The Case of the Phantom Fetish: Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Stirling Online Research Repository The Case of the Phantom Fetish: Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires Elizabeth Ezra School of Languages, Cultures and Religions University of Stirling Stirling FK9 4LA Email: [email protected] Author bio: Elizabeth Ezra teaches in the School of Languages, Cultures and Religions at the University of Stirling. Her most recent book (co-edited with Terry Rowden) is Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2005). She is the author of The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Cornell University Press, 2000); Georges Méliès: the Birth of the Auteur (Manchester University Press, 2000); and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (forthcoming in 2007 from the University of Illinois Press). She is also the editor of European Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2004), and co-editor (with Sue Harris) of France in Focus: Film and National Identity (Berg, 2000). 2 The Case of the Phantom Fetish: Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires On the cover of Laura Mulvey’s collection of essays entitled Fetishism and Curiosity, there is a well-known illustration of Musidora in the role of Irma Vep from Louis Feuillade’s ten-episode film serial Les Vampires.1 This image of a head floating in space, surrounded by a question mark, was apparently, and aptly, chosen to suggest the ‘curiosity’ of the book’s title. However, it also evokes the ‘fetishism’ of the title, as it provides a substitute for an absence within the book, which contains no mention of Les Vampires, Musidora, or Irma Vep. This familiar fetish-image of Irma Vep’s head, taken from a contemporary publicity poster, perfectly embodies one of the serial’s central motifs. This article examines the recurring image of the severed head in Les Vampires in relation to its various metonymic functions. In particular, I argue for a reconsideration of its emblematic status as a symbol of castration, and suggest how the image of the severed head in Feuillade’s serial can be linked to the anxieties and traumas engendered by the First World War. Les Vampires follows the exploits of a gang of criminals, masters of disguise, who terrorise the Parisian bourgeoisie while being pursued by investigative journalist Philippe Guérande (played by Edouard Mathé) and his sidekick, a reformed vampire and some-time mortician named Mazamette (played by celebrated character actor Marcel Levesque). Shot between the summer of 1915 and the spring of 1916, the serial makes no explicit mention of the war that was slaughtering millions. This apparent omission could perhaps be explained by the fact that audiences were looking for diversions to distract 2 3 them from the horrors going on around them. Feuillade himself knew exactly what he was distracting viewers from, having seen these horrors first-hand while serving as a sergeant earlier in the war, before being released from duty because of a heart condition in July of 1915. In its refusal to show the physical violence of the war explicitly, Les Vampires mirrors French newsreels of the period, which ‘[hid] neither the destruction nor the suffering of the soldiers but never reveal[ed] a corpse, a mutilated body or a wounded man’.2 This omission was even more marked in feature films, according to Pierre Sorlin, who notes ‘[t]he silence of French cinema’ on the subject of the war.3 However, it is not quite accurate to say, as one commentator did when the serial was shown at the Cinémathèque française in 1972, that ‘the war is completely forgotten in the ten episodes of Les Vampires’.4 Richard Abel has speculated about the symbolic presence of the war in Les Vampires, wondering ‘if, in their conjunction of the real and the unreal, the banal and the unexpectedly terrifying, the films also convey, through displacement, the French experience of the war—the absurd proximity of normal life to the ghastly horrors of trench warfare’.5 Abel’s suspicion can indeed be borne out by close analysis of the films. Feuillade’s serial predates the birth of the vampire film genre that viewers today would recognise, which began with Murnau’s 1921 Nosferatu, based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Though both kinds of film reflect similar anxieties about infiltration and physical violation, Feuillade’s serial is more concerned with urban crime than with rustic folklore. Anton Kaes has argued that crime films made during the Great War or in the inter-war period (such as Fritz Lang’s 1931 M) reflected a sense of paranoia that can be traced to the enemy’s hidden but pervasive presence in wartime trenches. Invoking Ernst Jünger’s theory of ‘Total Mobilization’, Kaes contends that the war mentality had