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Naoki Yoshimoto’s Sanguivorous: Palimpsests of Trauma and Nightmare
The title of Naoki Yoshimoto’s silent experimental vampire film Sanguivorous (which refers to creatures that subsist on blood) has the ring of the rational and categorical about it. Yet the film largely operates in the realm of dreams and associations, drifting within a liminal zone between traumatic memory, legend and possible delusion.
After an opening credit sequence that bears an epigraph concerning going to the center of the earth and rectifying the films opens with the female protagonist chanting what is apparently a magical formula to herself obviously in the grip of some great apprehension. It turns out that she is suffering in the present from some long ago event, a curse, passed down over many Centuries. The idea of rectification, of setting things right, throwing off the stigma and aberrations inherited or imprinted from the past gradually becomes the undercurrent of the film.
The legend of the vampire’s origin is revealed in a subsequent scene in a library where her boyfriend reads the story of how a 500 year-old Romanian vampire arrived in Japan. And how then a group of cultists seized a young female virgin, violated her and used her blood to revive the vampire, who subsequently killed those who had revived him. The boyfriend further relates that the young virgin, some kind of consort for him now, will return to life after 300 years and will succumb to her vampire nature if she has sexual intercourse. It is a strange coincidence that the boyfriend is reading this passage to the very young woman who appears to be the reincarnation of the female vampire consort. There is an aura of predestination here or perhaps the tendency of traumatic events to recur, for patterns to repeat, for victims to be drawn to people who will play out the same grim scenarios with them. Character is destiny. And frequently your character is a reflection of the injuries inflicted on your psyche in the earliest days of your existence.
Leaving the library the boyfriend attempts to get amorous with the young woman who rebuffs him because she needs to protect her purity. He opens his shirt and reveals that his body has been painted with “talismanic symbols” and she suggests that he has been “possessed.” Some force has taken hold of him and compelled him to find the vampire legend, to inscribe his body with a magical formula, to attempt to make love to her in order to insure that her vampire nature breaks through her attempts at chastity and resistance. A metaphor perhaps for the deformations of personality, the memories of pain and perversity, building up and threatening to break through the wall of repression. After an ambiguous encounter where the boyfriend may have succeeded at breaching her defenses she flees from him, reeling through a derelict landscape, struggling to regain control.
After an ellipsis she makes her way to a rural area and then to an odd dwelling, as if she has no choice now but to return to the past. Once inside she catches sight of the ancient male vampire of the legend, played by Butoh dancer Ko Murobushi, in an impressively physical performance.
She woman then proceeds to repair to a closet where she finds and dons a kimono, reconstituting the ancient past of the original trauma delineated in the legend and also perhaps the trapping of the traditional family where the first conflicts and injuries in life are experienced. The boyfriend comes searching for her and is immediately captured, becoming an object of contention (or so it appears) between the female protagonist, an older female vampire and the alpha vampire as if there is only this one human victim in the whole world.
There is a pervasive feeling of entrapment and suffocation, resentment and dread; they appear to be trapped in the center of the world or in some dream world of memory or the past. All of them suffer a horrible anguish at their state and their situation, simultaneously desperate to survive and to escape, to cease being the hungry creatures that they are and to extricate themselves from the stifling and bitterly enmeshed relationships they are bound up in. The vampire coven is an exaggerated symbolic allegory of the nuclear family. The young woman longs to escape, to end the curse once and for all and finally takes action to put an end to it.
Sanguivorous proceeds deliberately, the (possibly) simple though ambiguous plot running like an undercurrent beneath a profusion of visually striking images constantly shifting from one register to another, high resolution color to black and white to grainy monochromes, moving shadows, migrating light sources, mists and dissolves. The performances depend on movement, gesture, posture and placement in relation to each other and the background, facial expression. Sounds are mostly limited to screams, moans, and animalistic cries. The only audible dialogue in the film takes place in the prosaic contemporary world that precedes the action in the vampire’s realm. The world of the vampires is silent, the dialogue conveyed by titles; it is the silence of a deeper, primal and more disturbing layer of the mind, the place of demons and repetition compulsion. Anybody expecting Twilight will be sorely disappointed.
The director, Naoki Yashimoto, professes to be an admirer of many filmmakers. These include pillars of the art cinema, popular directors and avant-garde masters. He is a graduate of The Image Forum, a film school that specializes in experimental film. Sanguivorous is an experimental dark dream variation on popular genre elements that attempts to utilize the elements of the vampire genre to explore the most tortured recesses of the human spirit.
Fractured Synthesis The Blender Aesthetic of Outsider filmmaker Bob Moricz
My new essay in Bright Lights Film Journal, a critical survey of the work of underground filmaker Bob Moricz.
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/74/74bobmoricz_smart.php
Hey there, don't have access to FB during the workday, just wanted to let you know that your clip from this morning about Dido and Aeneas inspired me to listen to Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (on Grooveshark), which I haven't heard in ages. Was an obsession of mine in high school. (yes I was a real weirdo compared to my peers) It's kind of scary how much I remember of it, even some lyrics from the parts I used to listen to most. Next, The Coronation of Poppea...
