"Meta-film", that is, films about movies – a worse genre, full of self-analysis and nostalgia; Another fascinating genre because it is a meditation on the filmmakers and filmmakers facing themselves.
No director really wants to make "meta-films", shooting them always seems to be some kind of rescue-style, forced action, an action that can only return to the medium itself to find answers after it has been exhausted, especially when the media itself has undergone great changes, "meta-film" is our compass.
But the paradox of making such a film is that it is not so much about making a meta-movie as it is about finding its "meta" in any movie.
Thus, the best "meta-films" are not "Eight and a Half" or "Day and Night" that go directly behind the scenes, but "Ecstasy" and "Sacred Carriage", where the action of "making a movie" is abstracted, and in Kim Novak's change from "Madeleine" to "Judy", it is Hitchcock who gives us a fuller understanding of the bewilderment and manipulation of cinematic art.
Stills from Ecstasy
Well, "Don't make a metafilament," as in Olivier Assayas' 1996 film, the director played by Jean-Pierre Lyod is warned, "Don't remake Vampire, don't touch Ferrad, that's a trap." ”
However, in 2022, Assayas brought a more chaotic and crazy, more devious episodic version of "Lost Robbery".
In seven hours, between clichés in the film industry, academic film-historical speculation, and Assayas' own semi-autobiographical novel, viewers witness a world of constant tearing in the 2022 version of "Lost"—while Alicia Vikander struggles between the two career choices of "Irma Vipp" and the Marvel superhero, her intimate female assistant in the shadow is holding Deleuze's Time-Image and reading it with relish.
Poster for Lost Robbery (2022).
When? Whence?
It all starts with Louis Ferrard and his famous silent film blockbuster Vampire.
For today's movie fans, Ferrard's name is probably a little strange.
As a ten-episode, seven-hour series created between 1915 and 1916, the work itself seems far away, but many of Ferrard's "series", such as Fontemas, The Judge, and Timing, made him one of the important founders of the art of film narrative, especially genre films, not to mention the fact that it was a precursor to the form of television series.
Louis Ferrard's Vampire poster
Of course, the "vampires" in this film are not literal blood-sucking creatures, but an underground criminal organization operating in Paris — on the surface, these criminals can be glamorous and beautiful aristocrats, or seemingly ordinary doctors, bankers or servants, but secretly, they wear their signature black tights and commit murder, kidnapping, theft, robbery and other crimes without a trace.
So, for Ferrad, the two actions of "camouflage" and "seduction" become the most critical elements of the Vampires work — these "vampires" may be any character the audience sees on the screen, lurking in another identity waiting for an opportunity.
Stills from Louis Ferrard's Vampire
Speaking of which, Ferrard's work is already a "meta-movie"—a film about role-playing, a confused performance, a dangerous abduction.
In the final shot of the first episode, we watch the camera shoot a "vampire" crawling down the roof of a house down a water pipe until it lands, seemingly nothing happens, but even for us who are spoiled by juggling film techniques a hundred years later, just watching this action alone can make us hold our breath – realism and surreality intersect on the street corners of Paris.
Ferrard digs deep into a more realistic battle: it's not in the trenches of reality (World War I was already fought at the time of filming and screening), but in offices, study rooms, hotels, apartments, dining tables, and plain streets.
Stills from Louis Ferrard's Vampire
Philip, the journalist who spares no effort to investigate and hunt down the "vampire", is not a warrior, and what we see more is him sitting at his desk, listing and deciphering the evidence and code collected at hand.
The viewer's constant sighting of letters, business cards, codes, and parcels passed around in large close-ups, as well as hidden doors and escape huts, illustrates once again that this is a world ruled by information, identity, and communication.
Who do criminals pretend to be in society? The aristocratic counts, the lobby managers, the bank clerks, the stock agents, the priests, the pharmacists, always the people who wielded knowledge and power...
