The Marquis de Kéranic dies, leaving his estate to his 18-year-old orphaned niece Suzanne (Grandais). Until she turns 21, her cousin, Count Fernand de Kéranic (Perret), will be Suzanne’s guardian and executor of the uncle’s will, according to which, if she dies, enters a convent, or goes mad, the Count will become sole heir to the estate. The Count plans to marry Suzanne to acquire her inheritance, but she spurns his advances in favor of a young captain (Dhartigny). The Count then resolves to kill his young ward and the man she loves at the Rocks of Kador. His plan goes awry, but the traumatized Suzanne is stricken with “insanity” and remembers nothing of the attempted crime. Fortunately, one Professor Williams’ advances in the application of the cinematograph to medical science mean that Suzanne can be awakened from the “darkness” by the revelatory power of the moving image, and she is reunited with her love.
Grandais was a central figure in the Gaumont troupe, and when Kador was released in 1912 she was at the height of her success at the company. She began the year appearing in at least three Perret films, Coeur d’enfant, Les Chandeliers, and Les Blouses blanches. Another important Gaumont actress, Renée Carl, recalled in an interview that Grandais became the first actress, at the request of Perret, to have her name appear on screen. Following the success of Kador, Grandais asked Léon Gaumont for an increase in her salary, which he stubbornly refused. She subsequently left Gaumont to sign with Géo Janin.
Together with the cinematographer Georges Specht, Perret and Grandais formed a close-knit team during a period of technical innovation, as directors transitioned from single-reel subjects to more complex multiple-reel films. Despite working under the staunchly conservative Léon Gaumont, Specht and Perret were technical innovators, and in L’Heure du rêve (Perret, 1913) they adopted soft-focus shots that were later edited out at Gaumont’s request.
Perret is known for his frame-within-a-frame compositions, a style we find him adopting in Kador. Before she is poisoned, Suzanne is framed by a dark arch at the rocks of Kador, an ominous and foreboding contrast to the bright balconies that frame her within the house. Rather than using landscapes for their picture-postcard quality, Perret uses exteriors to shape our understanding of the characters. It is Suzanne’s love of nature that allows the Count to lure her outside, where he poisons her coffee as she distractedly watches birds.
The cliffs and caves of the Baie de Morgat, in the Finistère area of Brittany, add a note of drama to the scene. The craggy rocks and cliffs provide stark lighting contrasts, and enable Perret to orchestrate the film’s dark turn into violence when the Count shoots the Captain and leaves the couple to be engulfed by the rising tide. The rugged beauty of the area – and its accessibility by rail – drew other artists from Paris, resulting in artworks such as Eugène Bourgeois’s Morgat, Pointe Cador (1907) and Henri Rivière’s Grottes de Morgat (1908).
Perret’s frames-within-frames dovetail with the taste for metacinema at Gaumont, as seen in dramas like Louis Feuillade’s L’Erreur tragique, in which an aristocrat believes his wife (Grandais) to be having an affair after seeing her on film with a young man, and comedies like Perret’s Les Bretelles, where a filmmaker named L. Terrep (Perret backwards!) makes a historical film at Léonce’s villa, and then believes his wife (Grandais again) is having an affair after finding a pair of actor’s braces. In Kador, too, cinema and real life transgress on each other’s spheres: Just as Professor Williams (Keppens) demonstrates his psychotherapeutic application of cinema, so did Léon Gaumont impress Parisian scientists with lectures showcasing his chronophone sound-on-disc technology.
It is in the context of the fascination with cinema itself that we should see the metafilmic element of Kador. Upon its release the film shared the Gaumont-Palace programme with early sound films in a tour de force of pro-cinema propaganda. For contemporary believers in the limitless power of cinema technology, it was not such a leap to imagine that it could reach into a woman’s subconscious.

Annie Fee