Cuadecuc - Vampir

It was about a week ago I'd come across a fairly recent article talking about Jess Franco, the making of Count Dracula, and the tandem film project that was being shot simultaneously - Cuadecuc Vampir, by the underground Spanish filmmaker Pere Portabella. Looking more into this, I found out that Franco and Portabella were firends, and they had constructed the idea of this dual-project together. Funnily, Portabella's Cuadecuc is a completely experimental film, juxtaposing one of Franco's most straight-forward cinematic efforts. Of course, the straight-forwardness of his Dracula film is exactly what Christopher Lee liked about it - at the time, Lee had felt that the Hammer Dracual films were straying a little too far off the mark, and he welcomed the chance to play the Count in Franco's far more literal adaptation. Unfortunately, this didn't make for a better Dracula film, but even after-the-fact Christopher Lee stood up for it, saying that at least they gave the novel adaptation a good shot.

On the flipside, Pere Portabella was shooting Cuadecuc Vampir on grainy black-and-white film. The article 

Dracula in the Avant-Garde, or, How Jess Franco got into MOMA discusses the film in a way that makes it seem like a mixed-up of half-Dracula, from an alternate point of view, and half making-of documentary. I don't think this is entirely accurate (and this is purely opinion), because I don't think Portabella's film is a making-of documentary at all. To me, it is entirely an alternate rendering of Count Dracula within the context of an unusually engaging experimental film. It can't really be called a documentary as it's clear that the actors involved in Jess Franco's version are also playing to Portabella's camera, creating a skewed fiction for Caudecuc, one that is edited with some very candid, and yes, behind-the-scenes footage. But even the behind-the-scenes footage seems put-on, the actors know they're being filmed, and are still playing to the camera. The only truly candid footage is where Potrabella is showing us scenes actually being directed in Count Dracula, where the cast and crew's energies are focused towards Franco's direction, and Portabella's camera is acting more like a fly-on-the-wall, but because there is no location soundtrack for any of these shots, it ceases to be any sort of functianl documentary -- and this is to Cuadecuc's benefit, mind you -- to me this collection of footage serves to create a film that is also about the art of film, it's an experimental form of what would later in the 1990's be coined a bio-pic. Yet there's no dialog at all, the film runs over a sometimes hypnotic soundtrack. 

Because Cuadecuc Vampir was not exactly easy to track down, and because I think it's amazing in its own way, you can watch the movie here, until someone asks me to take it down.