Master in Audiovisual Heritage (PAT19)

After this somewhat lengthy yet essential introduction to the context of the Whitechapel murders, of the relationship between the Holmes lore, its author and the Ripper case, and of the Stephen Knight’s theory, let’s focus on the film Murder by Decree. It is a very interesting film, that has many qualities, but also many flaws.

The main strength of the picture is obviously the production design and the photography of the film, especially concerning the East End set design. It is a gloomy and dark place, consisting in many alleys shrouded in deep fog. As Cédric Delelée mentioned, it looks like we are in “a maze leading straight to hell”. This worrying atmosphere increases the tension related to the murders we are going to see. And at the beginning of the film, the first appearance of the murderer is already quite disturbing: a static shot, with a wide angle, shows an empty street filled with fog. Slowly, a hansom cab emerges from the fog and approaches the camera, while eerie music increases the tension. The cab stops just as the horse leaves the screen. Someone gets out of the cab, while the camera pans to the driver, hiding the guy leaving the cab.

A bit later, after a scene introducing Holmes and Watson at the theatre, we are witnessing the first murder of the film, the Liz Stride one – which is actually the third Ripper murder, the first two, involving Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, having already happened before the film began. The murder is shot this way: showing at first, with a first-person perspective, the slow walk of the killer in the narrow, foggy and empty alleys of Whitechapel, accompanied with the regular sounds of footsteps and with another worrying musical theme. Then, after a cut, we see the silhouette of the killer emerging from the shadows with a progressive staccato effect – an effect that occurs when you shoot with a very fast shutter speed. At the light, we now see, in a close-up, his dark eyes. This particular image deeply struck me the first time I saw the film, a couple of years ago. The killer, with his almost entirely black eyes that makes him looks like a soulless and devilish person, only existing with the purpose of killing, is now on the verge of entering in a bigger street. Back to the first-person perspective, we witness a girl walking down the street. The camera then rushes straight ahead towards the poor girl, very soon strangled by the hands of the killer, using then same staccato effect.

As we can imagine, the atmosphere of anxiety provoked by the serial killings is bad of the merchants, whose loss of business is significant. So, some of them go to 221B Baker Street and ask Sherlock Holmes for his help. The involvement of the consulting detective leads us to an unexpected emotional path. He shows at several times anger towards the murders, or empathy towards the victims of the plot, especially in a sequence located in an asylum, where he meets the character of Annie Crook, played by Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold, where he can’t help but lunge at the throat of the doctor in charge of running the asylum before ending up in tears.

If this sequence is one of the most striking of the film, it is a pity that the character of Annie Crook is only present in one sequence. We can say the same thing about the character of Robert Lees played by Donald Sutherland, who appears in only a couple of sequences. He might have led the film a bit into a fantastic way, but this underutilisation is, in the end, strange and this path seems to lead nowhere.

In spite of all those efforts concerning artistic direction and Holmes’ interpretation, the movie shows itself too chatty. For instance, the interpretation of James Mason is rather good – if we leave aside the fact that he is 20 years older than Christopher Plummer, which seemed to me a bit strange –, but at several times his lines explain things that we already understood. So that the rhythm of the film is quite frustrating, alternating great, slightly horrific, sequences, with others that are simply repetitive, until a clumsy conclusion where the detective explains the whole resolution of the case.

In the film, we sometimes hardly follow the ins and outs of Holmes’ investigation. We meet several supporting characters, like Annie Crook or Robert Lees, but none of them is developed enough which makes us lose track of the investigation. We can also mention the inspector Foxborough (played by David Hemmings, particularly known for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Dario Argento’s Deep Red) a policeman that in reality happens to be an undercover radical leftist. Here the film tries to ambush itself into a socio-political comment, relying on the troubles that were happening in those days in London. But once again, this aspect is so discreet that it is quite frustrating for the public.

So, this a film that I particularly appreciate, despite all the flaws that I can see in it – its unbalanced rhythm and its excessive dialogue. But in his appropriation of Holmes’ lore, Bob Clark takes a few liberties with his description in the books, which is an audacious move. But I mainly enjoy the dark atmosphere of the reconstitution of the late 19th century, and the few slightly horrific sequences featured in the film – and, on that aspect, I think I’ll always be haunted by the dark eye of the ripper as designed in Murder by Decree.

Matthieu M.

To go further:

Between the 31st of August and the 9th of November 1988, several sex workers were awfully mutilated and killed in the Whitechapel district in the Eastern London. Their names were Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth “Liz” Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. In those days, six other women were also found dead in the same district but are not commonly attributed to the same killer. The investigation into these murderers was widely covered in the tabloid press, which was booming in the late 19th century.

This serial killer was never identified. He instead became a legend – thus erasing the lives of the victims– under the nickname of “Jack the Ripper”, according to the signature of a letter (the “Dear Boss” one) sent to the Central News Agency of London on the 25th of September. The myth surrounding the perpetrator of those femicides became very quickly in the 1890s the topic of plays, songs and pulp fiction that created the still current imagery of Jack the Ripper.

However, Arthur Conan Doyle, who started publishing The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes a year before the Whitechapel murderers, in 1887 with the novel A Study in Scarlet, never wrote any fiction confronting his character with the serial killer. Bringing together the iconic private detective and the now-mythic Jack the Ripper seems yet obvious: they both share the same era – the Victorian one –, the same place – London – and they both embody a certain conception of the absolute – the absolute intelligence and sense of deduction for the first one, and the absolute horror and cruelty for the other.

