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.
Special Screening: Alexandre Volkoff’s La Maison du Mystère (1923)
Jul 28, 2003
MoMA
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