Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary movie review (2003)
The ballet as a silent movie with an orchestra. I'd never thought of it that way before. The dancers embody the characters, express emotion with their bodies and faces, try to translate feeling and speech into physical movement. They are borne up on the wings of the music. Gay Maddin's "Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary" uses (and improvises on, and kids, and abuses) the style of silent films to record a production of "Dracula" by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. The film is poetic and erotic, creepy and melodramatic, overwrought and sometimes mocking, as if F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) had...