They go to a cinematograph partway through the film so that Dracula—who has been in his Romanian castle and out of step with the march of time for four hundred years—can see what London in 1897 has to offer. But stalking this palace of modernity, where people gather to watch trick films, puppet shows and newsreels, is a snow-white wolf.
In Bram Stoker's novel, the virtuous and industrious Mina is a child of the dawning century, learning employable skills with the newest technology (a typewriter, a telegraph) but her heart is Victorian. In Francis Ford Coppola's unrestrained reimagining, Mina is the heroine of a bloody medieval love story reborn as a city girl: body and mind in the moment, soul beyond time.
The film also feels outside of time, its naive effects are mostly made with technology available from the very start of cinema, tricks passed down from stage magicians or stumbled upon by tinkering with the first moving image cameras. Even the relatively modern technology Coppola resisted using at the time, like the optical printer, has become obsolete and left to gather dust in Hollywood basements.
Because he will never run out of time, Dracula is outside of it. And Dracula is anachronistic too, but timeless for it.
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Double exposure
Light passed through twice. Something I tried in film school, recording an image and reversing the camera to re-expose it with a new image overtop. It's a simple, time-worn trick that hits like magic. The celluloid strip can hold many shadows, as long as you control how much light gets in.
With this effect, time folds and returns. A lover recalled is conjured in a floating image. Superimposed on her suicide note is Elisabeta's final fall in bright purple. Later, orange blood pumps through her veins, glowing beneath her skin for only Dracula to see. Suddenly, great ellipses are made into one word: separated by time and place but united in a frame.
The effect was used by Georges Méliès to remove his head multiple times, throwing the spare in the air. It was used in 1932 for Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr and countless vampire films to come. It was used by me in film school on a Bolex (a gymnast contorting into different shapes on a mat) and the success of the effect was thrilling, like I had conspired with something elemental. But not all were charmed by this light play, after the Lumières' first screening of their cinematograph in 1895, Russian writer Maxim Gorky wrote, gloomily, "Last night, I was in the Kingdom of the Shadows."
Splice
On a dinner date with Dracula, Mina is overcome with memories of her past life as his lover who met a brutal end. Contemplating her centuries-old death, a tear falls, Dracula catches it, and when he opens his hand, a small clutch of diamonds. She laughs.
In Jean Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast, tears fall onto a gloved hand and turn to gems before our very eyes. It's a trick built into the very fabric (or I should say plastic) of film, the cut between two things. We don't see the moment of change but we feel it, a subliminal caesura, dislocation made whole again by tape or glue.
In The Beast's strange castle, Belle braves her captivity, her isolation, the presence of a monster and his lurid architecture, like hallways lined with chandeliers held up by human arms. But all her suffering becomes her reward, like a diamond forged under extreme pressure over millions of years, brought to the surface by volcanoes and mined in perilous shafts. Or in a cut that contains a fraction of an instant: one image ends and the other begins.
The Beast asks Belle to marry him every night at 7 pm sharp over dinner, and every night she refuses, as she is free to, it seems, for the rest of their lives. But transformation is underway, it cannot be stopped. When The Beast becomes exhausted during a walk, Belle cups water in her hand for him to lap: "It doesn't repulse you to let me drink from your hand?" "No Beast," she replies "I like it."
Over time, in the pressure of her captivity, the maiden becomes a queen.
Reverse
The child wails, looking up at Sadie Frost in her architectural wedding gown turned funeral shroud. "Remember when I took my teeth out for you?" she says. But it's no use, the illusion can't be defanged.
In the scene, the child is held precariously, about to slip as the thing that has become Lucy Westenra walks backwards up the stairs of the mausoleum (a PA blows out the candles on a nearby chandelier.) The crying child is finally dropped without pause into the arms of a social worker lying on a mattress a few inches below.
In the broadly accepted order of things, one of the first filmmakers to play a film strip in reverse was also one of the first few filmmakers and the first to also be a woman. Alice Guy-Blaché was also in the room when the Lumière brothers held the first film screening; the next year, she was working for Gaumont and had made one of her own, one-minute-long and unsettling. La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy) follows the harrowing tale of a woman plucking screaming babies out of painted cabbages and laying them down, little feet kicking and wriggling at the bottom of the screen, like an offering to the audience.
