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When Louis Feuillade’s “Les Vampires” premiered in 1915, escalating the war of attrition between French film companies Pathe and Gaumont — in the middle of the actual armed conflict of World War I — it wasn’t a given that narrative feature films would become the dominant format for cinematic storytelling. In the 1910s, serials were in. It was equally likely, and more economical, for filmmakers to string together hours of storytelling via 12-minute reels that would stand as individual episodes and end on a cliffhanger, prompting the audience to return to the theater next week to see how it all turns out. Film was still as much an emerging technology as it was an art form, one with various and uncertain business models that were being tested simultaneously. Feuillade has more in common with any director working in the Age of Streaming than with Fellini or Ford, and making a “Les Vampires...

Call it a remake, a reboot, or a rethinking, the “Irma Vep” series on HBO is above all meta. Start with Louis Feuillade’s 1915 French serial about a criminal gang, Les Vampires; jump eight decades into the future to 1996, when Olivier Assayas’ “Irma Vep” found Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung starring in a movie-within-a-movie adaptating the serial. Now, more than a quarter century later, the “Personal Shopper” director’s latest work both expands upon and in some ways contradicts the Cheung movie.

The fast-paced dialogue, twisty narratives, freewheeling soundtrack, and extraordinary visuals are back. Alicia Vikander plays Mira Harberg, a Swedish actor famous for American comic-book blockbusters, who arrives on set as director René Vidal (the remarkable Vincent Macaigne) is struggling with a special effects shot. As the series unfolds, relationships form and break, careers shift, and ghosts from the past haunt the set. But Assayas brings an honesty, sincerity...

“Irma Vep” is a story of all different kinds of madness, from the patently absurd act of making movies to the equally absurd and manufactured process of trying to maintain one’s sense of self. So it’s only fitting that the series’ score, composed by guitarist and former Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore, feels a little hard to nail down. Sometimes pounding like a tension headache, sometimes beguiling and ancient (not so unlike a vampire), it always seems to fill up the scene and unbalance the audience’s relationship to Mira (Alicia Vikander), an American movie star who travels to Paris to remake the silent serial “Les Vampires” with a director (Vincent Macaigne) who is definitely not “Irma Vep” creator Olivier Assayas.

Moore has done bits of composing for film throughout his career; after Assayas used Sonic Youth’s “Tunic (Song for Karen)” in his original film version of “Irma Vep,...

In the early 1990s, French director Olivier Assayas was invited to develop a remake of a classic work of French cinema for television. “I hadn’t known where to start until I remembered [Louis] Feuillade’s Vampires,” he remembered in 1996, referring to the 1915 silent serial in which Musidora played the costumed criminal Irma Vep. “I spent a few weeks considering the possibility, then I decided that, attractive as it was, I couldn’t take it any further. Somehow, my heart wasn’t in it.” A few years later, another invitation: this time to join Claire Denis and Atom Egoyan in the sort […]

The post “Whenever Cinema is in Chaos, You Can Do a New Irma Vep“: Olivier Assayas on His New HBO Series first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In the early 1990s, French director Olivier Assayas was invited to develop a remake of a classic work of French cinema for television. “I hadn’t known where to start until I remembered [Louis] Feuillade’s Vampires,” he remembered in 1996, referring to the 1915 silent serial in which Musidora played the costumed criminal Irma Vep. “I spent a few weeks considering the possibility, then I decided that, attractive as it was, I couldn’t take it any further. Somehow, my heart wasn’t in it.” A few years later, another invitation: this time to join Claire Denis and Atom Egoyan in the sort […]

The post “Whenever Cinema is in Chaos, You Can Do a New Irma Vep“: Olivier Assayas on His New HBO Series first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Olivier Assayas takes a very different trip into silent movie nostalgia, with a director’s ill-fated attempt to remake the 1915 serial Les Vampires. Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung is cast as the erotic rooftop nightcrawler Irma Vep! We see the state of Paris filmmaking in the mid-90s, with a clueless, frustrated director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) out of ideas — what business has Irma Vep in the modern world? Meanwhile, Cheung dons her vinyl catsuit for a personal creepy crawly mission — just to see if it gives her a thrill. Criterion’s special edition contains both a full episode of the silent serial plus a must-see documentary on the life and work of the legendary Musidora, a major sex symbol of the silent era.

