Irma Vep & Memory: Record/Erase & Illusions

Irma Vep

Impersonation: This film is about making a film or about not being able to make a new film to celebrate the 100 years of French cinema. A film director is assigned to remake a French classic film series Les Vampires (Dir. Louis Feuillade, 1915). In the original film series, the story evolves around a mafia gang that operates through various disguises and role playing and their female lead is Irma Vep. In the 1996 film, Olivier Assayas invites Hong Kong film star Maggie Cheung to play the role of Irma Vep. Hence the film IRMA VEP becomes the view of the French film industry in the 1990s through the eyes of the Chinese actress. It is not a simple film within a film but a complex interplay between a Chinese artist learning to play a legendary French character; a French art film crew trying to accommodate the beauty and the temperament of a Hong Kong film star; a director trying to reimagine the moral collapse of Parisian urban society from the war years to the time of capitalist globalization of the 1990s and so on.

Irma Vep, one of the characters in the film series Les Vampires, was an enigmatic character. Her criminality was autonomous and not connected to any specific material gain or greed. Unlike her male peers, she was not playing any one social order over the other. She was simply the phantom of doom to the order of any order. In the film IRMA VEP, Olivier Assayas and Maggie Chang try to recreate that absolute critic of the system at the end of the 20th century and then decide to leave that open. This film foregrounds the questions over characterization of female criminality, of the role of nationality and ethnicity in an urban tale at the end the 20th century, and about the state of European art cinema then." (Madhusree Dutta)

Memory: Record/Erase

Impersonation: This work is based on the short story The Job by Bertolt Brecht. It carries the memories of an impoverished woman who had to impersonate her dead husband in order to procure his job as a night watchman. She had two small children and she took on a ‘wife’ to complete the disguise. After an accident, her body-identity was discovered in the hospital and she was denied the job meant for men. In order to make ends meet, she opted to become an exhibit for traveling freak shows. Through the process of drawing and erasure on parchment, the story is told in animation. The parchment acts as the memory membrane of the woman that gets overloaded and dies.
Malani’s choice of making drawings on parchment paper that are animated only to suddenly appear, are mutated, come undone and eventually vanish, attempts to evolve a screen language for impermanency of genders, sexualities and public performances. (Madhusree Dutta)

Illusions

Impersonation: Hollywood 1942, one year after Pearl Harbor, National Studios, a fictional film studio. Mignon Duprée, a Black production manager posing as a white woman, oversees a dubbing scene, in which the Black singer Ester Jeeter lends her singing voice to a white Hollywood star. Julie Dash outlines Mignon's dilemma, Ester's struggle, and the use of cinema in wartime Hollywood: three illusions in conflict with reality.