Georges Franju's Judex, 1963

Judex renders credible, and it simultaneously denies, a world in the negative subjunctive, a world which seems tenderly aware of its own unreality.
----Raymond Durgnat, Franju (University of California Press, 1968)

If Georges Franju (1912-1987) is remembered at all today it is for that favorite documentary of vegetarians, Le Sang des Betes (1949), portraying what exactly happens at a slaughterhouse. But he did make a handful of elegant and stylish fictional films, including Les Yeux sans Visage ("Eyes Without a Face'" 1959) and Judex.  Judex is something of a remake of a remarkable serial by Louis Feuillade, made in 1917, about a caped crusader for justice.  Franju's remake takes place in 1914 and has a dreamlike quality that makes it seem all the more real, with its incredible visual flourishes (in vivid black-and-white, of course) in near-silence:  a villainess disguised as a Daughter of Charity nun (complete with cornette headgear), a female circus perfomer in white climbing the side of a building, followed by men in black doing the same, in the quest to rescued Judex, a conjuror at a costume party making a dead bird come alive, Judex watching a kidnapped businessman with a  primitive television system, Judex at night with his hounds, seeking justice.

Franju's Judex and Feuillade's original portray a quieter time, before The Great War changed everything and it became harder to tell the difference between good and evil. Feuillade had some hope for the future while Franju found hope in the past, in the realism of Feuillade.