Watching Au secours!, you feel the urge to exclaim like Alice in Wonderland: “Curiouser and curiouser!” What could be more curious than this brief comic interlude, shot quickly and at low cost, nestling between the epics La Roue and Napoléon. And what an unusual pairing of the master of 1900s burlesque, Max Linder, with one of the leaders of the “first wave”, Abel Gance! A Grand-Guignol haunted house inspired by an André de Lorde play became a Pandora’s box for these two to unleash the past and present forces of their art. The Belle Époque attractions (automatons, menageries, special effects) married the rhythm of the Roaring Twenties with quickfire editing, flicker, kaleidoscopic images, and echoes of Hollywood slapstick. The inventiveness of the shots – from the Éclipse studios to the eccentric Folly of the 18th-century Désert de Retz gardens – transforms the stage into a laboratory. It is reminiscent of La Folie du docteur Tube (Gance, 1915) that also showcased the mystifying power of film, how it can contort the way the world looks until we cry out for help: “Au secours!”.

Élodie Tamayo

In July 1923, (Gance) and his friend Max Linder made the burlesque farce Au Secours! in just twelve days at Eclipse studios (…). According to legend, this film is the result of a bet: one day Max Linder supposedly challenged Gance to make a comic film as rapidly as he could, in which Linder would be the leading actor. Based on an idea of Max’s, Gance put himself to work: the result was a film of three reels that was presented a year later, on June 17th, 1924. Max Linder acts in his favorite role of an elegant, distinctive and nonchalant club man. One evening at the club, he accepts a bet from the Count of Estocade: to resist his fear without crying for help. Ten times, Max is ready to succumb, but every time, after a gesture of panic, his courage returns. Unclassifiable within Gance’s work, this odd farce is surprising and a bit unsettling because of its exuberance, its abundance of strange tricks.

Roger Icart, Abel Gance ou le Prométhée foudrayé, Losanna, L’age d’homme, 1983