100 Years of… Visages d’enfants

Jean Forest as Jean

If you’ve heard the name Jacques Feyder but never seen any of his films, Visages d’enfants is a prime place to start. A beautiful example of simple and direct storytelling done with more technique than you’d expect for a film from 1925, it demonstrates what a master Feyder was, particularly of the language of film – in fact he’s creating some of it as this film is running through his camera’s sprockets. The title translates into English as either Mother or Faces of Children and that difference of emphasis sums up the plot. A young boy is orphaned and his father remarries – how does little Jean fit in now, with the new … Read more