The following notes on Lafcadio were written by Dr. Zach Zahos, Public History Fellow at the WCFTR and alumnus of the department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. On Sunday, January 26, Lafcadio will screen on a DCP made from a rare print held in Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 collection at the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research (WCFTR). Immediately following Lafcadio will be a screening of a 35mm print of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, also from the Vogel collection at the WCFTR. The screening is the first in a series of four programs at the Chazen Museum of Art that celebrate the WCFTR collections. The program begins at 2 p.m. at the Chazen, 750 University Ave. Admission is free!
By Zach Zahos
Of all the titles featured in this semester’s “Treasures from the WCFTR” series, Lafcadio has been truly lost to time until now. Some verifiable facts about this short film are in order: Lafcadio is 15 minutes long. It was filmed, on 16mm and without sound, in Paris in 1948. It was conceived and directed by Jean Béranger, a cinéaste with several short films and books of film criticism to his name. It was considered a “poetic film” in its day, due to its fusion of narrative and avant-garde modes. It follows a young man named Lafcadio (portrayed by Alain Quercy) who is tormented by his same-sex desires. And as far as I can tell, it has not screened before an audience, seemingly anywhere, in more than fifty years.
The film’s unique distribution and preservation history reveals how this is so. Though it was a French production, Lafcadio received no contemporary commercial distribution in France. Neither Prof. Kelley Conway—whose research informs this piece—nor I have so far found a record of it playing in French non-commercial venues, such as ciné-clubs, either. But across the pond, it found a high-profile champion in Amos Vogel, founder of the Cinema 16 film society (and, later, co-founder of the New York Film Festival and author of Film as a Subversive Art). Not only did Vogel screen it in New York, but in 1950 he acquired Lafcadio, along with three other shorts by Béranger, for Cinema 16’s distribution catalog.
Béranger’s work did not exactly take the American underground film world by storm, which Vogel in part attributed to the “political situation” (i.e., McCarthyism) of the time. But even so, Lafcadio and another Béranger short, Elisabeth (1946), screened in dozens of U.S. nontheatrical venues across two decades. Lafcadio traveled from Yale Law School (11/14/1956) to Indiana University Bloomington (2/13/1970), often accompanied by a gramophone record featuring classical numbers by Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud (the exact cues go unspecified in the available material). Lafcadio has even screened in Madison at least once before, on July 22, 1958. According to the records of Grove Press, which acquired Cinema 16’s library in 1966, Lafcadio was last publicly shown on September 30, 1974, for the Department of Psychiatry at the Peoria School of Medicine. It played in Peoria, folks.
Since the 1970s, Lafcadio would appear to be, for the scant few trying to find it, a lost film. In May 1976, Grove Press returned its 16mm prints of Lafcadio and Elisabeth to the filmmaker’s home in Paris; it cited “very little or no activity” in rentals as reason. No archive of Béranger’s work appears to exist in France. What salvaged Lafcadio from the fate of so many other lost amateur and avant-garde films? The process took a long while, but it started in the early 1980s, when Vogel donated his Cinema 16 papers and film prints to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR). Much of this material sat unprocessed for decades, until 2023, when the WCFTR received a $100K grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. This grant facilitated the processing of four collections related to independent American film culture, Vogel’s Cinema 16 films and manuscripts being one of them. During processing, project archivist Matt St. John discovered two 16mm internegative prints related to Béranger, which were then digitized in August 2024. One of these prints is an incomplete version of Elisabeth, while the other, though in imperfect condition, contains Lafcadio in full.
It is now 2025, and the UW-Cinematheque is about to publicly screen Lafcadio (via digitized file) for the first time in a half century. Why should you care? I will make no bold claims that this film will change your life or rewrite film history as we know it. But it is a well-made, compelling, and quite poignant film, as evidenced during its (spoiler alert) climactic suicide attempt. This scene, shot in stark chiaroscuro, reveals an earlier scene (at the two-minute mark) to be a flashback, proving our dear friend, the late David Bordwell, right again regarding how much 1940s filmmakers embraced storytelling techniques of fragmentation. This suicidal act is unambiguously spurred by the protagonist’s torment over his homosexuality. Lafcadio’s frank depiction of gay (and bi) sexuality is its most remarkable quality today, and as such it deserves a place in the histories of postwar queer avant-garde cinema, as a French analogue of sorts to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) or Gregory Markopoulos’s Christmas U.S.A. (1949).
Amos Vogel—a prototypical “ally” if there ever was one—immediately recognized Lafcadio’s sensitive treatment of homosexuality. Vogel’s 1951 blurb, which doubles as a plot synopsis, plainly captures his conviction:
The commercial motion picture, hampered by the production code, financial considerations and the necessities of a mass market, has never been able to deal with some of the very real emotional problems of human beings. With sincerity and an enthusiasm unmarred by too much experience, Jean Beranger rushed in where angels feared to tread. Lafcadio, the son of a well-to-do family in the province, comes to Paris to study. In the boarding house, he slowly discovers that his feelings for his roommate are something more than mere friendship. At the same time, he is neither interested in girls at school nor in the prostitute whom he follows but finally decides not to approach. Afraid of his feelings, frustrated by his puritanical upbringing, he attempts suicide. When it fails, he returns home, leaving behind the girl and the boy; but we know that this “escape” is no solution.
In his correspondence with Vogel, Béranger made no bones about his intentions. One letter of his opens: “Why do the movies, at present the most potent means of expression, maintain a conspiracy of silence concerning homosexuality? Why do they always proclaim that boys meet girls and deny that very often boys meet boys?” He proceeds to champion both the 16mm format, as the sole available means to represent queer desire, and Anger’s Fireworks, which he only saw after completing his own film. “[Fireworks] is a film that leaves you breathless: it undoubtedly goes much further than Lafcadio,” Béranger concedes. However much truth this sentiment holds, it takes nothing away from the tragic clarity of Béranger’s vision, or from the fortuitous occasion to view it once again.