Irma Vep: final scene

December 6, 2009 6:05 PM

What film techniques were used in the final scene of Irma Vep?

I've always been in love with the final scene of Irma Vep, more so as a stand-alone piece of video art outside of the context of the film. Can anyone shed any light on how it was made? It looks as though some of the shapes were "scratched" onto the film itself -- is this how it was done? And what about the black geometric shapes? The effects don't look digital to me, but I don't know much about this stuff.

And more importantly, do you know who made it? And where can I see more video like this? Thanks.

posted by whiskeyspider to media & arts (12 answers total)

The effect could very well be digital, or could simply be scratches or other markings on the film itself; given the vintage, I suspect it's the latter. The film itself was made by Olivier Assayas.
posted by sinfony at 6:16 PM on December 6, 2009

Definitely direct manipulation of the negative, or an excellent facsimile thereof. To see a few old school examples of this check out Stan Brakhage. The technique is called direct animation.
posted by idiopath at 6:27 PM on December 6, 2009

Regarding wanting to know who made it -- I didn't think Assayas himself created that part. I guess I was assuming that they handed it off to some video artist with a brief description of what they wanted. This is just speculation though. There were no special remarks in the credits about it.
posted by whiskeyspider at 6:30 PM on December 6, 2009

As to how it is done: with pinheads or a razor blade or with a marker or paint or by baking the film in an oven or spraying lightly with spray paint from a distance (this case makes it random of course) or pasting objects onto the negative (see Brakhage's excellent Moth Light or cutting the individual frames into smaller rectangles, shuffling, and rearranging (see tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE's Dizzy Spots if you can find it). Pretty much if you can do something to a negative to alter it's appearance, however subtle or extreme, it is done in direct animation.

Though, in the Irma Vepp example, I would guess that was scratched with the tip of a pin.

Of course with the more extreme examples of manipulation the film-maker has to develop her own negatives, because no film developing shop is going to have the patience to try and develop a negative covered in moth wings.
posted by idiopath at 6:33 PM on December 6, 2009

Anthony Balch made a film with WIlliam S. Burroughs called Towers Open Fire that used the technique (semi NSFW at moments, strongly implied masturbation).
posted by idiopath at 6:39 PM on December 6, 2009

I doubt that Assayas just handed the film over to somebody and said "make this look interesting." Whether he actually took blade to negative, I don't know.

By the way, for another splendid example of this sort of technique, the video for "Cherub Rock" by the Smashing Pumpkins is fantastic (and looks way better on their video compilation DVD than the badly-compressed Youtube clip does).
posted by sinfony at 7:00 PM on December 6, 2009

Relatedly, see rotoscoping. The term applies to lots of techniques but it does seem to apply to Irma Vep-style "drawing on the negative" effects as well as hand-drawn traveling mattes and whatnot.
posted by hattifattener at 12:54 AM on December 7, 2009

Surprised nobody has mentioned there's an excellent Criterion Collection DVD collecting much of Brakhage's work, including some of the stuff that must have influenced Irma Vep. There's a second volume coming soon, and maybe a Blu-ray upgrade to the first.

Len Lye made an awesome film called "Free Radicals" using this technique. It never fails to blow my mind.

When I was a kid, a friend and I used to make films on Super 8 starring our collection of action figures, who would blast at each other with laser-beam special effects that we created by scraping at the film emulsion, frame by frame, with the point of a pin. I was stunned to find out, in college, that legitimate and influential film artists had used the same technique to make flat-out masterpieces.
posted by Joey Bagels at 5:55 AM on December 7, 2009

Norman McClaren was pretty much a master of this and predates Brakhage by decades.
He took it a step further by creating the soundtrack, too...by painting in the sound on the optical track at the side of the film. The excellent Neighbours is an example of this. Pen Point Percussion touches on the technique.
Here's his NFB page.
posted by chococat at 1:28 PM on December 7, 2009

"predates Brakhage by decades"

His film making career precedes that of Brakhage by single decade, actually. Brakhage made his first film at the age of 19.

And I just like Brakhage's stuff better.
posted by idiopath at 4:41 PM on December 7, 2009

Ya...not saying McLaren was better or more important or anything (it's fun to like lots of different things!); just giving an alternate example of the same technique that was done, you know, earlier:

-Born Robert Sanders in Kansas City, Missouri on January 14, 1933, Brakhage...completed his first film, Interim, at the age of 19 [1952.]
-[McLaren's] earliest extant film, Seven Till Five (1933), a "day in the life of an art school", was clearly influenced by Eisenstein and displays a strongly formalist attitude.

Sorry, I missed decades by a year. But I was thinking more 1960's vs. 1940's
posted by chococat at 7:27 PM on December 7, 2009

Actually, the most important point of influence for the ending of Irma Vep is Isidore Isou's 1951 film Venom and Eternity, which was also a major influence on Brakhage. You can see evidence of this scratching technique at 1:37 in this trailer, and at around 4:39 in this longer review/clip, which also mentions the Irma Vep connection. (The complete film is available at archive.org and on Kino's Avant-Garde 2 DVD.)

Isou was the founder of the Lettrist movement, which Assayas has written and spoken quite a bit about - I once saw Assayas on a panel discussing a film by Lettrist member/associate Guy Debord. The Irma Vep-Venom and Eternity connection is also mentioned here, here, here and here.
posted by Awkward Philip at 8:42 PM on December 10, 2009 [1 favorite]