White canines and ugly vampires ….
Finally not only! Vampires feed on cinema with the voluptuousness of these never satisfied gourmands. There is vengeful bulimia in the fear offered. Too happy spectators who find as soon as they enter the Vampires exhibition of Dracula in Buffy this dark corridor dear to the Hammer. It is to better haunt your memories, dear visitors. The corridor, on the rails, opens the path of the ghost train of your darkest imaginations. Shiver good people, your blood will freeze as it should. The happiness is there, admit it, on the progress of the exhibition that we can discover at the Cinémathèque française until January 20, 2020. Dracula as a benevolent host (but he is not the only accomplice to survive from his art) wishes you the eternity of the night as a welcome. He will be able to extract a few drops from your life serum just like Matthieu Orléan and Florence Tissot, the curators of the exhibition. Far from being princes of darkness, they have managed to offer the audience this sometimes forgotten cinematic thrill. So goes the 7th Art. From Dracula to Buffy (television series) the legend is exposed. A journey that follows parallel paths: historical (Prince Vlad Tepes who gave birth to the myth long before Bram Stoker’s novel) and fiction which « vampirizes » the facts and its attributes. Five sections to get your teeth into as many chapters to taste. Historical vampires or when reality exceeds fiction to better make the legend. Romanticism is invited in the continuation of the poetic Vampires course. The 7th Art is fully in line with this ambiguous relationship of its stars (the first of them being Béla Lugosi) who become the icon of evil by constructing a Gothic world charged with latent eroticism. In the 1950s, the Hammer’s cinema made a big splash with Christopher Lee. As everyone knows, the vampire is reborn from the ashes and, sometimes, where you don’t expect it; this is the theme of the third section: Political vampires. Fear is there to better understand our anxieties. Well beyond the fear maintained cinematographically, it is much change, the unknown in question, our resistance to the other (the SF also cultivates this confrontation). Eroticism and esotericism are a cocktail managed in the fourth part of the exhibition. Erotic vampires. The hidden eroticism, implying the dominant (your) / dominated (ees) relationships, the acceptance of the power of the other as life energy … The modernity and the complicity of the games offer, far from the vaporous scenes of 1950s, a social ambivalence that goes far beyond vampirism. We dust off the roles and sexism is only a distant memory. The vampire by his modernity opposes bourgeois values while borrowing his codes. The last section is rock n’roll. Pop vampires. Fantastic is part of pop culture. Besides, did this generation not proclaim itself « Freaks »! The watches generated by the old world, you know those from before the sixties. An unreal time when unemployment hovered below 2%. A nostalgic time. Legacy of a film like Some Call it Loving by James B. Harris: pop culture comfortably convolves in darkness. New vampires are looking for their roots, for forgotten identity. Isn’t that the theme of a lot of TV series? Far from the role of Dracula, we see that this new generation of vampires is young, in search of identity. Not very comfortable in his heritage. The evil of a generation. Not that of the 70s. The vampire is today kneaded by doubt. It reflects the uncertainty of our society and its future.
The exhibition is to be seen and reviewed until January 20, 2020 For any additional information and particularly on the rich program, click on the website www.cinematheque.fr.
It’s not all that, but I would take a little glass of blood. A positive B, please. At temperature.