There is no doubt that Evgueni Mlodik's Passion Remembered is a comedy at heart (its humorous final shot undoubtedly proves this fact) but it is a comedy that deals with romantic relationships in a refreshingly frank manner. Its unique combination of humor and drama draws upon European sensibilities far more than American ones, as does its stylish, carefully-framed camera-work, which is unafraid to get in close to the actors, granting the audience an intimacy with them American filmmakers for some reason often shun. The (implied) scenes of sexuality are not treated seriously; the characters' romanticized idealism concerning their illicit relationships is utterly ludicrous, and the film knowingly mocks them with a sudden burst of rowdy salsa music upon the advent of each such scene. It critiques such idealism in a manner evoking the writings of M.C. Dillon (and in the end the couple that acts as the film's protagonists find their love reaffirmed by an honesty Dillon would certainly approve of), but it does so in a blatantly comic tone.
This winking sense of the absurd concerning sexual desire certainly recalls the erotic comedies of Tinto Brass, whose bedroom scenes in La Chiave were humorously punctuated with similarly bawdy music and at one point the sound of a neighing horse. The rest of the music score hearkens back to just such films' time period; slightly jazzy, it seems drawn directly out of the eighties, setting the tone and style very well. Passion Remembered is briskly paced, intriguing in both visuals and plot, and although it is often poignant and painfully candid concerning its characters' troubled relationships, it is a joy to watch because it simultaneously keeps its tongue planted so firmly in cheek. Watch the film on IMDB here:
I recently wrote this essay for my Holocaust Literature class, and it subsequently won the E.B. White Award for Expository Writing at St. Charles Community College, hurrah.
As much a part of the horror genre as it is a spoof of it, Roman Polanski’s 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers is on its surface merely a comedic tribute to the Gothic horror films of British Hammer Studios (most famous among these being 1958’s Horror of Dracula, starring the now-legendary Christopher Lee). Yet at the heart of the light-hearted antics of bumbling vampire hunters Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran) and his young assistant Alfred (played by Polanski himself) is to be found something much deeper and moving; a reflection upon Polanski’s past.
Polanski was born in 1933 in Paris, to agnostic Jewish parents. However, he grew up in Kraków, Poland, a place he initially describes with some delectation in his autobiography, Roman on Polanski: “In any case, it was difficult to be bored in a city like Kraków, with the trumpeter up in St. Mary's church tower sounding his ritual fanfare on the hour…” (qtd. in “Religious Affiliation”).
His peaceful childhood was shattered, however, when the Nazis invaded Poland. He and his parents relinquished their Komorowski Street apartment in exchange for a “hideout” in Warsaw with Polanski’s grandmother and two uncles, further from the German-Polish border. Nevertheless, Polanski says that the danger never really seemed particularly real: “The Germans’ method was to lull people into passivity, to foster a sense of hope, to persuade the Jews that things couldn't possibly be that bad. My own feeling was that if only one could explain to them that we had done nothing wrong, the Germans would realize that it all was a gigantic misunderstanding” (qtd. in “Religious Affiliation”).
Beginning December 1, 1939, they were forced to wear white armbands emblazoned with the Star of David. Then the Germans began to wall in the city. One can certainly draw parallels between the isolated Transylvanian village of The Fearless Vampire Killers and the Kraków ghetto so vividly described by Polanski. Just as for those in the ghetto, there is no escape for the villagers; the brutal, shadowy presence of the vampire Count von Krolock and his minions rules them completely. Soon after, while he was away, his mother was taken. In 1943, when SS officers began to liquidate the Kraków ghetto, Polanski’s father cut a hole in the barbed wire fence that surrounded them and told the terrified boy to flee to a family whom he had paid to care for him should just such an event as this occur (Bradshaw).
Later Polanski discovered that his mother had been murdered in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. His father, although forced into slavery in a stone quarry, miraculously survived, and the two were reunited after the war. Polanski eventually became fascinated with the cinema and went on to receive a scholarship at the Łódź film school.
