The Grand Illusion
Meeting the Magic Circle
In an anonymous alleyway near London’s Euston Station, behind a blank door, lies the Centre for the Magic Arts. Marked only by a brass plaque bearing a circle of astrological symbols, the home of the Magic Circle is a private club where - away from the flapping ears of the public - magicians meet every Monday night to exchange notes on new tricks and illusions. My first attempt to gain access to this organization was (unsurprisingly) a failure, offering little more than a view through a half-opened doorway into a fantastic hallway filled with richly coloured theatre posters from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The way into to this élite enclave, I subsequently discovered, is via a waiting list for an evening event where members of the public are invited to ‘Meet the Magic Circle’. Six months later, ticket in hand, I visited the centre again.
Back in 1905, when this fledgeling fraternity of showmen held its first meeting, magic was big business. In Britain the magicians David Devant and John Nevil Maskelyne had dominated the variety entertainment scene for decades, performing to packed audiences at the long-since demolished Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly, known as ‘London’s Home of Mystery’. These audiences came to see tricks such as the ‘magic kettle’, which would pour any liquid requested, a ‘spirit orchestra’, which played without the aid of live musicians, and theatrical sketches such as ‘An Artist’s Dream’, in which Devant - playing a recently widowed painter - would make the ghost of his dead wife appear on stage. Then there was the spectacular illusionist Chung Ling Soo, who died in 1918 performing an act called ‘Defying the Bullets’ at the Wood Green Empire, prompting the public discovery of his finest illusion: the fact that he was not Chinese at all, but an American named William Robinson. That nobody had hitherto noticed this suggests that the early 20th-century public was perhaps less experienced in magic’s bluffs and parries than its contemporary counterpart. All Soo had to do to maintain his deception, after all, was to travel everywhere with an interpreter.
The Magic Circle is something of a shrine to this ‘golden age’. The purpose-built décor of the present building (its home since 1998, after a decade at the Victory Services Club in Marble Arch) would appear to be the product of a seemingly incongruous marriage of cultures - the gentlemanly splendour of the Edwardian drawing-room and the tarnished spangle of contemporary Las Vegas, where Vaudeville came to rest after its decline in the 1930s. A modern spiral staircase, which would not be out of place in one of the Nevada city’s numerous hotel lobbies, dominates the central hallway, while upstairs in the Devant Room a life-size bust of David Devant himself (the Magic Circle’s first president) slowly rotates on a plinth in a room lined with vitrines. Each of these cases is filled with the holy relics of the greats of yesteryear, such as the wax cylinder that emits the ghoulish and rather clipped tones of the most famous magician of them all, Harry Houdini. In the subterranean part of the building - past a series of locked doors marked with the words ‘Private: Inner Sanctum’ - is a small museum housing yet more magical paraphernalia and the Magic Circle’s library, a repository of knowledge devoted to the preservation and study of such peculiar and anachronistic skills as mesmerism, mentalism and phantasmagoria. The library’s clandestine air is a perfect reflection of the society’s Latin motto, Indocilis Privata Loqui (Not Apt to Disclose Secrets), a phrase whose mock occultist feel is a satirical linguistic affectation left over from the days when stage magicians and spiritualists were in acrimonious competition.
During his illustrious career John Nevil Maskelyne - ‘the father of modern magic’ - was the scourge of false mediums, giving evidence against them in the courtroom and discrediting them through the newspapers. One of his most notable victims was Ann Eva Fay, an American medium whom he pursued to the point where she fled the country. Oddly (and somewhat controversially), she was later made the first female associate member of The Magic Circle, a title she received after successfully re-branding herself as a ‘mentalist’ - a sleight of hand in which she shed her problematic ‘spiritualist’ label while retaining the content of her act. As the Magic Circle’s original rule forbidding full membership for women wasn’t repealed until 1991, Fay is one of the very few women in the history of the society, leaving it with a membership profile that still largely resembles that of a fusty gentlemen’s club. Today, 90 per cent of these members are weekend magicians rather than professionals, possessed of the hobbyist fervour necessary to pass the entrance exam.
In total it took four hours to ‘Meet the Magic Circle’. Seated around small tables in the clubroom, I was initially treated, along with a large group of day-tripping Sussex pensioners, to a display of ‘close-up magic’, a familiar repertoire of card tricks, ‘cups and balls’ and coin manipulation. Following some larger-scale magic in the theatre upstairs - peppered with mother-in-law jokes and self-depreciating, Royal Variety Show-style humour - it became clear that most of these present-day performers owe more to TV magicians such as Tommy Cooper or Paul Daniels than to the great illusionists of the past. Then, during a coffee break, there was finally time to actually meet some of the circle’s members. For the most part this was a strange and somewhat uncomfortable business, leaving me with the feeling that I’d mistakenly wandered into someone else’s family gathering, albeit one where the elderly uncles have all adopted stage personas and arrived in sequined tuxedos. The one exception to the circle’s avuncular conservatism was Romany, the evening’s sole female magician, who wore a pair of shiny black high-heeled fetish shoes beneath her gypsy fortune-teller outfit - a tiny present-day incursion into the all too respectable realm of the retired hobbyist and children’s entertainer. Nevertheless, when I eventually stumbled out of the building, I couldn’t help but feel warm towards my hosts. As Dave Hickey commented when he met the veteran Las Vegas illusionists Siegfried and Roy: ‘beneath all that phoney tinsel, there is real tinsel’.
