Jeanne Roques (23 February 1889 – 11 December 1957), known professionally as Musidora, was a French actress, film director, screenwriter, playwright and novelist. A major figure of French silent cinema, she became internationally known for portraying Irma Vep in Louis Feuillade's serial Les Vampires (1915–1916), and Diana Monti in Judex (1917).
Musidora was one of the earliest "vamps" in cinema, and was later embraced by surrealist writers and filmmakers as a cultural icon. She was also among the first women to direct films, also screenwriting and producing several features in the 1910s and 1920s.
Jeanne Roques was born in Paris to the music composer and theorist of socialism Jacques Roques (1852–1931) and the painter and feminist Adèle Clémence Porchez (1855–1928), who instilled in her a love of literature. Her paternal grandmother was of Spanish descent. She began her career at an early age, encouraged by her mother. She wrote her first novel at the age of fifteen, she painted and sculpted, attending Emmanuel Frémiet's school for three years.
Jeanne adopted the stage name "Musidora" (Greek for "gift of the muses"), after the heroine in Théophile Gautier's novel Fortunio, and began performing in cabarets, music halls, revues and plays in Paris in 1910, gaining recognition in Aristide Bruant's play La Loupiotte, where she played the part of La Môme Liquette (The Shirt Chick). Her first success was two years later at the Bataclan theatre, in the revue Ça grise, where she shared the stage with Colette, who became a lifelong friend. Musidora also performed in cabarets and on the stages of the l'Odéon and Châtelet theatres, and appeared in revues at the Folies Bergère and Bataclan theatre from 1912 to 1914, singing, dancing (especially tango), comic acting, sometimes cross-dressing.
After a few appearances in short films, almost all of which have been lost, she made her film debut in Les Misères de l'aiguille (Miseries of the Needle) (1914), a feminist social drama produced by the socialist film collective Le Cinéma du Peuple and directed by Raphaël Clamour, one of her colleagues at the Théâtre du Châtelet. The film tells the story of a seamstress who, after the death of her husband, attempts suicide with her child to escape poverty. The film highlights the problems of urban women of the French working-class.
After signing a contract with Gaumont, she appeared in a handful of films for Gaston Ravel in 1914. The film director Louis Feuillade had seen her perform as a tango dancer in La Revue Galante at the Folies Bergère and they began a professional collaboration, with her first major roles coming in his adaptation of François Coppée's play Severo Torelli, and in Le Calvaire. She was then one of the many actresses Feuillade employed in patriotic productions and vaudevilles. She also made several films with Gaumont's in-house directors, who were all pulled from their work by war mobilisation. Historical dramas, slapstick comedies, patriotic films, and sentimental scenes followed one another from 1914 to 1917.
Stardom – Les Vampires and Judex
In late 1915, having returned to civilian life, Louis Feuillade offered her the role of Irma Vep (an anagram of "vampire"), a cabaret singer, in Les Vampires (The Vampires). (The serial was not about vampires, but about a criminal secret society, inspired by the exploits of the real-life Bonnot Gang.) Irma Vep plays a leading role in the Vampires' crimes, and is a master of disguise. In the third episode, Musidora appears dressed for burgling, clad in a tight black silken hooded bodysuit, sometimes masked. She also appears in other episodes disguised as a maid, a typist, a sailor, a viscount, and a telephone operator, and spends two episodes under the hypnotic control of Moreno, a rival criminal, who makes her his mistress and induces her to assassinate the Grand Vampire. In another episode, she escapes captivity and conceals herself under a steam train: Musidora did her own stunts, hiding beneath the moving train, dropping off and lying between the rails as it moved away.
Musidora said later, "In the stunning VAMPIRES, I introduced the most discreet luxury. The black tight bodysuit had been worn before me by Josette Andriot, but it had been made of decent cotton. The micromesh silk of my suit would for a long time set astir the youth of 1916." Her biographer, Patrick Cazals, considers the scenes in which Musidora appears in her black silken bodysuit to be among the most erotic ones in the first quarter century of cinema. In Annette Förster's analysis, "film historic and feminist accounts treat the figure of Irma Vep in the black bodysuit as an embodiment of eroticism, evil, criminality, sexual difference, ambiguity, mobility, and silent film-experience."
The series was an immediate success with French cinema-goers and ran in ten installments until 1916. As a criminal antiheroine and femme fatale, Irma Vep was an immediate sensation; the role brought Musidora international fame and established Irma Vep as an enduring figure in silent cinema. The strange character enjoyed great popular success and Musidora was admired by members of the Surrealist movement, who later made her one of their poetic emblems. Her heavily stylised appearance, with her dark eyes heavily lined with kohl, her pale skin, her dramatic makeup, and her exotic wardrobe, contributed to Musidora becoming one of the most recognisable stars of French silent cinema. Her vamp persona was popularised in the United States by actress Theda Bara at about the same time.
After the Les Vampires serial, Musidora starred as the criminal adventuress Diana Monti in Judex, another popular Feuillade serial filmed in 1916 but delayed for release until 1917. Diana Monti is even more seductive and wicked than Irma Vep. Disguised as the governess Marie Verdier, she attempts to seduce the banker Favraux, and tries throughout the series to seize his fortune.
In the fifth episode, Diana Monti escapes capture by removing her outer clothes to reveal a black bathing suit, in which she dives into water and swims away. A contemporary reviewer wrote admiringly, "Miss Musidora, who has to flee in great haste, plunges into the river in such a marvellous way, that one forgets the blackness of her soul for the moment." Judex was an even greater popular success than Les Vampires, and confirmed her position as a French film star or vedette.
By the time her contract with Gaumont expired in 1917, she had appeared in more than forty dramas and farces, and had become one of the stars of French silent film.
She subsequently acted in films directed by André Hugon: Les Chacals (The Jackals) (1917), Johannès, fils de Johannès (Johannes, Son of Johannes) (1918), and Mam'zelle Chiffon (1918); by Gaston Ravel: La Geôle (The Jail) (1918); by Germaine Dulac: La Jeune Fille la plus méritante de France (The Most Deserving Girl in France) (1918); and by Fred LeRoy Granville: Le Berceau de Dieu a.k.a. Les Ombres du passé (Shadows of the Past a.k.a. The Cradle of God) (1926). At the same time, she continued to appear on stage in revues, vaudeville, and melodramas.
André Breton, Louis Aragon, and the other founders of the Surrealist movement were avid viewers of Feuillade's serial films, particularly Les Vampires. Though not intended to be avant-garde, Les Vampires and Judex were lauded by Aragon and Breton in the 1920s for the films' elements of surprise, fantasy/science fiction, unexpected juxtapositions and visual non sequitors. They adopted Musidora as a cultural icon, and invited her to several of their events.
The worldview that an entire generation forms originates in the cinema, and there is a film that summarises that, a series. An entire generation of young people falls in love with Musidora in LES VAMPIRES.
Breton sent her roses, and the actress attended a Dada evening. He wrote to her:
A few of us have often talked about you and the mediocre future that awaits the French cinema and theatre which has never known who you were. ... It is through Les Vampires that Musidora's portrait is offered, in its final touches, adorned in her tights for the union of love and death, her eye by turns dreamy, sadistic, or passionate. The myth was established through this idealised imagery. Yet beneath the hotel mouse-like swimsuit of arachnid and sublime silk, there was also a woman whom her admirers ignored. Suffering, sensitive, anxious, seeking to express in love, poetry, and struggle, a feeling of the unattainable that this elegant black armour stifled or masked ...