An Irma Vep “Revamp”

By Yelizaveta Moss, Chloe Kwiatkowski, and Kyle Brandys

The 2022 Irma Vep series, directed by Olivier Assayas and released by HBO, claims a long lineage of film history. The show revisits Assayas’s 1996 film Irma Vep, which starred Maggie Cheung as an actor playing Irma Vep in a remake of the French silent serial Les Vampires (Feuillade, 1915-1916). The HBO show makes much mention of this original serial, both as a justification for its TV format and as a chance to delve deeper into the artistic intention of the silent serial. Alicia Vikander plays an actor, Mira Harberg, who plays Irma Vep in this fictionalized remake of Les Vampires. The show gives us far more scenes of a hypothetical Les Vampires remake than the 1996 film ever cared to, and it explains the Irma Vep character further with Vikander also playing Musidora, the original Irma Vep actor, in reenactments of the 1915 production. The show is quite interested in referencing all of these “meta” layers by consistently referencing Musidora, Maggie Cheung, and the effect that the 1996 production had on Assayas’s personal life. Just as in the 1996 Irma Vep, the 2022 show is concerned with laying bare the inner-workings of a film production, though this particular 2022 production is clearly inflected with ghosts of productions past.

Olivier Assayas’ 2022 Irma Vep is even perhaps, above all, a ghost story. Following in the footsteps (or the spectral lack thereof) of Personal Shopper–a film in which Kristen Stewart’s Maureen is haunted by the spirit of her deceased brother and the ghostly omnipresent gaze of modern smartphones–Irma Vep now finds the director searching for the specters hidden within his own past: both cinematic and personal. (Appearing throughout the show: the character Jade, a phantom stand-in for Maggie Cheung and her character from the 1996 film.) As such, the conversation that follows takes the form of a hunt for these ghosts; a framework for contextualizing Irma Vep’s spectrality within theory and philosophy such as Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory; and an analysis of how ghosts can arise from the annals of film and media history. We begin with the simple prompt:

What is the significance of the various appearances of ghosts in Irma Vep (2022)? 

Yelizaveta Moss: I find it very strange that in the show that “Jade”, who is supposed to be Maggie Cheung, is presented as though she is a ghost. But she’s not dead.

Kyle Brandys: A conversation that René had with his therapist about Jade being both alive and a ghost did fascinate me. He stated that, “ghosts have very little to do with the dead, and more about what’s dead inside us, the past that lives within us.” He also states that Mira is a “cure.” This link with Mira and the remake of Irma Vep makes me think “Jade’s” ghost is operating on a couple different layers. “What is dead inside us and the past that lives within us” seems to be referring to Assayas’ regrets concerning his past marriage with Maggie Cheung as well as the production of the original Irma Vep. This project seems to be an attempt to exorcise these ghosts and past regrets on a personal level as well as a filmmaker through the remake and Mira’s inclusion. I think Cheung’s ghost is always haunting these two different layers. 

YM: Can I add a third option too? René is treating Maggie’s memory as an object that he owns; he (René and Assayas) quite literally owns that footage, which he is willing to use. And Maggie Cheung actually did consent to being mentioned in the film or being a character in the film, but she has no control over how that image is used. I think it’s very telling that Assayas uses this alter ego, René, to explore his relationship from only his point of view. Maggie Cheung does not get a say. She does not get to participate in this because Jade is a fantastical ghost that Assayas created out of a woman who isn’t even dead, a woman who could speak for herself. But he’s decided to create a fictional character that interacts with him and teaches him things. He prefers the figment because it’s all him. It’s a Freudian dream.

Chloe Kwiatkowski: To use a more theory heavy term, I want to call that an example of optical visuality[1] This view of Maggie Cheung and Irma Vep and Jade, it’s completely separate from René, from Assayas. So the women are complete but absolutely objectifiable. And I’d even say that’s Musidora in the original Les Vampires. My question then becomes, what is Mira or Alicia Vikander: is she seen the same way? Is she as objectified as these other two women, or is she completely different? Because, Liz, you brought up the question too. Why isn’t Alicia Vikander playing herself? She does mention that she’s a Swedish-American actress. There’s the scene where she comes to terms with that and that she’s a Hollywood superstar. But there’s something off about her that’s a little bit different from Maggie Chung and Jade.