After the nightmarish surrealism of his breakthrough film, 1962’s Knife in the Water (which earned him his first Academy Award nomination), Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-Sac (1966), Polanski inexplicably turned to comedy with 1967’s The Fearless Vampire Killers. It was his first color film, and the first to utilize the widescreen, 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The film is languorously paced, the dreamlike atmosphere enhanced by its settings of snowy, moonlit valleys, and by Krzysztof Komeda’s beautifully bizarre and subtly jazzy score.
The vampire hunters of the film’s title, Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran) and Alfred (Roman Polanski), arrive at an inn in a tiny Transylvanian village conspicuously filled with copious amounts of garlic, but the fearful villagers aren’t talking. They know of no nearby castle; not even of a windmill. It was on this film that Polanski first met Sharon Tate, who played the innkeeper’s daughter, Sarah. Polanski’s romance with Tate, beginning at the time of filming, strongly mirrors that of Alfred’s infatuation with Sarah. Disturbingly, this was one of Sharon Tate’s last films before her tragic murder at the hands of the Manson “family.”
The innkeeper, Shagal (a name bearing an interesting similarity to that of Marc Chagall, the Jewish-Russian artist) is almost stereotypically Jewish, and he and his wife Rebecca utter Yiddish sayings with inflated abandon. One of the film’s comedic highlights comes when he, newly undead, creeps into the maid’s room. She quickly snatches a cross from the wall to defend herself, but Shagal merely chuckles rakishly, exclaiming, “Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire!” It seems a Star of David would have been more appropriate in this instance.
Shagal (Alfie Bass) is a character completely lacking in any pretense of sentimentality. Throughout much of the film he is a complete coward in the face of the ever-looming vampire menace, and he cheats on his wife with the reluctant maid (see fig. 1). Yet the very reason Shagal becomes a vampire in the first place is because he sacrifices his life in an attempt to save his daughter, who is kidnapped by the film’s central vampire, Count von Krolock (Ferdy Mayne). Despite all of his shortcomings, his fierce love for his daughter Sarah (Sharon Tate) strikes a strong emotional chord. The scene in which he boards up her bedroom door to prevent her from leaving of course reveals his rampant insecurity but is also poignant.
He is eventually forced into the metaphorical betrayal of his fellow humans by becoming one of the undead, and in the end there is no redemption for him. It doesn’t take long for him to grow to utterly relish his new vampiric powers, and he ends up accidentally killing the maid in a fit of blood and sexual lust. He is last seen shutting himself, and her corpse, away from the world in a tomb. The corruption of innocence in store for all of the other characters at the film’s climax is equally bleak.
It is obvious that Krolock views the villagers, and the entirety of the human race, as nothing more than animals; they would be wiped out were they not such a convenient food source. On this note, the connection between the aristocracy and vampirism so popularly made by Bram Stoker in Dracula (and previously by Sheridan Le Fanu in Carmilla) is quite interesting in the manner that it reflects a sense of supreme superiority very reminiscent of what would become in the 20th century the horrors of Nazism. As observed by Andrew Sinclair in his book The Last of the Best: The Aristocracy of Europe in the Twentieth Century, just as Nazism functions upon a foundation of bastardized social Darwinism, so does the aristocracy, although it is “concerned not so much with the survival of the fittest or the best, as with the survival of the well-born” (176).
Spurred on by Hitler, among others, the dawn of the Second World War was a time of violent cleansing in Europe, and this cleansing extended to the failing powers of the aristocracy as well. As Sinclair points out, “[c]ommunism was dedicated to the destruction of the feudal classes at once; revolutionary fascism to their eventual strangulation; and bourgeois democracy to their bleeding away through death duties and income tax” (62). It is arguable that the decline of the aristocracy (represented in the film by Polanski’s caricature of Dracula in Krolock), a slow death felt not just in Germany in the early years of the 20th century, but throughout Europe, may have helped to usher in the ideologies of Nazi Germany.
