With both versions of Irma Vep,Assayas looks tothe ruptures between the production processes and moviemaking cultures of then and now to create comedy and tragedy about what it means to want to continue the fight, the folly, that is making movies, continuously posing that vital and unanswerable question—“What is cinema?”—in order to recalibrate our perception of what it could be and what it’s not amid such endless reinvention and recontextualization.