Happy Birthday, Irma Vep!

I realize, of course, that strictly speaking fictional characters don’t have birthdays, but since since Wikipedai gives the date of November 13, 1915 as the release date for Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires, today is as good a time as any to extend a sort of birthday wish to one of my all-time favorite cinematic characters.

The eponymous Vampires of this extraordinary ten-part silent serial are not the undead bloodsuckers of Nosferatu or Dracula or even Twilight but rather a shadowy criminal order that has infiltrated the bourgeois order of troisième république France, against which it plots and executes crimes of breathtaking audacity and sophistication. With bombs and poisons and anesthetic gas and portable, surprisingly concealable artillery they kidnap and steal and kill. But one man, crusading journalist Phillipe Guérande, fights to expose and destroy the Vampires’ reign of terror. Phillipe is brave and resourceful and moral and patriotic and clean. He also lives with his Mom.

It is really the anti-heroine Irma Vep that is the reason to watch this landmark of world cinema. Created by the actress (as well as pioneering writer and director) Musidora (1889-1957), she sets me a-tingle from the moment she appears in the third episode of the serial as a chanteuse. Even in flickering sepia tones and without a word of dialog of her own, she dazzles with a range of expressions in the first seconds the camera shows her close up.

Irma Vep is aggressively amoral in her willingness to pursue her ends — one of the movies’ original and still one of their greatest bad girls. That alone would make her intriguing and attractive. But she’s also an unambiguously sexual character as well. Even in France there were pretty strict limits to what Studio Gaumont could put on the screen, but still they managed to suggest rather a lot. Irma Vep’s preferred costume for break-ins and burglary work is something called a maillot de soie, which covers almost everything, but is remarkably revealing.

A remarkable shot, not just for what Irma Vep is daring to wear, but the for the pose she is daring to strike — she has no fear of the man she is confronting. I understand this costume was something of a scandal when it was first put on screen.

It also shows that perhaps Musidora did not look like Hollywood thinks female sex symbol ought to look.

Screw Hollywood. Give me Irma Vep any day.

Irma has quieter erotic moments as well. Look at her here with her lover Moreno (one of perhaps several she takes in the serial).

Fans of erotic mind control fantasies might wish to take note: Moreno is an early practitioner of your kink, it seems.

Kohl-eyed Irma manages to be striking even in moments when fate has her down. Here she is, making an escape under a blanket from her pursuers.

Unfortunately, in the end, the good guys win. Philippe and a squad of French cops capture the Vampires. Philippe’s fiancé manages to kill Irma Vep. But note that at least Irma dies shaking her fist at her enemies.

Quite the antithesis of submissive good womanhood. We could use more anti-heroines like Irma.

The Ecstasy Of Saint Beauty

A few months ago I had the pleasure of an edifying correspondence with an old friend who had recommended to me a trilogy written by Anne Rice (she of the vampire books fame) in which Rice re-imagines the old fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty as an extended BDSM scenario. A very extended, quarter-million words-long scenario, as it happens. Many ErosBlog readers are doubtless familiar with this trilogy already, but for those that aren’t and who like that sort of thing, I’m happy to report that all three books appear to be still in print.

In the course of our discussion, my learned friend grumbled a bit about the fact that, as of late, Ms. Rice appears to have turned her back on such agreeably lurid and salacious content. Once a self-described atheist, she has returned to the Roman Catholicism of her childhood and sworn off writing about vampires, flagellation, etc.

Tish-tosh, I responded. It’s a free country, isn’t it?

Indeed it is, or at least ought to be, my liberty-loving comrade hastened to reply. But isn’t Rice dissing her fans a bit, when she disparages the themes those fans embraced so loyally and profitably?

I turned this thought over in my mind for a while.

What came up was something rather odd. A memory (or possibly confabulation) from childhood, of being a ten year-old faculty brat tagging along with a group of American college students on a tour of a church in Rome called Santa Maria della Vittoria. As you art lovers should be aware, this church contains a famous sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) called The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.

Ten year-old me didn’t really understand why the big kids were elbowing each other and trying not to snicker. Later in life I discovered that Teresa of Avila left us a rather vivid account of her ecstasy, which makes what’s going on here a little clearer.

Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form … He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire … In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it — even a considerable share.

But it’s spiritual pain, so that’s okay, I guess.

Still I couldn’t help thinking more along these lines. I also remembered seeing a lot of renderings of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Pietro Perugino (1446-1524) is perhaps typical in his generous rendering of Sebastian’s arrow-violated flesh:

And one cannot help but notice what pretty flesh it is, too.

No one is safe from suffering in this grand artistic tradition, not even — especially not even — its central figure:

That’s by Caravaggio (1571-1610), a painter of genius who, for my money, would have extracted homoerotic interest from a still-life of a bed of gravel, had he chosen to paint one.

I’m not sure whether Albert von Keller (1844-1920) is mocking this tradition or part of it, but it’s pretty clear he was willing to take it a logical step forward in Mondschein (1894):

These are only four works, presented here only because they happened to catch my eye on a certain day. Other works of a similar inspiration and part of the same grand religio-visual narrative could easily be found by the truckload. I have no doubt that many ErosBlog readers can add their own favorites to the list. If you’re of a certain cast of mind, you will be led to the suspicion that an anthropologist from Alpha Centauri, given the record of humanity’s visual culture and tasked with identifying its largest and longest-lived fraternity of BDSM enthusiasts, might point to a certain institution headquartered in Rome.

For my part I shall confine myself to a more modest conjecture, in response to my friend, and addressed to any fan of Anne Rice who might be feeling dismayed by the current turn in her life. Without this particular grand narrative, in which Ms. Rice was reared, and back into which she has now written herself, there might never have been her own distinctive body of work at all.

Or to put it more simply: no Holy Mother Church, no Naughty Beauty Tales.

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