Anything recorded can be reversed, but the trick still beguiles. In another early film, Guy-Blaché made the city bustle backwards, vehicles and people moving away from the direction of their momentum. A little joke with time.
Frost climbs out of her coffin backwards, a feat considering Eiko Ishioka's avant-garde dress inspired by Byzantine art and lizards. When the film is reversed, she's getting in, but off somehow, a jack-in-the-box retreating, the springs compressing. "This is the hardest thing you'll be called upon to do," Coppola says to her in the coffin before they call action. In the film, immediately after, she is staked in the heart and decapitated in front of her three lovers. Oh right, and a child.
Pepper's ghost
The room is a small suite in the sanatorium, Mina is in the bed, sleeping. At a 45-degree angle from the room is a large mirror, across from it, an exact copy of the room but everything covered in black velvet. This effect, called Pepper's ghost, was popular in stage productions and spirit photography; the figure appears in the image, but almost, ghostly. Here the figure is dry ice lit neon green and piped into the velvet room, it seeps in through the window and down to the floor and slips under the covers to wake Mina up.
It's the most mystifying of Dracula's forms and according to Roman Coppola, who oversaw all the effect on the film, one of the trickiest to accomplish. Roman accumulated a little library of guidebooks for stage magicians, and books on illusions and trick photography.
This is also a scene where Dracula takes a dizzying number of forms: a twelve-foot bat, a stack of rats, and the young soft-haired prince. His transformation is eternal, with seemingly endless faces to wear: to terrify, to go unnoticed, to travel, to grieve or to seduce. He has more powerful forms, but when the men come to destroy him, he turns vaporous to see his love one more time.
Matte painting
There is a ripple in the garden hedge. The matte painting has slumped at the bottom. In the courtyard built inside one of MGM's Culver City soundstages, Coppola sits cross-legged on the ground with Mina and Lucy, describing the scene in which Lucy announces her engagement: "These are two young women in a moment of moody change." Soon the lights flash and a man lying on the rose arch above them holding a dropper, dispenses little raindrops on the actresses.
These are the soundstages where they shot The Wizard of Oz (snowy, treacherous Borgo's Pass was once a sunny brick road) and where they set fire to the old King Kong sets for the unforgettable scenes of chaos in Gone with the Wind. Dracula opens with a particularly vivid painted sky, red and purple, silhouetted with impaled puppets as Dracula cuts a bloody swath through Europe. Then the genteel gardens of London, stone and hedge and muddy little pond.
Scenes that stick: the deathly drop at the end of Black Narcissus, the giant ships in the port on the street where Marnie's Mom lives in Marnie, and the fiery sky Scarlett O'Hara curses, all made electric by painted canvas.
Computer Generated Imagery
Of course, there is one shot in the film that uses digital effects. It's right at the end when Dracula magically transforms back to his younger self, not the genteel top-hatted man, but the general who renounced god and drank the blood that gushed from a ten-foot cross: a satanic sacrament that condemned him to eternal life and unending longing. He longed for Elisabeta but settled for blood and real estate and brides with hair like snakes, until they could meet again.
I long, more than I understand, to see the black-velvet-covered room. And to go behind the backdrop at the ballet, to be industrious, to remember my past lives. I hope that the sometimes stifling patter of my daily life, its pressures and stress, is transforming me into the strongest stone, faceted and fine.
There are still effects I don't understand, the flowers that wilt in a second as the vampire's shadow passes over them: time-lapse or heat gun or a sly digital effect? Red alstroemeria, freesia, poppy and ranunculus, red blood cells, the red spray of two pyrotechnic bullet hits they had lying around and decided to detonate over Lucy on the bed, a symbol of her final claiming. This ruined the set, but sets are made to be ruined, like the mountains of Skull Island or the plywood facades of Atlanta. And technology is meant to be abandoned, forfeited in the inevitable slide of time.
Celluloid, if you control how much light gets in, can last centuries.
