From Paper to Screen: Dracula, Vagaries, and Mutations of a Gothic Figure
Menegaldo, Gilles
From Paper to Screen: Dracula, Vagaries, and Mutations of a Gothic Figure - 2005.
10
This article studies the transposition of a few classics of gothic literature to the screen, taking the example of several adaptations of Dracula by Bram Stoker, from Murnau’s founding Nosferatu, to the post-modern re-writing by Coppola. In all these films, the natural settings, spectacular and sublime, play an essential role as a source of aesthetic contemplation and as places of angst. The directors also highlight the draculean castle and exploit in their own way the narrative structures characteristic to the gothic. Cinema contributed to mythicize, but also to noticeably transform the modes of representation and the significance of Dracula’s figure, who is first the incarnation of a monstrous Other, and then evolves toward a more humanized image, although still tainted with an ambivalence associating seduction and terror. The latest avatars show a more dramatic shift that makes Dracula a romantic and tormented character radically different from Stoker’s conception.
From Paper to Screen: Dracula, Vagaries, and Mutations of a Gothic Figure - 2005.
10
This article studies the transposition of a few classics of gothic literature to the screen, taking the example of several adaptations of Dracula by Bram Stoker, from Murnau’s founding Nosferatu, to the post-modern re-writing by Coppola. In all these films, the natural settings, spectacular and sublime, play an essential role as a source of aesthetic contemplation and as places of angst. The directors also highlight the draculean castle and exploit in their own way the narrative structures characteristic to the gothic. Cinema contributed to mythicize, but also to noticeably transform the modes of representation and the significance of Dracula’s figure, who is first the incarnation of a monstrous Other, and then evolves toward a more humanized image, although still tainted with an ambivalence associating seduction and terror. The latest avatars show a more dramatic shift that makes Dracula a romantic and tormented character radically different from Stoker’s conception.
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