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By PAUL BRENNER
Guy Maddin continues his
love affair with silent film stylistics but adds
dance to his thimble rigger's palette in "Dracula:
Pages From A Virgin's Diary." Originally shown on
the CBC, the film is now available on DVD from
Zeitgiest Video.
Maddin enlists the services of the Royal Winnipeg
Ballet and adapts their production of Mark
Godden's "Dracula." Ladled with the strident
strains of Mahler (Maddin in his commentary
remarks states that he spat on Mahler's grave and
then danced on it), the music and choreography is
refracted through Maddin's frenzied early cinema
mania. The result is a one-of-a-kind
phantasmagoria of eccentric choreography,
proscenium theatricality, Eisensteinian shock-cut
editing, and Jean Epstein silent cinema
avant-garde.
The film retreats (or advances) from the lollipop
colors of "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs" and is shot
in a luminous black-and-white with thematically
tinted sequences, punctuated by a loving nod to
Edison's primitive hand-coloring with viciously
red blood, sickly green paper money, and glowing
golden coins. Maddin's film is a much more
perverted, passionate, and dreamy vampire epic
than Stoker's novel but the mood of the piece is
much closer to the source than the Browning,
Coppola, and Murnau versions (the only source that
equals Maddin's in mood is Dreyer's austere
"Vampyr").
Maddin uses silent film titling to not only link
the film to the Stoker source material but uses
the archaic language to create an otherworldly
atmosphere ("She's filled herself with polluted
blood," "We'll root him out. The vampire has the
brain of a child," and "Cuckold's counterblow" --
though the last intertitle is a Maddin original).
Maddin clearly dislikes Stoker's Victorian
emphasis on Woman as the evil source of passion
and the emphasis of racial purity and fear of The
Other. Rather than reconstitute these attitudes as
horror, Maddin brings them to the foreground with
his circus time hallucinatory camerawork and
having Dracula played by the Asian dancer Zhang
Wei-Qiang. As the film unfolds, the quaintness and
danger of Stoker's themes become as artificial as
the moody tinting and the Crayola blood. With
Godden's choreography to support him, Maddin
burrows within the essence of "Dracula" while at
the same instant exposing the dastardly Victorian
worldview and leaving it flapping in the wind.
Besides, what other version of "Dracula" ends with
Van Helsing stashing a woman's undergarment under
his vest?
Maddin is on hand to provide a wry audio
commentary. Also offered is a Canadian news
segment on the making of the film, a video piece
on the construction of the sets, radio interviews
with Maddin and producer Vonnie Von Helmolt, and a
photo gallery. |