In the early 20th century, many writers brought them together, especially in France and in the UK. A bit later, some films, plays, comics and video games followed the same path. However, none of these works were memorable. One of the most remarkable is Murder by Decree, directed by Bob Clark – whose greatest feat is the film Black Christmas (1974), commonly considered as the very-first slasher – and starring Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes and James Mason as Dr. Watson.

The film’s plot originates from the famous book written in 1976 by journalist Stephen Knight – not to be confused with Steven Knight, the creator of the series Peaky Blinders – Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. In this essay, Knight elaborates a conspiracy theory that supposedly solved the case, involving the royal family and the Free-Masons. Historically, this theory doesn’t hold water. Yet, it quickly became the basis for several works, starting with the film Murder by Decree, but also for the comic book From Hell, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell in 1988 and later adapted for the screen in 2001 by Albert and Allen Hughes.

Directed by Billy Wilder in 1970, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is one of the most interesting films adapted from Doyle’s stories, and yet it isn’t based on any story written by his hand. In the film, Holmes is portrayed by Robert Stephens, while Watson’s part is carried by Colin Blakely, two actors usually confined to supporting roles. It is noteworthy to state that this British production is the first ever non-American film among Wilder’s filmography – if we except his first one, the almost amateur French movie Mauvaise Graine that he made in 1934, long before the real start of his career in 1942. Indeed, in the early seventies, Wilder’s last two American pictures were unprofitable. The Austro-Hungarian native is no longer in vogue on the West Coast. Therefore, he is now coming back to Europe.

And his ambition is huge: Wilder and his long-time screenwriter partner I.A.L. Diamond, both passionate by Holmes’ lore, wrote an original script that exceeded three hours in length[1]. In the end, many scenes were cut out by order of the United Artists, the company that distributed the film. In fact, it contained several cases and stories, each one digging either the past of Holmes or the relationship between Watson and the famous consulting detective. For instance, one of these cases was entirely made up of Watson’s attempts to occupy Holmes’ mind and get rid of his cocaine quirks. Watson took a corpse in the morgue and put it in an upside-down room he created to increase the mystery of the case. For another of the cases, Watson himself led the investigation – he fails miserably. Nowadays, all that remains of the shooting are a few pictures of the set and some sound recordings.

That’s too bad, because another aspect of the film is remarkable: the production design was created by the iconic Alexandre Trauner – a long-time Wilder collaborator, and like him, born in 1906 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In addition to the marvellous upside-down room and other creations, Trauner recreated Victorian era Baker Street in the Pinewood studios, and the result is purely outstanding. Watching the film today, knowing the background of the production, also means regretting the injustice done to Trauner’s wonderful work.

After these cuts, the final edit consists in a film that can clearly be cut in half: the first one happens in London, and the second one in Scotland, more specifically around the Loch Ness.

The film begins with the opening of a suitcase that belonged to Dr. Watson. We are 50 years after his passing, and in accordance with his wishes, it is now time to discover what it contains. Among all of Holmes’ objects that made his signature – a deerstalker, a pipe, a magnifying glass, and other items stuff among which a remarkable hypodermic syringe that gives the tone of the film –, there is a story that Watson wrote, but wasn’t published because the detective didn’t look his best here. And now, the picture promises that we are going to discover the truth behind the greatest and legendary private detective the world has ever known.

The first part is very playful with the fan’s theories, especially the one concerning the romantic relation between Watson and Holmes, aspect in which the latter himself shows irony at several times. Moreover, the film insists on his cocaine dependence, a pastime he indulges in when he is bored – that is to say when he has no case to attend to. By miracle, a Belgian girl, Gabrielle Valladon, victim of a murder attempt – she was dumped in the Thames – comes to 221B Baker Street, brought by a taxi driver. She is amnesiac, so she doesn’t remember why she intended to find the detective. Such a mystery brings finally a case that may occupy Holmes’ mind and move him away from his destructive passions. Despite the warnings given by Mycroft Holmes (played by Christopher Lee) to his brother, this story will lead us to the landscapes of Loch Ness and to some sort of conspiracy involving a German spy. The end of the picture echoes with Doyle’s first Holmes’ short story, A Scandal in Bohemia, written in 1891.

With The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, we recover Billy Wilder’s and I.A.L. Diamond’s subtlety and sense of irony, and we are carried by their passion for the Sherlock Holmes’ lore. Yet the photography of the picture and the characterisation of Holmes are imbued with a certain sense of melancholy and romanticism, probably a reflexion of Wilder’s own state of mind in these days – the comeback in Europe due to the disasters of his last pictures, a continent deeply associated to his youth but also to the disaster of the Holocaust where his mother died.

As for Watson, his depiction is in my eyes quite ambivalent: it seems like his part could easily have been played by Jack Lemmon, Wilder’s fetish actor. He brings a funny touch to the film, but he shows no use in the investigation led by Sherlock Holmes – which would have been the case if the original script had been followed. This point may bring a little imbalance in the picture, especially in the couple formed by Holmes and Watson.

Unfortunately, the picture turned out to be a flop, and Billy Wilder was deeply touched by his public and critic failure. But with time, the picture gained a cult status. For instance, in his very recent book about the filmmaker, French scholar Marc Cerisuelo calls it « undoubtedly his author’s masterpiece ». Mark Gatiss, co-creator of the BBC series successful Sherlock, mentioned The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as one of his greatest inspirations.

