Love Bomb Blog-a-thon
This blog entry is in answer to Final Girl’s call: “HEY, INTERNET, STOP BEING SUCH CYNICAL EFFING DOUCHEBAGS BLOG-A-THON!” Click here to visit her site and see the post that inspired this blog entry.
My goal during this post is to deliver a love bomb about Louis Feuillade’s “Les Vampires.” IMDB link here. Netflix link here. Shot in 1915, this is a series of short silent films chronicling the (mis)adventures of the notorious Parisian criminal gang Les Vampires. Here’s what I love about it:
* I love how when one of the villains is struck by a new opportunity to do evil, that they gloat over it. For a long time. Visually.
* I especially love when Irma Vep does it.
* Speaking of Irma Vep, I love Musidora as the evil Irma Vep. In this screen cap the background supplies her with an Art Nouveau halo while she plays the part of an angelic maid. Look at her. We are almost fooled.
* I love how Mazamette (the sidekick) is such a natural comedian, and how he breaks the fourth wall and hams it up to the audience.
* I love it when a heated two minute conversation between Guérande and Mazamette (our two heroes) with tons of gesturing, pantomiming, and making faces ends up being something like, “Mazamette confesses he got lost.” in the intertitle (intertitles are where in silent films a frame is displayed which has some dialog or narrative information in writing.)
* I love making up what they’re actually saying in my head.
* I love how the film is tinted to denote dark or light. Having a character in a scene walk over to a light switch and turn the tint of the film from blue (denoting dark) to sepia (denoting light) is really delicious.
* I love how naive these films are. A person could say that the worst thing about these films is that they were working in an exciting new artform, and the best thing about these films is that they were working in an exciting new artform.
* Mmmmmmmmmmm. Poisoned pens, sleeping gas, secret passageways, hypnotized dopplegangers, and an ill-fated ballerina in a bat costume.
* I love the sense of composition in the cinematography.
* I love that we live in a world where people care enough about this art form to preserve, restore, and distribute something like this that has an admittedly small audience.
I love old films, and I love very odd things. Les Vampires is both. If you like old films you will love “Les Vampires.” You will also love “Ella Cinders” with Colleen Moore. Now STOP BEING SUCH CYNICAL EFFING DOUCHEBAGS, YOU INTERNET!
March 18th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Before the restored print of this went into release on DVD it was shown at a silent movie theatre in El Segundo (south of Los Angeles) where they do live accompaniment for silent movies on a full size Wurlitzer organ (pipes and drums and cymbals and assorted noisemakers all along the back stage wall). They do The Phantom of The Opera every year at Halloween (with the color sequence during the Mask of The Red Death scene) and, if I’m lucky they’ll show Thief of Baghdad.
Anyway, they showed the whole thing over the course of a day. The WHOLE thing. What, 10? 15 hours? And I sat through every amazing, surreal, skewed, insane frame of it. The seats in that place aren’t designed for people and my ass was numb after about five hours, but it was worth it.
One of the things I’ve loved about Les Vampires is how it pulls in the events of the day, like poison gas, which was going on pretty much right outside Paris during the war while they were filming it.
It’s a great series and I can’t recommend it enough.
March 21st, 2008 at 9:00 am
I had a college course in the history of vampires and their portrayal in Western literature and other media, and Les Vampires was featured prominently… I loved every bit of it we were shown - glad to see it’s something we can get on DVD now. (Why yes, I have been living under a rock, tyvm!)
March 21st, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Stephen - Wow I just saw The Thief of Baghdad. That’s a great one. I love theaters that do creepy silent films on Halloween. There’s one in San Francisco that would do Nosferatu with a live band. The band released a CD recently. It’s called something like “Into the Land of Phantoms” and is really excellent.
inkgrrl - That sounds like a really cool class. I’m curious what they had to say about “Les Vampires” in relation to vampires in general.