Les Vampires Ep. 10 – The Terrible Wedding – P. Emerson Williams Score
Now ,this tenth and final episode of Les Vampires can only be described as a helter skelter romp, complete with chases, mesmerism, somnabulism, dancing vampires and gunplay. The English title should be something more akin to “The Bloody Wedding”, methinks, but the above is what it says in the title card…
This serial was a ton of fun to create sounds for, and I may start another one soon, but first there’s a few small and larger treats in the works.
Les Vampires Ep. 09 – The Poisoner – P. Emerson Williams Score
Well, I was on my way to keep with my original intention of scoring the ten episodes of Les Vampires in ten weeks, but life got in the way. The tenth and final episode will be up within a week though and many other videonic projects to follow.
The Vampires learn of Guerande’s engagement and plan to poison him and his family at his engagement party. Guerande and family are spared due to a servant imbibing in the poisoned champagne early and then the chase is on. Will Irma and Venemous escape?
Salomé (1923) – P. Emerson Williams Score
Working on this brought to mind a million different thoughts and connections. I’ll be pulling the chaos together into something relatively linear soon.
Salomé (1923), a silent film directed by Charles Bryant and starring Alla Nazimova, is a film adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play of the same name. The play itself is a loose retelling of the biblical story of King Herod and his execution of John the Baptist (here, as in Wilde’s play, called Jokaanan) at the request of his stepdaughter, Salomé, whom he lusts after. Salomé is often called one of the first art films to be made in the U.S. The highly stylized costumes, exaggerated acting (even for the period), minimal sets, and absence of all but the most necessary props make for a screen image much more focused on atmosphere and on conveying a sense of the characters’ individual heightened desires than on conventional plot development.
I think the mythical Salome is both a product of and a window into the minds of those who told it. There’s a flavour to the tale that feels more like one from the old testament than the new.
http://etext.virginia.edu/subjects/salome/salome2.html
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2848
The Multiverse of Phantasmagoric Reality and Corporeal Myth
When the Soviet Union fell many pondered what would happen to the spy agencies and the main strains of paranoia that characterized the cold war period. And what would happen to the spy genre and the archetypical characters who inhabited this oppressive world. Film noir style and atmosphere could be used in a light-hearted manner in a post-historical context, but viewing the original films while living in an empire in fast decline brings out the undercurrent that gives lie to a Father Knows Best view of the -50′s.
There are parallels between with past decade and the mid to late 1950′s, culturally and politically, but the situation is inverted economically. The loans taken out by the Greatest generation (TM) and the baby boomers has come to term with no payments having been sent in in the meantime. The -50′s was the crest of the wave of prosperity and that wave has now crashed against the rocks.
The sunny gloss of -50′s popular culture covered an underbelly crawling with tension, political subterfuge and the gradual intertwining of oranized crime and power. In recent memory the popular culture and media of the West combined a Brave New World tabloid «reality» TV peopled with orange-tanned hedonists coupled with news organizations reduced to being propaganda mouthpieces for the corporate paymasters who own you, me, our government and even our :grass-roots» movements, divided into «left» and «right» wing outlets arguing over whether the populace should be drinking political and economic bleach or gasoline. Different substances, same outcome.
My own perspective may singular in its vantage point. I have been working nearly three decades of working with the Lord of Hallucinations, so it may logically follow that I should find my consciousness invaded by disturbances, hypnagogic impressions and that I would be drawn to projects that inhabit dream worlds. Film noir, german expressionism, electronic voice phenomena and hauntology inhabit different countries in the same dark parallel world. The haunted landscape of Witch House is the dread beneath the crumbling suburban veneer, just as the world of the films of Harmony Korinne lifts the lid of the psyche of that majority of people who were left out of even the boom times.
As with Cirxus, its theme of nuclear meltdown and utopian promises was met with dismissal from some corners with a notion that the nuclear energy question was one settled in the favour of the industry. Now we have the nuclear disaster in Japan and it turns out many of our facilities are similarly vulnerable. So it is with dreams and monsters that for a few generations have seemed to be innocent and hokey. Zombies grab our collective imagination, and witches are potent archetypes in one subculture and another subculture is hard at work trying to bring literal witch hunts back elsewhere on the globe with a view to importing them back here. A possible dystopian future could be as much The Crucible and the rat-infested Nosferatu as Mad Max, and the mood is definitely dread and maximum schreck…
The stories we tell play a role far greater than to make the period between shift at work pass by more quickly. They help us interpret our reality and more importantly, to shape it.
