![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I don't think I've even mentioned this here yet due to being busy with other things, but I have agreed to give a lecture in Bradford on 26 May to mark World Dracula Day. As it's the 125th anniversary of the publication of Stoker's novel, I'm going to lean into the theme and talk about how Stoker himself uses temporal resonances in the novel, and then about how people have responded to it since its publication in 25-year snap-shots, and how they have made use of round-number anniversaries in their own right. It's something I should be on pretty solid ground with, between my knowledge of vampire film and literature and all the thinking I've done about anniversaries and how they work in the context of my work on Augustus.
Anyway, that's all by way of a preamble to explain why I spent an hour and a half of my life watching ( this shonky low-budget film on Saturday night )
Finally, as soon as I saw pages from an antiquarian vampire tome bearing what looked a lot like Latin writing being flicked through in front of the camera, I of course hit the print screen button. I expected to discover it was something like lorem ipsum, and functionally it kind of was - but weirder...
Obviously the first word, and probably the only word most people will catch when watching the film normally, is 'Nosferatu'. After that, someone seems to have stuck in a garbled version of 'mens( )sana in corpo(re sano)' ('a healthy mind in a healthy body'). But then came the real surprise - most of the rest of the text was lorem-ipsumified snippets from Augustus' Res Gestae. You can make out 'A. Hirti{b}o consulibus, con{w}sula{j}rem locum [...] sententiae' (RG 1), '{i}quos ex se{ }natus' (RG 4) and 'in libertatem vindicavi' (RG 1 again). There are other bits in between them, but I think that's enough to show that the Res Gestae is the basic source text here - especially the first and longest snippet with the very distinctive 'Hirti{b}o' in it. I'm still pretty sure it's basically the output of an automated lorem ipsum generator which happens to have the Res Gestae in its database, but nonetheless it was fun to come across it. I expected this film to be of interest as a reception of Dracula, but I didn't anticipate bonus Augustan receptions along the way.
Anyway, that's all by way of a preamble to explain why I spent an hour and a half of my life watching ( this shonky low-budget film on Saturday night )
Finally, as soon as I saw pages from an antiquarian vampire tome bearing what looked a lot like Latin writing being flicked through in front of the camera, I of course hit the print screen button. I expected to discover it was something like lorem ipsum, and functionally it kind of was - but weirder...
Obviously the first word, and probably the only word most people will catch when watching the film normally, is 'Nosferatu'. After that, someone seems to have stuck in a garbled version of 'mens( )sana in corpo(re sano)' ('a healthy mind in a healthy body'). But then came the real surprise - most of the rest of the text was lorem-ipsumified snippets from Augustus' Res Gestae. You can make out 'A. Hirti{b}o consulibus, con{w}sula{j}rem locum [...] sententiae' (RG 1), '{i}quos ex se{ }natus' (RG 4) and 'in libertatem vindicavi' (RG 1 again). There are other bits in between them, but I think that's enough to show that the Res Gestae is the basic source text here - especially the first and longest snippet with the very distinctive 'Hirti{b}o' in it. I'm still pretty sure it's basically the output of an automated lorem ipsum generator which happens to have the Res Gestae in its database, but nonetheless it was fun to come across it. I expected this film to be of interest as a reception of Dracula, but I didn't anticipate bonus Augustan receptions along the way.
