In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our team favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
In all of the hubbub surrounding the release of The Artist, and its subsequent Oscar win for Best Picture, last year the name of Guy Maddin only occasionally wormed its way into the conversation. I tried, okay!
Many people seemed to think Michel Hazanavicious’s ode to silent movies was an anomaly, little knowing that this Canadian provocateur had done his own silent movie several years prior. Not just that, mind you, but a silent horror romance filled with elegant, swanning ballerinas and a Dracula that takes the idea of vampirism as the most romantic of all the ghoulish elements of cinema to an entirely new level.
Pirouettes, arm extensions and lifts are just the surface of Maddin’s Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary as he navigates the vampyr myth like none have ever done before.
Perhaps most striking about this Winnipeg native’s take on the material is how stage bound he has kept it, and yet never once does it feel caged by the walls that surround it. Unlike, for instance, Roman Polanski’s Carnage, Maddin’s film truly lives and breathes as CINEMA, despite never leaving the stage.
He allows the Royal Winnipeg Ballet – the film is more or less an adaptation of the company’s Dracula production – to do their job as if they were on stage, but the film is imbued with so much of Maddin’s trademark technical flourishes that it never comes off as stale or like just another filmed performance of an on-stage work. The dancers are let free from the confines of the stage and their passion passes through the screen in a way that allows viewers to have as heartbreaking an experience as anybody would have in live theatre.
Maddin’s love of high contrast black and white cinematography, at times even appearing to smear the camera lens with Vaseline to give the look of an otherworldly, dreamlike appearance, is perfectly in tune with the deceptively simple production design. Filled with wickedly macabre, gothic inspired art direction that one could easily see early-period Tim Burton wishing he’d had a hand in creating, Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary is an exotic visual experience to behold.
One can imagine a Maddin virgin (har dee har har) comparing his work to Burton’s in a negative light (they’d call Maddin a “rip-off” no doubt), but rather than that they actually compliment each other. For instance, there are moments in here that echo Edward Scissorhands, but Maddin is most assuredly his own beast.
I suspect those who have yet to experience the wonders of Maddin’s work would be surprised at how original and yet kookily accessible it is. Especially this reworking of the Dracula tale, which is (for me) his strongest work.
To watch Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary is to let Guy Maddin’s horror ballet wash over you. Dissolve into the film, which takes on the qualities of a luminously lit, half-sketched dream. A dream that you wake up from not entirely sure of what you dreamed and how it all came together, but one that leaves you with a feeling of floating bewilderment.
It packs an emotional wallop and should appeal even to those who have a natural aversion to musicals and ballet. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen, and yet coos its viewer with its lullaby song. It is an utterly captivating film and one that is well and truly worthy of being called an “experience”.
- Glenn Dunks
ACMI is holding a Maddin retrospective that includes a big screen screening of this movie as well as many other Maddin titles. Dates and such are on their website.
"A fevered, sexy take on the material, it plays up the desires of the female players, the repression of the men and Dracula's status as all-purpose object of dread and desire." Patrick Peters - Empire Magazine
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.