Feuillade’s ten-episode Paris crime serial is a century old, seven hours long and looser than it should be, and it is still more alive than most thrillers made since. Musidora’s Irma Vep is the reason people remember it; the rooftops are the reason we do.
Nobody in Les Vampires is a vampire. The name belongs to a gang of thieves and murderers who work Paris in top hats and black hoods, and Louis Feuillade’s serial, ten episodes shot for Gaumont across 1915 and 1916 while a good part of the city’s men were away at the front, follows one reporter’s attempt to bring them down. The whole thing runs 422 minutes. We would not ask you to sit through it in a day. We would ask you to sit through it, and gladly, because a hundred years on it still moves faster than most things made with a plan.
Feuillade, who wrote as well as directed, made it up an episode at a time, and it shows in a way we came to enjoy. There is no grand design. There is Philippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé), a hat-stand of a hero who looks at cryptograms and frowns; there is his ally Mazamette (Marcel Lévesque), a crook who has changed sides; and there is the gang, headed by the Great Vampire (Jean Aymé) and run in practice by Irma Vep (Musidora), a cabaret singer whose name is an anagram. Each episode invents a new trick, a poison ring, a cabinet with a false back, a room that empties through the floor, and gets out before you can ask how it was paid for.
The cinematographers, Manichoux and Georges Guérin, keep the camera still and at chest height and let the rooms play out in depth, so that a drawing room shows you its door, its window and the man behind the curtain in one shot. That would be theatre, except that they then carry the same fixed camera out onto real streets and real roofs in flat Paris daylight, and because the camera never cheats, you believe the roofs. When a figure in black runs along a mansard six storeys up, that is a person on a roof. Robert-Jules Garnier built the interiors, and he built them with too many doors: flats whose wardrobes open into the next building, hotel rooms with a panel behind the bed. Most critics who like the serial praise these spaces, and they are right to.
Then there is Musidora. Irma Vep spends much of her time in ordinary dresses, playing a maid or a secretary or a guest, and the first time she strips down to the black silk body stocking and goes over a balcony we sat up as if we had been caught at something. It is a century old and it still lands as a shock: a woman’s body, moving with purpose, in a film where every other body stands about waiting for an intertitle. She is on screen less than memory insists. It does not matter. Lévesque is the other performer alive in it, a rubber face who mugs straight at the lens and is the only one allowed to know we are there, and we laughed at him more than we expected to, and more than his material deserved.
The rest of the cast is stiff in the manner of the period, and the women other than Musidora are there to faint. Mathé’s Guérande spends a good deal of the serial being rescued. Somewhere around the fourth hour the episodes start to rhyme, capture and escape and capture, and we were bored, and then annoyed with ourselves for being bored when the next instalment produced something we had never seen a film do. The gang’s leadership changes hands more than once along the way; we will not say how, only that Feuillade treats it as briskly as a change of hats.
He had done this before with Fantômas in 1913 and would do it again with Judex in 1916. Fantômas is the tighter film. This is the looser one, and the more enjoyable, and it is the one that stuck: the Surrealists adored it, and Olivier Assayas built a whole film, Irma Vep (1996), around the difficulty of remaking it. You can see its fingerprints on every thriller that has since put a woman in black on a roof.
Watch it at home, one episode an evening, with a week between them if you have the patience, which is how Paris saw it. The cliffhangers were designed for the gap.
