Monitor: Watch

Bloodlust and Ballet

Words: Anthony Kaufman

With its sublimated sexual desire, Gothic baroque style and early cinema sources, you'd think Canadian cultist Guy Maddin (Careful, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) would have tackled a version of Dracula a lot sooner. Like his recent celebrated short The Heart of the World, a breathtaking Eisenstein-ian feverdream, Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, Maddin's first feature in seven years, recalls early film masterworks, such as Nosferatu (1922) and Vampyr (1932). Silent, black-and-white (with a few splashes of blood red) and shot on digital video, Super 8 and Super 16 stocks, the TV movie uses subtitles, tinting, fogging, double exposures and Vaseline-blurred edges to evoke an expressionistic and melodramatic reverie of repression ("Unclean!") and lust ("Fleshpots!"). Commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Maddin's Dracula is also (get this) a dance film, adapted from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production of the Bram Stoker classic. But with Maddin's maddeningly stylized mise-en-scene, multi-layered imagery and over-the-top silent screen acting, the balletic moves of his performers are the subtlest thing about it. Seventy-five-minute silent dance films aren't exactly ideal distribution fodder, but Zeitgeist Films, which has released a number of Maddin's work, has put its faith in the Winnipeg maven once again. Look for it in 2003.