Presented in 35mm
Thursday, April 6 | 5:30 & 8 pm
Named for the cat-suited anti-heroine of Louis Feullade’s 1915 crime serial Les Vampires, Olivier Assayas’s delirious behind-the-scenes satire follows a fading French New Wave-era director—Jean-Pierre Léaud (The 400 Blows, The Death of Louis XIV)—as he attempts a contemporary remake of Feullade’s masterpiece, with Hong Kong icon Maggie Cheung (In the Mood for Love) in the lead role. Dressed from head-to-toe in black latex and unable to speak a word of French, Cheung—who plays herself—floats from one surreal situation to the next as the doomed production implodes around her. With jagged, propulsive editing driven by the music of Sonic Youth and Luna, Assayas’s boldly experimental treatise on the globalization of the French film industry is punk cinema at its most elegant. An unabashedly fetishistic celebration of film in every sense of the word, Irma Vep deserves to be seen on 35mm.
Director Olivier Assayas 1996 France 99 minutes NR 35mm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBSddyNVqE0
