As soon as we turned our backs on the train, it ceased to exist

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[sovay]

That's wave-form collapsing awesome.

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.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

*gapes*