Strange Factories – The Power of Stories from FoolishPeople on Vimeo.
Strange Factories is FoolishPeople’s first feature film, which explores the power of stories and myths and how they are ultimately given life by those who engage with them.
We would like you to become part of our story. You’re a crucial element of how this project is produced, created and experienced.
Join our IndieGoGo campaign and become a part of the ‘Strange Factories’ story.
http://www.indiegogo.com/strange-factories
http://www.info.strangefactories.com
A special thank you to Arban Severin, designer and maker of the Punch mask.
Les Vampires – Ep02: The Killer Ring – P. Emerson Williams Score
Our story opens up in this episode with the appearance of the gangsters calling themselves “Les Vampires” and the dramatic entrance of the amazing Musidora as Irma Vep. We now know a little more, but this just deepens the mystery and increases the heavy atmosphere. The fact that this series was shot in post WWI Paris has me pondering the urge to create, even in the midst of turmoil and chaos. the Killer Ring offered me a lot in the way of visual inspiration and coaxed sounds from me that I hadn’t anticipated.
From Wikipedia:
Les Vampires (1915) is a 10-part silent film serial. It was written and directed by Louis Feuillade and stars Musidora as “Irma Vep” a femme fatale whose name is a suspicious anagram of “vampire.” The serial is set in Paris, France and follows the exploits of a gang of master criminals (known in the period as an “Apache gang”) who call themselves “Les Vampires.”
There are 10 episodes, averaging around 40 minutes each, totalling about 6 and a half hours.
Olivier Assayas 1996 movie Irma Vep, with a story line of a director’s attempt to remake Les Vampires, is both an homage to the innovative nature of the original film and a critique of the then current state of French cinema.
Over the next few months I’ll be scoring all the episodes of this series:
La tête coupée (The Severed Head) 33 min. Released on 13 November 1915.
La bague qui tue (The Killer Ring) 15 min. Released on 13 November 1915.
Le cryptogramme rouge (The Red Cypher) 42 min. Released on 4 December 1915.
Le spectre (The Ghost) 32 min. Released on 7 January 1916.
L’évassion du mort (The Escaping Dead Man) 37 min. Released on 28 January 1916.
Les yeux qui fascinent (The Hypnotic Gaze) 58 min. Released on 24 March 1916.
Satanas (Satanas) 46 min. Released on 15 April 1916.
Le maître de la foudre (The Thunder Lord) 55 min. Released on 12 May 1916.
L’homme des poisons (The Poisoner) 53 min. Released on 2 June 1916.
Les noces sanglantes (Bloody Wedding) 60 min. Released on 30 June 1916
Les Vampires – Ep01: The Severed Head
Of the moonless nights they are kings,
darkness is their kingdom.
Carrying death and sowing terror
the dark Vampires fly,
with great suede wings,
ready not only to do evil… but to do even worse.
The Original Poster for Les Vampires
I’m having a lot of fun creating a score for this. Les Vampires is a film serial that gave us so much of the aesthetic for iconic gothic imagery its influence can not be overstated. Not a single vampire in sight, but enough mystery, twists and wickedness to fill twenty vampire novels.
From Wikipedia:
Les Vampires (1915) is a 10-part silent film serial. It was written and directed by Louis Feuillade and stars Musidora as “Irma Vep” a femme fatale whose name is a suspicious anagram of “vampire.” The serial is set in Paris, France and follows the exploits of a gang of master criminals (known in the period as an “Apache gang“) who call themselves “Les Vampires.”
There are 10 episodes, averaging around 40 minutes each, totalling about 6 and a half hours.
Olivier Assayas 1996 movie Irma Vep, with a story line of a director’s attempt to remake Les Vampires, is both an homage to the innovative nature of the original film and a critique of the then current state of French cinema.