Next time, we will focus on a more unknown Holmes adaptation: Bob Clark’s 1979 picture Murder by Decree. This movie can be defined as the obvious crossover of the two of the greatest Victorian era’s myths. Indeed, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson will confront themselves to the Whitechapel murderer, Jack the Ripper.

Matthieu M.

To go further:

Marc Cerisuelo, Billy Wilder. Un Européen à Hollywood, Paris, Capricci, 2025.

Hellmuth Karasek & Billy Wilder, Et tout le reste est folie. Mémoires, Paris Nouveau Monde Éditions, [1992], 2024.

For this four-article blog, I decided to focus on several on-screen adaptations (film and TV) of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The character created by Doyle is indeed one of the most recurring characters in movies and on TV, with more or less 300 appearances. I will personally focus on the ones which I like the most or which I find remarkable, even if they may not be considered the best.

Often considered as the first Sherlock Holmes-movie shot in colour, The Hound of the Baskervilles is directed by Terence Fisher in 1958. The film is produced by the Hammer Film Production and stars Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes, André Morell as Dr. Watson and Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville. Cushing, Lee and Fishing already knew themselves at that time: they worked together for two of the greatest successes of the Hammer, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), both directed by Fisher.

Let’s remind ourselves of the synopsis of Doyle’s story. Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead nearby his mansion, located in Dartmoor, in the South-West of England. Clues indicate that he died of heart failure, but also that a strong fear may be at the origin of his passing. Moreover, the aura of the Baskerville family is surrounded by the legend of a big, terrifying hound that threatens and kills its members. Could he have also been murdered by the legendary dog? Mortimer, a local doctor, tasked with welcoming Henry, the heir to the Baskerville estate, gets to 221B Baker Street. He indeed believes the life of Henry to be at stake and asks Holmes and Watson to investigate the curious matter.

The film rewrites a couple of things, for instance swapping the profession of certain characters living in Dartmoor, changing the relations between some others, or – quite frankly I find this point frustrating — the removal of scenes tailing suspects in the novel that I found really thrilling.

The most striking aspect of the film is its use of colours and the sophistication of its decors, in the purest Hammer style: baroque for the interiors of the Baskerville Hall, while the moor is built in studio with the best efforts. Highly expressive, the moor nevertheless never appears on-screen as threatening and hostile as it is described in the book, in which it is almost a character. Although this is beautiful, with our contemporary eyes, it really sounds like a movie-built set. In one hand, such a representation is therefore less frightening and a bit deceptive, but in the other, it gives the movie part of its charm.

Despite it, Fisher leads Doyle’s story in a more horrific path. The prologue, in which we dive into the origins of the legend, is quite representative of those choices. This opening introduces us to Hugo Baskerville, whose cruelty and sadism make us wonder who really the hound of the Baskervilles is. But also, shortly after in the film, the first meeting between Holmes and Henry Baskerville features a scene that didn’t exist in the novel. Someone, already observing and threatening Henry’s life, has indeed put a big tarantula in his hotel room, which is now slowly climbing up Henry’s arm. The growing tension constructed by the editing of the film offers here one of the climaxes of the film. This early event will come as a surprise to anyone expecting to find the same elements as in the novel.

The film did not encounter enough success to encourage the Hammer to produce other Holmes movies. Perhaps the lack of monsters turned out to be detrimental to the film. Indeed, if the hound appears at the end of the picture, he is quite deceptive. Maybe Fisher should have had the audacity to keep him out of range and use other means.

Still, The Hound of the Baskervilles remains a charming and beautiful picture, sometimes scary and sometimes dated, led by supreme casting. Next time, we will focus on another Holmes movie, which also features Christopher Lee: Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

Matthieu M.

Musidora Muse (4/4)

“Ce qui nous attirait, c’était tout ce dont nous privait une morale imposée, le luxe, les fêtes, le grand orchestre des vices, l’image de la femme aussi, mais héroïsée, sacrée aventurière. Il y a un document précis de cet état d’esprit, c’est à lui que je veux en venir. L’idée que toute une génération se fit du monde se forma au cinéma, et c’est un film qui la résume, un feuilleton. Une jeunesse tomba toute entière amoureuse de Musidora dans Les Vampires. À cette magie, à cette attraction, s'ajoutait le charme d'une grande révélation sexuelle. Il appartint au maillot noir de Musidora de préparer la France des pères de familles et des insurgés. Cette magnifique bête d'ombre fut donc notre Vénus et notre déesse Raison”. 

This is what Louis Aragon wrote in his literary history project in 1922-1923. Indeed, if the vamp archetype quickly declined, disappeared, or shifted, it remained a source of inspiration for a group of artists, the surrealists. These artists appreciated sordid and criminal atmospheres and found inspiration in the serial Les Vampires. For example, in 1929, Louis Aragon and André Breton collaborated on a play entitled Le Trésor des Jésuites. A play in which every character’s name is an anagram of Musidora : Mad Souri, Doramusi… The story in itself is a tryptic, very much inspired by Irma Vep’s story in Les Vampires. Mad Souri, the enigmatic protagonist forms part of a criminal group organizing murder and robbery actions. Not only does the story resemble very much Les Vampires, but the costumes worn by the actress, a black overall, are also very similar. 

