A Bastille Day Rebel. Georges Franju’s Judex.

Georges Franju is as important a figure of cinephilia as they come. Having co-founded the cinémathèque française with his good friend Henri Langlois (alongside Jean Mitry) in 1936, Franju would go on to have his own career in film production, initially with a handful of documentaries before turning his attention to feature length fiction film with 1958’s La Tête contre les murs, a searing examination of mental illness and the nature with which society treats its affected. Judex fell five years later, during in which an iconic figure of Horror cinema was born within the running time of Eyes Without A Face. With Judex though, Franju looked to his own cinematic DNA, drawing inspiration from the work of Louis Feuillade. In the half-decade between 1913 and 1918 Feuillade mastered the serialised drama, first with Fantomas, and later with Les Vampires (though a number of other serials appeared between the two) before turning his eye to Judex.

Franju’s reworking of Judex plays like a more wide reaching tribute to the serialised form, rather than simply the one with which it shares a title and central protagonist. It’s his love letter to the serial in general, the project having initially started life as a thought of adapting Fantomas before the rights proved tricky to pick up. Franju’s Judex apes the stylistic tone and shape of the original source material neatly, coming complete with the kind of convenient cliffhanger-quelling plot contrivances that one would expect of the earlier series (there’s also a killer of a literal — kind of — cliffhanger). Franju’s film is a celebration of such things, though, importantly, it never feels as though it is a one-note homage, and is perfectly welcoming to an audience who might be unfamiliar with the original Feuillade series. Unlike a film such as Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, or André Hunebelle’s 1964 Fantomas, both of which tread similar territory to Judex, the Franju movie doesn’t feel above or ashamed of it’s pulp origins, instead embracing the very specific tone of the source material.

Franju’s film is aesthetically simplistic, in contemporaneous terms at least, with the director keen to pursue a visual angle that reflected the time in which the original series was derived from. Franju was forthcoming in his disdain for colour and the movies, suggesting dramatically that “it destroys values”, and instead chooses to force the viewer to look in to a world rendered in the image of the abstract and unreal. While the eye might be greeted with a sight not dissimilar to that of the early cinema, the ears are met with an experience very much of the contemporaneous movies (a number of piercing screams that wouldn’t have been in any way possible during the silent-era punctuate the film), while extra-textually Franju’s Judex remains contemporaneously relevant to the immediate now too, with it’s tale of a corrupt banker still relevant in a world never more left feeling the effects of such people.