Field Reports, Part III: Journal report.

I found an article buried in Senses of Cinema that was pretty interesting. It's called "Seeing in the Night: A Nocturne" by Fiona Villella. When I clicked on the link, I had no idea what it was. I was quite surprised to find a summary and discussion about an underground Australian philosphical vampire film. The film, A Nocturne, is written and directed by Melbourne-based Bill Mousoulis. According to the article, his films rarely fall into genre or conventional narrative categories. Upon reading more, this film appears to do the same, although it does employ a certain genre-reworking. The author gives a good overall summary of the film's ideology. She writes, "As in previous Mousoulis films, A Nocturne sets up an opposition between commerce and art; mainstream and alternative space; the ruthlessness of capitalist society and the humanity of the artist." This is really the best way to describe what the film is about without going into plot details. The vampires are the outcast 'artists' - they are fuelled by passion and desire. The men in suits who go about ordinary life are what the vampires oppose. These people are repressed and passionless, fuelled by commerce, profit, and what have you. What interesting about this is that Mousoulis doesn't leave the film this painfully cut and dry. Though he seems to sympathize with the vampires for their raw passion, he also questions their morality. The vampire (though moved by true and honest desire) is at the core, an 'evil' entity, feeding on the blood of the living victim. He has a character call into question the vampires' so-called revolutionary and oppositional nature. So the film says that while vampires are opposed to a passionless society, they are still problematic in and of themselves. The author writes as the main question of the film, "What remains a truly oppositional way of being?" Because the vampires, while oppositional, have fatal flaws in their way of living (or unliving, I suppose). The film doesn't provide any solutions to the problematic questions it presents. As a viewer, I appreciate this. I like it better when some things are left open to interpretation. One has to take away from a film like this whatever he or she can. It would be nice to actually see this film as opposed to reading about it, but I have a good general idea of the film. I like the metaphor of the vampire to represent a sort of underbelly or repressed side of ordinary society. The vampires in this film represent everything that the common people dis-embrace, or are too afraid to embrace. This film seems as much an abstract work as it does a genre re-working - and these factors definitely make it less tangible but more inviting of viewer interaction in order to draw personal conclusions.