Luitz Morat is one of the many metteur en scène almost unknown by French cinema. And yet, even though his films are in good part invisible, his activity is full of many reasons for interest; above all because Luitz Morat was one of the best creators of that hotbed of images which was the Pathé Consortium Cinéma at the time of Jean Sapène’s direction – the producer who, with great determination, directed the destinies of the company to serials and kolossals, able, according to his interpretation of the market, to discourage the Americans from introducing their new distribution systems into France which would have given the coup de grace to national production.

Luitz Morat, born in Geneva, started his career in Paris as a theatre actor, making his debut in cinema in 1913 in the dramas which Louis Feuillade realised for Gaumont. One year later, he became one of the scriptwriters for the ‘daisy house’. Author of over ten full-length films, his name is tied to Cité foudroyée (1924), in which Paris is destroyed by a mad scientist – a film which made an impression on the critics of the age who admired his screenplay and the tricks of Robert Gys and the catastrophic scenes of this French proto-science fiction film. The success of the film consecrated him as one of the masters of the French colossal and Pathé Consortium Cinéma entrusted him with three cinéromans: Surcouf, eight episodes dedicated to the king of the corsairs, interpreted by Jean Angelo (and in a small role Artaud), Jean Chouan, with Maurice Schutz, the epic poem of the realist Vandea and, of course, Le Juif errant. He died in 1928. Today we know almost nothing else about this artisan of cinema.

“Le Juif errant is taken from one of the first and most popular feuilleton, written in 1848 by Eugène Sue and, despite a story which embraces 18 centuries and follows the adventures of fifteen or more characters, Luitz Morat manages to straighten the plot by simplifying its passages – making them rest on the oldest narrative rule in the world, the opposition between good and evil.

The good is Marius de Rennepont, a Jew who in 1640, faced with certain death during a pogrom in the Warsaw ghetto, entrusts his worldly goods to the Jewish merchant Eléazar. His heirs will only be able to open his will on the 13 February, 1830. They leave from the four corners of the globe to arrive in time for the mysterious opening. But against them, rises the same enemy, the evil which had killed de Rennepont, the sect of the Ardents which tries to do the legitimate heirs out of the enormous fortune which in the three centuries the successors of Eléazar had nurtured and increased.

Around this narrative nucleus, infinite masks move in a dilated temporal space crossed by the Jew condemned from Crucifixion day to wander in eternity.

Time is thus the first key of a film which runs for 6.500 metres, five episodes and five hours of projection, always on the edge of finishing but continually renewing itself, so much so as to make us think, half way through the story, that it might renew itself to infinity like a labyrinth.

That time is the key to the film can be understood in the essential dialogue between Marius de Rennepont and the old Jewish merchant Eléazar, where the former has found temporary shelter. Marius says to him: “si vous me croyez, votre fortune sera restaurée, mais il faut employer l’arme de ma race, l’arme plus puissante; le TEMPS!”

This might seem to be the prime rule of a Cinéroman, instead it is, according to Sue/Luitz Morat the Jewish principle of survival.

But the use of time dilation could not by itself justify the fascination of this film which has one of its principal motifs in the taste for screenplay; the décor is the driving force of the action, a space which creates sense: right from the first shot which sees Pontius Pilate invoke the will of the people of Jerusalem, and then in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto, on the ocean where two ships sink, in the Paris of 1832, invaded by scenes des bals et des courtilles, by the Carnival, by cholera; and again in the terrified horses, the fires, the nightmares.

In this kaleidoscope of events and places the stereotypes of characters move, played by a band of perfect actors who give life to an affresco which finds, in chorality, its unity.

On all, Rodin, (played by an almost unheard-of Fournez-Goffard, who would later play the doctor of La Chute de la Maison Usher and the frightening Jean Aspelée in La passion de Jeanne d’Arc), “confit en sourires, inquetant meme pour sa souplesse visqueuse”; he is the genius of evil, the true artificer of the history which opposes a miserable humanity to the eternity of the wandering Jew; it is his death which marks the end of the tale”.

Gian Luca Farinelli