Music for Films: Les Vampires
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First broadcast 11pm, 21st June 2017 Resonance FM in London

[Repeated 24th June, 6am]

1 hour version, first broadcast 11pm, 21st June 2017 on Resonance FM in London.

Every month, interesting people talk about the music, films and music for films which have shaped their lives.

Roz Kaveney and Tim Concannon are joined by film scholar and dj Lexi Turner and artist and musician Anne Pigalle, to hold a seance with the spirits of cult cinema from the silent era. Louis Feuillade’s crime thriller serial released in 1915, ‘Les Vampires‘, made a star of the vamp burglar and main insurrector of the piece, Irma Vep, played by Jeanne Roques aka ‘Musidora’. Irma breaks into the bedrooms of the 1% and terrifies them in a skin-tight bat costume.

We discuss the eroticism of the film, the female gaze, Oscar Assayas’s 1996 remake featuring Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung, Lois Weber’s 1916 ‘Shoes‘, and the influence of ‘Les Vampires’ on dada and the surrealists, George Franju, and on a left-handed, European version of art house cinema.
























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