“"Everything is in Irma Vep": On Assayas’s Self-Reflexive Remakes of Feuillade’s Les Vampires”

Abstract:

      French critic-turned filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996) is a uniquely dense metatext, depicting the doomed production of a feature-length remake of Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915). The breakout star of Feuillade’s original serial—a ten-part epic of urban disarray and surrealist destabilization—was not the titular gang’s leader but its muse: Irma Vep, indelibly played by the French actress Musidora. Simultaneously typifying a patriarchal vision of erotic spectacle while also embodying the subversive possibilities of feminine transgression, the character’s legacy—as well as Feuillade’s, whose work has undergone multiple cycles of critical reevaluation in the last century—endures as, in the words of Louise Shea, a “complex and disputed sign.” 

 

      This paper argues that, in recapitulating this story and Feuillade’s legacy around the character of Irma, Assayas reveals how remakes themselves can be their own works of criticism, speaking to contested historical narratives and contemporaneous anxieties. In 1996, this was the perceived decline of French film culture amidst the rise of global genre cinemas, specifically Hong Kong action cinema. In remaking his Irma Vep as a streaming series for Max in 2022, Assayas extends his satire of an increasingly transnational film production environment to both our fractured present and a self-reflexive auto-critique of his own methods. When viewed in tandem, these works not only dramatize the work of adaptation itself, but radically depict the character of Irma Vep as an intertext both vast and live, a malleable sign in constant need of critical reassessment.