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Beginning from a consideration of some ideas on aesthetics deriving from R. G. Collingwood, this essay sets Dreyer‘s Vampyr beside Fulcis The Beyond. The article then goes on to suggest something of the nature of the horror film, at least as exemplified by these two works, by placing them against the background of certain poetic procedures associated with the post-symbolist poetry of T. S. Eliot.
horrific truth about humanity. The vampire, therefore, becomes a means of exposing the monstrosity of modern humankind, prepared to commit murder for financial or scientific gain. In contrast, films such as Nosferatu and Vampyr (Carl Dreyer, Denmark, 1932 ) present the vampire genre as a confrontation between premodern and the modern in which modern man becomes engulfed
itself. Within a year, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr: The Strange Adventure of Allan Gray ( 1932 ) – a talkie that almost entirely abstains from talk – would exploit a comparable unease to gloriously poetic effect, affecting an apparent nostalgia for the recently deceased silent film. As Jean and Dale Drum have written, with wonderful understatement: ‘Dreyer’s first sound film was a radical departure from
The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
to sap the life of others and who can trace their ancestry through literary transformations to those blood-sucking creatures originally designated vampyr . But our title talks of the Undead, too, though space allows us only a passing glance at other revenants and it is predominantly vampires who inspire the most fascination. So we have chosen creatures who show an affinity with, or allow a constructive
qualities of Lagerlöf's 1912 novel Körkarlen ( Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness ) on which the film was based. The first Nordic vampire movie, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Danish expressionistic film Vampyr (1931–1932), is structured as a journey to an isolated island, a settlement beyond time and space at the border of life and death, day and night. 17 During the interwar years, Gothic also surfaced in Modernist writing, for example, in the Swedish Nobel laurate Pär Lagerkvist
their circulation of various online articles, new websites from other countries are appearing online and elaborating upon vampire ideas derived from the Anglo-American models. For example, the German online vampire group Vampyrs refers to the vampire as ‘shadow’, a concept used by Frater Mordor in his book on real vampirism, Das Buch Noctemeron: Vom Wesen des Vampirismus ( Noctemeron: On the
1819, when Mazeppa was published concurrently with The Vampyr e, Polidori’s ‘usurped’ version of Byron’s 1816 tale. 27 This was falsely attributed to Byron himself, with Goethe going as far to praise it as Byron’s best work to date; the poet decided he had had enough nonsense about vampires and Polidori and denied authorship. Byron, however, secured authorship rights to his Fragment by
, P. (2008), ‘Kingdom of Shadows: Double Exposure in Vampire Films’ Guardian.co.uk , 8 September: www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/sep/08/dvd.con nections.vampyr (accessed 8 June 2012). Howells, R. and Negreiros, J. (2012), Visual Culture , 2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity Press
-of-view shot – which is repeated throughout Dead of Night – is symptomatic of the whole film’s hesitation before the image, its constant refusal to confirm whether what we the audience are seeing is ‘real’ or an illusion. As argued by Mark Nash in an article on Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), such a hesitation is a mark of the fantastic, and clearly Dead of Night falls into that category (whereas Hammer horror, with its altogether more solid monsters, does not). 9 However, it will be suggested below that