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145 Afterword The Cinematic Legacy of Feuillade and Musidora and a Different Way of Knowing Olivier Assayas’s invocation of Irma Vep in a 1996 film is but one of many repetitions of the Irma/Musidora character in cinema history. Indeed, the figure is one that haunts not just Feuillade’s texts but marks a significant strain of French cinema and can even be seen in other national cinema contexts (e.g., Fritz Lang’s Spiders, 1919). Perhaps more significant, Irma/Musidora can be understood as a type of visual shorthand for another mode of cinematic representation, another model for cinema history. If my focus on Musidora in a concluding discussion on Feuillade seems a bit tangential or digressive, let me take the opportunity to underline once again the centrality of the actress to the films and aesthetic mode in question. This is neither a feminist polemic nor a fan’s plea for Musidora’s recognition in cinema history (although perhaps a bit of both these elements are here) as much as an effort to foreground a key component of Feuillade’s serials; what Musidora represents in her bodysuit is indeterminacy as a different mode of knowing. To provide a bit of context for the 1996 variation on the figure of Irma/Musidora, let us look at the path that leads to Cheung’s comments . Henri d’Ursel’s surrealist short film La perle (1928), based on a poem by Georges Hugnet, operates much like one of Todorov’s classic fantastic tales that feature an ongoing hesitation between the dream and waking states; the ambiguity in La perle is only resolved with the last shot of the film. The narrative finds a young man on the track of a pearl that has fallen from a necklace he has just purchased for his girlfriend . As he pursues the pearl, he murders one woman in a forest, but on waking afterward all trace of the crime has mysteriously vanished from his previously bloodied hands. The trail of the pearl then leads “She has no morals . . . is that a problem?” Comment by Maggie Cheung’s “character” during the film Irma Vep on the persona of Irma Vep/Musidora the man to a hotel, where a host of women, jewel thieves, can be found clad in the notorious black bodysuits. His sexual liaison with one of the women ends his romance with his original girlfriend, but as he chases his new love through the forest, she suddenly falls in the same place and in the same pose as the earlier murdered woman. Her body transforms into the image of his prior victim and suddenly the materiality of the crime and the pearl both appear all too clearly to the hero. The woman’s death this time stops the narrative flow; there are no more transformations or chases, and we are left at the scene of the crime as the film ends. This summary does little to convey the sense of repetition and the leaps of logic that drive La perle (just as any proper narrative reconstruction of a dream state must do to produce order). The pearl and its associative link with the female body—the man originally selects the pearl necklace gift from a woman’s stocking—initiate a series of encounters with elusive and troublesome women (who operate as both crime victims and perpetrators). Perhaps the most troublesome aspects of these women are their exchangeability and mutability, and here again the necklace is telling. Such finery or ornamentation references not just the female consumer, who is so crucial to the period’s sense of the nouvelle femme, but also to an understanding of the feminine as surface and construction. The film’s homage to Musidora/Irma through the bodysuit is inspired by both the pleasure and danger behind this construction (and its implications for female and male identity). Musidora is also central to the remake of Judex (1963) by Georges Franju. Franju continues the process of abstraction begun in Feuillade (and necessitated by a nonserialized version of the film), with some interesting alterations. First, the family melodrama is downplayed and the emphasis is on marvelous gadgets (the typewriter that writes “in fire”), secret passageways, and of course, Diana/Musidora. In an interview, Franju noted that he found Judex fairly passive and ineffective and that his sympathies were usually with the figures of criminality (like the character Fantômas).1 In Franju’s version, even more so than Feuillade’s, Judex (Channing Pollock...

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