Channing Pollack makes his unforgettable entrance in Georges Franju’s JUDEX.
significantly, the Lobster Quadrille from ALICE. That’s a dance performed by animals, and the bird- headed dancers at Favraux’s ball suggest it as well as earlier imagery. While the dreamlike event may recall Max Ernst, it also echoes Grandville at his most oneiric. And am I alone in being reminded— by the lit exterior of the chateau, the stylized ball, the image of a mysterious figure walking away along a corridor—of L’année dernier à Marienbad (LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD), made two years earlier?
Judex and three masked helpers (one of them the doctor who pronounced Favraux dead, played by André Méliès, son of Georges Méliès) transport Favraux to Judex’s lair beneath a castle, where an owl hoots in broad daylight as well as by night. The clock that chimes three (presumably the same one that struck midnight at the ball) as they leave the graveyard might be a sound heard in a dream. It’s heard again—twelve strokes—as Jacqueline walks through the empty chateau, and Franju cuts from her ascending the stairs to Diana Monti (Francine Bergé) arriving at the top of a different flight. She’s the most vital character in the film, and the cut surely suggests that she’s Jacqueline’s repressed self. Where would that self be released if not in a dream?
As Diana and her accomplice Morales (Théo Sarapo) burgle the chateau, which is guarded by
a stone sphinx, the resurrected Favraux phones for help from his prison. The phone proves to con- nect directly with his study—one of many connec- tions that make sense only in a dream. It wakens Jacqueline, whom Diana chloroforms back to sleep, but she’s then rescued by Judex’s three dogs. The scene is poignant and beautiful in its simplicity, but doesn’t the imagery—the cloaked figure that has power over lupine creatures and carries her into a fog, after which she wakens feebly in bed—also remind us of vampirism? Both the vampire and Judex are associated with irreligious resurrection.
Diana and her accomplices kidnap Jacqueline and attempt to kill her in a sequence of events that feels like a condensed serial episode. She’s rescued from the river by two children, one of whom recognizes the nun-disguised Diana from a photograph in his friend’s shop. The nonchalant casualness of this development surely belongs to a dream. As Diana makes to stab her with a bod- kin, Jacqueline wakens momentarily and seems to break the dream, so that Diana can’t continue. Rescued by Judex, Jacqueline wakens and dis- covers him in the act of becoming Vallieres. It’s worth pointing out that, although in the original Judex was given detailed motivations—he and his brother Roger were the sons of one of Favraux’s victims—he was still essentially inexplicable: a
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