Louis Feuillade | Les Vampires Episode 6 – "Les Yeux Qui Fascinent" ("Hypnotic Eyes") / 1916

buried treasure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louis Feuillade (screenwriter and director) Les Vampires Episode 6 – "Les Yeux Qui Fascinent" ("Hypnotic Eyes") / 1916

 

Although I have written about all the episodes of Louis Feuillade’s entertaining silent crime serial film lasting roughly 7 hours in full, the only sequence vaguely of interest to LGBTQ audiences is Episode 6 wherein the series’ central villain Irma Vep (Musidora) disguises herself as Viscount Guy, the son of the Grand Vampire who during their stay at the Royal Hunt Hotel in Fontainebleau has chosen the pseudonym of Count Kerlor.

 

     As anyone who has seen the full 417 minutes of Les Vampires knows, Irma Vep is of interest to gay readers simply because she is such a powerful and dominate female in the manner of Italian director Mario Roncoroni’s titular hero in Filibus, a movie released in the same year in which Feuillade’s series began. But whereas Filibus actually courts women while dressed as a male, arguing for a lesbian identity, Irma is not very convincing as Kerlor’s son, and the happenstance that she supposedly is in disguise is immensely undercut by the fact that journalist Philippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé) and his somewhat comic assistant Mazamette (Marcel Lévesque) easily recognize the young count as Irma in a theater newscast—surely one of the first instances of a film-within-the-film serving to develop the plot*—while the rival gang leader Juan-José Moréno (Fernand Herrmann), who also immediately recognizes the young viscount as Irma, eventually falls in love with her in this episode and—due to the fact that Feuillade fired the Grand Vampire (Jean Aymé) because of his consistent lateness to film-shoots— hypnotizes Irma to shoot and kill her Vampire friend.

 

     If nothing else, we know from Irma’s later marriage with the last Grand Vampire Venomous and her relationship with another Grand Vampire Satanas—clearly Les Vampire gang is sexist given that no one seems to consider choosing Irma as their leader—that Irma Vep is consistently heterosexual, as all other of the film’s figures appear to be, Mazamette even presented as a womanizer.

      In this episode the labyrinthian plot involves the fact that in the same hotel where Kerlor and his son are holed up an American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Verner are also staying. They are also using pseudonyms since it becomes apparent early on that they are really Raphael Norton and actress Ethel Florid, who have fled to Europe after Norton has robbed the American millionaire George Baldwin (a figure who appears in later episodes). Baldwin has posted a notice in the newspaper that whoever can capture the criminal(s) will be awarded the unspent amount of the loot.

     Early in “Hypnotic Eyes” Philippe and Mazamette, having bicycled into the Fontainebleau region in order to evade attention, notice before they even reach the city a man riding a full speed on horseback quite early in the morning. Climbing a nearby rock, they observe him turning off the road and carrying a small case to another rock formation before he turns back and rides off. After he has left, Mazamette explores that other rock formation, finding in a hole the small carrying case, inside of which they later discover are the $200,000 in banknotes that Norton (now pretending to be Werner) has stolen.

     By solving the puzzle and reclaiming the cash so very early in the episode, the director has resolved most the intrigue of his story, and the rest of this segment is dedicated almost entirely to the complex intrigues of both gangs, Les Vampires and Moreno’s slightly less brutal villains, as they attempt to track down the missing funds.

 

     Whereas Les Vampires simply engage the hotel guests, including the Werners, with the histories of Count Kerlor’s father—which involves another film-within-a-film whose sole purpose is to divert attention—while Irma, dressed in her dark bat-like attire explores the Werner’s room wherein she discovers a map leading to the hidden treasure.

       Moreno exerts far more energy to obtain the same information. Hypnotizing his new female servant and dressing her up as Irma, he carries her off to Fountainebleau where, after Irma has found the map, he grabs and chloroforms her. Obtaining the map, he hands it over to his secretary pretending to be Irma, who returns to Les Vampires, passing it onto the Grand Vampire while signaling that it is dangerous to speak so as to prevent herself from having to reveal that she is a fraud. She returns to Moreno as he tosses Irma’s body out the window to his cohorts below.

      Meanwhile, given the map, the third Vampire (Miss Édith) follows it in hopes of finding the treasure, only to discover a message there that if the owner of the money should come upon this spot Philippe and Mazamette will return the cash. Moreno and his men, of course, have followed and arrest her, equally disappointed with the fact that others have beaten them to the prize. They provide her with their own message to relay back to the Grand Vampire: they have taken Irma as ransom.

      The police, summoned by Philippe and Mazamette, meanwhile search the hotel patrons, finding Norton and his girlfriend hiding in their suite and arrest them, the award money going to Mazamette who buys himself a fancy suite where he entertains his lady friends and takes interviews from news reporters.

      As I mention above, Moreno falls in love with Irma, determining not to give her up to the Grand Vampire, forcing Irma to kill him. In this episode, at least, Les Vampires are utterly foiled and lose two of their most crucial followers.

 

*One thinks immediately a far later films such as John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Ulrike Ottinger’s Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (1984) in which various other media comment on the events in the film itself.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).