One of my favorite films, Judex (1963) directed by Georges Franju, screened at Anthology Film Archives last night, and on third viewing it is still inspiring and magical. It is a remake of the silent serial by Louis Feuillade, who also made the serials Les Vampires and Fantômas, hugely influential films about super-villains. In response to complaints that he glorified crime he made Judex, featuring a heroic leading character, a vigilante hero with all the flash and panache of a villain. He is a master of disguise, lives in a decrepit castle with secret passages and dashes through the night in a black cape. Sound familiar? The introduction to the film credits the character with inspiring Batman.

I’ve never seen the silent version, but the Franju film was made after the golden age of comic books, so that visual influence is definitely felt. People vanish through trap doors open, scale walls, walls slide open–there is even a villainess in a black catsuit and mask! The Batcave’s instruments are not Art Nouveau, however, as they are here.

The film’s most beautiful sequence is the masquerade ball, with the major characters wearing elaborate bird masks. It led in its way to the creation of my character Black Rabbit, who appeared in last year’s Easter pageant, Vernal Hoodoo. At the Metropolitan Museum’s British fashion retrospective one of the designers, probably Alexander McQueen, riffed on it as well, with a mannequin clad in a gargantuan black ball gown, its head a giant black bird mask.

What I love is how deeply imagined it is, the images are pop poetry, born out of fairy tales, pulp crime novels, comic books, and silent movies. There is the daughter, languid in her chair on the lawn of the chateau with giant trees draping beside her; here is the villainess framed by a car door, her cigarette perched, her eyes aglow; there is the circus acrobat who doffs her cloak and jumps into the action.

I hesitated on going to see it again, but since the film has never been released, at least in the U.S., on VHS and never on DVD, I felt like I had to go. Years ago I dubbed a bootlegged VHS that was itself an nth-generation copy of a copy with harsh contrasts and on which you can barely make out the subtitles. My dream is to someday pay for a Criterion edition to be made (or they can take my suggestion). I just prefer the movie to Eyes Without a Face, Franju’s better-known film. Thanks to the American Cinematheque in Hollywood, where I first saw the film in a Franju festival. That’s also the first place I saw another major inspiration, Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, but I’ll save that for another time.