pervaded civilian life to the extent that enemies—in the form of criminals—were thought to be lurking in 3 4 the shadows of the great metropolises.6 From this argument, it can be inferred that the sleuthing necessary to track down criminals, so prevalent in Les Vampires, is linked to the preoccupation with code-breaking during the war. The Great War’s presence is in fact encrypted in Feuillade’s serial, which invites its own decoding in a series of clues offered to viewers. The first clue to the enigma involves the very depiction of codes within the films, surely not insignificant at a time when Feuillade was unable to film on location in urban centres because people worried that movie cameras might be instruments of German espionage.7 The serial abounds in veiled semiotic systems such as cryptograms, as in the third episode, entitled ‘Le Cryptogramme rouge’; numerical codes (episode 9), invisible ink (episode 8), and anagrams (as when the letters in the name ‘Irma Vep’ dance around on a marquis to form the word ‘Vampire’, in the third episode). The repeated emphasis on deciphering scrambled messages evokes the practice of codebreaking used in wartime espionage. The French were the most effective cryptanalysts of the First World War, possessing ‘the strongest team of codebreakers in Europe’, which they had developed as a defensive measure after their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.8 Other clues to the war’s hidden presence include the use, in episode 5, of a poisonous gas with which the vampire gang immobilizes a roomful of party guests in order to rob them (Francis Lacassin describes this scene in terms that seem unconsciously to evoke the war, as the transformation of ‘a ballroom in to a gigantic mass grave’9). Later, in the ninth episode, Irma wears a gas mask taken from a chemical laboratory where she has been helping the new vampire leader conduct experiments; and the vampires again attempt to use poisoned gas on their enemies in the tenth episode. These aspects of the plot would have evoked the first use of poison gas as a weapon of war by the Germans in the spring of 1915, just a few months prior to the filming of these episodes. Similarly, the 4 5 oversize cannon that the villain Satanas uses to blow up a Parisian cabaret would certainly conjure up the ‘Big Bertha’ used in battle for the first time in World War I. And finally, the exploding ship from which Irma narrowly escapes death (for which Feuillade appears to have used actual newsreel footage) would have reminded audiences of the sinking of the Lusitania, the British passenger ship bombed by the Germans, also in the spring of 1915, which killed some 1400 civilians, making headlines around the world. But the serial’s most pointed allusion to the Great War occurs in its almost obsessive allusions to fathers, either actual pères-de-famille, or men who could potentially father children with the hundreds of thousands of women left partnerless as a result of the war, contributing to the much-discussed fear of declining birthrates in France at the time. We learn in the first moments of the first episode, and are reminded several times thereafter, that one of the central characters, Mazamette, is a single father of three small boys. (Of course, Mazamette’s single status raises the question of the absent mother, presumably dead, but it is Mazamette’s status as a father that is repeatedly emphasized in the films.) Mazamette’s lapse, and later relapse, from respectability and righteousness into a life of crime, is motivated by his need to provide for his young sons, as he reminds Philippe by brandishing a photograph of himself with his progeny at several opportune moments throughout the serial. Then too, the serial’s morally upright hero, the investigative journalist Philippe Guérande, lives at home with his widowed mother, while identifying with his deceased father through his paternalistic treatment of Mazamette, which includes boxing his ears when he disapproves of his behaviour; showing him a moralistic passage from La Fontaine’s fables when Mazamette threatens to return to his criminal ways; and bestowing his blessing upon him when he wishes to marry. And finally, Irma Vep, a foundling, appears to be seeking a father figure in her 5 6 liaisons with the succession of Grand Vampires, gang leaders with whom she invariably falls in love. The persistence of these images points to a cultural preoccupation with fathers at a time when many more of them were going off to the front than were coming back—in the first four months of the war alone, France had lost about 850,000 men, who were either dead, wounded, missing in action, or taken prisoner.10 Absent fathers are figured throughout the films by means of a recurring image, that of the severed head, which appears in several guises.