Representation of Le Trésor des Jésuites

Furthermore, the text is also very evocative of this source of inspiration and quotes directly, through some puns, Louis Feuillade’s movies. 

Des nuits sans lune ils sont les Rois,Les ténèbres sont leur empire.Portant la Mort, semant l’Effroi,Voici le vol noir des Vampires.  […]Ils vont les sinistres VampiresAux grandes ailes de veloursNon pas vers le Mal…VERS LE PIRE ! 

Le Trésor des Jésuites, Aragon, Breton, 1929. 

Finally, the temporality and spatiality choices of Aragon and Breton in the play are very revealing of their inspiration. In fact, they aim to transform the stage into a theater screen. Therefore, far from observing the unity of time rule, the authors drew inspiration from the plasticity of cinema by using rules of editing. For example, a scene takes place in 1929, before going back to 1917, and then forward to 1939. 

What could appear as plagiarism is actually an homage to Musidora who was a dear friend of the surrealists and collaborated with them on a play. She was always considered by the members of the surrealist group as the 10th muse. 

Musidora’s drawing to André Breton

This fascination isn’t strictly restricted to Musidora and her vamp alter ego, but more generally to women who are marginal. Indeed, it particularly applies to criminals. The anarchist Germaine Berton, Violette Nozières, and the sisters Papin were all linked in some way to the artistic production of the surrealists. 

All in all, the vamps once liberating for actresses, quickly became an archetype used to put women in tiny boxes. They wouldn’t let the vamps disrupt. And even though they still inspired some artists such as the surrealists, in movies, this type of role quickly disappeared. However, in the last few years, a new archetype seems to emerge, maybe drawing inspiration from the vamp. These female characters are led by vengeance, using violence to counter men’s abuse. Therefore, this series of articles entitled “Bring back the vamp !” eventually comes full circle, going back to our first words :

Over the last few years, spread over audiovisual productions the female rage.  Antidote to the male gaze?  Liberating and transgressive.  This feminist archetype overcomes the ideal of the silent and obedient woman. On the quest for justice and vengeance, they do not hesitate to use violence.

The liberating vamp archetype, or liberating from the vamp archetype? (3/4)

If Musidora and Theda Bara remain in the collective memory as the first ever vamp, a lot of actresses, who are mostly forgotten now, followed their path and embodied, voluntarily or not, this archetype. This is due to an adjacent development: the cinematographic press. This type of press first dealt with movies, but quickly went on to cover shootings, backstages, and gradually focused more on celebrities and their personal life and scandals than on the films themselves. French researchers Myriam Tsikounas and Anne Bléger produce a very witty analysis of this specific period of post World War I and how it is linked to the birth of stardom in their book, La fabrication des vedettes dans l’entre-deux-guerres, Petits arrangements avec la biographie. Stardom brought the concept of persona that blurs the frontier between characters and actors, or, in our case, actresses, including outside of films. Therefore, it is interesting to look up how the word vamp was used in the press during the 1920s and early 1930s to talk about actresses rather than characters in movies. 

The first example that I would like to address is the case of the Russian actress Kissa Kouprine who often played vamps. Indeed, she played the role of Marie, an enigmatic lady-in-waiting in the movies Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1930) and Le Parfum de la femme en noir (1931), both directed by Marcel L’Herbier. But most notably, she was a thief wearing black overalls in the movie The Pearl by Belgium director Henir D’Ursel, a possible tribute to Irma Vep from Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade. 

Kissa Kouprine as Marie in Le Mystère de la chambre jaune. 

On the 10th of December 1931, she gave an interview to the journalist Robert Bré for the weekly magazine Pour Vous. The title of the article is very evocative, both of the concept of persona and of the fact that actresses had very little to say about how they wanted to craft their own careers: “La “vamp” Kissa Kouprine voudrait faire les ingénues”. Sadly, Kissa Kouprine, is very aware of this process as revealed in this extract of the interview:

“Comme les gens du cinéma sont curieux ! nous dit-elle. Voilà qu’ils m’ont condamné à jouer les femmes criminelles ou fatales. Je suis brune, je n’ai pas l’air de rire à tout propos ou de gambader à tout bout de champ, donc je suis une femme fatale. J’ai demandé une fois à l’un d’eux, qui m’avait prié de venir le voir après avoir lu le scénario, de me confier le rôle de l’ingénue. Il en est resté pantois durant quelques secondes, puis il m’a démontré - doucement, comme on explique aux enfants - que je n’étais vraiment faite que pour être vamp. D’ailleurs, comme tant d’autres, cette affaire n’eut pas de suite” 

The second example is the case of Claude Mérelle, born Lisa Laurent. On the 23rd of January 1914, she tried to kill her lover Paul Guidé. After the trial, where she was found not guilty, she took the name Claude Mérelle. However, it wasn’t enough and her career shifted for good. She was stuck with roles of jealous, manipulating and wicked women. For example, in 1921, she played the terrible Milady in an episode film, Les Trois mousquetaires, by Henri Diamant Berger. The next year, she was a gypsy seducer led by vengeance in Le Roi de Camargue by André Hugon. Unlike Kissa Kouprine, she wasn’t considered a vamp because of her looks but rather because of her actions. Reading the press from that time is quite funny as journalists seem genuinely afraid to go interview her. That is the case of the article from Cinémagazine of the 23rd of November 1923 : 

“Vous qui, au coin du feu, maintenant que la température commence à baisser, lisez tranquillement Cinémagazine, savez-vous que le métier de reporter exige parfois le plus grand courage ?  – Il faudrait bien, me dit mon très cher directeur, savoir si, oui ou non, Claude Mérelle est une femme fatale.  – Bien, répondis-je simplement, et le regard que je surpris me récompensa de ma bravoure”

Claude Mérelle in Le Roi de Camargue. 

