FANTOMAS at Yale

Friday night I loaded the Outback with two each of Rolands, keyboard stands, music stands, lights, cables, one new lovely Groove Tube stereo amp, and drove to Yale for a marathon screening of Feuillade's 1913 serial FANTOMAS. Nicole Thomas, who is my new colleague and neighbor in NW CT, packed her lovely French accordion, drove down with her partner Malcolm and met me there. And together we improvised for something like 6 hours of intrigue, murder, robbery, and other dirty doings. An audience of film scholars and local folks filled the Whitney Humanities Building for the first few hours, and by midnight the crowd had thinned, but everyone enjoyed the event, which included a superb dinner, and many donned masks or beards and mustaches supplied by Prof. Dudley Andrew, who headed the weekend-long seminar. Tom Gunning spoke with illustrated slides about Fantomas at the beginning of the afternoon.

Here's an excerpt from the screening: