Friday, March 18, 2016 at 7:30pm
Pere Portabella's Cuadecuc, vampir

155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn

Introduced by Andrew Bujalski

Cuadecuc, vampir, Pere Portabella, 1970, digital projection, 69 mins

"I wandered into a screening of this movie at a film festival a decade or so ago with absolutely no idea of what it was, and it felt like being smacked with a tuning fork. I was amazed that it existed; I was amazed that I'd lived without it for so long. If you've spent too much of your life watching movies then you've probably also spent too much of your dreamlife imagining being inside the movie, and this is easily the finest cinematic representation of that dream. Oddly enough, by the end of it, it had also proved itself to be my new favorite vampire movie." - Andrew Bujalski

"The first word in the title of Pere Portabella's ravishing 1970 underground masterpiece, made in Spain while General Francisco Franco was still in power and shown clandestinely, means both 'worm's tail' and the unexposed footage at the end of film reels. The film is a silent black-and-white documentary about the shooting of Jesús Franco's Count Dracula, with Christopher Lee, that becomes much more: the lush, high-contrast cinematography evokes deteriorating prints of Nosferatu and Vampyr, and the extraordinary soundtrack by composer Carles Santos intersperses the sounds of jet planes, drills, syrupy Muzak, and sinister electronic music, all of which ingeniously locate Dracula and our perceptions of him in the contemporary world. Moving back and forth between Franco's film (with Dracula as an implicit stand-in for the generalissimo) and poetic production details, Portabella offers witty reflections on the powerful monopolies of both dictators and commercial cinema. The only words heard are in English, spoken by Lee and written by Bram Stoker." -Jonathan Rosenbaum

Tickets - $8, available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm.