In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

Gothmas 2019: Dracula by the Northern Ballet

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 17:47:56 GMT

lady_lugosi1313 and I booked our tickets for the Northern Ballet's Dracula some six months before the actual performance, because we had both enjoyed it so much when they last did it in 2014 (LJ / DW).

( Ballet as a medium for Dracula )

( Eroticism and Dracula as a liberator )

( Similarities and differences compared to last time )

( The ending )

Now that I have seen this version of Dracula for a second time, it's confirmed the provisional opinion I had of it beforehand - that it is the second best adaptation of Dracula I've ever seen, with only Hammer's cycle of Dracula films above it. As regular readers will realise, I have seen a lot of Dracula adaptations, and Hammer's will always remain the ultimate interpretations to me - so that's the highest praise I can possibly give. This time, the performance we saw was filmed and transmitted live to various cinemas around the country, and I am really hope that also means it might be made available on DVD at some point, as I would love so much to be able to watch it again. And, since the casts changed from performance to performance during its run, I will record here that ours was as follows:

Dracula: Javier Torres
Old Dracula: Riku Ito
Mina: Abigail Prudames
Lucy: Antoinette Brooks-Daw
Jonathan: Lorenzo Trossello
Renfield: Kevin Poeung
Dr Van Helsing: Ashley Dixon
Dr Seward: Joseph Taylor
Arthur: Matthew Koon
The Brides: Rachael Gillespie, Sarah Chun and Minju Kang

Well done and thank you so much to all of them!

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6. The Red Shoes (1948), dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Sun, 28 Jul 2019 17:06:51 GMT

Life is genuinely a bit quieter for me at the moment than it has been for a while, and (touch wood) should stay that way until the end of August, so I'm taking the opportunity to try to get back on top of things a bit. I've been tidying and cleaning my house so far today, and now turn my attention to my unblogged film list - not that I am really likely to make great inroads into it today, given that I am probably going out to see another film this evening. ladylugosi1313 will appreciate just how far I am going back to review this one, although luckily I did take some notes on it at the time, so I have at least something of a starting point.

Anyway, this is a classic and very famous Powell and Pressburger film which centres around the lives and loves of a ballet company engaged in putting on an adaptation of 'The Red Shoes' by Hans Christian Anderson. The story tells of a young girl who yearns for a pair of beautiful red shoes, but when she acquires them through the manipulative machinations of the evil shoemaker, she finds that they compel her to dance on and on until she dies. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the film, we are treated to an amazing sequence, probably some 15-20 minutes long, which is just the company performing the ballet. The relevant cast members were all actual professional dancers, so it is essentially a filmed version of an actual ballet performance, but enhanced also by the potential of what film allows them to do. This ranges from the relatively simple and obvious business of close-ups and camera tracking, which a static audience in a real theatre can't benefit from, to special effects such as the girl seeing a vision of herself already dancing in the shoes when she peers in to the shop window to wonder over them, and then her dancing through fantastical landscapes using an early version of what's now green-screen when she is first experiencing the joy of having acquired them.

Around this, the story of the ballet company echoes the narrative of feeling compelled to dance with tragic consequences in a real-world setting. The lead role in the ballet is played by Vicky Page, who is just emerging into the ballet world as a new rising star, and feels a strong vocational compulsion within herself to make her way in the profession and be the best dancer she can be. This is externally personified by Boris Lermontov, the ballet company's director, who takes her as his protégé and demands of her to devote her entire life to dancing. But meanwhile she also falls in love with the company's composer, Julian Custer, and runs off to marry him - only to discover and admit to a jealous Boris some months later that his career as a composer has taken over, and she has barely danced since their marriage. It is tragic and terrible and very emotively played, but it does essentially boil down to a very gendered story about how a woman can't have both love and career success. Even worse, because Vicky's own internal conflict about this is externally personified into the two men, it is largely framed as a conflict between them within which she has no real agency. Vicky's response is thus to run in tears from the theatre, horribly compelled by the red shoes she is wearing, and jump from a terrace into the path of an oncoming train. That is, two men fight over a woman until she breaks.

It was a visually very beautiful film, beyond the ballet scenes I've already mentioned. The colour was over-saturated, but with a taupe tint - probably largely because that was what they could achieve using still quite early colour technology, but it looked amazing anyway, with the red shoes themselves incredibly rich. Some of the cinematography also reminded me of Fellini's films - especially shots of people looking smallish and isolated in large, splendid rooms which accentuated their fragility. Some of the dialogue struck me the same way, too. Fellini's characters often make very simple, even banal, statements which acquire a lot of their meaning from context, and these characters quite often did the same. Fellini was in his late 20s and just getting started in the film industry at this time, so maybe he saw it and picked up some ideas?

Anyway, very beautiful and effective overall, as long as you can look around the inherently rather misogynistic central conceit.

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The International Vampire Film and Arts Festival, Highgate

Sat, 27 Jul 2019 17:13:12 GMT

Two weeks ago, I attended IVFAF, a vampire festival combining an academic conference, a creative congress (i.e. authors talking about their work), a film festival, a number of theatrical performances, a Bram Stoker walk, a cabaret and a ball all into one glorious five-day event. I've been following their activities on Twitter / FB for a while, but their last three events had been in Romania and at times of year when I already had a lot on. This one, though, came to the Highgate area of London, and I decided it was worth devoting a week of summer holiday time to going along.

Back in April, I went to a different two-day conference marking the bicentenary of John Polidori's 'The Vampyre', which also took place in Highgate (though at a different main venue). I never wrote it up here, though I did upload an album of pictures intending to use them as the basis for a never-written entry, mainly of our visit to Highgate cemetery complete with a few screencaps from Taste the Blood of Dracula, which used it as a location. I went along to that conference purely out of interest as a listener, but by the end of it I'd realised that specialists in Gothic literature aren't always in the best position to unpick 'The Vampyre's engagement with Classical antiquity, and indeed that that engagement was considerably deeper and richer than I'd previously realised.

IVFAF 2019 also took the bicentenary of 'The Vampyre' as one of its themes (along with the Highgate Vampire craze and Hammer's vampire films), and I registered for it from my academic email address, which prompted the organiser to ask whether I was planning to offer a paper. Fresh from the recent Polidori conference, I said yes, I probably would, and indeed re-read both Polidori's story and Byron's related Fragment and made some notes on them. But then as the abstract deadline drew closer I looked more soberly at the other tasks I had to do during the same period, and realised that it probably wouldn't actually be a very good idea, so I didn't submit one. I decided I would just go along in the same spirit as I had to the Polidori conference, to enjoy other people's papers and the films, shows, walks and partying around them. Except that then, about three weeks before the conference, I got another slightly plaintive note from the organiser saying that he was holding a slot for me on the programme, and could I send in my abstract? And it turned out I couldn't resist this, so I had yet another look at my calendar, identified three days I could claw out to write the paper after all, and knocked an abstract together. So that is how I turned what was supposed to be a week's holiday into three days of intensive paper preparation followed by travelling down to London and delivering it.

It was fine, though. I had been right in the first place that there was a good paper's worth of things to say about how both Byron and Polidori's stories engaged with Classical antiquity, was able to compile it into a perfectly respectable paper in three days, and indeed managed to identify some quite specific source material for each of them which I don't think has been fully explored before. So it was all in the bag by the end of the Monday, leaving plenty of time for me to relax, travel down to London and settle into my aparthotel on the Tuesday. I even found time that evening (equipped with advice from a few FB friends) to get my nails done in suitably vampiric style in a local nail bar, ready for the week ahead.

My paper was scheduled for the first day, which was nice as it meant I could get the worky bit over and done with and then enjoy the rest of the festival. I made sure to attire myself appropriately, and ( did my thing )

The ( other papers were good to listen to too )

I didn't spend so much time in the creative congress, which was largely scheduled in parallel with the academic conference, but I mean you might as well sit and listen to Kim Newman being interview by Stephen Jones (editor of The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories in which Kim's first Anno Dracula story appeared) if you've got no other pressing commitments.

The Bram Stoker walk ( was another highlight )

DracSoc chair Julia also attended the academic conference, while additional members Adrian and Pat joined us at various points in the evenings for dinners, shows and films. We saw two productions by the Don't Go In The Cellar theatre company: 'Sherlock Holmes versus The Sussex Vampire' (which also included versions of The Creeping Man and The Devil's Foot) and 'Dracula's Ghost', in which a very pale-faced lawyer named Mr Leech (whose true identity I'm sure you can guess) periodically visits the widowed Mrs Bram Stoker, interspersed with relating the story of his life. The first was done as a one-man show (as are most DGITC productions), with the audience cast as criminals in Sherlock's memory palace, and worked pretty well, but we felt that Sherlock as a character did struggle a bit without other characters to be clever at. The second was an absolute cracker, though. The inclusion of a second actor on stage playing Mrs Stoker probably helped, but it was basically a whirlwind tour through more or less every possible vampire and Dracula-related story you can think of, all incorporated into and referenced within Mr Leech's life story. My favourite moments were a mention of D.D. Denham (Dracula's alias in The Satanic Rites of Dracula) and a scene in which he meets and speaks with Kali - partly because this references one of the very unmade Hammer Dracula films we'd heard Kieran talking about the previous day, but also because it was just done so effectively, by the actor who'd also been playing Mrs Stoker putting masks on both her face and the back of her head, and undulating her arms in a very divine and otherworldly manner.

I didn't make it to any of the new shorts and feature films which were screened during the days, again because of clashes with the academic conference and Stoker walk, but I did get to ( three evening showings of vampire classics )

Finally (though not chronologically as it took place on the Friday - but the grand climax of the festival anyway), there was the ( combined cabaret night and ball at the Birdcage in Camden, some of which was NSFW )

Plans are afoot already for next year's IVFAF, quite possibly to be in Santa Cruz with a Lost Boys theme. I'm not sure I'll make that, but having the chance to go this year was definitely a good thing, and now I even have another Classical vampires paper to maybe think about writing up properly some time soon. Dracula first, though...

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2. The Favourite (2018), dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 17:55:34 GMT

‘Kay, so I’m on a train to London, and I’m going to try to use the time to catch up with some film reviews. We’re going back to January for this one, which I saw with glitzfrau at the Hyde Park Picture House. Anyway, I probably don’t need to say a great deal about it, given that everyone in the world has seen this one, and indeed that it has won multiple awards including an Oscar since.

Anyway, it’s great. It is a story all about women maximising the power available to them in a male-dominated world complete with explicit lesbianism, and everything about the production at every level is superbly well-executed. Olivia Colman deserved her Oscar for how well she acted having had a stroke alone. The moment we saw her, before anyone said or did anything, I recognise straight away what was supposed to have happened. The lighting was also brilliant – one of the most natural-looking depictions of candle-lit interiors I have ever seen, which are very hard to do on film. And Rachel Weisz looked so amazing in her breeches during the shooting scenes, that was worth the entrance price on its own.

As a historian, though, I think the thing I’ll appreciate it for most long-term was its overt creative anachronism, as seen in e.g. many of the clothes, the awesomely-funny dance-off, the music (Baroque Greatest Hits but with a modern twist), etc. No production is ever going to be 100% historically accurate – only actual history was ever that – and attempting to do so can ham-string a good story that would otherwise resonate strongly with its modern audience. So lampshading it by making it clear that for all the truthiness, this isn’t actually the ‘truth’ seems like a good solution. Maybe there’s a general drift in that direction in the creative industries at the moment? It’s certainly what the TV series Britannia has been doing for example. Anyway, I like it and I hope the immense success of this film will encourage more in the same vein.

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35. Drakula İstanbul'da (1953), dir. Mehmet Muhtar

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 21:59:00 GMT

In 1928, an unauthorised Turkish version of Stoker's Dracula was published. Like Makt Myrkranna a generation earlier, it's a free adaptation rather than a translation. For example, it bears the title Kazıklı Voyvoda (Impaler Voivode), which is what the Ottomans called the historical Vlad Dracula, includes dialogue spelling out explicitly that he is the exact same person (rather than hinting allusively at the idea like Stoker), and shifts the post-Transylvania action to Istanbul rather than London. This film is based on that book, but adds its own layer of adaptation as well by updating it to the 1950s. There's a pretty good page explaining all about it here (annoying auto-playing video, but you can kill it and read a transcript underneath instead), and if you're lucky enough to speak Turkish, the original film is here.

Unfortunately, I am not, so I had to watch this version instead, which a) is a very shonky print indeed, b) has had the original sound-track completely overwritten by discordant organ music throughout (except for one dancing scene) and c) has subtitles which were clearly generated with the help of automatic translation software. Of these flaws, it's the shonkiness of the print that's really irritating. It meant I struggled to tell what was going on half the time, and certainly couldn't appreciate what seems (from a quick glance at the Turkish-language version linked above) to have been pretty decent camera-work. All I can really say is that possibly some effects were quite surreal and phantasmagorical and some shots nicely composed, but I'm not 100% sure. The subtitles, by contrast, were absolutely charming. I had fun counting the multiple different ways in which they spelt 'Dracula' - at least eight by my reckoning, although the only ones I can remember now are Dracula, Drakula, Drukala, Dragula, Draqula and Draquelle. I was also highly amused when the moment came for him to proclaim his past as the legendary Impaler - or, as the subtitles had it, the Poker! But the best moment of all was when our 1950s Dracula asked Azim (the Jonathan Harker character) to write three emails to his friends because the postal service was so bad. Brilliant.

