“Who? What? Where? When?” reads one of the advertisements for Louis Feuillade’s 1915 serial Les vampires. Above these words, a question mark cradles the masked head of one Irma Vep (incarnated onscreen by the legendary music-hall performer Musidora), with only her twinkling eyes in view, pulling us deeper into her mystery. Decades later, in Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996), Maggie Cheung—playing an alternate-universe version of herself who is summoned to Paris to play Irma Vep in a flashy, internationally co-produced remake of Les vampires—dons a mystique-conferring catsuit to re-embody Musidora’s criminal mastermind, only to be ultimately fired from the role when the production collapses. Yet even as this first iteration of Irma Vep suggests that the cinema of today lacks the spark to create a comparably seductive spectacle, it also…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 92- Fall 2022