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As soon as we turned our backs on the train, it ceased to exist
Ulrike Ottinger's Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1989) is one of the best things I have ever seen in my life. I was going to write that it is a crime against humanity that this movie is not available on DVD from Criterion, but it looks as though copies can be ordered through the director's website, so I am going to hold off on calling down the wrath of Tengri and Angela Carter just yet. It's hilarious and otherworldly, stylized and documentary, full of old ritual and Yiddish theater standards, and while I have read stories and poems like it, I've never seen anything comparable on a screen. I loved it very much.
Ottinger's current project is Die Blutgräfin—The Blood Countess—from whose title you may correctly guess the subject is Erszébet Báthory. She will be portrayed by Tilda Swinton. With vampires, in Vienna. It is possible there will not be enough awesome in the world to describe this film.
These discoveries have seriously improved my day.
Ottinger's current project is Die Blutgräfin—The Blood Countess—from whose title you may correctly guess the subject is Erszébet Báthory. She will be portrayed by Tilda Swinton. With vampires, in Vienna. It is possible there will not be enough awesome in the world to describe this film.
These discoveries have seriously improved my day.
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Ulrike Ottinger and Tilda Swinton?
{{{{{dies}}}}}
Nine
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I wish I could get her to film my last night's dream . . .
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Nine
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Die Blutgräfin sounds brilliant, but I probably shouldn't watch it.
I'm glad that your day is improved. I hope you have a good night and a better tomorrow.
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Run, do not walk, if it ever comes to a film festival near you.
Die Blutgräfin sounds brilliant, but I probably shouldn't watch it.
Why not?
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I will do so, at least in the metaphorick sense. I'd expect that driving would actually be a more productive means of reaching any film festival that's like to be near to me.
Why not?
Assuming it's like the actual story of Erzsébet Báthory, it's apt to be too disturbing for me. Women being harmed, especially in a simulated-realistic fashion on a film screen, makes me very upset, and I've found there are things I'd best avoid.
If it's not so much about the young maidens being slaughtered and drained, I'd probably like to see it. But I'll probably wait till I've heard about what's in it from a few trustworthy people, such as yourself.
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I translated the director's statement for
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Thanks! That statement does make me feel a bit more hopeful for it. I was imagining something more like a straight retelling of the legend about the Countess Báthory--I've seen a few art photographs based on that which came close to giving me nightmares.
Sorry for being such a whimp about these things.
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It really, really was. I think it may just have joined The Seventh Seal and A Canterbury Tale as films I consider integral to the world.
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Yiddish theater standards--do you mean certain items that always turn up in Yiddish theater?
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I hope someday you have the chance to see it!
Yiddish theater standards--do you mean certain items that always turn up in Yiddish theater?
Songs that have become famous, that everyone knows; one of the characters in the first half of the film is a Yiddish theater star named Mickey Katz, who performs a version of "Toot-Toot-Tootsie, Goodbye" that winds up incorporating lines or musical quotes from half a dozen (or more) well-known classics of Yiddish film or theater. It was kind of breathtaking.
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That's wave-form collapsing awesome.
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From the website:
For a long time now, the maid Hermine has lived at the Hotel Königin von Ungarn. Because of the dreaming-slow movements with which she draws through the endless corridors day after day in the company of her vampire vacuum cleaner [no, really: Vampyr-Staubsauger], she has become known as "the sleeping beauty." She seems to be waiting for something. Only the old night porter knows her secret.
After the ghastly events which for decades had all Vienna in a state of fear and terror, her mistress abruptly vanished and since then has been as though swallowed up from the face of the earth. Her unexpected reemergence from the underworld has a tremendously invigorating effect on the sleepwalker. Together with her adored Blood Countess, La Comtesse Sanglante, the World Champion Lady Vampire of All Time, Tigress in Man-Shape, Hyena of Csejte, she recalls past adventures and they make their nightly forays anew through an eerily beautiful Vienna with its catacombs, fools' towers, coffeehouses, and tombs in which the hearts, eyes, and entrails of rulers and their heroes repose.
Both the old and the new Vienna with its imposing sights and curiosities become the stage for their hunts and predations, which soon lead them out of the city, into Bohemia and Hungary. The landscape lies under snow, and wherever the red coach with six horses comes by, horrified faces show themselves to the travelers and the peasants cross themselves in their fields. They are reluctantly accompanied by a person of tarnished character, a vegetarian vampire, sternly monitored by his therapist. Tracked by two enthusiastic vampirologists, they encounter the pleasure-seeking fellows of the fight club Vampyria, a beautiful librarian, an even more beautiful nun, a nervous privy councillor, field marshals, councillors, and the little countess under the bell jar. From all of it, they obtain surprising discoveries about their ancestors.
Fired by her love-delusion, the sleeping beauty binds the shy vegetarian vampire to her by biting away his therapist. The musical and visual high point of the film is the vampires' ball with its strange rituals, where an orchestra of women plays. At the end of a dramatic showdown at a midnight supper on a Ferris wheel high above Vienna, the inevitable takes place. The Blood Countess, even more beautiful and made youthful anew, bites one last time as a blood-red comet appears in the night sky.
The color red is dominant in all forms, facets, and materials. Reflecting pearls, brocade, dull felt, tulle, rep, silk, moiré, glowingly illuminated charnel houses, fire-blazes, candelabra of Murano glass, red-marbled spiral stairs, hearts of wax, red heather, garnet necklaces, steak tartare and blutwurst, in addition to that most peculiar juice from ruby-red chalices. Even the bats have red eyes.
The distinctiveness of this vampire film lies in the round dance of its protagonists, who—as in a paper-chase—are perenially lured to new places whose bizarre real-life histories are a component of the film's narrative. So a miniature drama evolves from a comic-strip form.
How far do the terrors of the night reach into our day—or are they our daydreams, which come to meet us?
Seriously, I cannot wait until 2010.
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That's what the PDF looks like it says to me? I think we would be going in shares on a communal copy, so it might not be bank-breaking. But, yes. On the other hand, having to wait until some projected film festival decides to screen this movie again . . .