"Fantômas" (1913) de Louis Feuillade
Louis Feuillade easily belongs to the pantheon. "He foresaw that people who went into the dark to participate in stories, no matter how sophisticated their world, were still primitive creatures." says David Thomson in A Biographical Dictionary of Film (quoted here).
Comments
I've only seen all the Fantomas... This post was only for the first episode in the series, I plan to put up screengrabs from the other episodes.
I'd love to see Judex, Vampires, everything he made. And I wish there was a way to see them on film...
I haven't seen the two films you mentioned but the point you're making is interesting. Fantomas do have a structural/conceptual quality to it. But one becomes aware of that much, much later...