written and directed by Paul Morrissey

Criterion #28.

I just read this weekend’s New York Times profile of Anne Carson and I step away from it with a strong feeling of envy. The privilege of being gnomic and still listened to! I have known a few people who hold to that path, artists to the bone — or should I say to the skin — whose every utterance is riddlesome. Who probably aren’t really being understood by anyone but who seize their leisure at its height anyway. They pluck from the root because the fruit is lovelier whole, nevermind that the husk may be impenetrable. I envy the Anne Carsons of the world their impractical dignity.

So why not just (re)claim it? [I wrote some other stuff here but it’s gone now because I can’t actually convince myself that there’s any more to it than this:] Fear of being isolated by incomprehension. I fear that the admirers of the impenetrable are in it for the wrong reasons. The people I tend to enjoy — and thus would most like to reach — are the people who tend not to indulge such stuff. That is a bind. (Perhaps the problem is tied up in “and thus would most like to reach”; perhaps it’s the ideal of symmetry that is stopping me up.) But I am trying to face this fear.

Of course, isolation is the extreme case; less extreme is mere elitism. I think I fear that too. Some things that are incomprehensible to others are comprehensible to me. Over the weekend we saw Roman Polanski’s The Tenant in a theater. When I first saw it a few years ago, I took to be sort of intuitive and fanciful, dreamy, irrational, not to be comprehended fully. This time I found (to my horror) that I understood everything in it quite vividly, like someone was speaking directly to me in a clear voice. Based on their quizzical murmurings I don’t think the other people in the theater experienced it that way. I tend to feel sorry for the movie that it has so few true friends, and likewise for myself. But perhaps that ought to be behind me as well. This is my truth and here’s someone speaking it to me. Isn’t that good enough? If you gotta ask, you ain’t got it, so why fret about those who gotta ask?

I agonize a lot, too much, about where to draw the line in writing on this site. I would love to erase the line entirely, but that’s a big step up for my little legs, and while I’m waiting to get there, a lot of things seem like strong evidence for the prosecution and shake me.

This entry is, in form, my effort to stick to my dignity no matter how far off the menu it orders; and in substance is about that, because that is, not coincidentally, what it is ordering. (It is also what The Tenant is a cautionary tale about, and why I understood it.)

My Flesh for Frankenstein entry read (and wrote) like one of my late-night term papers, the sort I still have to write in my nightmares. It was self-indulgent but only by principle. Here in Blood for Dracula I am hoping to err on the side of actual indulgence.

This is of course all an exercise.

(It’s no shock for that to appear here, on this site, because you all already know it, but it might be an interesting thing to find in the middle of a novel.)

So the substance of the substance, which in my mind ties this all together: these two movies (Flesh and Blood) are themselves both inscrutable utterances, easy to misunderstand and probably impossible to understand, and more than ever I believe them to be that way because Paul Morrissey is an artist of integrity. Which as suggested above has nothing whatsoever to do with quality. Here it is quite at odds with it.

“All bad poetry is sincere,” but most bad movies are not. Movies tend to be bad because they are oblivious, lazy, cynical, evil. Not these. These movies are bad because an artist followed his gut and made them that way. They are folk art, a one-man culture in themselves.

I admire his dignity but not his art.

Or — should I say that I do admire his art, because it and his dignity are one and the same thing? (I did after all kind of enjoy the movie.) Or does it mean that I do not admire his dignity, because it led him astray? (I did after all enjoy the movie only from within the knowledge that it was terrible.) Or does it work another way entirely? These are rapids for me.

Blood for Dracula is a lot better than Flesh for Frankenstein. Understand that I use the word “better” only because it is the closest word in your Earth language for describing a direction in the fourth dimension of taste where these movies live. This one has no spilled intestines, no facelift ladies, and is all filmed on lovely location rather than in a studio set that looks like a toilet. That alone would make it better. It also has a gonzo melancholy atmosphere that makes it almost soothing. Unlike Flesh for Frankenstein its crappiness is immediate and warm. In this respect, it comes closer to satisfying the standard expectations of camp viewing: garbage as comfort food. Like Little Debbie, Blood for Dracula approaches junk edibility, while still remaining fundamentally alien.

Okay, okay … fine, I’ll just do the slightly grudging thing I usually do, since I’ve already typed up most of it. (Maybe the next entry will be more consistently kooky. I always think that.) Here goes.

