Filmic Avatars of a Vampire Figure: Conservation and Transformation of the “Vourdalak”
FBK Aula Piccola
Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Polo delle Scienze Umane e sociali
Aula Piccola
FBK Aula Piccola
Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Polo delle Scienze Umane e sociali
Aula Piccola
At a time when vampire fiction was still in its infancy in Western Europe, Count A. K. Tolstoy penned a French-language Gothic novella titled La Famille du Vourdalak (1839). It has since been largely neglected, despite multiple screen adaptations, from two Italian opuses, Mario Bava’s “I Wurdalak” (1963) and Giorgio Ferroni’s La notte dei diavoli (1972), to a couple of experimental Soviet films by Klimov/Shavlak and Yufit, in the early 1990s. Contemporary screen versions, including Adrien Beau’s Le Vourdalak (2023), are testament to a revived interest.
The Slavic vourdalak’s specificity lies not only in its status as an archaic patriarch (a far cry from the suave seducer made popular by Bram Stoker’s Dracula and its innumerable screen incarnations), but also in the nature of its victim(s) as it only feeds on its “loved ones.” A reassessment of the family unit (through disintegration and eventual reconfiguration) is thus foregrounded in vourdalak narratives, with a striking mise en abyme of the conservation-and-transformation process in both diachronic and diegetic terms. Various cinematic treatments of the motif will be analyzed, from “straightforward” adaptation to experimental fragmentation, melancholy tone to grotesque, religious iconicity to modernization, social critique to political subtext.
The presentation will take place in presence in the Aula Piccola FBK while places are available and online.
The speaker will be in-person.
The event will be held in English.
Speakers
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University of PennsylvaniaPhilippe Met is former Chair of French and Professor of French and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Distinguished Visiting Professor at East China Normal University where he has received a Chang Jiang Chair award. He has been Editor-in-Chief of "French Forum" since 2007 and has published widely on poetry, fantastic literature and genre or auteur cinema. In addition to over 100 articles, single-authored and edited books include but are not limited to: "Formules de la poésie. Études sur Ponge, Leiris, Char et Du Bouchet" (PUF, 1999); "La Lettre tue. Spectre(s) de l’écrit fantastique" (Septentrion, 2009); (co-ed.) "Screening the Paris Suburbs 1895-1995" (Manchester UP, 2017); "Ponge et le cinéma" (Nouvelles Ed. Place, 2019); (ed.) "Louis Malle dans tous ses états" (Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2022). A new book has just been released: "Le 'Giallo', ou l’Enfance de l’art" (Classiques Garnier, 2025). Two new book projects are currently being developed, one on a “phantom film” by Alain Resnais, the other on “the poetics of the notebook”
Registration
Registration to this event is mandatory.
RegisterRegistration is mandatory by 14 March 2025 at 12 noon.