KB: I think that Alicia Vikander not playing herself as opposed to more the direct “character” of Maggie Cheung in the original Irma Vep is another way for Assayas to bring to the surface that these films are operating in a simulacrum[2]: an imitation of reality, that is both uncannily similar but not without some notable aberrations—such as the names of the characters. What really intrigues me about the show is how Assayas portrays these aberrations in the simulacrum formally.  One shot that struck me is when Mira is sneaking through the hallways of a hotel in the famous Irma Vep catsuit. Suddenly, a shot down the length of a hallway is superimposed with a shot of the 1996 Irma Vep, depicting with the same composition, another, separate hallway from the original film. The original Irma Vep in this shot seems to be reduced, in quite a literal way, a hazy specter overlaid on another “reality.” I interpret Assayas as communicating that the original film is an alternate history (and path): another ghost that is both dead inside René /Assayas but also as a past that still lives on in a ghostly capacity.

YM: This ghostly quality is also created through the layering of the diegetic and the non-diegetic. You can’t help but think about both layers in the show, specifically the fact that Assayas and Cheung met on set, made Irma Vep, and then started a relationship. The show tells us: you must think about their relationship at the same time as thinking about the show as a remake or a continuation of the same project. And so we have to superimpose those two things. Just looking at the diegesis of the original Irma Vep, I don’t see a relationship happening between Maggie Cheung’s character and René, the alter ego of Assayas. That character, that alter ego: he’s horrible. He’s beating his wife, and they’re about to go through a divorce. That’s not a romantic beginning to a love story that would haunt you for 12 years. So we have to merge the two and understand the difference constantly, always at the same time, which is what those hallways seem to represent in the sequel. We have one hallway that is Alicia Vikander’s and one hallway that is Maggie Cheung’s. The two pieces of footage of them slinking around in catsuits start superimposing together, and that’s the challenge for the audience too [separating and understanding these timelines].

KB: Watching the concluding scene again, I interpreted the scene as much more straightforward than I did on my first watch. René ’s dialogue with his wife, (a stand in for Mia Hansen Love), on the phone is one that alludes to the finality of the project. He says, “We’re done, we finished. It’s in the can…. Always a bit weird when it all comes undone. Mira’s gone. The crew has moved on to other films.” So, this time through when this Mira “spectre” emerges from the screen, I interpret this ghost as the essence of the “completed” work, divorced from the actress Mira Harberg, the frenetic production of the show, and the ghosts of René’s past. Much in the same way there are ghosts produced from the original film that haunt the show, a new one has emerged from this new art from René and the crew. The dialogue hints at this, as René ’s wife states, “It’s always the same story. You should be used to it.”

CK: Why show the ghost? The show’s absences are its greatest strength, right? Because if we can’t see it, we can’t say it, but something’s there and we try to access it. We’re going to talk about it to get near to it so we don’t need to see the ghost at the end.

YM: Assayas does a better job in Personal Shopper, which is also about ghosts, but it’s a much more ethereal film because it’s not so literal. It allows for these spaces of experiences to happen.

Assayas and René definitely over-explain. René keeps harping on this murderous quality of Irma Vep: ‘And there’s something very haunted about her. Also, she’s in touch with evil.’ It’s a quality that we never really see in the film that he’s producing. Unlike the original Irma Vep, the sequel explicitly shows us the final footage throughout (or at least the dailies). René conceives of Irma Vep as being in touch with the spiritual world, and then Mira repeats this conception when she talks about the costumes. There’s a moment when she talks about how she’s not herself and that films are a portal onto spiritual worlds. And so when she puts on that catsuit, she is not herself. She turns into something else. It is explaining ghosts – I hate to say it – in blockbuster language. It’s explaining away every single piece of the magic. And when I watch this in a pessimistic mood about the industry, what I see is that despite all this talk of ‘this is not a superhero movie,’ her walking through walls is just a superhero trick. It’s incorporating a little bit of market demand, which the characters also discuss in other parts of the show. The sequel talks about the industry, the market, and the needs of streaming research and data. The superhero element feels like pandering to that mentality while also keeping distance from it, which is the loophole in our current “meta” film trend. It’s a nice trick. But when I’m optimistic, then walking through walls becomes about the ghostly and unknown. 

Mira walking through walls: Episode 7, “The Spectre.”

KB: I also see the walking through walls as a little more metaphysical. I really liked the conversation between René and Mira at the beginning of episode six. They have a conversation about the set they are working in, and René states that, “Most of the time sets are soulless but not this one.”  And Mira says, “Sets are eerie, because they’re real and they’re not real. They look real but they are an imitation of reality. Just like dreams are an imitation of reality.” So when Mira later gains the ability to walk through walls, I see it as a continuation of this conversation: another way to show that the characters are physically moving in this uncanny simulacrum that is being converged upon by the previous Irma Vep projects and Assayas’ personal history. These different layers of history are rendered physically permeable.

