The Silent Oscars: 1913

One of my favorite of the early silent directors, Louis Feuillade, made a big splash in France with Fantômas, five interlinked feature films (each running between fifty and ninety minutes) based on a series of novels about the eponymous master criminal, one of film history's first anti-heroes. Feuillade alone of the great early directors anticipated the chief maladies of the coming century—violence, anxiety, paranoia, alienation—and even this century's scourge, terrorism. His film serials Fantômas, Les Vampires and Judex directly influenced filmmakers as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Throw in the fact that Feuillade's films are extraordinarily entertaining—not just as film history but in a 21st century sense—and he winds up, along with Charlie Chaplin, as my favorite director of the first three decades of film history (1888-1918).

PICTURE
winner: Fantômas (The Complete Saga) (prod. Romeo Bosetti)
nominees: Der Student von Prag (prod. Deutsche Bioscop GmbH); Sumerki zhenskoi dushi a.k.a. Twilight Of A Woman's Soul (prod. Aleksandr Khanzhonkov); Suspense (prod. Rex Motion Picture Company); Traffic In Souls (prod. Jack Cohn and Walter MacNamara)

ACTOR
winner: Roscoe Arbuckle (The Keystone Comedies)
nomiees: René Navarre (Fantômas); Ford Sterling (The Keystone Comedies); Paul Wegener (Der Student von Prag)

ACTRESS
winner: Hilda Borgström (Ingeborg Holm)
nominees: Lillian Gish (The Mothering Heart); Mabel Normand (The Keystone Comedies)

DIRECTOR
winner: Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley (Suspense)
nominees: Yevgeni Bauer (Sumerki zhenskoi dushi a.k.a. Twilight Of A Woman's Soul); Louis Feuillade (Fantômas)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Louis Feuillade, from the novels by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre (Fantômas)
nominees: Victor Sjöström, from a play by Nils Krok (Ingeborg Holm); Walter MacNamara, from a story by George Loane Tucker (Traffic In Souls)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Nikolai Kozlovsky (Sumerki zhenskoi dushi a.k.a. Twilight Of A Woman's Soul) (Cinematography)