Kylo Ren Is The Vampire
Trying to learn Japanese entails watching the occasional movie (with subtitles). My Japanese isn't very good, but I can pick up basic conversations OK. Everything more complex still mostly escapes me.
The other day, I signed up with a free streaming service that has some Japanese material. I'm not particular interested in most new movies, but they have some interesting other stuff. This includes a movie called Evil of Dracula, which in itself is a ridiculous title (the original title translates as Bloodsucking Rose, which is a lot better).
The movie itself isn't ridiculous at all. It's actually very well made, and it features a bunch of very good scenes (for example, there's a chase scene through a forest which is sublime). Parts of the plot are somewhat goofy, but you could easily say the same for any other horror movie.
At some stage into the movie, the back story of why there is a vampire in Japan is revealed. I wouldn't know if Japanese folk tales include a blood-sucking creature; if they do, they decided not to use it. Turns out that the root cause of the vampirism is a Western guy who got washed up at the country's coast (which did indeed happen occasionally), who got tortured by his Japanese captors (ditto), and who then somehow was released into a desert that I'm not sure actually exists in Japan. Regardless, because he was so famished and thirsty, he started drinking his own blood, which turned him into a vampire. I didn't know that drinking your own blood would do that. I learn something new every day.
One of the funny things about the movie is that all the people who are becoming vampires or have become one turn really pale. Yet all the other people are unable to see this. Another funny aspect is that the vampires don't bite their victims in the neck (where there is an ample amount of blood vessels) but into the chest. How that is an efficient way to draw a lot of blood escapes me, but it allows the film makers to show the occasional naked female breast.
Once the main characters arrives at the school he is supposed to teach at, he is being informed that the headmaster's wife just died, and she has been laid to rest in the basement for a week. Somehow, this doesn't faze him at all, and things evolve from there. The headmaster (who looks a lot like Kylo Ren from the Star Wars movies -- when you look at the movie poster, you see his face at the far left on top of the coffin) changes back and forth between his human and vampiristic form, and larger parts of the story are borrowed from the original Dracula story.
There are a number of plots points that frankly escaped me. But in the end, the vampiristic Kylo Ren and his undead wife are killed by the main character in what seems like an odd stroke of luck (the movie did away with the original Dracula plot point of the stake through the heart etc.). The only survivors are the main character (second from the right in the poster) and one of his students, a young woman (in the center).
There's a new version of one of the most accomplished photobooks of the 20th century, Kikuji Kawada's The Map. I lucked out when I bought a copy when they could still be had at a somewhat reasonable price ($95 at the time). I've been admiring it ever since. But apparently, Kawada had originally envisioned a completely different form for the book: a two-volume set, with abstract and "straight" photographs being separated. That version has now been released as the Maquette Edition.
Over the past few weeks, I've been working on an article about the photographer and his book that turned out to be very time consuming and involved. Given there actually is very little information available about the book (at least in the Western press) and given that some of the information is actually not even correct (the essays in the Maquette Edition clarify a lot of aspects), I wanted to write about who Kikuji Kawada actually is, in particular where he was coming from as a photographer: what is the context of the work?
The article has now been published, and I hope you will find the time to read it. I'm very happy with how it came out.
The week before, I published an interview I had conducted with Jenny Kim, which ended up being very personal. I hope you'll find time to read it as well.
Near the end of October this year, I had finally reached a breaking point with my site. I can't say any longer that I don't mind writing photobook reviews. I actually do mind -- if that's all I'm doing. Going forward, I want to produce a lot of other, different pieces, whether they're interviews or in-depth articles such as the one about The Map. I'm not making any money off that work; but I feel that at the very least, whatever I contribute to the world of photography ought to be more than just book reviews.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg