Vampires, the 'porn' bite

The Cinématheque de Paris has just opened an expected exhibition about the vampiric myth and its various reincarnations. Vampires: from Dracula à Buffy will arrive at the Caixaforums of Madrid and Barcelona in 2020 to delve into the keys to why the vampire figure has been employed by creators of various disciplines for more than a century, and why he still has so much depth in the contemporary society

The exhibition uses cinema as a thread to develop a story that starts in the Middle Ages, when a rumor spreads in Central Europe about a horrifying creature called "vampyri" that stalks cemeteries to feed on human blood. This story will be transmitted generation after generation, being enriched with sensual and even heroic dyes. The figure of the vampire will continue in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries within the popular culture, debtor of the vampire as a romantic creature that would fix in the imaginary the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Attracted by the occult and psychoanalysis, Stoker would recreate a fearsome character, fascinating and perfumed by melancholy. The first reference film would be Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) unauthorized adaptation of Stoker's book and jewel of expressionist cinema. This film will make it clear that cinema is the ideal means of expression for the myth of vampires , because what is cinema if not a play of light and shadow, an illusion in which death and resurrection are natural facts, in the that bodies that do not age? From Nosferatu , the vampire will move in the shadows of the movie theater with total naturalness throughout history.

The cinema is surely the most juicy and obvious trigger to tackle the reincarnations of myth because it is the pot where all the clichés crystallize. However, there are other representations in parallel from the art that comes to gloss and enrich the myth, and that in the exhibition have been strategically placed as small pearls. The backdrop to which the vampire and the creatures of the night are agitated is that of dark romanticism as an aesthetic and symbolic atmosphere. The misty and dark landscapes of the nineteenth-century German painter Karl Lessing - influenced by Friedrich - are the archetypal air that the bloodsucker breathes in its romantic and seductive side. Lessing's paintings, like those of some 19th-century Nordic authors who recreate crepuscular landscapes, are actually representations of states of inner turmoil.

These disturbances are connected with a nationalist sentiment (one that underlies romanticism painting), but they also evoke the drives between sex and death that beat in the vampire myth. Already in the twentieth century, the nightmare facet of the eros-thanatos drive is well expressed in the illustrations of the Austrian Alfred Kubin - tormented soul and good friend of Kafka - or the Frenchman Gaston Redon who results in the identification of the landscape with the inner shudder. Edvard Munch and the Argentine surrealist painter Leonor Fini resort to the female version of the vampire: the first, in a painting with different versions entitled Love and pain, in which a woman bites a man dressed in gray, an eloquent image about her vision of love as submission and source of anguish. Fini, esoteric and unique, will make portraits of the lesbian vampire Carmilla inspired by Le Fanu's novel, with all the mystery and sensuality she was able to reflect in her magical paintings. In the 30s, Max Ernst would take the vampire to the moorish surrealism moor with his collages for the graphic novel A week of goodness , where he makes it clear that the vampire is already an icon (it is the time of popularity of the Dracula of Bela Lugosi in the cinema) by adding a layer of cruelty and black humor fostered by the collage -cutting technique of collage .

From Bela Lugosi to Iván Zulueta

In the 60s, the vampire is definitely a pop icon. Its transmission through the media of popular culture such as comics or pulp novels in addition to film and television, make the vampire can be a housing that is filled with something else, that is: it becomes a vehicle receptacle New arguments Andy Warhol used in 1963 the icon of the vampire on the skin of Bela Lugosi for his series of serigraphs The kiss, a vision about the vampirization of the cinephile by the cinema (something that would underline the filmmaker Iván Zulueta in the essential Arrebato ), but for also address the hunger of the other. The silkscreen is related to a video of the same title in which three couples face three-minute screw kisses in front of the camera: the love act becomes carnivorous.

The vampire is a cursed society, and this curse will make him an ideal recipient to embody political and economic conflicts. Goya knew how to understand it and, pioneering, would give vampire symbolism to the figure of the bat in some of the Caprices and Disasters of the war, prints in which these squeaky animals are metaphors of abuses of the people by the power. From the 70s, artists such as Niki de Saint Phalle, Mike Kelley or Jean Michel Basquiat would use the bat and the vampire and their declines as a symbol of causes to fight, both common and their own. Basquiat in his painting Beast reflects a black man who can resemble a vampire creature to allude to his condition as an outsider within that snob framework of 80s galleries. But perhaps he also alluded through the monster to his own addiction.

Although the vampire is a commercial icon, it can also fit into very experimental contexts. In Spain there are excellent examples in the field of cinema such as the film Vampyr-Cuadecuc by Pere Portabella , the homoerotic short films by Pierrot (character from the 70's undefined Barcelona), the aforementioned Iván Zulueta's Arrebato , or History of my death of the winner Albert Serra

In the end, the vampire ideally personifies the notion of transgression: that of one's own cycle of life and death, and that is why it is an ideal vessel to fill it with other transgressions, of a political, social, religious and, no doubt, sexual nature. . But, mainly, he appeals to each of us through another idea: the vampire lives alert, focused on the search for the Other; his loneliness is related to a present in which, illusoryly connected, we are increasingly alone.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• movie theater
• culture

Clothes hanging Saura, Baroja, Hemingway and Cela

CineJoker slips among the best rated films in the history of cinema

Sitges FestivalThe hidden, dirty and perfect memory of Spanish cinema