Ferdinand Zecca
Par le trou de serrue

So, the film is from 1901, before Griffith, partly to exonerate himself from the implicit racism in “Birth of a Nation” and partly to claim an expressive freedom owed to the artist, created his masterpiece, “Intolerance,” whose structure was later revisited in the film “Leaves from Satan’s Book” by Dreyer. However, Dreyer juxtaposed various episodes instead of making the (pre-Tarantino, so to speak) move of mixing them—the episodes (Passion of the Christ, Fall of Babylon, St. Bartholomew’s Night, contemporary history) were characterized by the use of masks as elements of dramatization (see, for example, the triangular shot on the hands playing the harp), and so, before Welles lamented that type of cinema (the silent or early cinema, anyway) with “The Magnificent Ambersons,” where the iris (or iride, in any case that punctuation system of sequences where the shot more or less quickly appears/disappears in a circle that opens/closes it) is used nostalgically and evocatively, and even before—and it will have already been understood that the focal point of the review will be the technological aspect of the screen in the cinema transplanted into the film I am about to discuss—Gance, eager to make a film about Napoleon and in the absence of a cinematic language grammar, which naturally implied high degrees of experimentation, decided that the only way to capture the magnificence of this leader would be to adopt polyvision, thanks to which the filming was done with three cameras that either filmed the same scene or were differentiated (the central shot of Napoleon surrounded by the two battle scenes—eidetic image—is epic), and the result was an avant-garde setup during the film's premiere where the spectators found themselves surrounded by three screens, one central and two on the sides. Before all this, that is, in 1901, there was “Par le trou de la serrure,” a French parody of keyhole films, a micro-genre (apparently famous and although overshadowed (see below), since a parody was already made) that depicted someone peeping through a keyhole, thus having strong voyeuristic tones, so much so that at the time, the so-called black evenings were organized, during which the keyholes had a pin-up theme, meaning behind the door there was always a girl undressing; present also in this parody only initially, as she reveals herself to be a he, thus horrifying the voyeurist with whom—and this is why I want to talk about it because in itself, the film isn’t much nor does it aim to be—thanks to a gigantic cardboard keyhole placed on the camera, the viewer would experience one of the first examples of point-of-view imagery.