Portabella, a name I have conjured but whose films I have never caught, comes up with a slightly delirious deconstruction of both the vampire myth and the cinematic fascination with said myth. Portabella uses footage from the Jesús Franco film Count Dracula, which featured Christopher Lee, no less, as a dashing Dracula who sinks his fangs into various lovely youths. There’s also Herbert Lom wandering around as Van Helsing (?), reminding me of his appearance in Marias’ Thus Bad Begins.
Portabella´s approach is vividly unconventional. Until the very closing moments., the movie has no dialogue. It’s not silent, as there is an invasive and brilliant sound design/ score, but it has tropes of the silent movie, as actors speak without their words being heard. It then goes one step further, and completely deconstructs the filmmaking process, with the camera team featuring as the actors are filmed ‘out of character’. The nuts and bolts of the cinematic process are exposed. A kind of Pompidou vampire, perhaps reminiscent to some extent of Truffaut’s Nuit Americaine. Only Portabella goes further. The bat is revealed to be a model on wires. An actress winks at the audience. Lee clowns around in shades. The film within a film is called El Proceso (The Trial). Is the trap of eternal life a cinematic version of the Kafkaesque state? At the very end of the film Lee reads Stoker’s original text which reveals that before he is finally killed, Dracula smiled, relieved, it would appear, at being released from eternity. Of course, cinema is a paean to the eternal: the beautiful youths who populate the screen will age and die, what we are watching is a vampiric process at work, and this is what Portabella discloses, as he strips away the veneer.
With its bleached out print, its hysterical zooms, its beguiling close-ups, Cuadecuc Vampir is simultaneously a homage and an ironic shakedown of the image. The effect is amusing and bewildering, in equal measure.
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Watching images on the big screen from Portabella’s Cadeuc, I have the feeling that few people will experience this process in the future. The cinema as it used to be is dying. Few go now. Even dedicated cineastes watch on the small screen of their television or their laptop. If one were to say, yes but now home projectors exist, and this is true, they are just as good, this would still be to lose the effect of watching a film with others, sharing the magic or mysticism or excitement, which has always been part of the cinema process. Which used to be something that was in no way elitist, but will only become more and more so as the social world is picked apart at the seams. As people retreat to their homes, where the world is smaller and seems safer.
The passing of cinema feels like the passing from one human state to another, just as its arrival must have done, when people first marvelled at the capacity of the medium to capture ‘reality’ and reproduce it. In little more than a century, humanity has hopped, skipped and jumped onto the next phase. This process has accompanied the one that I am participating in now, the switch from the written, which had existed for centuries, to the type-written. Humans move on, things are gained and things are lost. Literacy is not that old a concept in the great scheme of things. I feel sorry for the generations that will never know the freedom that the individual knew before the internet; just as the generations who first learned to read must feel sorry for the freedom that was lost when the knowledge of reading was inculcated into greater humankind. With every technological advance, freedoms and pleasures are forgotten and left by the wayside. New pleasures, and, perhaps, new freedoms, arrive to take their place. I wonder what they shall be in another century’s time, after this era has receded into the memory of a grandparent; pictures on screens, lost dreams.
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