Tales from the crypt
Famed Winnipeg director Guy Maddin takes a stab at the last century’s most famous monster
TELEVISION PREVIEW
DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN’S DIARY
Opening Night
Starring Zhang Wei-Qiang, Tara Birtwhistle, CindyMarie Small and David Moroni
Directed by Guy Maddin
Thursday, February 28
CBC-TV
"Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?"
– Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray in Dracula (1897)
What’s this? Polyandrous yearnings amongst the fair maidens in Victorian England? What else would you expect to capture Guy Maddin's attention if you put the story of the world’s most famous neck-biter in his hands?
The famed Winnipeg director is known for films that revel in sexual deviance – titles that include Tales From the Gimli Hospital, Archangel, Careful and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs – so it’s no surprise that given the chance to direct a version of Dracula, Maddin would seize the opportunity to examine the gothic connection between sex and death, not to mention all the other ritualized eroticism in Bram Stoker’s novel. What’s odd, though, even by Maddin's standards, is that the film, entitled Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, was produced for CBC-TV. And not only that, it's an adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s (RWB) production of Dracula, commissioned by the network's performing arts program, Opening Night.
Initially, Maddin's involvement in the television dance film seems strange, if only because his cinematic style is rooted in melodrama, Soviet montage and other characteristics of the silent film era. It’s a way of making films that, until recently, led him to be regarded as a cult figure in Canada, even while he enjoyed widespread critical acclaim elsewhere. Nevertheless, with his recent short film, The Heart of the World, he finally attracted the attention of the cultural establishment at home, winning a Genie Award for the six-minute short that wowed audiences across the country.
So maybe it was the possibility of expanding his growing Canadian audience even further that led him to this project with the RWB and CBC, but whatever it was, it certainly got his juices flowing again after a four-year hiatus from feature films. When interviewed, Maddin speaks fervently about smashing the proscenium arch of the theatre to make this an exercise in pure cinema – all the while cracking wise about the challenges of bringing a theatrical work to the screen.
"You can always tell when a play has been... ‘opened up’ for film, because it still just reeks of a play being performed outside in a hair-flapping breeze," he says. "So you might as well just stay on the stage at that point, but I thought this still had a chance to at least look like a theatrical movie as opposed to a stage with dancers on it.
"My goal was to shoot it like a movie, with close-ups, medium shots, wide shots, back to close-ups, and actually stressing the face more. And it turns out that most of these ballet dancers are fine melodramatic performers – facially as well as bodily. I was happy to show their faces to help tell the story. Basically, I just shot it like an episode of Kojak, but with dancing."
This self-deprecating facetiousness is typical of much of Maddin’s verbal patter, and not only is it a testament to his prodigious wit, it also demonstrates why he gets away with the things he does. By being charming, funny and a great raconteur, Maddin is capable of dazzling both his collaborators and his audience, hypnotizing them as only the best, most self-assured illusionists can.
He explains that he convinced the dancers to allow him onstage with them in order to capture the entire scope of Mark Godden’s choreography – but once he was up there, he took the production into his own capable hands.
"I just went right up onstage and (filmed) them dancing right around and among us... and you could understand the narrative elements of the story a lot. This is what the choreographers and the dancers were excited to possibly have captured. Of course, they also hate it when you come up close. It dismembers them, you know. Oh, they love the close-ups... and they deserve them – it’s just that all the dance work gets omitted if it’s just head shots....
"So, right away, realizing that I wasn’t going to please the performers, who were all very sweet – I was disappointed there weren’t any divas among them – I just decided to plunge ahead and then dodge them at the première."
While he may have to escape the wrath of his performers, Maddin’s audience certainly won’t be disappointed. He says he mostly trimmed from the RWB production, but he also re-introduced a few elements that seemed crucial to the story, one being the character of Dracula’s supplicant Renfield, played with expressionistic mania by Maddin regular Brent Neale (Careful).
"To me, Renfield is very important if Dracula is sort of an incarnation of of sexual desire," says Maddin, who also notes that the women in the story must sleepwalk in the early stages of their sexual desire to communicate with the men, while male vampires get to penetrate women as a way of consummating their desires.
"That places Renfield where I’ve always identified myself," continues Maddin. "Alone in a room with a few substitutes for women, namely bugs and other tiny souls...."
No wonder, then, that Maddin’s version has the men all behaving monstrously – much more so than Dracula ever does. He says that Stoker’s novel characterizes the men as being very self-righteous, but he also suggests that they’re in a battle for someone’s heart, so why would they be nice?
Due to the fact that Stoker's male characters regard the sexual awakenings of the women around them only very dimly, Maddin says that Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary is about the way men punish all women who won't direct their sexual desires toward them.
"I thought it was intriguing, once I read the book, that it seemed to be a profile of Van Helsing, the biggest bitter virgin of them all, whose job seems not to cleanse England of vampires, but to make sure that younger men just never got laid either. If he could behead and remove the hearts of all the women, and convince these boys that they’re big sluts, he could at least have plenty of company in his misery. They could all go down to the Dutch Blue Balls pub in Westminster together."
Maddin sinks his teeth into 100 years of Dracula
Given that Guy Maddin, director of Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, is a self-confessed film history buff, we asked him to tell us about his five favourite cinematic neck-biters of all time. While Maddin claims that he had an aversion to Dracula since he was a child, he nevertheless quite easily came up with several variations on the theme that really suck – so to speak.
· "I like Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (Germany, 1932) the best. That one avoids all the clichés and is incomprehensible – and seems mysterious as a result. It’s not too long, so its incomprehensibility doesn’t defeat me... and it’s so decayed that it seems to come from the late 19th century somehow....
· "I finally watched Bela’s version of Dracula (U.S., 1931) just a year ago, with the Philip Glass score added.... I know it’s blasphemous to say because he’s added a score to a movie that’s 70 years old, but I like it more with the Glass score (performed by Kronos Quartet). It really drives an insanely slow-moving thing and makes the slowness nightmarish. It’s like one of those swimming-in-oatmeal dreams or something.
· "Although it disappointed me a bit as an adult, the first Christopher Lee one, I guess, Horror of Dracula (Great Britain, 1958) – excellent death scene at the end.
· "Nosferatu – eine Symphonie des Grauens (Germany, 1922) and Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Germany, 1979): In stills, of course, Klaus Kinski looks pretty good, and Max Schreck, but those movies don’t thrill me as much....
· "I’m still waiting to see Deafula (U.S., 1974), apparently an all sign-language version, and I still haven’t seen Blacula (U.S., 1972), so maybe Roosevelt Brown or Rosie Greer or whoever played Blacula will be on there. I don’t know who it was – some former NFLer probably...." |