YM: Is this the time to talk about hauntology? Derrida in The Spectres of Marx does talk about media specifically. He writes that media is neither present nor absent, and so it is spectral, at its core nature. That seems to be appropriate here, right?  In a way, anything made in this film medium will have an element of the spectral and ghostly because, as you’re saying with the mise-en-scène, it’s not literally there. That is what is so special about these more and more virtual mediums.

Traditionally hauntology is used to talk about the past informing the present. But there is also another way of thinking about it as talking about a virtual future. That seems to be what is happening with the relationship between these two works; Assayas’ alter ego, René is always talking about this time when Irma Vep was being made and he and Maggie Cheung were falling in love. The show emphasizes this past love, and it’s presented as a promise of a virtual future that doesn’t exist yet. That seems to be what he’s holding onto. That feels very spectral too. It is the unknown that you can’t quite pin down in any way, with data or marketing: a truly ghostly future. The real tragedy of the show is that this future never happened. The future becomes concrete, just one thing, as opposed to the myriad of possibilities: the virtual future that could happen and that René had hoped for.

CK: Is Derrida’s idea of the actual and the virtual the same as Bergson’s?[4] With Bergson, the whole actual/virtual problem is that the stimulus is presented, and a delay occurs, which results in a response. But the perception of an object distinct from our body–separated from our body by an interval never expresses anything but a virtual action. The more distance decreases between the object and our body, the more virtual action tends to pass into real action. So in other words, the longer the period of reflection, the number of potential increases because memory and affect have more time to intercede there. That is what Deleuze believes cinema reflects: the movement from past to present where a splitting of time occurs.

KB: Derrida also throughout Spectres of Marx keeps reusing this phrase that “time is out of joint.“[5] (The quotation comes from Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet upon seeing his father’s ghost.) Derrida cleverly points to translation when quoting this phrase, and the frustration, “the out of jointness”, inherent with translation, and in particular, the particular translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

“‘The time is out of joint’: the translations themselves are put ‘out of joint.’ However correct and legitimate they may be, and whatever right one may acknowledge them to have, they are all disadjusted, as it were unjust in the gap that affects them. This gap is within them, to be sure, because their meanings remain necessarily equivocal; next it is in the relation among them and thus in their multiplicity, and finally or first of all in the irreducible inadequation to the other language and to the stroke of genius of the event that makes the law, to all the virtualities of the original (Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 20).

I wonder if the Brakhage scratches and the “destruction” of the film form by both René and Assayas is not so much an issue of adaptation but rather an issue of translation. Is the repetition of Les Vampires, through these translations–1996 Irma Vep and 2022– (repetition being a key element of haunting for Derrida) a result of a frustrated Assayas being unable to translate both the original work’s essence into his own cinematic language as well as now being unable to properly translate his own experiences—their essence—making the 1996 film and his marriage with Maggie Cheung into cinema as well. These translations are once more acting on multiple levels, which further compounds this lack of fidelity, despite Assayas’ attempts at honesty and accuracy. Derrida once more points to multiplicity and virtualities, of both the source text and the translations as an aggravation, even when bordering on accuracy: “ The excellence of the translation can do nothing about it. Worse yet, and this is the whole drama, it can only aggravate or seal the inaccessibility of the other language.” In trying to be faithful to his experiences and his personal relationship with Maggie Cheung, it seems like Assayas admits to an inaccessibility to the past and what might have been: the actress only appearing as an uncanny simulacrum. This virtual future is now locked from Assayas, arising in René’s “destruction” and frustration; René being both unable to capture Feuillade’s spirit as well as his inability to be in a relationship with Jade (through cinematic translation), brings him to destroying the film—the syntax— and quitting the project repeatedly. 

YM: There’s one point that keeps getting hammered home in the show that I feel is the opposite of this potentiality, where they keep talking about the need for the story to be in TV format. There are a couple arguments presented in episode 3. Actors and crew are sitting around a table at a party, discussing the meaning of cinema and art. One character says, “René said he would never touch TV.” Another character says, “It’s not TV, it’s a serial, just like the silent era.” And then they talk about industrial entertainment that’s ruled by algorithms and how the whole point of TV serials now is to stretch content that could be a film, but now stretch it into a show, adapt to the market, become a slave to ratings. Regina argues that the difference between TV now and the serial form is that serials are classic. All great 19th century novels were serialized, that this is actually a very old form that’s being reused now. She argues that of course it makes sense that Irma Vep would become a serial because film is not appropriate to this project. I find it really hard to conflate that mode of thinking with the other arguments Assayas is making about character, Maggie Cheung, and love because that argument about TV serials feels very linear. It is saying that Les Vampires was onto something. It was ahead of its time. It was anachronistic. It feels like a Bazinian argument, like “The Myth of Total Cinema”: we were always meant to be doing TV serials. 19th century novels had this impulse, even if the artists couldn’t imagine the future technology of TV. Les Vampires was serialized and so Irma Vep was just naturally going to lean towards serials eventually, even if in the 90s it stumbled into a feature film form. I feel that this kind of linearity is so different from the other arguments that the film and show are making.

