THE OBSESSION WITH AUTHENTICITY, OR THE ART OF COSTUME IN JASSET’S FILMS

“He was a knowledgeable man, with credentials… He’d make you a set dec ration out of nothing. When he dressed a woman, it was sheer elegance. But when it came to getting the actors to perform, that wasn’t for him. We complemented each other admirably. For my part, I understood about performance, and he had extraordinary imagination for dressing a person or decorating something: that was his calling. Jasset had done amazing things: the Vercingétorix models, they were splendid, veritable masterpieces. That spectacle was a revelation for everyone. And if you’d seen his fashion shows, his mise-en-scène. When he wrote that pantomime he had a clear idea of what to do. There were 1,180 people on the set… Jasset, by dint of his professional experience, knew about decoration, costumes, re-enactments, he was terrific.”

Recollections of Georges Hatot collected by the Commission de Recherche Historique, under the direction of Henri Langlois, 15 March 1948 (Cinémathèque française archives)

Documentary realism is often evoked, unselfconsciously, from the first images. In 1910, Jasset was seen as a naturalist pioneer, alternating authentic exterior locations with studio sets, imposing a syntax of shots (eg inserts of closeup shots) and camera movements (eg the tracking shot developed by Hatot) and also paying equally close attention to the costumes; all this helped to provide a vivid intensity to the films, at once popular and subtle. Cinema’s first black leotard belonged to Protéa, and it is the clothes that fashion the individual on the screen, which codifies them, like Morgan the Pirate’s cape or the bare feet of the gypsies in La Fleur empoisonnée. In the Zigomar serial, Jasset unflinchingly shows the makeup and disguises in real time, in front of the camera, opening the way for the likes of Lon Chaney, and other geniuses of transformation. With Jasset, there was no sleight of hand or ellipsis, he took care to signal trap doors and moving walls; by drawing on the old stop-motion trick, he could gently suggest the clandestine gambling den and the footsteps on the ceiling appearing seemingly by magic in Méliès’s works. Conversely, Balaoo appears as it is, in its natural form, a monkey dressed up as a man, which deftly contributes to its originality. His obituary on 27 June 1913 read “where Jasset found his greatest success was in creating costumes for the theatre. This was where his impeccable knowledge of historical styles, his wealth of invention, his abundant inventiveness found a fitting home.”

Émilie Cauquy