JAMESON DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL:' Carmilla' is stranger and more transgressive than anything in contemporary vam-roms
Outliving Dracula: Le Fanu's Carmilla, Directors: Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh, Ireland, 2010 (Jameson Dublin International Film Festival)
IN 1872, SOME 25 years before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, also Irish, created the lesbian vampire Carmilla. Shocking and radical then, even allowing for the restraints and circumspection of the day, the character continues to have more relevance to today's society than Dracula, who has been largely tamed through over-familiarity and send-ups. At its most basic level, Stoker's novel is a rattling good adventure yarn of harried chaps pursuing a monster. Carmilla is different; more subtle, and certainly stranger and more transgressive than anything in contemporary vam-roms such as the anodyne Twilightseries.
As well as greatly influencing Stoker, Carmilla was adapted by Danish director Carl Dreyer in 1932 as Vampyr, a masterpiece of weird cinema, and by Roger Vadim in 1960 as Blood and Roses. And there were, inevitably, a few fanged girl-on-girl Hammer romps based on Le Fanu's creation.
Made under the Arts Council's Reel Art initiative, Outliving Dracula: Le Fanu's Carmillaseeks to re-establish Le Fanu's importance as an Irish writer who has had profound influence on world culture. As well as the many movie adaptations, Carmilla has inspired an album by British rock band Cradle of Filth, featured in video games and even been a character in Doctor Who.
Daly's and Waugh's backgrounds are in philosophy rather than film-making, and parts of Outliving are static and unfilmic: long sequences of experts and academics talking straight to camera. At the Q and A after the screening, Katherine Waugh explained that this was deliberate: she and Daly wanted to produce an unsensational work that did not slot into an easy TV documentary format, which is why vampire icons such as Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt were not approached just to add star allure.
However, this not to say that their film isn't at times visually exciting; there are moody passages in graveyards and much footage from movies inspired by Carmillaas the story of Le Fanu, a Church of Ireland clergyman's son and great-nephew of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, unfolds - though it should be stressed that this is an examination of the long-lasting phenomenon of Carmillarather than a biopic of her creator.
An excellent innovation, and one that will hopefully inspire future documentary-makers, is the incorporation of video work by gallery artists Jaki Irvine and Breda Lynch. The links between commercial film-making and experimental video by artists may seem obvious, but are exploited all too infrequently.