JUDEX

Georges Franju’s known mostly for his 1960 classic ‘Eyes Without a Face‘, his follow up is a playful tribute to the serials of the influential silent filmmaker Louis Feuillade, and is truly a remarkable and curious film. It tells of the unscrupulous banker Favraux, who receives a threatening note, signed by ‘Judex’, demanding that he pay back the people he has swindled.

The film is defined by its complex twists and turns, and most of all its melodramatic indulgences. The texture of the images is grainy and dark, tending toward shadowy nighttime scenes where cloaked figures skulk through the abandoned streets. ‘Judex’ plays and jumps all over the conventions of classic, pulp genre storytelling and gives us a wonderfully subtly surrealist perspective on the story.