Unearthed Treasures – Episode #3 : Impéria
So here’s another “little” treasure unearthed from the famous “Calais lot” in April 2025 : an clip from the serial Impéria, directed by Jean Durand in 1920.
The word “little” here doesn’t refer to the significance of the discovery, but rather to the actual length of the fragment : barely 4 minutes out of the 12 chapters that originally made up the serial—hardly much… Still, since Impéria had been considered completely lost, we’ll happily take it !
1 – At the Crossroads of the Arts : The Ciné-Roman
Impéria was directed by Jean Durand, one of the pioneers of French cinema. He began his career at Pathé in 1908 before joining Gaumont, where he created an entire series of comedies built around characters such as Onésime, Calino, Serpentin, and Zigoto.
The screenplay was written by Arthur Bernède, a highly prolific novelist and creator of legendary characters such as Belphégor, Judex, Vidocq and Mandrin. Considered a “popular” author, Bernède quickly developed an interest in cinema, which offered him the opportunity to bring his characters to the screen—beginning with Judex, directed by Louis Feuillade in 1916—thus contributing to the rise of the film serial, sometimes referred to as the ciné-roman.
Bernède actually joined forces with Renée Navarre (who played Fantômas in Louis Feuillade’s serial of the same name) and another famous “popular” writer of the time, Gaston Leroux, to found the Société des Cinéromans in 1919, a company dedicated to producing film serials. The concept was simple : the release of the episodes in theaters would coincide with their publication in newspapers such as Le Petit Parisien, Le Journal, or L’Écho de Paris. This system proved highly successful for several years, until the Société des Cinéromans was gradually absorbed into the Pathé group with the arrival of sound cinema.
Impéria was the first production of the new company, and it was distributed according to this very model. Its publication in Le Petit Parisien began not on April 27, as announced in the press clipping above, but on May 3, 1920, and continued until the end of July.
As for its theatrical release, distributed by the company Ciné-Location-Eclipse, it is difficult to establish precise dates, though it likely followed more or less the same rhythm as the serial’s publication in the newspaper. What we have been able to establish, however, is the complete list of titles for the twelve episodes—something never done until now :
– episode 1 : Le serment à la croix (The Oath at the Cross)
– episode 2 : La danse du diadème (The Dance of the Diadem)
– episode 3 : D’énigme en mystère (From Riddle to Mystery)
– episode 4 : Une tempête dans un cœur (A storm in a Heart)
– episode 5 : Condamnée (Condemned)
– episode 6 : La lumière dans la prison (The Light in the Prison)
– episode 7 : Les exploits d’Herzélius (The Exploits of Herzélius)
– episode 8 : La revanche des Bohémiens (The Gypsies’ Revenge)
– episode 9 : Le saut de l’écureuil (The Squirrel’s Leap)
– episode 10 : Le poison de la beauté The Poison of Beauty)
– episode 11 : La justice de la sorcière (The Witch’s Justice)
– episode 12 : Par la douleur et par l’amour (Through Pain and Through Love)
Renowned filmmakers would go on to work for the Société des Cinéromans, including Henri Fescourt, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Louis Mercanton and Marcel L’Herbier. Other successes followed Impéria, such as Tue-la-Mort, Le sept de trèfle, Rouletabille chez les bohémiens and Fanfan-La-Tulipe et Belphégor.
But what exactly is Impéria ? To get a sense of it, here are the opening lines of Arthur Bernède’s novel :
“The Duke of Corannes had married the gentle Miarka, daughter of Prince Mikaël Gernovitz, the last descendant of the ancient kings of Bohemia. The prince, enamored of nature’s beauty, traveled endlessly in a sumptuous caravan.
After a year of unbroken happiness, Miarka learned from Militza, Prince Mikaël’s sister—a kind of sorceress—that the Duke of Corannes, bewitched by a woman as strange as she was beautiful, and known by the name of Impéria, had abandoned his home forever.”
Impéria is thus the name of the central character, played by Jacqueline Forzane, an actress who was rather obscure. With barely ten screen credits to her name (the first being an Italian version of Adrienne Lecouvreur in 1919!), Forzane was originally “a star of Parisian society […] whose silhouette was popularized in numerous illustrations by the caricaturist Sem.”1 Described as “beautiful, with a grave, somewhat somber beauty, tinged with sorrow,”2 she was chosen to embody this character—“a woman of marvelous beauty, who inspires the most violent passions while remaining entirely the mistress of herself.”3
She would later appear in another successful serial entitled La Pocharde, based on the novel by Jules Mary, and in an adaptation of Émile Zola’s Nana in 1926 (Jean Renoir’s second film), though she never became the “queen of the screen” that some had hoped for. Her film career came to an end in 1928.
