Andréani, Henri

(1877-1936)

   Director and film pioneer. Henri Andréani got his start in film in much the same way as his contemporary, Alice Guy, by being the right-hand man to the boss. He was, in fact, Charles Pathé's secretary at the time when Pathé was just breaking into film. Andréani found himself lured by the cinema, and began acting in small roles in Gaston Velle's films. He went on to become a film producer and director himself, making some twenty films over the course of his career.

   Historical films were Andréani's forte, and he made many of them. The most celebrated of these are his Napoléon (1909), Cléopatre (1910), Siège de Calais (1911), and his multipart serial adaptation of Les Trois Mousquetaires (1921). Cléopatre is an exotic orientalist rendering of the story of the mythical Egyptian queen. It uses elaborate décor and costumes, and was shot entirely instudio, which emphasizes the "otherworldliness" of its subject matter. The Siège de Calais, by contrast, is a nationalist historical film on the Hundred Years War, and it was one of the grandest and most widely publicized historical films of the time. It was filmed on location, rather than entirely in a studio, and featured rather elaborate battle scenes and some of the first true crowd scenes in cinema.

   Apart from historical films, Andréani made biblical histories, although he tended to avoid the more widely celebrated stories from the Bible. His biblical films include Le Sacrifice d'Ismaël (1912) and Rebecca (1913). Andréani was also an early experimenter with the spy film. It is perhaps fitting, given the grandeur of his own historical films, and his production of a film on Napoleon, that, near the end of his career, Andréani formed part of the production crew of Abel Gance's legendary Napoléon Bonaparte.