Irma Vep

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1074

1996 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 99 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 27, 2021 / 39.95

Starring: Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard, Bernard Nissile,...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep (1996) is showing November 30 - December 30, 2017 in the United States and December 6 - January 5, 2018 in most countries around the world.An action movie star from Hong Kong, Maggie Cheung (played by Maggie Cheung) arrives in Paris and right off the airplane, exhausted and jet-lagged, finds herself in the production hell of an arthouse film that she was hired to star in. The movie is a creative (allegedly) remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic silent series Les vampires, helmed by an aging New Wave director René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud). Vidal, way past his prime, doesn’t seem entirely certain about what he is doing and why but he is adamant about his vision of Maggie as Irma Vep (an anagram of ‘vampire’)—an acrobatic thief whose tight black garment is for the remake’s...

Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart. Courtesy of IFC Films.This week sees the release of Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, starring Kristen Stewart. Assayas’s prior film, The Clouds of Sils Maria, also featured Stewart. This repetition of casting is nothing new for Assayas. Maggie Cheung has been in several of his films, as has Juliet Binoche (who stars opposite Stewart in The Clouds of Sils Maria). Assayas began his career as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma and his films are clearly reflections on the cinema as much as about any other subject. The repetition of a major star is part of this reflection. Viewing Assayas’s works featuring Maggie Cheung, Juliet Binoche, and Kristen Stewart provides a complex exploration of actress and character.In three films that star these actresses—Irma Vep (1996), The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), and Personal Shopper (2016)—supposed truth readily blends into fiction. Script and spontaneity collide.

Mariann Lewinsky curates several strands at Bologna's festival of restored or recovered films, Il Cinema Ritrovato: this year, she commemorated the centenary birth of the Dada movement and Krazy Kat with her Krazy Serial, in which surviving episodes of incomplete serials were jammed together with shorts and newsreels. The finest moment was perhaps when one serial ended and another, Abel Gance's The Poison Gases, began, but with it's opening title long lost, so that the caption "A few minutes later" seemed to join to wholly unconnected narratives.The preceding serial was Jacques Feyder's bizarre spoof, The Clutching Foot (Le pied qui étreint), which I realized from pervious excursions to Bologna was a parody not just of serials in general but of 1914's The Exploits of Elaine in particular, in which Pearl White was regularly menaced by a secret society led by the hooded and spasm-wracked mastermind The Clutching Hand.

Though we’re barely into a new calendar year, Kino Lorber has released one of the year’s most notable Blu-ray restorations, a superb presentation of Louis Feuillade’s famous silent serial Fantômas with a five title set ranging from 1913 to 1914. Surprisingly violent and full of cunning twists (based on the pulp novellas of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre), the criminal overlord was an early template for genre cinema staples, including Feuillade’s later iconic characters such as Irma Vep or the crime fighter Judex (each in turn inspiring an innumerable amount of other auteurs, from Fritz Lang to Georges Franju to Olivier Assayas). But this was Feuillade’s first master of disguise, a cold hearted criminal intent on rending all the jewelry and other worldly goods from Belle Epoch Parisian women he could get his greedy fingers on.

Feuillade remains one of the most prolific auteurs of all time,...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of the Moving Image

Several more titles play in the Museum’s excellent Maurice Pialat retrospective. Read more about his work here.

Wiseman‘s Model and Central Park show on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

Anthology Film Archives

Olivier Assayas‘s Irma Vep and its central inspiration, Louis Feuillade‘s eight-hour Les Vampires, play on Friday and Saturday & Sunday,...

Queen Of Earth's Elisabeth Moss and director Alex Ross Perry at MoMA with Josh Siegel Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The disquieting power of laughter, shooting a film in sequence, countering movie clichés about female friendship, a Doris Day Pillow Talk moment, hysteria, editing time (by Robert Greene and Peter Levin), Edvard Munch, Musidora in Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires, slow zooms (cinematography by Sean Price Williams), plus Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski's use of food, entered into Josh Siegel's conversation with Queen Of Earth director Alex Ross Perry and star Elisabeth Moss.

Alex Ross Perry introducing Queen Of Earth Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Catherine (Moss) visits her old friend Virginia (Katherine Waterston) at her family's lake house to recover and possibly come to terms with two recent traumatic events in her life. Her father, a famous artist whose estate Catherine manages, committed suicide, and her longtime boyfriend James (Kentucker Audley) left her.