Two other rather obscure names also appear in the credits of Impéria : Jacqueline Arly and Doudjam. The former, considered “so bad in Impéria”4 appeared in only seven productions between 1919 and 1923, the year she vanished from the screen. The reason ? “The Vogue” according to Raphaël Bernard :
« “It’s funny,” a friend of mine told me recently, “how is it that we no longer hear about Viola Dana, Henry Bosc, Bert Lytell, Mary Allison, Theda Bara, Antonio Moreno, Alice Joyce, Jacqueline Arly, Catherine Calvert, Gladys Brockwell, Vivian Martin, etc.?” This remark is perhaps the clearest illustration of a dangerous force that, alas, has already turned many a head ! I mean The Vogue ! That dreadful power for the artist— The Vogue ! […] But in the end, what is the Vogue ? Some will tell you it is the favor of the public, the audience’s enthusiasm for one performer or another ; but is that really true? […] In most small provincial towns, movie theaters only show films on Saturday evenings, and on Sundays for matinees and evening screenings. It’s easy to see, then, the effort an actor must make to ‘win over an audience.’ Spectators are often very enthusiastic while watching a film, but that admiration lasts… as long as roses do : the span of a morning!”5
As for Doudjam, who played Miarka and is at the center of the recovered clip, she has only three screen credits to her name : Impéria, which was her first appearance on screen ; Le Chemin d’Ernoa, directed by Louis Delluc in 1921 ; and La Loupiote, based on a screenplay co-written by Arthur Bernède and Aristide Bruant in 1922.
Born in Tunis and a milk-sister of the city’s bey (hence her title of Princess), described as “of a fine Oriental type, with a strange and lively mask,”6 Doudjam clearly made a strong impression in her first role, immediately hailed as a “cinematic revelation”7 by the press. After nearly drowning in the Seine during the filming of La Loupiote, she too vanished from the screen, as quickly as she had appeared.
Another case of “The Vogue” at work ?
The last notable figure to mention in the cast is Berthe Dagmar, whose presence is confirmed both in the credits and in this excerpt. Wife and collaborator of director Jean Durand, she was a member of his troupe, Les Pouittes, alongside Gaston Modot, Joë Hamman, Mégé, Bataille, Léon Pollos, and Édouard Grisolet. Berthe Dagmar was a well-known actress during the 1910s and 1920s, appearing in countless French comedies and westerns of the era.
An expressive performer, she often portrayed strong female characters—sometimes mysterious, sometimes comic—in productions blending fantasy and audacity. In Impéria, it follows naturally that she plays the gypsy and “kind of a witch” Militza, as seen in the recovered clip in which she administers a mysterious “potion” to Miarka to give her “a sweet dream.”
In her profile on the Women Film Pioneers Project, Aurore Spiers wrote that Dagmar “likely appeared in Durand’s serial Imperia, whose twelve episodes are now considered lost.”8 Thanks to the reappearance of this clip, we can now drop the word “likely” and state it with certainty.
2 – Sensational or Endless?
When Impéria hit French screens in May 1920, the fashion for film serials had already been well established for several years. One immediately thinks of the pioneer and specialist of the genre, Louis Feuillade, from Fantômas in 1913 to Barrabas in 1919, passing through Les Vampires (1915–1916), Judex (1916), and Tih Minh (1918). Born in Europe, the serial quickly found an audience in the USA, where it became a specialty. Soon, all studios, from the smallest to the largest, were producing episodic films which, thanks to the cliffhanger principle, kept audiences coming back weekly to discover the next installments in the adventures of their favorite characters. Kathlyn, Pauline, Elaine, Helen, Beatrice, Myra, Dolly, Lucille, Ruth, Gloria, and many others—the serials often gave top billing to female characters, the most famous being Pearl White and the legendary The Perils of Pauline, produced by Pathé’s American branch in 1914.
The formula is almost always the same : take a central hero or heroine, have them face powerful and mysterious antagonists, perils, and twists of all kinds—kidnappings, murders, chases, betrayals, secrets—set against varied and spectacular backdrops.