Stills from Louis Ferrard's Vampire
In one of the most surreal shots, the "Great Vampire" uncannyly lifts a cannon from behind his otherwise elegant and lavish office wall— an amazing whimsical ability that is still impressive a hundred years later, but as the French surrealist writer Louis Aragon said after seeing the film that year: "This is the reality of this century." ”
Among them, the most classic character who laid the foundation for the image of "vampire" is Irma Vep (derived from the alphabetical order of the word "Vampire") played by Musidora (real name Jenny Rox) -
She was the deputy of the "Vampire" organization and a superb female thief, and her graceful appearance in tights and the ever-changing disguises in the film were unforgettable, and made Musidora one of the most beloved female stars in the French film industry at that time (as one of the few female directors at the time, Musidora also directed dozens of works, but most of them have been lost); The image of the thief in black has also been widely borrowed by later generations, becoming a variety of superhero figures such as "Catwoman" known today (Assayas also indicates this in the film).
Stills from Louis Ferrard's Vampire
Audiences familiar with "Vampire" will know that the so-called "Grand Vampire" in the film is actually not so attractive, and can even be regarded as a "tool man" used by the director once, but Musidora's Irma Vip is the most deserved soul of the film, throughout the film.
However, the biggest question surrounding Assayas' two "Lost" films is: Why remake "Vampire"? Why play Irma Vip again? As the director of the play, René Vidal (played by Vincent Maccainé), puts it in his confession: He admires Firad, but how can he "become" Ferrad?
That's because Philade's work is exactly what any filmmaker dreams of, an ideal art that was sought after by mainstream audiences and appreciated by underground artists, just as the Film Handbookers justified The Hitchcocks in Hollywood about thirty years later and saw it as a model of balancing the duality of business and art in film.
Stills from the 2022 drama version of "Lost Robbery"
From 1996 to 2022, that is, the era of Assayas's creation, such films that balance business and art have gradually become rare, the separation between art films and mainstream films has become more and more serious, and the international production model has gradually reduced most mainstream films and televisions to commodities and "content" that burn after reading.
In 1996's "Lost robbery", a Hong Kong film fan reporter complained that contemporary French art films are all contrived things for intellectuals, and the violent aesthetic of "ballet" in Wu Yusen's films is the new king.
All in all, the task of returning to a relatively "innocent" era is particularly urgent.
Screenshot of the 1996 film version of "Lost robbery"
But most importantly for Ferrard, Vampire is a film with "no past", not only because the art of cinema was still in the "primitive" stage at the time, but also because of Ferrard's posture as a director.
Everything is done so lightly, the characters in the film do not need to be dramatically stumbled to improve themselves, and the actor's performance is more naturalistic (on the set of the remake, an actor is angry because the character lacks "character motivation"): Ferrard improvises the scene with the actor on the spot and loosely connects it into a story, nothing is absolute, and nothing is dependent on, so the work blooms more uncertainty under precise scheduling (Griffith, who invented the parallel montage in the same period, invented parallel montage, Obviously on the opposite side of Ferrard in philosophy).
But what Assayas/René did was a remake, that is, the author could not escape the past, and even created for the past: this can be a source of inspiration, but it can also make it self-indulgent.
Just as Mira, played by Vikander in the play, is always confused by her past lovers, what triggers the director's mental breakdown in the play is also the ghost of the past - "Vampire", Firad, Musidora, Maggie Cheung, or the entire history of cinema, that is, the filming of the "meta-film" itself, itself will analyze itself, and eventually crush itself.
Screenshot of the movie version of Vampire
Asayas's self-deprecation is bitter, as René confesses to the psychoanalyst in the show: "I thought making this movie (episode) was my antidote, and it just opened the scars again." Since we cannot pursue purity, then the focus becomes how to detach ourselves from the past.
Assayas's 1996 film and the 2022 series have obvious similarities, but in terms of concept, they are significantly different in concept, and the eccentric pedantry replaces the intuition that the actor brings.
We know the real reason assayas made Lost in 1996 — it was dedicated to an actor, or Maggie Cheung to be precise.
In the four or five years since the film was made, Assayas and the Hong Kong film superstar have briefly become husband and wife, and finally ended the marriage with another film ( 2004 'Clean " ) .
Maggie Cheung and Asayas
Just as Madeleine in Ecstasy becomes the object of the detective's projection of her desires, each actor carries the thoughts and desires of a director in a movie, but more often, the director is fascinated by an image itself, and she becomes all.