These frustrations and sillinesses aside, it was a fascinating adaptation to watch. Despite being in some ways two good hearty steps (novel adaptation, then film) away from Stoker, it actually retains a surprising amount of detail from the original, and more than some films which claim to be faithful adaptations. For example, it includes scenes of Dracula crawling down the wall of his castle, Azim hitting him on the forehead with a shovel and Sadan (the Lucy character) saying she is floating in green water and that it feels both sweet and bitter when Dracula bites her. The first two of those are rare in film adaptations, and I don't think I've ever seen another one which retains Lucy's description. Some of the unexplored corners of Stoker's novel also get filled in as well. I particularly appreciated the landlady in Bistritz adding weight to her pleas to Azim not to go to Dracula's castle by explaining that her son didn't listen to such warnings a year ago and is now dead. I've always wanted to know what experiences she and her husband have had before Jonathan Harker arrives which cause them to react so strongly when they hear where he is going, and I think the producers of this film (or the author of the novel it's based on?) were right to identify this as one of the implied possibilities.

Meanwhile, there are all sorts of intriguing little changes, too - some obviously for pragmatic reasons, some for more dramatic ones. Pragmatic changes include just the one vampire bride (a popular budget-saving measure) and no Demeter (ditto). Dracula does seem to arrive into Istanbul by boat, but this is conveyed simply by Guzin (Mina) and Sadan (Lucy) meeting people carrying boxes from Romania up from the shore. Sadan's mother is included in the story (not often the case, and probably reflecting the strength of Turkish family structures) and dies in similar circumstances to Stoker's original, but there's no wolf crashing through the window (again for obvious budgetary reasons). And garlic entirely takes the place of crosses, as is appropriate for a non-Christian context and as Zinda Laash (LJ / DW) also did for the same reasons (though additionally ditching the garlic and the stakes).

Less obviously pragmatic / logistical changes include Dracula having a servant in his castle, who conveys some of what were his lines in the original novel: for example the warning to Azim not to fall asleep anywhere except his bedroom and the library. This I like - I've always been quite invested in the idea of Dracula having human servants in his castle, as it demonstrates his power to bend people to his will and the extent of his domination over the local populace. He also seems to have some additional supernatural powers which don't come from Stoker - specifically the ability to materialise out of nowhere (though Stoker's Dracula can solidify from mist into human form) and to make a piano play ghostly music using nothing but the power of his will.

Guzin (Mina)'s characterisation is also quite significantly changed - or at least, developed quite considerably along its logical trajectory. Far from being a school-teacher (only ever an off-page role for Mina anyway), she is a show-girl, and generally very much the independent, modern 1950s woman. In one scene, she teases her husband by telling him that she is knitting something for 'another stud' who will visit them in eight months' time. What she means, of course, is that she is pregnant, but he is utterly oblivious, and I don't think ever cottons on until after the end of the main story. Her profession is also used quite deliberately for titillating belly-dancing sequences, as are scenes of her in the bath. I suspect this material would have seemed quite saucy anywhere when this film was made, let alone Turkey specifically, but presumably it was done in the expectation of boosting box-office takings. Certainly, it's another point of connection with Zinda Laash, which gives Dracula's vampire bride a seduction-dance and includes scenes of dances in the local bar as well. What I don't know is whether Turkish cinema in this period had as strong a tradition as Pakistani and Indian cinema of more-or-less obligatory dance sequences. In any case, here it all paves the way for an excellent climactic scene where Dracula traps her in the theatre where she works, commands music out of the piano and makes her dance just for him - now uncannily like The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula (LJ / DW), in which he does just the same to the dancer Lakshmi.

Overall verdict - a very enjoyable version which was probably better in its original form that I could appreciate from the version I saw (but then again gained a lot from its terrible subtitles!). I'd definitely like to see this in a better-quality print, and I also really want to read the novel it's based on. An English translation actually came out only a few months ago, but seems to have been released as a print book only in the USA, which is a bit annoying and the main factor that has stopped me actually buying it so far. I'll definitely get to it at some point, though.

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