature-length films, Fantômas

skilfully established the 'fantastic realism' that Feuillade and his new cameraman Guérin

would make characteristic of the series before it was interrupted by the war: the master

criminal circulated freely through all kinds of actual landscapes and social milieux,

particularly in and around Paris, his incredible, sometimes bloody exploits deftly masked

by the reassuringly mundane façade of daily life.

When Gaumont resumed film production, in 1915, Feuillade returned to the crime series

with Les Vampires, ten feature-length episodes released monthly to July 1916. Here it was

Musidora, as the
femme fatale
Irma Vep, who emerged as the film's most powerful,

repeatedly deceptive figure, infatuating the reporter hero ( Édouard Mathé) on the track of

her black-clad criminal band and deflecting his plans to revenge his kidnapped wife.