In fact, in the 1996 "remake," Assayas was less interested in Vampire itself, with Emma Wipp acting more like a container to introduce Maggie Cheung, the real star, and Maggie herself capable of creating meaning—she possessed and recreated the image of Emma Wepp almost freely.
By 2022, Assayas found himself still chasing this image, this time not just Maggie Cheung, but to truly return to "Vampire" and use it as a haha mirror in today's film world; Alicia Vikander's version of Irma Wipp also represents another kind of actor's physical meaning — today's Hollywood has long since ceased to produce "superstars," and Vikander's Mira is brilliant enough but clearly less dazzling to make sense for her.
Stills from the 2022 drama version of "Lost Robbery"
At the beginning of the series, she almost overpowered the cliché about Mira's "star", almost to the point of disgust, until the middle of the series, Assayas gradually warmed up the character, and she slowly realized that she was always close to "Irma Vip".
In one scene, Vikander, dressed in velvet black, slowly walks through the hotel corridor where "Maggie" once appeared, and Assayas suddenly superimposes almost identical footage from the 1996 film onto the screen, and the two "Emma Vip" achieve the same frame.
But what new is generated by this "one plus one"? It seems hard to say.
Who? What?
So, what's the point of everything?
If Assayas/René knows that the "play-in-play" version of Vampire that is remade in the show is inherently flashy, is there anything in this series that revolves around the remake that can truly inherit the spirit of Ferrard's original?
Assayas deliberately set the remake of director René as an exaggerated, anamorphic widescreen, coupled with the colorful color palette of heavy makeup, fake film grains and bluffed camera movements, it looks "too much like a movie" and thus becomes over-decorative and meaningless; Instead, we begin to appreciate the crisp clarity of Filard's original (but not simple) fixed shots.
Stills from the 2022 drama version of "Lost Robbery"
As the series progressed, the images that were originally framed in the ordinary 16:9 television format also became more and more mysterious that "play-in-play" did not have—in the 1996 film, only when Leod's Vidal confessed his inability to remake, Maggie was able to truly incarnate as Irma Vip in a dreamlike fantasy, becoming an "animal" with no past and no identity (and on set, she was an Orientalist exotic "other" in an Orientalist foreign country. The image is gazed at and obsessed);
In the episodic version, it's not just Vikander's reenactment of those fantasies, but the sets of shots of the indulgent German actor (played by Ras Edinger) fleeing from the intensive care unit after a night of affair are clearly more absorbing of Ferrard's style than any of the exquisite scenes in the "play within a play".
In fact, the real "remake" always appears outside the play.
In the episodic version of Lost, who did the "vampires" in Asayas/Rene's eyes become? For example, the president of the luxury brand, as the owner of the remake in the play, agreed to invest in this filming for the sole purpose of creating momentum for the top stars in his advertising campaign. This businessman doesn't care about ratings, let alone the quality of art—the order of film, television and advertising, two already disconnected industries, has been completely reversed, and film is now a by-product of the advertising empire.
Stills from the 2022 drama version of "Lost Robbery"
This abominable impure forces (money, bureaucratic...) Destroying the birth of art, which may be the cliché of film history and "meta-cinema", and also makes the series always fall into a kind of exhaustion of constantly having to compete with it, but Asayas seems to enjoy it.
Some of the highlights of the series often don't happen on set, but in the producer's office, in the rest tent between shots, in the psychoanalyst's living room, or in the hotel where the stars are staying.
A point in the episode where Assayas pushes the idea of a "meta-movie" to a climax occurs in episode five, where he completes his interpretation of Vampire and successfully pulls Ferrard himself into the parallel game.
Stills from the 2022 drama version of "Lost Robbery"
In Vampire, there is a controversial classic scene in which Morino, a fierce enemy of the Vampire Party, successfully kidnaps and hypnotizes Irma Vip, and eventually controls her as her lover, causing her to kill the "vampire boss" who came to pay the ransom.
As soon as this passage was screened, the Paris police immediately suspended the film's subsequent shooting on the grounds that the film glorified crime, and it was not until two months later that Musidora himself pleaded with the police station, who lifted the ban; On the other hand, the real reason why Ferrard decided to kill the "vampire boss" in the play was because the actor who played him, Jean Ayme, was often late, which made the director angry.