Thus, we can end this article by saying, that, if the vamp archetype was liberating for some actresses like Theda Bara of Musidora, it quickly got picked up by directors and journalists who used it to characterize not characters, but rather women. 

Suzanne.

Sources: 

BLEGER Anne, TSIKOUNAS Myriam, (dir.), La fabrication des vedettes dans l’entre-deux guerres, Petits arrangements avec la biographie, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2024. 

BRE Robert, « La “vamp” Kissa Kouprine voudrait faire les ingénues », Pour Vous, n°160, 10 décembre 1931

From black kohl to idol (2/4) 

1915 is the year where they appeared. The first ever vamps. 

It was the beginning of World War I, a time where freedom and independence were reachable for women. They were in charge of keeping life going in the back line, worked in manufacturers for example and had more and more responsibilities. 

Therefore, the 1920s were a polarized decade: women started to demand more rights and independence but misogyny grew even stronger as men felt their masculinity threatened. Thus appears a tension between a sense of modernity and a will of tradition. That is what the French historian Dimitri Vezyroglou studies in his thesis,  Le cinéma en France à la veille du parlant : un essai d'histoire culturelle. He analyzed different narrative outlines from this time and discovered the recurrent trope of the fear of perdition. That is what he writes: 

« Honnêteté du travail pour les héros masculins, vertu et honneur pour les héroïnes : on décèle dans ces schémas narratifs la crainte de déstabilisation des valeurs traditionnelles ». 

Theda Bara

Thus, the vamps, morally ambiguous characters are a real counterpoint to this traditionalist dogma. “Women are my greatest fans because they see in my vampire the impersonal vengeance of all their unavenged wrongs”, says Theda Bara in an interview for Theater magazine, in June 1917. But who are these actresses who were able to create a whole new type of character? 

Large eyes circled with black kohl, dark lips, pale skin contrasting with even darker hair, loads of jewels, suggestive and revealing draped gowns… Constantly talking about mysticism and the occult, posing with wild animals and skeletons… 

Theda Bara for the promotion of A fool there was. 

That is how Theodosia Burr Goodman, born in 1885 in Cincinnati, carefully constructed the figure of Theda Bara, star of silent films. Bara is known as the first ever vamp for her role of the “vampire”, in the movie A fool there was in 1915. Her character seduced and lured men before leaving them completely ruined physically and morally to then eventually take their lives. This movie was such a success that it allowed William Fox to found the Fox Film Corporation. Between 1915 et 1919, Theda Bara acted in more than forty motion pictures, mostly roles of femme fatale and deadly seductresses such as Salomé and Cleopatra. Alongside with her movies, she continued to craft her public image with ad campaigns, photos and interviews. She was fascinating to the public who even started to believe she had magical powers, quickly she became an icon. She retired in the late 1920s when directors stopped giving her roles. Sadly, only six of her movies managed to reach us because the rest of them disappeared in a fire in 1937. 

Theda Bara

Black overalls, as close to the body as possible, dark lips, black kohl around the eyes, almost translucide skin and a daring gaze. That is how Musidora first appears in the third episode of the ten-episode serial Les Vampires, by Louis Feuillade in 1915. Born Jeanne Roques in Paris in 1889, she quickly developed interest in art, she painted, sculpted and wrote. She received an artistic education and took her artist's name from the heroine of Fortunio by Theophile Gautier. Eventually, she found success in theater where she was spotted by French director Louis Feuillade. He offered her her most iconic role, Irma Vep. Anagram of “vampire”, Irma Vep is a cabaret singer and leading member of the secret society “les Vampires”, a gang of crooks. After that, Musidora acted in other movies but mostly dedicated her life to the stage and also went on to directing her own movies. People mostly remember her as Irma Vep, but unlike Theda Bara, she was able to move on from this character and shaped her career following her own will.  

Musidora as Irma Vep in Les Vampires. 

At that exact moment, in 1915, on both sides of the Atlantic ocean were born the vamps, a term frequently used but never quite defined, often relegated to a simple variation of the femme fatale. They are such ambiguous and transgressive characters that do not fit categories that it seems impossible and even pointless to even try to suggest a definition. However, we could say that what the vamps offer female characters are as liberating as vampires are deadly. 

Deadly indeed are their looks. Musidora and Theda Bara modified their physical appearances in order to create an iconography of the vamp that would soon become recognizable. For example, Theda Bera purposely dyed her hair black. 

Liberating are the characters that they embody. Liberating for Musidora, her characters led the storyline and were equal to men, something very rare back then. Liberating for Theda Bara, her characters materialized on screen a global will for vengeance. All in all, the vamps are liberating because of the infringement to propriety that they represent through a deadly and vampiric violence. 