Watching a film by Olivier Assayas is a little like wandering into the bedroom of a teenager, taking in the aesthetic décor that clings to his or her walls and bookshelves—posters, pop records, hastily cut-out collages of idols, and literature—and being left to draw a logical conclusion based on these ephemeral scraps. This idea of collage, assembling or reinventing an identity, has always been a concept inherent to punk and youth culture: British punk historian Jon Savage coined the term “living collage” to describe European teenagers in the 1970s who tore apart thrifted vintage clothing at the seams to fuse and repurpose them with safety pins. Assayas’ work is essentially the filmic equivalent of that same idea: he populates his frames with torrents of ideas and surfaces and lets loose cinematographers Yorick Le Saux and Eric Gautier to pan wildly, struggling to encapsulate everything into their widescreen, handheld compositions.

As is no doubt befits the ease of manipulation of film's past through contemporary consumer digital means, Rotterdam this year seems full of “video essays” and art pieces deconstructing or exploring cinema material and history. The proliferation alone prompts my skepticism; browse the festival catalog and see videos that engage with Psycho, Zabriskie Point, Eyes Wide Shut, Easy Rider, Freud's celluloid doppelgangers, Faces, and more.

From the spectral underground comes a real work of cinephilia, and by that I mean something that is neither fetishization of a film object nor an exploitation of the same for other means. Rather, Mary Helena Clark's 16mm Orpheus (Outtakes), which I had the pleasure of seeing at Tiff's Wavelengths program last September and revisiting again in Rotterdam, finds on the cutting room floor the facts, dreams, and possibilities of cinema history and future. Cinephilia as lucid consciousness of what lies beneath, behind, and beyond films.

At around the time that the Vicomte de Noailles was dabbling in film finance with Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet and Buñuel's L'Age d'Or, another aristocrat, the Belgian duke Henri D'Ursel, adopted a pseudonym to direct and star in La perle (1929), a short surrealist fantasia owing much to the twin influences of Murnau's Nosferatu and Feuillade's Les vampires.

It's a charming and elegant (and slightly sinister) piece. We're told that the surrealists admired Feuillade partly because they saw his serials without the intertitles, which had been lost, so the plotlines, already oneiric and chancy, became even more opaque, transforming from linear thrillers into a random series of outrages. D'Ursel, following Murnau's lead in The Last Laugh, has only one letter and no intertitles at all, leaving us to more or less invent our own narrative to make sense of the dreamy events he depicts.

This much is certain...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Aug. 14, 2012

Price: DVD $34.95, Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Kino Lorber

Musidora is sleek and sexy assassin Irma Vep in Louis Feuillade's classic 1915 serial Les Vampires.

The 1915 serialized silent adventure-crime movie Les Vampires is the greatest work of French filmmaker Louis Feuillade (Fantômas), the undisputed master of the espionage serial.

Comprised of ten episodes and clocking in at nearly seven hours, Les Vampires follows journalist Philippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé) in his efforts to expose a vast criminal organization known as “The Vampires.” Joined by a comical sidekick Mazamette (Marcel Lévesque), and often competing against a rival gang lord (Fernand Herrmann), Guérande dethrones a succession of the Vampires’ Grand Masters. But most evasive of all is The Vampires’ muse, a seductive assassin who performs her job with deadly grace: Irma Vep (Musidora).

Feuillade crafted his films with labyrinthine plots, narrow escapes and unforgettable characters—all of which went on to influence multiple generations of filmmakers,...

One of the pleasures of digging around for movie posters is coming across great designs for films that have otherwise been forgotten, that have not become part of the pantheon—or even any of its foothills—but which nevertheless are fascinating reminders of areas of cinema history that are usually ignored. The other day I posted a lovely Russian poster on Movie Poster of the Day for an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights that I wasn’t familiar with but which, I then discovered, was directed by a man described as “the high priest of Stalinist Cinema.” You can read more about that here.

When this terrific poster for Le passe-muraille caught my eye I knew absolutely nothing about the film, and, with the exception of English actress Joan Greenwood (Kind Hearts and Coronets), nearly every name on the poster, from star Bourvil to director Jean Boyer to author Marcel Aymé,...

I bought the old black and white RCA television from a garage sale for one dollar. For this thirteen year old, the purchase was a secret defiance of the no television after, or no television before rule in the house; and surprisingly, once it was installed into the basement rec room, the second screen in the house, was met with very little parental disapproval. The indifference was perhaps a nod to my bargain-hunting skills; more likely it was the fact that the television produced a beautiful pattern of electronic snow, and little else. After a couple of days of initial disappointment, I decided to take the back off the unit and see what could be done about saving it from the trash (I had already offered it to a neighborhood kid for 50% off my purchase price, but to no avail). Staring at a bunch of plugs, wires and one big cathode ray tube,...