Film Studies

In many ways, Steven Soderbergh could be described as an exemplary postmodern film-maker: smart, prolific, and pragmatic, at ease with Hollywood blockbusters and low-budget experiments alike. He knows enough about the nuts and bolts of technique to serve as his own cinematographer, and enough about the science of deal-making to sustain a parallel career as a producer (thirty films and counting, including such notable titles as Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven [2002]).

In many ways, Steven Soderbergh could be described as an exemplary postmodern film-maker: smart, prolific, and pragmatic, at ease with Hollywood blockbusters and low-budget experiments alike. He knows enough about the nuts and bolts of technique to serve as his own cinematographer ...

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.

If you share my view that Andy Warhol (1928–87) ranks among the most important film-makers who ever lived, ‘Our Kind of Movie’ will be your kind of book. A sophisticated yet direct writer with firsthand knowledge of the 1960s queer underground, art critic Douglas Crimp is equipped to do justice to Warhol’s manifold gifts: the perverse wit, the ceaseless formal invention, and, not least, the soul.