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By turns voluptuous, whimsical and exceedingly strange, Guy Maddin's film "Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary" suggests that silent movies and ballet may have always been natural dancing partners. At least they seem that way when folded into each other by a quirky visionary like Mr. Maddin, the Canadian experimental filmmaker whose work has acquired a fervent cult following.
His silent, black-and-white "Dracula," which opens today at Film Forum, was made for CBC television and is a collaboration between Mr. Maddin and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, which unveiled its evening-length adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel on the stage five years ago. For all its oddities, the movie is surprisingly faithful to the 1897 novel, which infused a modern ashen-faced archetype of night-crawling depravity into popular culture around the same time Freud published his groundbreaking studies of hysteria.
Mr. Maddin, whose mostly silent films recreate the flickering, melodramatic ambience of early movies, is a cinematic aesthete whose montages evoke a primitive moviegoing experience with a winking postmodern knowingness. In "Dracula" he and his longtime associate director and editor, deco dawson, have re-invented the dance film in a homemade style that alludes to F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" while looking back but nodding to the present.
"Dracula" isn't altogether silent or entirely black and white. Sound effects and painted-on dashes of color have been applied. Blood (which is plentiful) is red and money green, and the story's jagged mood swings are accented by the film's tint, which changes from sepia to blue to orange to lavender.
Subtitles and intertitles are sparingly but tellingly used to keep the story on track and to announce its themes. The use of dreamy close-ups, slow motion, pantomime and silhouette, and copious amounts of fog that makes the dancers appear to be rising up from a roiling gorge enhance the movie's sometimes campy Gothic ambience.
For all its eccentricities and technical quirks, "Dracula" is a compelling expressionistic work. Its dancer-actors, especially Zhang Wei-Qiang's Dracula, Tara Birtwhistle's Lucy, CindyMarie Small's Nina, and the Dr. Van Helsing of David Moroni, C. M., emote in the grand nostril-flaring tradition of silent melodrama. Their leering grimaces of the unhinged, fantasy-besotted characters are as memorable as Mark Godden's elegantly sexy choreography.
~ Stephen Holden, New York Times
Maddin's version supposes Stoker's text as a sort of fear-of-others allegory, in which Dracula arrives from the East in turn-of-the-19th-century London as an Asian specter. The movie, however, is bigger than its metaphors and is too airy to get bogged down in anything so ponderously meaningful. Its theme is kinetics, and the fluidity of the camera pays uncanny compliments to Godden's choreography.
Timed to the attack of Gustav Mahler's strings, the dancing is like an unexpected tap on the shoulder. Van Helsing and the boys twirling around Dracula's lair with flashlights is a small thing of beauty.
That's not the kind of image you'd expect from a cult artist, but Maddin doesn't have the camp or kitsch sensibility of most fringe heroes. "Dracula" in particular is a meticulously shot, impeccably edited, and composed labor of love and imagination. It paraphrases German expressionism, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Cocteau, Maya Deren, and Michael Powell's "The Red Shoes," as Maddin takes cinema to its outer limits without stranding you there in a vacuum of heady esoterica. Like his other pictures, this one is hugely accessible and completely fun, psychologically and visually.
~ Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe
Tapping the richness of 1920s filmmaking under the mask of irony (a principal tool of subterfuge in the present climate), Dracula offers a feast of rapid editing, fast lap dissolves, fade-outs, whiteouts, blackouts, tinting, superimpositions, irises, slurred motion, stop motion, and slow motion, along with the delectable textures of light, mist, snow, human flesh, vegetation, and Victorian upholstery. Yet it isn't so bound by the technical parameters of 20s pictorial film art that it can't make fruitful use of Super-8 footage and digital effects. That it's principally in black and white and mainly silent makes it more expressive and sensual rather than less -- a premise that may seem hard to swallow because we've been trained to fetishize state-of-the-art technology involving color and sound. In fact, Maddin makes better use of digital effects than most Hollywood-blockbuster wizards, because he's an artisan, not a factory worker -- the mark of his hand is everywhere. And this only makes it easier for viewers to enter and get lost in his fantasy.
~ Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
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