Against all odds considering the puritan moral context of the 1910s-1920s, the vamps went from black kohl around their magnetic eyes to idols of silent movies. Carefully cultivating their public image, Musidora and Theda Bara were the first ever vamps but also the first stars of cinema. They paved the way for actresses who would soon embody this ambiguous and maybe not so liberating archetype of the vamp. 

Suzanne.

Sources : 

AUROUET Carole, CHERQUI Marie-Claude, VERAY Laurent (dir.), Musidora, Qui êtes vous ?, Paris, Editions de Gremese, 2022. 

TIERCHANT Hélène, Musidora, première vamp, Editions Télémaque, 2014. 

VEZYROGLOU Dimitri, Le cinéma en France à la veille du parlant : un essai d’histoire culturelle, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2011. 

Before the female rage were the vamps (1/4)

Over the last few years, spread over audiovisual productions the female rage.  Antidote to the male gaze?  Liberating and transgressive.  This feminist archetype overcomes the ideal of the silent and obedient woman. On the quest for justice and vengeance, they do not hesitate to use violence.  However ! Long before the female rage were the vamps…  …Born with silent and black and white films in the 1910s. Inspired by an occult and sensual figure, the vampire.  They strike on screen.  Satisfy their desires.  Seduce men.  Leave them miserable. 

« Woman as vampire, man as victim: that was, if not the general consensus, a strong current of male feeling in nineteenth century France », Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience. 

That is what the historian Peter Gay wrote in the chapter “Offensive Women and Defensive Men” of his book The Bourgeois Experience. Indeed, before the vamps, and before cinema even existed, Gay’s statement already resonated with a certain iconography of the threatening and vampiric woman in art. 

Philip Burne-Jones, The Vampire, 1897. 

Literature could serve as an example to that. 

Before Dracula was Carmilla. Before the world's most famous vampire was another vampire, a woman. In fact, in 1872 Sheridan Le Fanu published his short story entitled Carmilla. It tells the story of Laura who leads a solitary life with her father, deep in an isolated forest. Until one night, a mysterious but gorgeous young woman, Carmilla, asks for hospitality. “I wonder whether you feel as strangely drawn towards me as I do to you”, says the young woman to her host. But as the relationship between the two young women blooms, Laura finds herself prone to strange nightmares. If the nature of what Carmilla is, a vampire, a monster, an animal, a creature, isn’t quite clear in the text, she surely is a transgressive figure. The author uses his writing to talk about a taboo topic in the Victorian era, women’s sexuality, and more specifically sapphic relationships. That is what Coleen Damman defends in her analysis of the text as she writes : “As a woman, Carmilla can only claim her sexuality after death. Thus, vampirism is the only way she can express her own carnal desires. Besides marriage, becoming a vampire is one of the only ways that female sexuality is licensed in the Victorian era.”. 

Visual art could also serve as an example. 

Symbolist paintings are filled with representations of dangerous and menacing women. In his painting The Vampire, Pre-Raphaelite artist Philip Burne-Jones represents a man being consumed by a female vampire. In 1895, Edvard Munch, represented himself in a deadly embrace with his lover in the posture of a vampire in his painting Love and Pain, also known under the title The Vampire. 

Edvard Munch, Love and Pain, 1895

The same year that Munch painted this canvas, cinema was invented. And that same year, the press was radical: cinema is the end of death. Indeed, it was now possible to capture the movements and expressions of people and keep them alive forever, on film. That is why Philippe Azoury in his text, « D’une sorte de fureur diabolique », suggests an intrinsic link between vampires and cinema, both offering the seducing possibility of immortality. Therefore, it is no surprise that the iconography of the vampire, and of the female vampire that interests us here, would quickly develop in films. 

1915, is the year where they appeared. The vamps.  Two of them, first. Musidora as Irma Vep, in Les Vampires, by French director Louis Feuillade.  Theda Bara as “the vampire”, in A fool there was by American director Frank Powell.  Soon, they were included in the much wider archetype of the femme fatale, leaving the vamp one undefined.  It seems about time to bring back the vamps from the dead. 

Suzanne.

Sources: 

AZOURY Philippe, « D’une sorte de fureur diabolique » in, ORLEAN Matthieu (dir.), Vampires (catalogue d’exposition Cinémathèque française, Paris, 9 octobre 2019 - 19 janvier 2020), 2019. 

BALANESCU Miriam, “Female rage: The brutal new icons of film and TV”, October 12th, 2022, BBC, online: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221011-female-rage-the-brutal-new-icons-of-film-and-tv

DEARBORN Leah, “Where is all the feminist vampire litrature?”, October 12th, 2022, Litreactor, online: https://litreactor.com/columns/where-are-all-the-feminist-vampires.html

GAY Peter, « Offensive Women and Defensive Men » in The Bourgeois experience : Victoria to Freud, Education of the senses, Oxford Univesity Press, 1984. 

Around 1880, photography entered what many contemporaries experienced as an age of modernity. The camera no longer simply fixed static poses in long exposures, it began to shoot the movement “on the spot,” to analyze it frame by frame, and to turn fleeting instants into images. This transformation was driven by new technologies, above all, the gelatin dry plate, and by a cultural fascination with speed, play, and everyday life.

The invention and gradual adoption of the gelatin silver bromide emulsion between 1871 and the late 1870s was crucial. Richard Maddox’s original formula aimed to create a dry process that would free photographers from the chemistry of wet collodion. At first, these plates were not much more sensitive than existing processes, and their revolutionary potential was largely unnoticed. But when Désiré van Monckhoven improved the emulsion, photographers realized that exposures could drop below one‑hundredth of a second. This new sensitivity made instantaneous photography possible.