They go to a cinematograph partway through the film so that Dracula—who has been in his Romanian castle and out of step with the march of time for four hundred years—can see what London in 1897 has to offer. But stalking this palace of modernity, where people gather to watch trick films, puppet shows and newsreels, is a snow-white wolf.
In Bram Stoker's novel, the virtuous and industrious Mina is a child of the dawning century, learning employable skills with the newest technology (a typewriter, a telegraph) but her heart is Victorian. In Francis Ford Coppola's unrestrained reimagining, Mina is the heroine of a bloody medieval love story reborn as a city girl: body and mind in the moment, soul beyond time.
The film also feels outside of time, its naive effects are mostly made with technology available from the very start of cinema, tricks passed down from stage magicians or stumbled upon by tinkering with the first moving image cameras. Even the relatively modern technology Coppola resisted using at the time, like the optical printer, has become obsolete and left to gather dust in Hollywood basements.
Because he will never run out of time, Dracula is outside of it. And Dracula is anachronistic too, but timeless for it.
Double exposure
Light passed through twice. Something I tried in film school, recording an image and reversing the camera to re-expose it with a new image overtop. It's a simple, time-worn trick that hits like magic. The celluloid strip can hold many shadows, as long as you control how much light gets in.
With this effect, time folds and returns. A lover recalled is conjured in a floating image. Superimposed on her suicide note is Elisabeta's final fall in bright purple. Later, orange blood pumps through her veins, glowing beneath her skin for only Dracula to see. Suddenly, great ellipses are made into one word: separated by time and place but united in a frame.
The effect was used by Georges Méliès to remove his head multiple times, throwing the spare in the air. It was used in 1932 for Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr and countless vampire films to come. It was used by me in film school on a Bolex (a gymnast contorting into different shapes on a mat) and the success of the effect was thrilling, like I had conspired with something elemental. But not all were charmed by this light play, after the Lumières' first screening of their cinematograph in 1895, Russian writer Maxim Gorky wrote, gloomily, "Last night, I was in the Kingdom of the Shadows."
Splice
On a dinner date with Dracula, Mina is overcome with memories of her past life as his lover who met a brutal end. Contemplating her centuries-old death, a tear falls, Dracula catches it, and when he opens his hand, a small clutch of diamonds. She laughs.
In Jean Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast, tears fall onto a gloved hand and turn to gems before our very eyes. It's a trick built into the very fabric (or I should say plastic) of film, the cut between two things. We don't see the moment of change but we feel it, a subliminal caesura, dislocation made whole again by tape or glue.
In The Beast's strange castle, Belle braves her captivity, her isolation, the presence of a monster and his lurid architecture, like hallways lined with chandeliers held up by human arms. But all her suffering becomes her reward, like a diamond forged under extreme pressure over millions of years, brought to the surface by volcanoes and mined in perilous shafts. Or in a cut that contains a fraction of an instant: one image ends and the other begins.
The Beast asks Belle to marry him every night at 7 pm sharp over dinner, and every night she refuses, as she is free to, it seems, for the rest of their lives. But transformation is underway, it cannot be stopped. When The Beast becomes exhausted during a walk, Belle cups water in her hand for him to lap: "It doesn't repulse you to let me drink from your hand?" "No Beast," she replies "I like it."
Over time, in the pressure of her captivity, the maiden becomes a queen.
Reverse
The child wails, looking up at Sadie Frost in her architectural wedding gown turned funeral shroud. "Remember when I took my teeth out for you?" she says. But it's no use, the illusion can't be defanged.
In the scene, the child is held precariously, about to slip as the thing that has become Lucy Westenra walks backwards up the stairs of the mausoleum (a PA blows out the candles on a nearby chandelier.) The crying child is finally dropped without pause into the arms of a social worker lying on a mattress a few inches below.
In the broadly accepted order of things, one of the first filmmakers to play a film strip in reverse was also one of the first few filmmakers and the first to also be a woman. Alice Guy-Blaché was also in the room when the Lumière brothers held the first film screening; the next year, she was working for Gaumont and had made one of her own, one-minute-long and unsettling. La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy) follows the harrowing tale of a woman plucking screaming babies out of painted cabbages and laying them down, little feet kicking and wriggling at the bottom of the screen, like an offering to the audience.