Generous synopsis: Dracula (Udo Kier again!) is sort of a sad sensitive type. He is dying because he can only drink the blood of virgins and there aren’t enough virgins left in this debauched modern world (= vaguely the 1920s). He goes searching for one good woman whose blood he can safely suck but finds only hypocrisy and amorality, which are poisonous to him. At the last minute he finally identifies a good old-fashioned girl and makes her his blood bride, but then he is staked dead by the angry young laborer (Joe Dallesandro again!), who makes revolutionary talk and hates Dracula because he typifies the old aristocracy, living off the blood of the people. The newly vampired girl, heartbroken, throws herself on the stake (!) and dies with him.

But a summary is misleading. The effect of the movie stands apart. So here are a couple more tidbits instead.

* This movie was made immediately after Frankenstein. They started it one day in the afternoon after they finished Frankenstein in the morning.

* This one has a good deal more sex, graphically (if unconvincingly) simulated. The extremely dubious sexual politics are ripe for analysis, but why should I? It would all come back to speculation about Paul Morrissey again. See previous entry.

* Udo and his sidekick mostly say “wirgins” instead of “virgins.” This comes up not infrequently.

* Like Goldilocks, before Dracula gets to the wirgin who is just right, he first tries the blood of two of her less virtuous sisters. In both cases, when he realizes that he has been deceived about their wirginity, there follows an extensive sequence of him vomiting up blood. On and on, all over everything, making wretching sounds. This is pretty much the only “horror” effect in the movie, most of which has almost no atmosphere of horror at all.

* Except at the end when all four of his limbs are chopped off one by one in the course of a quick ridiculous chase scene. Spoiler alert.

* Vittorio de Sica — you know, the distinguished director of Bicycle Thieves — plays the father of the girls, and gives some extremely strange speeches about the linguistic splendor of the name ‘Dracula.’ Morrissey says that de Sica wrote most of his own dialogue. Having been hired for only three days, he departs suddenly in the middle of the movie, saying that unfortunately his affairs must take him to London… but “not to worry my dear: I didn’t want to tell you but I’m getting the analysis of Count Dracula’s urine made by Professor Benson. The result will be positive, I am sure — more than positive!”

Just in case you still don’t understand what kind of movie this is, let me make clear that this is the first and only reference to urine. Or to Professor Benson. Morrissey, on the commentary, says that he loves this line because he finds it so utterly bizarre and has no idea where it came from. Don’t ask the writer/director, he just works here.

* Hey, speaking of Roman Polanski: Roman Polanski suddenly turns up for a cameo! He proceeds to oversee a little business clearly of his own devising, and such is his charisma that for a moment it seems we might be in a Polanski movie. This is not coincidentally the best scene. Here it is. I assure you this has nothing to do with anything that comes before or after it.

* I was wrong about composer Claudio Gizzi, last time, when I said he didn’t compose for any other movies. He also composed the score for What?, the movie Roman Polanski was making nearby at the time (which is why he was around to make a cameo). I was also wrong about his talent. Blood for Dracula confirms the impression that he is not practiced in film scoring and is making it up as he goes, and also that he is a clumsy composer; but this time some of the things he does clumsily are sort of tender and sweet and give the movie a good deal of its strange sympathy. Here is the main title. Compositionally it’s amateurish, an awkward attempt at sentimentality that isn’t properly worked out. And yet juxtaposed against a movie that is the same, it becomes sort of affecting. The emotions we have no good reason to feel sometimes have a special power, because they are born free.

* What is the real one degree of separation between this movie and The Tenant? They were both produced by Andrew Braunsberg. He’s the guy at the end of the table in the Polanski cameo scene you just watched.

* Criterionity: First of all, let me note with some satisfaction that I am now finally really out of these woods at the beginning of the Criterion list, both in terms of availability and of quality. Of the next 20 movies, only one is out of print and only one is Armageddon.

Blood for Dracula was unavailable from any legitimate source so again I watched a rip (so again no menu image above) and I missed some kind of gallery feature. But I did hear the commentary track, with the same dramatis personae as last time.

The commentary on this one was for me a particular pleasure. Here are Paul Morrissey’s final thoughts at the very end. Imagine a lot of ambivalent pauses and nose-sighing:

Whatever it is, it’s some sort of a vampire movie. And I think it raises more questions than it answers, But horror movies are not really in the business of answering questions. They’re just sort of strange little fables, that are supposed to have certain resonances, perhaps, outside of their own immediate narrative. I think that’s what Blood for Dracula actually is: a kind of strange trip into a horror-movie mentality. And a little bit horrible. In some parts. In other parts, enjoyable. And never exactly one simple thing.

But it’s Udo and his accent that are the real star of the commentary, as of the movie, so I’ll let him have the last word. He sums it all up: click here.