Over the next few months I’ll be scoring all the episodes of this series:
- La tête coupée (The Severed Head) 33 min. Released on 13 November 1915.
- La bague qui tue (The Killer Ring) 15 min. Released on 13 November 1915.
- Le cryptogramme rouge (The Red Cypher) 42 min. Released on 4 December 1915.
- Le spectre (The Ghost) 32 min. Released on 7 January 1916.
- L’évassion du mort (The Escaping Dead Man) 37 min. Released on 28 January 1916.
- Les yeux qui fascinent (The Hypnotic Gaze) 58 min. Released on 24 March 1916.
- Satanas (Satanas) 46 min. Released on 15 April 1916.
- Le maître de la foudre (The Thunder Lord) 55 min. Released on 12 May 1916.
- L’homme des poisons (The Poisoner) 53 min. Released on 2 June 1916.
- Les noces sanglantes (Bloody Wedding) 60 min. Released on 30 June 1916
Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror
Veil Of Thorns – Nosferatu soundtrack MP3
Because I can leave no idle idea alone, I’ve created a soundtrack to “Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror”, the silent masterpiece by F.W. Murnau. I realize dozens of folks have done the same, but I’m actually quite proud of this one. I may do something with this with much better sound and picture quality. If I had a dvd burner, I’d let a chosen few of you have a full quality disc of it. I may yet be able to do something about it.
the approach was inspired by the Dogme 95 manofesto. Now, using so much technology probably makes it anathema to its adherents, but my mode of working is never pure, but, Harmony Korinne fanatic that I am, I feel an affinity to the movement. I had several limitations in doing this, as my hard drive is almost full, and I’ll be needing to send a bunch of large image files out in the coming week. Therefore, my first rule was only to use sounds I already had on my hard drive. This was easy, as what I have taking up space are the audio tracks from the Veil Of Thorns album I’ve just completed. What you’ll hear is 90% vocals with much less processing than it sounds like.
Secondly, I gave myself a timelimit of eight hours to create and sync the audio to the movie file. You can hear just the audio by downloading from the link above. You can download a windows media version by right clicking the image and saving, or you can watch it on the Veil Of Thorns Myspace page.
It’s actually taken me longer to render the movie than it took to write the music(k), which was fine, as I had lots of drawing I wanted to get done. More on that later.
The Vampire theme may make me goth at last.
For those few of you who haven’t seen countless versions of thos film, I include part of the wikipedia entry:
This was the first film of the production company Prana-Film GmbH; it was also the last as they declared bankruptcy after Bram Stoker’s estate—acting for his widow, Florence Stoker—sued for copyright infringement (plagiarism) and won. The court ordered all existing prints of Nosferatu destroyed, but a number of copies of the film had already been distributed around the world. These prints were then copied over the years, resulting in Nosferatu gaining a reputation as one of the greatest movie adaptations of the vampire legend.
With the influence of producer and production designer, Albin Grau, the film established one of two main lines of vampire depiction in movies. The “Nosferatu-type” is a living corpse with rodent features (especially elongated fingernails and incisors), associated with rats and plague, and neither charming nor erotic but totally repugnant. The victims usually die and are not turned into vampires themselves. The more common other line is the “Dracula-type” (established by Bela Lugosi’s version of Dracula and perpetuated by Christopher Lee), a charming aristocrat adept at seduction and turning his victims into new vampires.
Parts of the film allegedly showing Transylvania were filmed in Slovakia. Nosferatu’s castle, for instance, is Orava Castle in northern Slovakia, and other locations are in the High Tatras and on the Váh River around Strečno Castle.
The shadow of the vampire is seen climbing stairs in this famous scene from the movieMurnau’s Nosferatu is in the public domain, and copies of the movie are widely available on video—usually as poorly transferred, faded, scratched video copies that are often scorned by enthusiasts. However, pristine restored editions of the film have also been made available, and are also readily accessible to the public.
Watch the Nosferatu (Low bitrate)
Watch Nosferatu (high bitrate)
CHORONZON
Incunabula Papers – Ong's Hat
PANICMACHINE
Veil Of Thorns
