Special Screening: Alexandre Volkoff’s La
Maison du Mystère (1923)
June 28, 2003
The great revelation of last year’s film preservation festival,
Il Cinema Ritrovato, in Bologna, Italy, was this spellbinding
French serial adapted by Russian émigrés
Alexandre Volkoff and Ivan Mosjoukine from a potboiler
by Jules Mary. Preservationists anxiously awaited the suspenseful outcome
of a love triangle leading to betrayal and murder, but
it was the film’s visual inventiveness—a wedding
scene in silhouette, a climactic fight reflected in an
onlooker’s camera lens, a
perilous chase across a threadbare canyon footbridge—that
convinced them to place La Maison du Mystère alongside
the work of Louis Feuillade as a masterpiece of the serial genre.
.1923.
France. Directed by Alexandre Volkoff. Screenplay by Volkoff, Ivan
Mosjoukine. With
Mosjoukine, Charles Vanel, Hélène
Darly. Preserved by the Cinémathèque Française.
French intertitles with simultaneous English translation.
Silent, with theatre organ accompaniment by Ben Model. Total
running time approx. 9 hours, with two thirty-minute intermissions.
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