The Public Humanities Hub and UBC Connects at Robson Square are presenting a free screening of Olivier Assayas’ meta-cinematic masterpiece, Irma Vep (France, 1996) on Thursday, September 15. The screening will be accompanied by a talk and discussion led by Assistant Professor Dr. Mila Zuo, whose new book, Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke University Press, 2022), looks at how the charisma of Asian women film stars, including Cheung, shifts when placed in a transnational context. The event, which will be hosted by Dr. Danielle Wong, is part of the Cinema Thinks The World project, a series of 12 screenings and discussions held between UBC and the Cinematheque.
About Irma Vep:
Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough stars a magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself: a Hong Kong action movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic 1915 crime serial Les vampires. What she finds is a behind-the-scenes tangle of barely controlled chaos as egos clash, romantic attractions simmer, and an obsessive director (a cannily cast Jean-Pierre Léaud) drives himself to the brink to realize his vision. Blending blasts of silent cinema, martial arts flicks, and the music of Sonic Youth and Ali Farka Touré into a hallucinatory swirl of postmodern cool, Assayas composes a witty reflection on the nineties French film industry and the eternal tension between art and commercial entertainment.
About Dr. Mila Zuo:
Dr. Mila Zuo is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC. Her research areas include transnational Asian cinemas; film-philosophy; abject epistemologies; star studies; digital and new media; and critical theories of gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity. Her book Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke University Press, 2022) focuses on the affective racialization of Chinese women film stars, demonstrating the ways which vulgar, flavourful beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty.
