Irma Vep (1915–2025)
Louis Feuillade’s “Les Vampires” is a silent movie serial that got a lot of respectful attention from the Surrealists, and you can see why if you plow through its seven headlong hours, as I just did.
https://youtu.be/W7s0iHtc3UA?si=hhRtJXKnrEtGp1xc
There’s a lot of diffuse, off-the-wall incident in this episodic thriller-movie, but the music-hall comedienne “Musidora” is carrying the film on her back. Musidora’s not in every episode, but her presence is electrifying, not just because she’s a good actress with an expressive pantomine schtick highly-suitable for silent film, but because she’s so otherworldly.
Musidora’s character “Irma Vep” is the top female criminal in the large and powerful “Vampire” gang. Irma doesn’t have her own name or any civilian identity, since her assumed name — (or maybe her stage-name, since we first see it on a theater poster) — is simply an anagram of “Vampire.”
Irma Vep’s got no parents, no children, and no personal history; her only family is “Les Vampires,” and she’s nothing more-or-less than one-of-them.
The other Vampire gangsters, who are amoral criminal-masterminds, jewel thieves, swindlers, poisoners, blackmailers, and disposable underclass apache thugs, all seem to admire and adore Irma Vep. It’s not clear why they love Irma so, because Irma is irksome, aggressive and blandly murderous, and she never shows any feminine kindness or emotional engagement with the other Vampires. Irma Vep does perform a riotous music-hall number for them in their favorite low criminal dive. It may be that they are star-struck by Irma, that she is their diva, their muse.
Musidora is certainly the star actress in the “Les Vampires” movie, but Irma Vep is also an actress of sorts in and during the film itself. Irma Vep is a mind-boggling mistress-of-disguise and has no stable identity of her own. Irma Vep variously poses as a music-hall apache chanteuse, the female secretary/courier of a big bank, the posh debutante niece of an aristocrat, a young male French Viscount ( in her dandy-esque male drag), a demure French housemaid, a meek and homely telephone operator, a drowned castaway, and also in her most iconic role, as a black-masked sneak-thief in a skin-tight black leotard.
When she’s swanning around as this absent-yet-shapely black silhouette, in her silky ninja get-up adorned for some surreal reason by daintily-feminine patent-leather heeled pumps, “Irma Vep” is both not there at all (because she’s supposed to be invisible and unseen), but also extremely and radically there, because this is Irma at her most sexy, provocative, powerful and threatening, a succubus-vampire creature of the night who infiltrates hotel bedrooms.
As Irma is performing this slithery night-walking act, a very peculiar plot twist takes place. Irma gets tricked and kidnapped by a rival criminal who possesses hypnotic powers.
Irma instantly despises him and defies him to do his worst to her.
So he grabs her, stares into her eyes and puts her under his spell.
This psychic ravishment is obviously calamitous for the self-willed Irma, but as the film progresses, her fate-worse-than-death doesn’t seem to bother Irma much if at all. She’s become the submissive hypnotized slave of the Spanish master-criminal “Moreno,” but this subjugation doesn’t spoil or even mar her all-pervasive Irma Vep vibe. Her forced separation from her Vampire gang even seems to be a tonic for Irma.
Irma Vep never comes out of Moreno’s “hypnotic spell.” She never seems, in the course of the film, to recognize that she was even under Moreno’s spell at all. On the contrary, it’s Moreno who can’t help but fall for Irma Vep; he’s captivated by her.
Irma Vep could become his puppet (like another, meeker woman Moreno hynotizes, who is obviously terrified of him), but instead she becomes his loyal mistress, and, more than that, his helpmeet and most-trusted advisor. When Moreno gives up his own career and swears fealty to the mighty Vampire gang, it’s clear that Irma Vep has persuaded and recruited Moreno to do that. Irma Vep turns her lord-and-master into a subordinate Vampire gangster because she decides that course will be best for him.
Although she’s the personification of chaos and evil, Irma Vep’s Significant-Other relationship with Moreno goes on for a remarkably long time. She never shows any romance-film tropes, she’s not girlishly needy, weepy, tender and clingy, but she never denounces or betrays Moreno; instead he simply gets guillotined by the French police for his many dreadful crimes (which are fewer than hers, but who’s counting). She doesn’t visibly lavish her affection on him (as he often does on her), but she never shows any resentment that he abducted her. She never quarrels with Moreno; she accommodates him as the man in her life, and she more or less does what he says.
As Moreno’s live-in mistress/secretary, Irma has quite a nice, spacious, and well-furnished Parisian apartment. She even has two sub-criminal house servants. We never see Irma humbly cooking or laundering for Moreno (because she’s not his servant but the mistress-of-the-establishment), and yet, she doesn’t laze, lounge in lingerie and eat bonbons as the kept-woman, either. Irma Vep seems to achieve genuine self-actualization, as a mature, responsible woman-of-the-world with a cool pad and a steady guy.
This is the only period in the film when we see Irma costumed — not to perform some bizarre crime-scheme — but simply dressed as Irma Vep herself, wearing clothes from her own chosen wardrobe, privately at ease in her own abode. Irma scarcely looks weird or surreal at all; on the contrary, domestic Irma Vep is quite chic, well-groomed, tasteful and well-put-together. Her home is immaculate, verging on home-office high-tech. She commonly wears a taut tie-and-jacket Parisian business-woman ensemble that encroaches on the feminine-paramilitary.
In one scene, Irma goes out on a nightclub date with Moreno — just to break their stable domestic routine, apparently, a condescension on her part to liven things up for him — and she’s in full datenight-girlfriend Art Nouveau regalia. She’s cheerfully boozing-it-up, and looking fabulous.
Irma’s not in disguise in her fabulousness, except in the sense that any pretty girl dolled-up for date-night is always in disguise. She seems unaffectedly happy and in her element, charismatic, up-beat and charming, an adornment to the party scene in a great capital city. She shows some caressing affection for Moreno, and even some wifely concern for his well-being, and then the nightclub gets blown up with artillery fire.
After that destructive cannon explosion, it’s mostly downhill for villainess Irma Vep. She returns to her usual desperate-underclass atrocious behavior, but it’s truly remarkable that Irma Vep somehow has this humane capacity to become so bourgeois, so settled-down and so stabilized. Irma would never “go straight,” because Irma’s inherently evil, but all her situation needs is a pregnancy by Moreno and a little Irma in her cradle, and clearly she’d be just fine with that. She would seamlessly become an upper-middle-class, or even petty-nobility, Parisian wife-and-mother who just happens to be a career white-collar grifter with a grisly criminal record.
As the beloved little-mother, chaotic and surreal Irma wouldn’t even stab or shoot anybody; not that she wouldn’t want to, or would ever mind doing that, but just because it would seem awkward and counterproductive, under the circumstances. J G Ballard used to say that the most “surreal” thing anybody could ever do was to retreat to middle-class suburbia and live that life completely straight. Maybe that’s what Louis Feuillade was telling us here.
