Shadowman

Once again, Georges Franju embraces his influences by Louis Feuillade’s silent movie series and retro pop culture (Feuillade’s grandson Jacques Champreux is back on screenwriting duty), propelling them to new and unprecedented heights of eccentricity.

Shadowman is a ruthless criminal with no moral compass, whose real identity remains unknown. With an army of human robots at his disposal, willing to obey his every order, he’s about to embark on his most reckless scheme to date: to obtain the Knights Templar’s legendary lost treasure.

Once again, Georges Franju embraces his influences by Louis Feuillade’s silent movie series and retro pop culture (Feuillade’s grandson Jacques Champreux is back on screenwriting duty), propelling them to new and unprecedented heights of eccentricity.

Infusing the film with imaginative references to pulp adventure novels with labyrinthine plots and outrageous intrigue, he crams “Shadowman” full of occult rituals, mass murders and raging battles between secret organizations against an indeterminately modern Europe full of masked conspirators, ancient maps and inspired murder weapons. Franju brings this bizarre, orgasmic universe to life with unique style and inexhaustible imagination. Th.P.

Εναλλακτικοί τίτλοι / Alternative titles: Nuits rouges / Shadowman

Σκηνοθεσία / Director: Georges Franju

Σενάριο / Screenwriter: Jacques Champreux

Φωτογραφία / DoP: Guido Bertoni

Μουσική / Music: Georges Franju

Μοντάζ / Editors: Gilbert Natot, Gilles Mathot

Ηθοποιοί / Principal Cast: Jacques Champreux, Gayle Hunnicutt, Joséphine Chaplin, Ugo Pagliai, Gert Fröbe, Patrick Préjean

Γαλλία, Ιταλία / France, Italy
1974
Εγχρωμο / Color
104'
Γαλλικά / French

* Screens on 26th September

Publication date: 2013-09-11 12:30:00

Georges Franju: Behind the Mask

Thomas the Impostor

Balancing lyricism and realism, the director illustrates the war-ravaged landscape as an arena of absolute absurdity, full of hollow delusions and unfulfilled fantasies, where innocence is doomed to crash and burn into the harsh reality.

Judex

Enigmatic avenger Judex kidnaps a corrupt banker on a quest for justice on behalf of his victims and then takes his innocent daughter under his wing to protect her from her father's demonic mistress.

Thérèse Desqueyroux

True to the spirit of Claude Mauriac's novel, Franju transports the viewer to the asphyxiating atmosphere surrounding Therese, inspiring compassion for his enigmatic heroine, whose extreme reactions and self-destructive trajectory play as a personal revolution against hypocrisy, in a society that's in a hurry to brand anyone who doesn't fit the norms as an outcast.

Eyes Without a Face

Despite popular prejudice, which refused to take the horror genre seriously at the time, Franju turns the ingredients of a cheap b-movie into high art, expressing his concerns about the limitations of science and radically renewing Gothic mythology with a bizarre hybrid of horror, science fiction, melodrama and film noir.