4. Detectives, Traces, and Repetition in The Exploits of Elaine

Chapter 4 focuses on a single serial, Pathe’s The Exploits of Elaine (1915), which substantiates film serials’ crime fiction heritage, and calls for a critical reflection of the ‘serial-queen melodrama’. The serial features numerous elements that became generic to film serials in later years, such as the detective, scientific gadgets, or the masked villain. It thus benefited from the success of crime fiction in the 1910s but lacked the narrative voice that untangles the mystery. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s introduction of the detective as a counterpart to the flâneur , the chapter proposes that viewers themselves become detectives as they connect tangentially related anecdotes and identify the mechanics of both the mystery and the narrative, engaging in ‘operational detection’—a mode of film viewing that informs both silent- and sound-era serials.