A sinuous saga of honor, betrayal, seduction, rivalry and triumphant masquerade, written, directed, and produced by nascent avant-gardist Germaine Dulac, this trailblazing serial was composed of six episodes: 1) La seconde Marquise de Sombreuse; 2) Le Château maudit; 3) Folle; 4) L’Exilée; 5) La Danseuse inconnue; 6) Hallucination et réalité. Set in modern day France in a chateau thought to be haunted since the Revolution, a Marquis and his daughter Irène (granddaughter of Marie-Antoinette’s lady companion) are preyed upon by Latin seductress, Lola, and her brother, Pedro. Committed to an asylum, Irène feigns her death, escapes, and masquerades as an Egyptian dancer and a ghost to restore her family’s honor, fortune, and a lost love. Pushing social and aesthetic boundaries, Dulac combines realist elements – outdoor settings, historic sites (Versailles, Cluny, Marseille-Old Port) – promoted in her essay Où sont les interprètes? (November 1917), with symbolist performance and Eastern themes (diverse incarnations, multiple identities), offering a vision of a new medium, both artistic and popular, able to represent modern life: a new woman, a new man, and a new world.

Tami Williams

 In 2017, very short fragments of Âmes de fous were discovered in the Van Liemt collection, a nitrate film collection at the EYE Filmmuseum. At first, two of them were found that had the title of the film written by hand on the film strip. Than more snippets were found. A comparison with set photographs and the illustrated booklet of the ciné-roman conserved at the Cinémathèque française made the final identification possible.

Clément Lafite