 Technically, dry plates also made photography easier to industrialise. Instead of preparing and developing plates on the spot, photographers could buy ready‑made materials, expose them quickly, and process them later. Factories such as the Lumière's increased their production spectacularly: in 1889 they produced thousands of glass plates per day, and by 1900 it multiplied by ten. At the same time, George Eastman’s company, later Eastman Kodak, moved to control the entire photographic chain. With products like the cheap Brownie camera, photography became a mass pastime. Amateurs no longer needed deep technical expertise, they only had to “press the button.”

This democratization changed the nature of images themselves. The snapshot aesthetic, (blurred skirts, mid‑air jumps, dogs running, children tumbling) emerged as a new visual language of spontaneity and play. Being “modern” now meant being in motion and capturing motion. For amateurs like Jacques‑Henri Lartigue, born in 1894, photography was both a game and a technical challenge. As a boy, he organised scenes of family and friends jumping, falling, or driving racing cars, so the camera could freeze them. These were not accidental shots, they were carefully performed images, in which the presence of the camera incited people to act.

The scientific study of movement evolved in parallel. Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments, begun in the 1870s with a battery of cameras lined up, to resolve a long‑debated question: how exactly does a horse gallop? By successive exposures of the animal, Muybridge decomposed the movement and showed that all four hooves left the ground at once, contradicting traditional paintings. His book “Animal Locomotion” presented hundreds of such sequences (humans walking, running, jumping, animals trotting or flying) against a grid background that allowed precise measurement. These images served both scientists and artists as reference material. Philosophers such as Henri Bergson later criticized this approach for “betraying” real duration: by slicing movement into static instants, science risked reducing living time to a homogeneous, mechanical sequence. 

By 1910, instantaneous photography had transformed both everyday visual culture and scientific practice. Cameras no longer simply preserved faces and landscapes, they explored time itself, turning motion into something that could be captured, analysed, and reimagined.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, photography and science get into a remarkably close alliance. Far from being a simple tool for documentation, photography reshaped how scientists saw the world, what they considered observable, and even what they believed could count as scientific proof. Between 1850 and 1900, astronomy, anthropology, medicine, physiology, and other disciplines used the camera both to record reality and generate knowledge.

One of the promise of photography was to “see the invisible and better see the visible.” Microphotographs revealed an entirely new universe of the infinitely small, captured through the microscope. At the other extreme, astronomers turned their telescopes into cameras, registered far stars and the granular surface of the sun. Radiography, born with X‑rays in 1895, extended this logic to the inside of the human body. 

This scientific imaging was never purely utilitarian. Microscopic and astronomical photographs fascinated artists and the public with their unexpected beauty. Photographers such as Laure Albin Guillot later transformed micrographs into decorative patterns, treating scientific images as visual motifs for design. Scientific photography was at the intersection of art and science, inspiring new forms of creativity and serving research.

The French astronomer Jules Janssen described photography as the “retina of the scientist.” For him, the camera’s eye differed fundamentally from the human eye: it could accumulate light over time, registered details for future analysis. Janssen’s own work illustrates this. In the 1870s he tried to use photography to measure the distance from the Earth to the sun during the transit of Venus, an ambitious experiment but unsuccessful. But in 1877 he succeeded in photographing the sun’s surface, revealing a regular cellular structure that suggested new interpretations of solar physics. Photography here was not just illustrative, it became an instrument of investigation that allowed scientists to discover phenomena.

 Scientific debates quickly emerged around the supposed “objectivity” of photographs. Many researchers trusted drawings from nature more than photographs, because drawings could synthesize typical features observed in multiple specimens. A photograph, by contrast, captured only a single, possibly atypical individual. The controversy over snowflake images is a telling example. In 1892, Richard Neuhauss photographed snow crystals under the microscope and discovered irregularities that contradicted the ideal, perfectly symmetrical forms found in traditional drawings. His work was strongly criticised, and he accused the American photographer Wilson Bentley, whose celebrated snowflakes appear perfectly symmetrical, of retouching his images and betraying photographic objectivity. The argument raised a crucial question: could scientific photographs be manipulated, or would any intervention undermine their evidential value?

In 1900, photography had generated new visual cultures in science. It produced images that oscillated between document and discovery, fact and imagination, and constantly negotiated the boundary between scientific observation and artistic creation. It reshaped not only what scientists saw, but how they thought about seeing itself.

02/04 The Rise of the Photographic Portrait

 In the middle of the 19th century, a quiet revolution took place, not in factories or parliaments, but in the photographic studios that sprang up across Paris, London, and beyond. Photography, newly born, quickly became both an incredible discovery of modern science and a mirror of an emerging bourgeois society obsessed with their self and self‑image. What began as an artisanal practice soon developed into what many contemporaries called an “industry of portraits.”

