Musidora

Before Irma Vep

Jeanne Roques was born in Paris on 23 February 1889 into an artistic and politically progressive family, and she worked young — writing, drawing, and performing before she was out of her teens. On stage she took the name Musidora, after a character in Théophile Gautier. By the early 1910s she was a working music-hall and revue performer, and it was in that world, around the Bataclan, that she met Colette, whose friendship would last the rest of her life.

Her first screen role was not a fantasy or a crime serial. In 1913 she played Louise, a seamstress driven toward suicide by poverty, in Les Misères de l'aiguille, made by the libertarian cooperative Le Cinéma du Peuple. The film was about the exploitation of working women, and it opened in January 1914 at the Sociétés savantes with a trade-union speaker and a lecture by the anarchist writer Lucien Descaves. Musidora's career in cinema began in explicitly feminist, working-class film.

Noticed at the Folies-Bergère, she signed with Gaumont in 1914 and entered the production world of Louis Feuillade, the studio's artistic director, who cast her in dozens of pictures over the next few years.

Irma Vep

The role that fixed her image arrived in 1915. In Les Vampires, Feuillade's ten-episode serial about a criminal secret society loose in wartime Paris, Musidora played Irma Vep — a cabaret singer who is also the gang's most capable thief and killer. She enters in the third episode, in a black silk maillot and darkened eyes, and takes the serial over. Her name is an anagram of vampire, a joke hidden in plain sight.

Musidora did her own stunts, without a double, and that physical confidence is central to the character. She climbs, crawls, fights, and escapes with an ease that makes the male criminals around her look temporary. The era had a word for the dangerous, independent woman, the vamp, and Irma Vep became one of the French screen's foundational examples of it. When the police condemned the serial for glamorizing crime and briefly banned episodes, the bans were lifted, by most accounts, after Musidora appealed in person.

She followed Irma Vep with a second serial villain, the adventuress Diana Monti in Feuillade's Judex (shot 1916, released 1917). The two roles made her one of the most recognizable figures of French silent cinema, though the black maillot has always dominated the memory more than its actual screen time.

The teenagers who would found Surrealism had discovered the marvelous in Feuillade's everyday Paris of trapdoors and disguises, and they kept Irma Vep. André Breton and Louis Aragon wrote her into their play Le Trésor des Jésuites in 1929; the movement treated her as something close to a muse.

It is in Les Vampires that one must look for the reality of this century.

C'est dans Les Vampires qu'il faudra chercher la réalité de ce siècle.

Her own films

Musidora turned her fame into authorship quickly. From 1916 she wrote scenarios, and she began adapting her friend Colette for the screen, among them Minne and La Vagabonde. In 1919 she founded her own production company, La Société des Films Musidora, in the Cinémathèque's phrase 'pour être plus libre' — to be freer. She was sole proprietor and personally liable, which was the price of the control.

The clearest surviving evidence of that control is Vicenta (1919), on which she is credited as director, screenwriter, producer, editor, and star. Only one of its five reels survives, restored by the Cinémathèque in 2017. She was not the first woman to direct a film — Alice Guy had been directing since the 1890s — but running a company to write, produce, direct, and perform her own work made her unusual even so. Where financiers distrusted a woman directing alone, a man's name was often attached to the credits beside hers.

Spain

Her most ambitious productions were shot in Spain. Pour Don Carlos (1921), adapted from Pierre Benoît and filmed in the Basque country, was the largest of them; during it she met the mounted bullfighter Antonio Cañero, who became her adviser, screen partner, and lover. Soleil et Ombre (1922), which she called a romanticized documentary, and La Tierra de los toros (1924) followed, films interested as much in landscape, ritual, and filmed reality as in melodrama.

• Vicenta (1919) — written, produced, directed, edited, and performed by Musidora; one reel survives.
• Pour Don Carlos (1921) — the Basque-country feature adapted from Pierre Benoît.
• Soleil et Ombre (1922) — her self-described "romanticized documentary" of rural Spain and the bullring.
• La Tierra de los toros (1924) — the last of the Spanish features, later shown with live stage presentation.

The productions were not financially sustainable, and by the mid-1920s the company's run was over. In 1926 the Paris Mi-Carême carnival elected her its reine du cinéma, a decade after Irma Vep; the following year she married Dr Clément Marot. As the films dried up she returned to writing, publishing novels, plays, and poetry into the 1940s.

The historian of her own era

Sound cinema had little use for her, and her last transformation was from subject of film history into one of its keepers. In 1944 Henri Langlois brought her into the Cinémathèque française, where she managed documentation and helped run its historical research work alongside Jean Mitry and Georges Sadoul. She interviewed the surviving pioneers of early cinema and gathered the records of the era she had acted in.

I thought it right to catalogue, with love, in my section for historical research at the Cinémathèque française, these treasures, so perishable and so priceless: letters from Colette…

J'ai cru bon de classer, avec amour, dans ma section des recherches historiques, à la Cinémathèque française, ces si périssables et si inestimables trésors : Lettres de Colette…

In 1950 Langlois had her make La Magique Image, a short homage to Feuillade. The woman at the archive desk had been the woman on the rooftops, and visitors did not always know it.

Paris, 1957

Musidora died in Paris on 7 December 1957 and was buried at Bois-le-Roi, southeast of the city. Her image kept traveling. The surrealists had made her a muse in her lifetime; a French feminist film collective took her name in 1974; and Olivier Assayas rebuilt Irma Vep twice, as a 1996 film with Maggie Cheung and a 2022 series with Alicia Vikander. The character she wore for a few episodes in 1915 no longer belongs to anyone in particular.