CK: For Assayas to choose to do a TV show, it could be a nice way of revealing the underlying hollowness that is in these commodities. At the beginning of film history, we have ingrained in it this organic appearance of capitalism. We have this world of desire images–fantasy images, wish images–for consumers to buy. So, when Assayas turns Irma Vep into a TV show it pushes this hollowness to the surface. It exposes this world of capitalism as a world of death, as a world of ghosts. You would expect Assayas to be upset with it all, but by the end of the show he seems to be accepting of it; there’s no real rage toward it.

“But the other day, I felt like I was losing the spirit of Irma Vep.”

“Of course. That’s the way.”

-Mira and René, Episode 8 

Assayas’ Irma Vep (2022) HBO series revamp serves as a guide through film history, a portal originally opened with Irma Vep in 1996. The eight-part series carefully moves through Assayas’ past, acknowledging and accepting that knowledge gained can inform futures, actual or virtual. The work is a farewell from the director to both Les Vampires  and the original 1996 film. Thus, Irma Vep, fittingly, ends with goodbyes: the crew packing and departing, Mira joining the project of an unnamed auteur, René trading his beloved “Feuillade” for the return of his wife and children. Mira had once said to René in the series, “Movies are a portal to some sort of spiritual world. Some sort of spiritual world we don’t have access to anymore.” For Assayas and René the portal appears, at least for the moment, closed. 

“But when your thoughts move away, when your fate takes you elsewhere, she will look for another vessel.”

As stated in our introduction, Irma Vep is a ghost tour: a search through Parisian streets, hotel hallways, and film sets for specters that may linger from the past. A voyage where time is out of joint, where present becomes past and pasts are preserved. For much of the eight-episode series, the show made manifest that this forage for ghosts, and the spirit of Irma Vep, belonged to only Assayas. However, the show’s final scene depicts one last ghost, a simulacrum of Mira, (having levitated out of the roof of René’s apartment) now free: her silhouette looms over the Paris skyline. This final shot acts as a gift from Assayas to audience members, inviting the viewer to take possession of the restless spirit of Irma Vep. For any brave soul who dares embark on this journey, let this work and conversation function as a medium whose ghosts and past will explore your relationship with film history, with others, and with yourself. 

Dr. Yelizaveta Moss, Kyle Brandys, and Chloe Kwiatkowski are editors and founding members of Day for Night.

[1] Conceptualized in the book The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses by Laura Marks, optical visuality and optical perception imply mastery over an object due to vision being the “sense generally most separate from the body in its ability to perceive over distances” (132). Optical visuality reduces an object to visual experience and spectacle and does not consider its invisible aspects– knowledge passed down through an individual or cultural body that can only be pointed to obliquely or through metaphor.

[2]  The term simulacrum refers to a representation or copy of a being or object. The concept has been interpreted in many pivotal philosophical texts including Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard argues for a hyperreality that can arise from the compounding of simulacra: “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”

[3]  Experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage explored the materiality and tactility of film through the use of collage, multiple exposures, and scratching/painting directly on celluloid. Irma Vep (2022) utilizes images similar to Brakhage’s scratching techniques to recall the 1996 Irma Vep film, to capture unconscious and conscious processes rather than representing reality.

[4]  A Bergsonian reading of the superimpositions of the 1996 Irma Vep film over the footage of Mira’sIrma Vepreconstitutes new images through the use of past film. The new images encapsulate a point of indiscernibility between the actual and the virtual. A meeting between the desires of Assayas, René, and Feuillade points to virtual images that have yet to be actualized, potential futures that have not happened.

[5]  The phrase both serves as the introductory quote to the lecture as well as a repeating motif throughout. The term besides its Shakespearean origins is used to represent ruptures and off kilterings in time; the term is essential to Hauntology, a concept and academic discourse that arose from Specters of Marx that describes the persistent haunting of past elements, which can often be political, personal and ideological traumas.