Dracula was published in 1897, so it is obvious that Stoker knew nothing of Nazis. Polanski, however, given his horrific experiences during WWII, could not have failed to see the connection between the contempt for the lower classes, and lower races, held by popular culture’s aristocratic vampire, and the same sort of scorn and chauvinism on the part of the Nazi Party.
Thirty-five years before Polanski would create his ultimate commentary on the Holocaust with the critically acclaimed The Pianist (2002), he made a veiled commentary upon the same material in an incredibly unique way with The Fearless Vampire Killers. Despite the film’s humorous trappings, one cannot help but reflect with some melancholy that in the real world these events would most certainly doom any of poor Shagal’s future grandchildren.
Works Consulted
Bradshaw, Peter. “The Guardian Profile: Roman Polanski.” The Guardian. 15 Jul. 2005. 25 Mar. 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/jul/15/romanpolanski.2005inreview
The Fearless Vampire Killers. Dir. Roman Polanski. Perfs. Jack MacGowran, Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, Alfie Bass, Ferdy Mayne. 1967. DVD.
Warner Bros. 2004.
“The Religious Affiliation of Director Roman Polanski.” Adherents.com. 02 Jul. 2005. 25 Mar. 2009
http://www.adherents.com/people/pp/Roman_Polanski.html
Sinclair, Andrew. The Last of the Best: The Aristocracy of Europe in the Twentieth Century. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969. Questia. 24 Mar. 2009
http://www.questia.com/library/book/the-last-of-the-best-the-aristocracy-of-europe-in-the-twentieth-century-by-andrew-sinclair.jsp
Do you not hate it when people utilize their first blog post to merely type the word “testing”? Me too, so I’m beginning mine with a brief film review that, although it will hardly contribute anything revelatory to the array of reviews already accumulated on the Internet, will nonetheless give you a small taste of what is to come.
Everyone loves some good Euro-sleaze, do they not? I’m speaking cinematically, and in that a vein I’d like to take a look at the film from which my current profile picture is derived, a supremely beautiful slice of sleaze indeed called Sie tötete in Ekstase (She Killed in Ecstasy; 1971) directed by the one and only Jess Franco. It must first be observed, however, that this film provides much more than simple sleaze; with this fast paced and even poetic film Franco paints a palpably intense atmosphere of pervading madness and violence.
The plot, such as it is, is incredibly far-fetched but within the context of a uniquely European genre of which plot is hardly a pervading concern, it functions suitably enough, and is certainly entertaining. The astonishingly beautiful Soledad Miranda is the wife of a well-intentioned doctor (Fred Williams) whose controversial research is rejected by the delightfully despicable, self-righteous local medical community, headed by Franco regulars Howard Vernon, Paul Müller, Ewa Strömberg and Franco himself. Being called a charlatan by these snobby assholes doesn’t sit well with Dr. Johnson, and he promptly goes completely insane. Mrs. Johnson (Miranda) is obviously distraught and sets out to seduce, torture and murder those who set her husband on his downward spiral.
Stylistically, She Killed in Ecstasy quite resembles what is perhaps Franco’s most well-known film (and probably his best), Vampyros Lesbos, released shortly before the same year, both in terms of the bizarre lighting’s bright, psychedelic color themes, and in the equally psychedelic, jazzy and cheerfully dated score. Also like Vampyros Lesbos, the film’s plot flies along at a quite appropriately fast speed, something that Franco’s films are certainly not known for. It also has some truly astounding cinematography, featuring all of the constant zooms typical of his work, but presented with a more carefully focused and poetic eye than in, say, Female Vampire a few years later (the most notable scene here is probably a particularly uncomfortable one in which Miranda’s character suffocates a woman with an inflatable pillow, seen in the above screen capture).
Despite the somewhat convoluted plot, the film remains a compelling example of Jess Franco at his very best, and is must see for fans of the genre.
