Watching Au secours!, you feel the urge to exclaim like Alice in Wonderland: “Curiouser and curiouser!” What could be more curious than this brief comic interlude, shot quickly and at low cost, nestling between the epics La Roue and Napoléon. And what an unusual pairing of the master of 1900s burlesque, Max Linder, with one of the leaders of the “first wave”, Abel Gance! A Grand-Guignol haunted house inspired by an André de Lorde play became a Pandora’s box for these two to unleash the past and present forces of their art. The Belle Époque attractions (automatons, menageries, special effects) married the rhythm of the Roaring Twenties with quickfire editing, flicker, kaleidoscopic images, and echoes of Hollywood slapstick. The inventiveness of the shots – from the Éclipse studios to the eccentric Folly of the 18th-century Désert de Retz gardens – transforms the stage into a laboratory. It is reminiscent of La Folie du docteur Tube (Gance, 1915) that also showcased the mystifying power of film, how it can contort the way the world looks until we cry out for help: “Au secours!”.

Élodie Tamayo