British Film Institute

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon is perhaps the best-known film never made. But what about others that never happened? What might a closer look at these reveal about the state of filmmaking? Such unmade films constitute the ‘dark matter’ of British director Michael Winterbottom’s book Dark Matter: Independent filmmaking in the 21st century. The invisible dark matter of the cosmos shapes our universe; without it many galaxies would fly apart. For Winterbottom, an examination of cinematic dark matter ‘might help to explain the wider landscape of British independent cinema’ this century.

The myth of the vampire entered into European literature as a Byronic hero of the Romantic era. This attractive but evil character appears to have shifted from peasant folklore into the written culture at the same time that Lady Caroline Lamb described Byron as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. That would be a perfect description for the classical vampire. Although the demonic figure that lives on blood has an ancient pedigree, it is significant that the modern vampire, the one we are familiar with, is parasitic on Christian mythology. The paraphernalia to ward off vampires are such as to give comfort that ultimately the evil of the vampire is powerless against the Good of the Christ. That evil is of central importance to the myth. The vampire is an erotic dream of the desires forbidden by Christian taboos. In most cases the taboo can read as a fear of disease, especially sexually transmitted diseases. In the nineteenth century, this fear of such diseases as syphilis and ‘consumption’ (tuberculosis) was unspoken, but expressed as metaphor. The three classic texts from which most vampirology derives – Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – are all essentially Christian, and erotic, in their symbolism. The descriptions of the symptoms of those infected by the vampire were very familiar to the readers of the day. So for nigh on two hundred years the vampire has roamed our nights striking fear but, at the same time, instilling desire.

Near the end of a candid 1966 documentary portrait of Pier Paolo Pasolini shot in 1966 (and shown last year on SBS), the French critic Jean-André Fieschi casually asks the Italian director whether art is for his a ‘matter of life and death’. Pasolini – who up to this point has been discoursing urbanely on class, culture, cinema and language like a true public intellectual – is floored by the question. ‘This changes the whole basis of our discussion,’ he declares, and goes on to confess that everything he has previously said is a mere mask hiding his actual, primal, angst-ridden feelings about life, death and survival. Unmasked as a trembling existentialist, Pasolini announces that the interview is over. And there Fieschi’s film abruptly ends.