Week 13/2025

From silent serials to avant-garde experiments and animated fairy tales, this week’s selection traces three ways in which filmmakers have drawn inspiration from the stage. Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913) absorbed the techniques of popular theatre. Its static-camera scenes unfold like boulevard melodramas – suspenseful crimes and disguises presented with the theatrical flair of a turn-of-the-century stage play. “Fantômas was the first anti-hero, the first evil hero. To be sure, he was opposed by a policeman, Juve, who stands for Good, but there was no doubt […] as to which was the more interesting character.”

Staying on the shadowy side and roaming but a couple of decades from Feuillade’s time, another bridge between cinema and stage comes from German animator Lotte Reiniger. A pioneer of silhouette film, she transformed the ancient art of shadow play into moving imagery. Her scissors-cut puppets dance to tell familiar tales using only shape, light, and movement. Reiniger’s Fairy Tales celebrate the expressivity of gesture in a choreography of silhouettes as vivid as live puppetry. Bringing a real live dimension to this screening are the students of the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp.

“[I]n fiction, the real and the virtual have the same status, since both are established and governed by the laws of writing.” Toshio Matsumoto’s Demons (1971) refracts a classic Kabuki play through a radical lens. This bleak samurai revenge tragedy draws on Kabuki and Noh in its stylized acting and stark chiaroscuro as well as in its fatalism. Matsumoto fractures this world with Brechtian cuts and narrative subversions, unsettling any sense of immersion, forcing us to watch as the illusion collapses. Matsumoto’s demons draw our attention to the very artifice of storytelling, even as we’re drawn into its nihilistic fury. Go see it in the theatre. ArtCinema OFFoff flew in a 35mm copy from Japan – that’s not nothing.