Anything recorded can be reversed, but the trick still beguiles. In another early film, Guy-Blaché made the city bustle backwards, vehicles and people moving away from the direction of their momentum. A little joke with time.
Frost climbs out of her coffin backwards, a feat considering Eiko Ishioka's avant-garde dress inspired by Byzantine art and lizards. When the film is reversed, she's getting in, but off somehow, a jack-in-the-box retreating, the springs compressing. "This is the hardest thing you'll be called upon to do," Coppola says to her in the coffin before they call action. In the film, immediately after, she is staked in the heart and decapitated in front of her three lovers. Oh right, and a child.
Pepper's ghost
The room is a small suite in the sanatorium, Mina is in the bed, sleeping. At a 45-degree angle from the room is a large mirror, across from it, an exact copy of the room but everything covered in black velvet. This effect, called Pepper's ghost, was popular in stage productions and spirit photography; the figure appears in the image, but almost, ghostly. Here the figure is dry ice lit neon green and piped into the velvet room, it seeps in through the window and down to the floor and slips under the covers to wake Mina up.
It's the most mystifying of Dracula's forms and according to Roman Coppola, who oversaw all the effect on the film, one of the trickiest to accomplish. Roman accumulated a little library of guidebooks for stage magicians, and books on illusions and trick photography.
This is also a scene where Dracula takes a dizzying number of forms: a twelve-foot bat, a stack of rats, and the young soft-haired prince. His transformation is eternal, with seemingly endless faces to wear: to terrify, to go unnoticed, to travel, to grieve or to seduce. He has more powerful forms, but when the men come to destroy him, he turns vaporous to see his love one more time.
Matte painting
There is a ripple in the garden hedge. The matte painting has slumped at the bottom. In the courtyard built inside one of MGM's Culver City soundstages, Coppola sits cross-legged on the ground with Mina and Lucy, describing the scene in which Lucy announces her engagement: "These are two young women in a moment of moody change." Soon the lights flash and a man lying on the rose arch above them holding a dropper, dispenses little raindrops on the actresses.
These are the soundstages where they shot The Wizard of Oz (snowy, treacherous Borgo's Pass was once a sunny brick road) and where they set fire to the old King Kong sets for the unforgettable scenes of chaos in Gone with the Wind. Dracula opens with a particularly vivid painted sky, red and purple, silhouetted with impaled puppets as Dracula cuts a bloody swath through Europe. Then the genteel gardens of London, stone and hedge and muddy little pond.
Scenes that stick: the deathly drop at the end of Black Narcissus, the giant ships in the port on the street where Marnie's Mom lives in Marnie, and the fiery sky Scarlett O'Hara curses, all made electric by painted canvas.
Computer Generated Imagery
Of course, there is one shot in the film that uses digital effects. It's right at the end when Dracula magically transforms back to his younger self, not the genteel top-hatted man, but the general who renounced god and drank the blood that gushed from a ten-foot cross: a satanic sacrament that condemned him to eternal life and unending longing. He longed for Elisabeta but settled for blood and real estate and brides with hair like snakes, until they could meet again.
I long, more than I understand, to see the black-velvet-covered room. And to go behind the backdrop at the ballet, to be industrious, to remember my past lives. I hope that the sometimes stifling patter of my daily life, its pressures and stress, is transforming me into the strongest stone, faceted and fine.
There are still effects I don't understand, the flowers that wilt in a second as the vampire's shadow passes over them: time-lapse or heat gun or a sly digital effect? Red alstroemeria, freesia, poppy and ranunculus, red blood cells, the red spray of two pyrotechnic bullet hits they had lying around and decided to detonate over Lucy on the bed, a symbol of her final claiming. This ruined the set, but sets are made to be ruined, like the mountains of Skull Island or the plywood facades of Atlanta. And technology is meant to be abandoned, forfeited in the inevitable slide of time.
Celluloid, if you control how much light gets in, can last centuries.