The Terrifying Yet Scintillating Origins of IRMA VEP
Charles Ludlam’s knowledge of film and literature was encyclopedic. He may be rivaled only by Tom Gunning, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, who took a moment to share with us the cinematic origins of “Irma Vep.”
It was in the 1915 serial crime drama The Vampires that French director Louis Feuillade introduced his notorious female villain/heroine Irma Vep, played by the legendary femme fatale Musidora. In a key scene of the film, the detective investigating the murderous vampire gang terrorizing Paris stops outside a cabaret where Irma is performing and stares at the billboard bearing her name. Magically the letters begin to rearrange themselves and the name Irma Vep becomes VAMPIRE! The detective realizes who has been masterminding the gang…
Musidora, clothed in her close-fitting black bodysuit, her maillot de soie, robbed, kidnapped, and murdered, and seized the imagination of a generation. For the devotees of Musidora’s silent films, that fascination survived for decades. The surrealists worshiped her
amoral sexuality, and the revolutionary poet Louis Aragon later claimed that Irma Vep’s dark bodysuit inspired the youth of France with fantasies of rebellion. In the 1970’s French feminists kept the image of Irma alive with an organization known as the Musidor Collective, and the great American avant-garde theater director (contemporary of Charles Ludlum) Richard Foreman featured her as a character in his opera The Hotel for Criminals (which contains the memorable song, “Oh Irma, Naughty Girl!”). More recently, French filmmaker Oliver Assayas directed a film bearing her name in which a contemporary director tries to remake the Feuillade film by casting the sublime Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung as Irma Vep, dressed in an updated kinky leather version of the maillot de soie that should inspire anyone who can get one eye open, well, if not to revolt, at least to dream.
–Tom Gunning
