Cuadecuc, vampir

This is truly a film/experience. There is no dialog until the very last and this is in English followed by publicity for the original Franco film in German. To complicate things even more the film was shot in Spain and the title "Cuadecuc" is in Catalan! The sound track is pure genius with little formal music - a part of Wagner's "Ring Cycle" - with the other parts made by impressive sound effects and music derived from them. We see clapboards and behind-the-scenes props everywhere as well as the actors putting on make-up or relaxing after scenes. The audience is in the film, beside it AND outside it in a matter of seconds!

Curtis Stotlar

This has to qualify as one of the strangest movies I have ever seen. Made from behind the scenes footage and out-takes from Jess Franco's 1970 Count Dracula, director Pere Potrabella has created an experimental bizarre-athon. Shot in high-contrast black and white and silent except for minimalistic music and sound effects, and including scenes from the film mixed with actors relaxing behind the scenes, along with some shots of the film crew, this one is a total head scratcher from start to finish. I have no idea what the intention could possibly have been but it did have a strange effect which kept me watching. It was also nice to see rare footage of late enigmatic cult actress Soledad Miranda chilling on set. Basically, this one is not for the weak! Venture at your own peril!

This is an avant-garde experimental documentary about the filming of Jess Franco's Count Dracula. There is no dialogue, only an atmospheric background score and sound effects (except for at the end, when Christopher Lee reads an excerpt from Bram Stoker's novel). The movie is hard to describe; it shows footage of scenes from Count Dracula being filmed, the actors preparing, special effects, and so forth. It is the only footage of Soledad Miranda as the person she was in real life. In one of the film's most magical moments, director Portabella captures the filming of Lucy's staking, including the precious preparatory moments of Soledad's stage makeup being applied and Jack Taylor (who plays the role of Quincy Morris) gathering her up in his arms and placing her inside her casket. Other memorable moments are Christopher Lee goofing off, Soledad smoking in bed while a shot is prepared, and Soledad and Maria Rohm each flirting with the camera at various points. There is some confusion about how the title is written. I have seen it referred to as Vampir-Cuadecuc, Vampyr/Cuadecuc, Cuadecuc-Vampir, and Cuadecuc (Vampir). The actual on screen title is Cuadecuc, with Vampir in smaller letters below. Therefore, I refer to it here as Cuadecuc/Vampir.

I was blessed last night with one of the most fulfilling experiences of my film life, a double-bill of this and an unknown film from '71 called 'Cuadecuc, Vampir'. Together they form one of the most powerful essays on cinema, this flickering replica of the real world, and so the mechanisms that control the makings of images around us and give rise to them. See both if you can.

I will preface this by saying that I am actively seeking out films about the making of films. In quick terms, they set in motion twin concentric cycles; projected outwards, we get to see how a reality that seems incoherent and meaningless is in fact powered around creative forces with clearly reflected purpose; and if we pull further back, how life - as this staged enactment before the camera - is only an illusion of the mind, a play of light and shadow that is animated because we are watching.

So with some effort we can shift the cycles around to align around the life that we know. I take much more from these than with a film that is simply emotionally powerful.

This is the most purely abstract of those films that I have seen. One side of the mirror, the stage, the illusion, is supplied by a Dracula film that Jess Franco was shooting in Spain in 1970. The other side is the camera, the artificial eye shaping the film that we are watching, in theory a documentary shot in and around Franco's set and which diffuses that film through the dreamlike haze of Vampyr.

Both films inverse from Dracula, Dreyer's by having the Jonathan Harker character venture into the monster's den to investigate an illusion but which he is creating himself, this one by pushing back the Dracula film, quite literally, and recasting ourselves in the role of the investigator. The monster's den is the actual film within.

But Dreyer's film mattered to me deeply because it was structured around a powerful notion; a man who asserts control over a world of increasingly sinister but incomprehensible events by imagining it is what he wanted to investigate. He shapes this into the horror film that we are watching. It was the stuff that we have used to dream up horror since early times.

Now look what the filmmaker does here, it's one of the most powerful reverse reversals that I've encountered anywhere in film; he conjures a nightmare from fragments of the other - there is no dialogue, and only a rough sketch of moments from the Dracula story- but which is embedded with the makings of both nightmares. It is plainly revealed this way, because we'd be hard pressed to identify the material without prior knowledge or a clue from the title, that it's the eye creating the nightmare we see - and have confused since early times as belonging to the world at large. The background stage is nondescript life, it might have been Forrest Gump.

The unforeseen encounter with evil of some purity that we find in Dracula, and is imagined in Vampyr, here is directly transferred to the eye, an evil eye where the formations of fear and illusion begin. It is horror because of the specific way that we are looking at the thing. Like the investigator in Vampyr, the annotation is all ours but here even more direct.

The effect is doubly eerie because it's a dangerous flow we are setting in motion, heads may roll. But all of a sudden Christopher Lee breaks character, playfully lunges towards the camera, smiles, then settles down in his coffin. We see production assistants weave cobwebs around him.

And a shot that I will keep with me as one of the most eloquent; a scene is playing out in some dark catacomb dimly lit from somewhere, inscrutable Gothic stuff, and our camera slowly turns to reveal far in the background the other, a film crew observing together, giant movie lights peering all around. It's a perfect in-sight; the retina of the mind's eye, to quote Videodrome, casting its light inwards on the fleeting illusion it has staged.

The result is horror in the most purely abstract sense, a disquieting dream of shapeless anxieties as they bubble to us from some far surface. Horror because the camera is filming.

Director Portabello takes silent footage from the filming of Jess Franco's fourth-rate Dracula film and makes a multi-leveled masterpiece. The striking sound track consists of drills, scrapes, and finally, Christopher Lee reading the end of the Stoker novel. The electric buzzing is occasionally interrupted by snatches of pop songs and long periods of silence, which adds to mystery as tech and cameramen slide into view behind the stony, mute actors. Is this the imposed silence of awful Franco years? Portabello is Catalan, and the Catalan tongue was forbidden under the fascist regime. No speaking of Guernica, of the war, no criticism or free press. The master narrative of the appalling Franco dictatorship is interrupted by the disjointed tale of Portabello's paste-board castle and sleepwalking horror tropes. To re-edit the banal film (Franco's) and the evil, banal regime (Franco's) so that all its artifice may be displayed in the clear light (under the visible lights of the set). Fashionable girls laugh over a coffin holding a dead man, men walk through forests arranging cobwebs, Lee's imposing angular figure stares ahead, all granite. Deaf, too: they can't hear the flies. Lee and Portabello also made the equally sublime Umbracle, a similar tale of horror haunted by taxidermy, secret police, and Lee singing a song in French. This film shows that the continuum of the Gothic is still a potent vessel for art and politics. Portabello is a genius.