Olivia Plender
The Grand Illusion
Olivier Assayas
Arthouse cinema in the 90s has seen a decisive shift away from Europe: the creative hotspots are now truly global, spanning China (Zhang Yuan), Taiwan (Hou Hsiou-hsien, Tsai Ming-Iiang), Korea (Jang Sun-woo) and Iran (Abbas Kiarostami, Moshen Makhmalbaf). But while attention has drifted East, 90s French cinema has been quietly revitalising itself with a new generation of filmmakers building on the achievements of the post-nouvelle vague. The forerunner of this new wave, Léos Carax, has been inactive since the artistic triumph/professional disaster of his 1991 film Les Amants du Pont Neuf, leaving Olivier Assayas, the writer-director of Irma Vep (1996), as the most exciting young filmmaker in new French cinema. Assayas and filmmakers like Arnaud Désplechin, Claire Denis, and Pascale Ferran share an urgent critical engagement with the rigours and impasses of contemporary life and relationships, and an acute, voluptuous sense of modernity in all its lyrical yet alienated flux.
Irma Vep, the first Assayas film to be distributed in Britain, marks a departure from his previous five. Always grounded in the harsh socio-economic reality of the here and now, his films - beginning with Désordre (Disorder, 1986), and followed by L’Enfant de l’hiver (Winter’s Child, 1989) - deal with the impossibly fraught emotional entanglements of self-absorbed youth and the brutal price of self-definition in a world of casual compromise and routine exploitation. Much of this applies in Irma Vep, where we follow the misadventures of a Hong Kong actress who doesn’t speak French starring in a modern remake of a classic silent film. The film shares with Assayas’ earlier work a disoriented main character forced to improvise an identity, but now the protagonist does this professionally.
The silent film that is remade in Irma Vep is Les Vampires (The Vampires, 1915). The title refers to a criminal underworld gang which includes the masked female spy, Irma Vep (an anagram of ‘vampire’). Louis Feuillade’s film is a sacred text of early French cinema, championed particularly by the Surrealists: in 1928, Breton wrote that ‘one day people will realise that there has been nothing more realistic and at the same time more poetic… in Les Vampires it will be possible to find the reality of this century’. While the notion of a commercial remake is seen in Irma Vep as both preposterous and sacrilegious, Assayas’ film itself attempts to capture the true spirit of the original as an apotheosis of the rupture of modernity.
The film operates on several levels: as a satire on the film industry and its politics; as an encapsulated debate on French cinema and its struggle between the cynicism of commerce and the idealism of art; and as a meditation on the nature of film itself. Amidst all this, Assayas promiscuously mixes actual and invented film history and iconography. At their intersection, Maggie Cheung, the Hong Kong movie star who plays herself playing Irma Vep, is at once subject and object: the puzzled, well-meaning protagonist of an adventure in cinema who succeeds beyond all expectation in entering into the spirit of her assignment. Assayas’ implication is that only a figure of such fabulous pop-mythic lustre as Cheung is capable of incarnating Irma Vep, a character with nearly a century’s accumulated iconographic mass.
The metacinematic self-reflexivity at work in Irma Vep recalls Warhol’s emulation of the Hollywood star system. Assayas has written that Warhol’s work represents ‘the most important and essential in American cinema’. If France epitomises a cinema of jaded sophistication and post-colonial, post-Truffaut decline, for some time now Hong Kong has represented the innocence and vitality of cinema’s infancy. In its appropriation of American movie genres and star system iconography, Hong Kong has the same relation to the pre-war Hollywood studio system as Warhol’s Factory. Irma Vep, like Wong Kar-wei’s Chungking Express (1994) and Iranian maverick Moshen Makhmalbaf’s Salaam Cinema (1995), suggests that the different strata of modern world cinema may be converging towards a real alternative to the cul-de-sac of pulverising Hollywood spectacle, itself a manifestation of fin de siècle malaise and confusion.
For all its busyness and momentum, Irma Vep is a tender reverie about cinema as intense libidinal projection. Crucially, it’s Cheung-as-Vep, not Cheung, costumed in a form-fitting latex bondage outfit and mask, who personifies the capacity of the movies to materialise its own inherent imaginative eroticism. The union of two doubled figures (real life actress playing herself playing a previously-incarnated fictional character) is a kind of erotic excess that destabilises the order of filmic representation. When René, the erratic, manic-depressive director, is overcome with despair at the state of cinema - ‘Just images. No soul… Images about images. It’s worthless.’ - Cheung counters: ‘That’s desire… that’s what we make movies with,’ reaffirming the medium’s power. It’s as if the dynamism and energy of New Asian cinema has been summoned to revitalise its near-exhausted Western counterpart.