Here, Assayas reinterprets the controversy surrounding the scene in a comedic manner (in '96's "Lost", Lyod and Maggie Cheung also filmed this passage)—
After seemingly smoothly shooting the relevant scenes, the rough cuts of the film began to be uploaded on the mobile phones of the crew; The next day, the old drama bone, who played the "big vampire", walked up to the director René with a group of young female employees and asked him: "Is the (kidnapping) you filmed actually a rape?" Faced with this moral kidnapping, René, who was already furious, made an incoherent justification and the next day concocted a generous gift that Ferrard had given himself to his actor a hundred years earlier: to have Mira shoot him in the play.
Stills from the 2022 drama version of "Lost Robbery"
Assayas appears to be here to debate the physical autonomy of an actress in post-"MeToo" filmmaking (Mira is not unhappy with the scene in the film), but more importantly, it raises a more difficult question - the systematic sexual assault of women by men, and on the other hand, curbing real lust, in other words, between women.
It's also a question about the cinema itself: Irma Vip may be an erotic figure, but it's this image that gives her long-term influence ("Irma Wipp boldly shows her feminine side, which is what her enemies fear," Vikander says in the play), and in the eyes of Both Ferrad and Assayas, she represents the pleasure of watching and sneaking in, finding secrets: she loves acting, and Irma Vip is an actress — this is the movie. And we are also curious about the emotions between the female characters in the play.
Assayas is satirizing, and to the other extreme of Hollywood today, just as Spanish director Almodóvar commented on the "lack of sexual desire in Marvel movies", today's Hollywood commercial films try to avoid the so-called "voyeurism" and promote a perfunctory and ascetic character "autonomy", and the feminist trend is thus commodified (in the other part of the series, Assayas also ridicules the position of "intimate drama adjuster" that has appeared in recent years), and the female characters are brutally transformed into "female male characters".
Screenshot of the 1996 film version of "Lost robbery"
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But the truth is that when the film forgets the potential power of the characters being "gazed at" themselves, the film loses its meaning of being watched—the fact that it is no longer the object of desire, and the desire to be watched, are not a dualism that cancels each other out, so the film is important, and here the two can coexist: the women in the film are watched, but they themselves are watching.
Commenting on another film about actresses, "Empires Inland," directed by David Lynch and starring Laura Dunn, film critic Melissa Anderson wrote: "The audience for the film is for people who like to watch women watching. ”
In other words, if the film itself is a metaphysical "kidnapping" of the audience and the actors (Ferrard and Musidora are visionary), trying to censor it, and "harmlessly" castrating the image and its desires, it is equivalent to destroying the film as an artistic feature, let alone posing a real threat to the patriarchal "vampires" in the industry: the loss of actresses, the loss of desire of the film does not deserve to be called a movie.
We can conclude with the classic statement of the French philosopher Alain Badio: "When you watch a movie, you are actually watching a battle: a battle against the impurity of material." “
Then Assayas undoubtedly showed the many contradictions in this battle in the two "Lost Robbery", even if the final appearance is somewhat bumpy, floating in the mud.
Stills from the 1996 film version of "The Lost Robbery"
So, is there an ideal "remake" of Vampire?
Perhaps we can look at Maggie Cheung's dream scene accompanied by Sonic Youth, or more absolutely, we can look at the characters created by two actresses, Juliet Berto and Dominic Labrier, in Jacques Riverette's (a big Fan of Ferrad) in "The Voyage of Celine and Julie".
Coincidentally, they also wear The Tights of Irma Vip in the film, and even the stage name "Juliet Berto" is a pseudonym used by Irma Weep in Vampire (Juliette Bertaux).
Stills from "Celine and Julie's Voyage"
In the film, Levitte uses a true improvisational performance, allowing the two actresses to set their own characters and unfold the story in a childlike play, even allowing them to reinterpret and modify the story at will, and Irma Vip is not a symbol or totem to them, but a mask during the performance: want to steal a witch potion manual in the library's forbidden book area?
Let's dress up as "Emma Vip" together! She is a mask that all actors want to have, but her true secret is in the hands of a little girl who returns to her innocence.