Cuadecuc, Vampir

Director: Pere Portabella
Cast: Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Emma Cohen, Jesús Franco
Spain, 1971, 75', DCP, b&w
English with Turkish subtitles

Shot opportunistically on the set of Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula, Pere Portabella’s parasite film shows us what images are doing to us, and how much we can do with them, given the ample ingredients of a well-known cinematic typology. A landmark of Spanish anti-establishment experimental cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the film is, in Portabella’s own words, 'a film within a film, a discourse within a discourse, in other words, a ‘bloodsucking film’ of another.' Filmed provocatively in 16mm with sound negative, Cuadecuc, vampir simultaneously reveals and revels in the strange 'fantasmatic materialism' inherent in both the constructive mechanisms of magic in mainstream narrative cinema, and that of clandestine politico-aesthetic strategies employed by avant-garde filmmakers under the Franco regime.