From the 1840s, the portrait photograph held extraordinary power. It fascinated and frightened its early audience. Honoré de Balzac and his supposed fear of the daguerreotype is a good illustration of this tension. According to Nadar, Balzac believed that every being was made up of countless layers of ghostly “spectres” and that the photographic process stripped one away with each exposure. Whether Balzac truly trembled before the camera or simply dramatized his discomfort, his anxiety reveals something strong: a photograph did more than reproduce an image, it captured something of the model’s essence. Photographers like Nadar embraced this mystery. He claimed that he was not simply trying to capture an image, but the soul, the psychological truth, of his subjects. In his portraits of artists and writers, from Delacroix to Baudelaire, the photograph becomes a dialogue between presence and absence, flesh and aura, at a time when society was discovering the thrill of its own reflection. 

By mid‑century, this fascination found its economic model. As sociologist Gisèle Freund later observed, photography was no longer an exclusive art, it had become a social habit. The portrait answered a distinctly bourgeois desire: the wish to possess one’s own image, to fix status and identity in a frame. Studios multiplied (from fifty in Paris in 1848 to more than two hundred by 1860). The daguerreotype had given way to cheaper, reproducible techniques such as the ferrotype and the carte‑de‑visite. Each innovation reduced cost and expanded accessibility, bringing the fantasy of immortality within reach of shopkeepers, office workers, even rural fairs. This democratization, however, came with its critics. Charles Baudelaire denounced what he considered a “narcissistic frenzy,” a vulgar obsession with appearances.  For him, the modern crowd had fallen in love with its own trivial image, turning art into commodity.

By the 1860s, the photographic studio itself had become a symbol of modern capitalism. Opulent ateliers lined the boulevards. Mayer & Pierson sought to attract imperial elites, while Nadar designed luxurious spaces that served as both art galleries and art spectacle. Portraits became standardized: everyone posed beside the same column, curtain, or balustrade. Individuality gave way to repetition; the photograph became a product, not a revelation. Yet even this “industrial madness,” as critics called it, tells us something essential: photography was becoming our new language of identity.

The 19th‑century portrait industry anticipated today’s social media feeds: a mass production of faces, each yearning for recognition, each promising authenticity yet shaped by convention. Behind the glittering surfaces of these early images lies the contradictory heart of modernity: our endless hunger to see ourselves, and our fear of what the camera might truly reveal. 

As you probably know, next year we will celebrate the 200th anniversary of photography, I wanted to do a little history of photography that you can easily follow. To begin, here is a short quote: “J’ai fait un point de vue qui a très bien réussi, (...) ce genre de représentation a quelque chose de magique: on voit réellement que c’est la nature.” Nicéphore Niépce, June 27, 1827. 

01/04 When Light Became an Image: The Birth of Photography

The invention of photography emerged gradually, in the early nineteenth century, from a  broader transformation in how people saw the world and understood vision itself. Around the 1820s and 1830s, new optical devices (like the camera obscura, the stereoscope and the diorama) reshaped ways of looking and turned vision into something that could be tested, measured, and engineered. The historian Jonathan Crary has described this period as the rise of a “new observer”: a modern viewer whose perception was increasingly mediated by instruments and technologies. Photography would soon become one of the most striking symptoms of this new way of seeing.

 In this context, several inventors had a similar idea: what if the image formed in a camera obscura could be fixed permanently? One of the first to achieve this was Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Around 1816, Niépce noticed that certain substances darkened when exposed to light. Bitumen of Judea, already known in painting and printmaking, is particularly sensitive. Niépce explored two main directions: using light-sensitive materials to reproduce engravings, and capturing direct views from nature through an optical device he called his “camera of discovery.” In 1826–1827, he produced what we now call the View from the Window at Le Gras, often regarded as the first surviving photograph.

However, Niépce’s achievement was not celebrated at the time. His images required extremely long exposure times (estimated at sixty hours), and the bitumen was not sensitive enough to make the process practical. The results appeared disappointing, and the revolutionary potential of his work was not immediately recognized. For decades, his photograph was forgotten, rediscovered in the twentieth century. Niépce died in 1833 without ever gaining full recognition for his invention.

Before his death, Niépce had entered into a partnership with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a painter and theatre set designer best known for his spectacular dioramas. Daguerre was fascinated by optics and saw a chance to refine Niépce’s experiments. The two men signed a contract in 1829, but they continued to work separately and did not always agree on methods. After Niépce’s death, Daguerre continued his research and developed a new process that would make his name famous: the daguerreotype.

 Announced publicly in 1839, the daguerreotype produced an image on a highly polished metal plate through a complex photo-chemical reaction. The image was first latent and then revealed by mercury vapour. The result was a small, unique, incredibly detailed picture, with a sharpness that seemed to surpass the human eye. Early exposure times were still long, so Daguerre’s first images included many still lifes and empty cityscapes, where moving figures disappeared.

Unlike modern photography, each daguerreotype was a unique object, not a negative that could be endlessly reproduced. The French state quickly understood the importance of this invention and purchased the rights so that the process could be made public. At the same time, other inventors such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Hippolyte Bayard were developing competing methods on paper, using different names and concepts. The word “photography” did not yet designate a single, unified technology. Instead, there was a constellation of processes, patents, national rivalries, and debates about priority.

What unites these early experiments is a shared ambition: to fix, through chemistry and light, the image formed in the dark chamber. From Niépce’s fragile bitumen plates to Daguerre’s gleaming daguerreotypes, the period between 1820 and 1840 laid the foundations of photographic culture. It is a story not just of genius inventors, but of a broader shift in vision, a moment when seeing the world began to mean capturing it, and when every fixed image carried, in advance, the melancholy knowledge that the moment it shows is already gone.