In Irma Vep, as in all his prior films, the freedom and the specificity of Assayas’ use and movement of the camera express this desire, but within a wider aesthetic economy defined by certain fault lines. These are most evident in the bleak, tender Paris s’éveille (Paris at Dawn, 1991) and the melancholy yet exhilarating L’Eau froide (Cold Water, 1994) which set up a tension between intense sensation and subjective abandon on the one hand and cool, unsentimental scrutiny and unsettling moral ambivalence on the other. Stylistically they are at once naturalistic and heightened, the narrative dynamics pulled between melodrama and introspection. To some degree this is the strength of much of the work from the new generation of French filmmakers.
Assayas’ refined visual sense is correspondingly divergent - muscular, sensual, restless yet subdued, tense. His camera can behave with elated, unpredictable abandon as it does in his most accessible film, Cold Water, and then with subtle, insidious deliberation and rigorous precision as in his best and most demanding film, Une nouvelle vie (A New Life, 1993). Assayas rejects the application of camera movement in post-classical cinema as ersatz style - gratuitous sensationalism or kinetic diversion, impulses which dissipate its expressivity. The camera’s momentum, its restless follow-movement and the use of long, dynamic continuous shots in Irma Vep catch the quicksilver shifts and acceleration of modern life, organising them into a poetics of transience, disorder and yearning. As in Cold Water, the camera renders a raw handheld documentary feel, but as often as it observes, the camera also indicates or expresses an emotion, mood or subjective state which is not visible. Often it combines the two principles into a lyrical impressionism; a style Wong Kar-wei and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle have pushed into bold, vibrant realms. The impressionism arrived at by Assayas and his director of photography Eric Gaultier is, by contrast, more contemplative and erotically charged. This is most notable in the ineffable grace of Maggie Cheung and her costume designer Zoe sharing a night-time moped-ride along the bank of the Seine, lights shimmering on water, accompanied by Ali Farka Toure’s lilting guitar.
The camera style shifts most radically in what proves to be Irma Vep’s pivotal scene where Maggie Cheung, dressed in her costume, succumbs to a kind of delirious rapture. This is conveyed subjectively by a stumbling, swooning, vertiginous continuous pan around the disarray of her hotel room (accompanied by Sonic Youth’s Tunic), until Cheung herself lurches into frame and becomes the subject of the rest of the shot. Creeping through hallways, stealing jewellery from a hotel room and ascending to the roof to stand amidst tumultuous rain and flaring, incandescent light, she is possessed by the spirit of Irma Vep. That startling schizoid pan, which you can see in Scorsese films from time to time, indicates this by beginning in a subjective register (Cheung’s POV), and abruptly shifting into an objective one (when Cheung enters the shot): in effect Cheung is seeing herself, as if in a supernatural out-of-body experience - or perhaps a bifurcation of self and icon/persona.
All of Assayas’ films are ultimately haunted by loss and abandonment: either physically or psychologically, his characters dematerialise like phantoms. Maggie Cheung - René and Zoe’s unattainable object of desire - is removed when René suffers a nervous breakdown and has to leave; for the film’s replacement director, the role of Irma Vep must be played by a French woman. Earlier in the film we glimpse a scene from the SLON collective’s Classe de lutte (1970) which is playing on a television, in which the camera pans to grafitti on a wall: ‘Cinema is not magic. It is a science and a technique, a technique born of science and at the service of a will, the will of the workers to free themselves’. Acknowledging the utopian tradition of French cinema from which René hails, Assayas equates post-’68 French militant cinema’s romantic idealism and ephemerality with the purity of cinema’s early silent era exemplified by Les Vampires. His own utopian agenda is perhaps even more radical, yet the very opposite of a materialist demystification of film.
Another playful piece of iconic substitution occurs when the director René, played by the nouvelle vague neurotic icon Jean-Piere Léaud, is replaced by José, played by burnt out 60s counter-cinema relic Lou Castel. In Irma Vep’s enigmatic coda he views René’s rough-cut. It is a mesmerising, avant-garde assemblage of shuddering, disjunctive optically-printed shots of Maggie-as-Irma, the image surface disfigured and eventually obliterated by scratches and line formations in the manner of 50s Letterist filmmaker Jean Isidore Isou in such films as Venom and Eternity (1951) - another lost continent of French film history. Is this a definitive negation of the filmic image, a collapse into formless, incoherent chaos? A denial of Cheung’s iconography? A cinematic expression of René and art cinema’s final nervous breakdown? Maggie Cheung’s possession by Irma in the hotel sequence is one more twist on the notion of cinema’s shuffling and transposing of iconography - one which assumes supernatural dimensions. Perhaps Maggie is possessed less by Irma than by cinema itself. René’s rough-cut certainty has the air of an invocation, a spell to conjure cinema’s occult powers of disruption. (Assayas is also a great admirer of Kenneth Anger.) Irma Vep’s flirtations with the uncanny and the fantastic, consonant with Les Vampires, suggest a reconciliation with an obsolete conception of movies that’s inscribed in the beginnings of cinema - the magic lantern, the demonstration of film projection in magic shows, the alchemy of photosensitive chemicals - the magic of the movies.
Gavin Smith
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