Béhula

Joseph Vallot and his team of guides and porters climb Mont Blanc in 1906. Their ascent will take three days. They spent their nights at the Grands Mulets refuge and the Grand Plateau refuge. This is the very first successfully filmed ascent. Joseph Vallot (1854-1925), rich heir of Lodève in Occitania. He devotes part of his fortune to the observation of the Alps, sometimes opposing the scientific community. He built an observatory, still standing today.

In a chase which literally encompasses the entire globe, a detective follows the path of an apparent embezzler through various foreign nations, exotic cultures and dangerous situations.

This is, for 1906, a strikingly ambitious prototype-documentary travelogue filmed in and around the cities now called Kolkata and Mumbai. It's full of precious, occasionally startling images, from an extended 'phantom ride' down busy Calcutta streets to thronging port life, street trading, even the cremation of a human body and the ritual decapitation of lambs on a Bombay street – a scene some viewers may find upsetting. This is a French production but, like many of the 'exotic' travel films so popular in early cinema, it travelled widely itself – hence this version, with English language intertitles.