The Cinema of Things by Elizabeth Ezra

Author:Elizabeth Ezra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Figure 16  Captured on camera, Episode 6, “Les Yeux qui fascinent,” Les Vampires.

The illusion of a film is created by means of live actors on a stage before the cinema audience, surrounded by a rectangular frame, meant to be the screen. In a mise-en-abîme effect, in which we see viewers watching people who are themselves engaged in looking at something, a small group of people, including Irma Vep in male drag, intently examines the ground beneath them. We learn that the vampire gang, returning to the scene of their most recent crime to remove any incriminating evidence, has been caught on camera by a roving news reporter. A movie camera then makes a second appearance at the end of the episode, brandished by one of the journalists who are interviewing Mazamette in his home after he has been given a big reward for solving a crime. Mazamette shows the reporters his mortician’s top hat displayed in a glass case on his mantelpiece, announcing, “Devant cette modeste coiffure que je portais naguère, je proclame que si le vice tarde parfois à être puni, la Vertu est toujours récompensée” (In front of this modest headpiece that I once wore, I proclaim that although vice may not always be punished, Virtue is always rewarded).

Between these two references to filmmaking, this episode of Les Vampires displays all the hallmarks of the voyeuristic process of “ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness” (Mulvey 1996: 205). In addition to the “moral” involving punishment and reward that Mazamette trots out for the benefit of the reporters to whom he tells his life story, we are also presented with another morality tale. While Irma Vep is sent to search the hotel rooms of an American couple suspected of harboring a treasure map, attention shifts to her accomplice, the Grand Vampire posing as the Comte de Kerlor (whose son Irma poses as before slipping back into her body-hugging vampire suit). The Grand Vampire distracts the hotel guests with a story about his great-grandfather in Napoleon’s army in Spain which he reads from an account he has written entitled “Les Aventures de Gloire et d’Amour du Capitaine de Kerlor, racontée par le Colonel Comte de Kerlor son arrière petit-fils” (The Glorious and Romantic Adventures of Captain Kerlor, as told by Colonel Count Kerlor, his great-grandson). We then see footage shot on location of a soldier ordering a Spanish woman to feed and water his horse. The woman, whose husband and brother have been killed by the French, unleashes a bull on the soldier. The bull chases the Frenchman, who does battle with the animal, finally stabbing it with his sword. When the bull is dead, an intertitle informs us, “Mais les Kerlor ne sont pas de ceux qui tirent vengeance d’une femme” (But the Kerlors are not the sort to take revenge on a woman).

This incongruous interlude was apparently inserted because Feuillade had already shot the Spanish footage for another aborted film.

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