Filmed at the Victorine Studios in Nice, Impéria follows this pattern, as noted by the contemporary press : “In short, it’s the serial novel in full: revolvers, poison, mysterious attacks, occult protections that will be explained in the final episode, in twelve weeks.”9 But this formula is a double-edged sword: some praised it as a “sensational film,” “thrilling and captivating,” shot in “the prettiest corners, the most picturesque sites,” with adventures that “flow well and are numerous and varied”10; while others wondered, “for how long will audiences be forced to swallow these improbable and endless tales, supposedly popular, which the public enjoys far less than their authors imagine?”11
Between 1914 and 1920, in addition to national productions, France was also importing a large number of American serials—The Perils of Pauline, The Exploits of Elaine, The New Exploits of Elaine, The Mysteries of Myra, The Shielding Shadow, The Mystery of 13, The Lightning Raider—and when one sees, on the same page of the Journal du Ciné-Club, Henriette Janne referring to the 7th episode of Le Trésor de Keriolet, the 10th episode of Barrabas, the 11th episode of Houdini, and the 10th episode of Le Gant Rouge, one can better understand the fatigue and irritation expressed by critics toward Jean Durand’s film
Despite this, Impéria clearly enjoyed a certain success (“Wasn’t the reception of the first episodes of Impéria most enthusiastic […]?”12) and allowed the Société des Cinéromans to thrive and produce many other film serials over the following years.
3 – A Storm in a Heart
Now that we know (almost) everything about Impéria, what about the copy recovered in Calais ?
This copy measures approximately 260 feet, runs for 3 minutes and 54 seconds, and is fully tinted (blue, yellow, and red). As with Adrienne Lecouvreur, it is a bilingual copy, but this time with intertitles in French and German. These intertitles are not presented sequentially in each language, as in the film with Sarah Bernhardt, but on the same card, divided either vertically or horizontally.
It can therefore be assumed that this copy was intended for screening in Alsace and Lorraine, two regions bordering Germany and with a high rate of French/German bilingualism.
It can also be noted that each intertitle carries a code : 18 b.1; 19 b.1; 20 b.1; and so on. The first numbers likely correspond to the card’s number in the sequence, but the meaning of the rest remains unclear: does “b.1” refer to the reel number—here, the first—or to the fact that it is a bilingual copy?
One thing is certain : a card is missing in this clip (and possibly some shots as well). Indeed, while the codes run from “18 b.1” to “28 b.1,” the code “19 b.1” is unfortunately absent.
To determine which episode of the “ciné-roman” these images come from, we referred to Arthur Bernède’s text published in Le Petit Parisien. It appears that this clip is from the fourth episode, titled A Storm in a Heart, and corresponds well to the recovered images:
“For many days, Miarka, consumed by her sorrow, had not left her tent.
In vain had her father and brother tried to rouse her from the torpor that weighed upon her. She remained there for hours on end, lying on a divan, lost in her mysterious thoughts, whose secrets she would reveal to no one. […]
Dreaming, like all Orientals, she let her imagination wander through chimeras… indulging in daydreams that carried her to unknown lands she discovered to herself, in the lyrical exaggeration of her imagination filled with mirages.”13
Enough talk.
Let the images speak !
Head over to my YouTube channel to (re)discover Berthe Dagmar and Princess Doudjam in Impéria.
1 – Histoire encyclopédique du Cinéma – Tome I – Le Cinéma Français 1895-1929 – René Jeanne & Charles Ford – Robert Laffont – 1947 – p.470
2 – Le courrier cinématographique – 30 avril 1921
3 – Les chefs-d’œuvre du cinéma – Impéria – Editions du Livre National
4 – Le journal du Ciné-Club – 15 octobre 1920 – p.11
5 – Le courrier Cinématographique – 21 avril 1923 p.9
6 – Le courrier Cinématographique – 3 avril 1920 – p.28
7 – Le courrier Cinématographique – 3 avril 1920 – p.28
8 – https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/berthe-dagmar/
9 – Le courrier Cinématographique – 3 avril 1920 – p.28
10 – Le courrier Cinématographique – 3 avril 1920 – p.28
11 – Le journal du Ciné-Club – 7 mai 1920 – p.12
12 – Le courrier cinématographique – 3 avril 1920 – p.28
13 – Impéria (Roman-Ciné inédit) Quatrième épisode – Tempête dans un coeur ! – chapitre V : Au Rocher de la Vierge in Le Petit Parisien du 2 juin 1920 – p.2