Paris (AFP)
Take out your cloves of garlic and your crucifixes: vampires are in the spotlight at the Cinémathèque française in Paris from Wednesday, in an exhibition that traces their story on screen, from the origins of cinema to today's TV series. 'hui.
A dark hallway, candelabra on the walls with flickering lights, shouts, ogival doors and a window behind which passes the shadow of "Nosferatu" Murnau (1922), with its long claws and sharp teeth. The visitor is immediately put in the mood in the immersive exhibition "Vampires, from Dracula to Buffy", presented in Paris until January 19th.
From Klaus Kinski's mask to Isabelle Adjani's blood-stained dress in Werner Herzog's "Nosferatu, ghost of the night" (1979), to other objects in the film (piles or stuffed rats ...), Gary Oldman's coat and Winona Ryder's dress in Francis Ford Coppola's "Dracula" (1992) in costumes of Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst in "Interview with a Vampire" (1994): this exhibition is full of relics of the universe of vampires, presented alongside many film clips, but also photos, posters, manuscripts or preparatory drawings.
Going back to the origins of myth, heir to legends ancestral before incarnating at the end of the nineteenth century in the novel "Dracula" by Bram Stoker, at the moment when the cinema is born, the exhibition then declines its evolution on the screen.
She adopts a thematic approach, from "poetic vampires" to "pop vampires", through their political and erotic aspects, to end up around a couch in the world of movies and series today. hui, from "Buffy against the vampires" to "True Blood".
"What we've tried to show in this vampire exhibition is that if we follow the vampire figure of the very beginning of the history of cinema, that is, from the years 1910-1915, until today (...), one realizes that one tells a history of the cinema ", explained to AFP Frédéric Bonnaud, director of Cinémathèque. "The vampires is exactly cinema".
- "minority aspect" -
"There are vampires during the silent cinema, in the genre cinema, but also the underground cinema, avant-garde There are vampires everywhere, in all countries, vampires American, Japanese, Mexican .. . ", he stressed. "The vampire has never gone out of fashion, and he is changing all the time, it can be a man, a woman, he can change sex, there can be all possible variations and imaginable".
Making the connection between blood-drunk creatures and cinema, "vampiric art" - with its stars, for which the term "vamp" was invented in the 1910s - the exhibition also seeks to show the Sexual dimension of the vampire, the seductive phallic vampire portrayed by Christopher Lee in the 60s and 70s to the vampire underground, libertarian or homosexual who opposes bourgeois codes, "Predators" of Tony Scott at the "Ball of vampires" Roman Polanski .
This course also examines the political dimension that the film of vampires can take, whereas these, sometimes executioners and sometimes victims, have incessantly incarnated a threat, that of the accursed part of the society, under the features of a communist spy, a corrupt capitalist, a guru or a drug addict from the depths.
He also questions contemporary vampire films, "which are much more about the minority aspect," says Matthieu Orléan, curator of the exhibition.
"Lately, movies and series have explored much more in-between areas, this issue of vampirism that could be a metaphor for example of homosexuality, or a minority culture, either religious or racial," continues -he.
The exhibition, which will then go to Madrid and Barcelona, is accompanied in Paris by a retrospective of vampire films, conferences, unusual visits or a Halloween night on October 31, with animations and projections.
© 2019 AFP