Volume 45, Number 20 · December 17, 1998
Silent Screams
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Les Vampires (1915-1916)
a film directed by Louis Feuillade
Image Entertainment, on laser disc pp., $124.99
Irma Vep (1996)
a film directed by Olivier Assayas
Fox Lorber, on videocassette pp., $68.99
The Mystery of Irma Vep
a revival of the 1984 production by Charles Ludlum, directed by and starring Everett Quinton. at the Westside Theatre, New York
The uncanniness of the way film preserves living moments never registered so sharply as on a July night in the mid-1960s when I was initiated into the work of Louis Feuillade. The occasion was an uninterrupted screening of his seven-hour masterpiece Les Vampires at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. This was the old Cinémathèque, not the comfortable carpeted shrine in the Palais de Chaillot but the more rudimentary screening room that preceded it; no refreshments were served, the chairs were uncomfortable, the ventilation barely supportable, and, in keeping with an iron law of the Cinémathèque, no music accompanied the film. The distinctly unhistorical silence (silent movie theaters, even when they were not music palaces, almost always provided some sort of live soundtrack) was doubtless intended to focus attention rigorously and unwaveringly on the image. No arbitrary glissandos were permitted to interpolate emotional shadings or mar the purity of the visual rhythm. The hall was reasonably crowded and for the whole seven hours neither laughter nor whispering nor so much as a restless shuffle was to be heard.
Review, 3376 words
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