Device Notes

In Peking Opera Blues , the characters rebel against the regime of Yuan Shikai in 1910s China.  A thief named Xiang Hong gets involved with two political dissidents, and all three end up at a local opera house after the owner's daughter, Bai Niu, helps them out.  One of the dissidents, Tsao Wan, is the daughter of a general, one of the film's antagonists.  She exploits her position to steal information from her father.  The one thing these characters from different backgrounds have in common is that they all engage in different kinds of performance.  They don't all act on stage, but they all use costumes or disguises to take on new roles that let them into places where they aren't supposed to be.  What comes to dominate in this film, between the ability go wherever you want and the extent to which it exploits the physicality of its sets and actors, is flexibility—though it doesn't come without the effort embodied in improbable feats of acrobatics and m...

Cuadecuc, Vampir is composed of footage taken on the set of Jesus Franco's 1970 film Count Dracula .  It incorporates both scenes from Count Dracula and documentary footage of that film's production.  Portions of the footage are shot in incredibly high contrast, to the point where it's hard to make out more than simple shapes, and you can practically feel the scarring of the film stock.   The film will allow scenes from Count Dracula to play for some time before interrupting them with behind-the-scenes details like makeup or effects work.  This often happens seamlessly, with an actor breaking character in the middle of a performance, or the mechanisms of special effects being visible in scenes that otherwise proceed normally.  Even though this film exposes Count Dracula as an artifice, it lingers on the scenes from that movie long enough to get you caught up in its internal reality, to temporarily take it at face value.  Seeing the film set interrupt...