|
|
Figures de cire
1912 Drama / Horror
|
|
|
Summary
At a party one evening, Pierre and his friend Jacques get into a heated
discussion about the nature of fear. Rashly, Pierre accepts a bet
from his friend that he can spend an entire night in any place, and he
is undaunted when Jacques chooses a waxworks museum. In a
deserted gallery populated by immobile, sinister wax figures, the night
passes slowly for Pierre, and he begins to feel afraid. Then he
sees a shadow of a man coming towards him. Pierre attacks the
ghostly vision with a dagger, not realising that it is Jacques, who has
slipped into the museum to frighten him.. The next morning,
Pierre has lost his mind, and the museum has gained another motionless
body...
Critique
One of Maurice Tourneur’s earliest films, Figures de cire is an unsettling
work which strangely prefigures his later, and probably best known,
film, La Main du diable (1943).
The most memorable sequence from that later film is the enlarged shadow
of a hand projected onto the back of the set, and Figures de cire uses shadow play
just as effectively to convey a sense of unremitting terror in the mind
of the character who sees it. Tourneur’s use of shadows to
suggest hidden menace pre-dates the German expressionists by a decade,
and his later films (particularly those of the mid 1930s) have a stark
visual style which relies on heavy use of shadows and which is recognisably film noir.
© James Travers 2008 Write a review for this film... |
|
|
