The Cleaning Man

Six-episode film Directed by Maurice Champreux and Louis Feuillade.

Louis Feuillade's final film

Georges Franju's Judex is an arch, playful tribute to the serials of the influential silent filmmaker Louis Feuillade. Franju shuffles through the plot of Feuillade's lengthy serial of the same name, about an adventurer named Judex whose revenge against the corrupt banker Favraux unleashes a complicated series of schemes.

When an unscrupulous banker ruins his family, a young man swears to bring him to justice, so he adopts a new identity, the mysterious Judex, and ominously disguised and sunk into the muddy path of vengeance, punishes the crooks and protects the innocents. (Originally a twelve-part epic serial.)

Jacques d'Athys, a French adventurer, returns to his home in Nice after an expedition to Indochina where he has picked up a Eurasian fiancée and a book that, unbeknownst to him, contains a coded message revealing the whereabouts of both secret treasures and sensitive government intelligence. This makes him the target of foreign spies, including a Marquise of mysterious Latin origin, a Hindu hypnotist and an evil German doctor, who will stop at nothing to obtain the book.

Pierrot et Pierrette, brother and sister, live in a caravan with their grandfather, the former ringmaster of a circus. To earn a living, they sing in the streets, and their lives are happy. But a charitable lady interferes, determined to put grandfather in an old folks' home and the children in an orphanage. Pierrot and Pierrette run away, and fall into the hands of a travelling vendor who wants to use them for burglaries.

When he goes to Paris an aristocrat steps into a cinema and is shocked by something he sees on screen.

In an effort to secure a promised inheritance, Onésime invents a time machine that speeds up activity on earth, hyper-animates men and machines, and telescopes the human life-cycle.

If you’re already familiar with Louis Feuillade, his little-known opus Vendémiaire may come as a surprise. Unlike the bulk of his work which was characterised as ‘Fantastic Realism’, Vendémiaire is wonderfully down-to-earth realism – or down-to-French-earth realism to be specific. The film itself is divided into four chapters, the titles of which suggest that this is a movie about the cultivation and consumption of wine. But as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that the cultivation and consumption of wine is an allegory for French culture and French land as a whole, and the real purpose of the film is to persuade the director’s fellow citizens to defend that spirit and those lands at all costs. It’s September 1918 and the war is coming to an end, but here on the Castelviel estate in the south of France the news has not yet arrived and everyone is busy with the grape harvest....

A silent French film depicting the story of the nativity.

A short from Feuillade's Bébé series

Rudolph Strelitz, known as 'Barrabas', is the leader of a brutal underground gang causing chaos and destruction in the lives of civilized people. A lawyer, Claude Varèse, is strongly determined to bring Strelitz to justice for the purpose of revenge, after his father was unjustly guillotined for the murder of Laure d'Hérigny, the mistress of an American millionaire. Later, the sister of Claude Varèse, Françoise, is kidnapped by Dr Lucius, one of the henchmen of Barrabas. Serialised over 12 chapters.