Zafeiris Dimitra Neogreaca Engleza Seria I, grupa 3

21.05.2012

The Gothic on Screen, as seen by Misha Kavka

There is no established genre of the gothic film or Gothic cinema, there are Gothic scenes or characters and they usually fall in to the cathegory of the Horror movie. The Gothic, as W.P. Day said, scares you trough spectacle, not necessarily trough plots and characters, it is a very visual form. On screen it delivers directly the images, having a two dimensional view, thus causing fear, but in its literary forms it lets the reader to have a larger and maybe even scarier view of the situation in hand. There are some specific Gothic elements ,codes that constitute the Gothic film , such as a foggy castle on the top of a hill, abandoned house, the tall dark windows that may cast shadows, the perfectly round moon passed by a dark cloud , trough these we can say that a Gothic film does exist and has clear patterns .A good example could be the hand of Dracula emerging from the side of his coffin that becomes in Frankenstein the twitching fingers of the newly animated creature. The Gothic may be confused with horror, therefore is good to specify that the Gothic is about fear, paranoia, constantly using the boundary between life and death, with characters that are corpses brought back to life and such; it also uses the boundary between the present and the past, conveniently unfolding the action in the past, bringing the historical moment into our century and renewing different fears with its shape changing content-as its being worked by different artists with different views-.Another factor is the period in which the movie was made, as we can observe , for the 1990s audience, it was the fascination with erotic piercings and the fear of HIV and AIDS that are transmited trough blood (Bram Stokers Dracula 1992, Coppola)(see picture 2). It represents a creepy inseration of a maybe imaginary past into the present. Some feminist and queer criticism underlined the mix between the feminine and masculine role that has been created, such as in Frankenstein where men have the possibility to reproduct or in Dracula, where the feminine emotional characteristics are combined with the masculine ones. The Gothic is a flexible genre, having to absorb different moments in history that affect the masses, not necessarily being directly linked, just transporting different anxieties from within onto the screen. In Misha Kavkas work, she is found stating that the Gothic film has, in fact, its place between film noir and horror.

Zafeiris Dimitra Neogreaca Engleza Seria I, grupa 3

21.05.2012

The Gothic on Screen, as seen by Misha Kavka

The late 1920s brought to America a raft of German directors, that also influenced Hollywood filmmaking. Theyre stylistic techniques have left a clear mark on the early Universal films. The most striking image of Dracula, is maybe presented in the scene in which Renfield enters the castle and the camera zooms out creating a counterbalance of human insignificance and immense space. In Whales Frankenstein the same element appears. The female Gothic deals with the interrelated themes of investigation, paranoia, and (usually deviant) sexuality. The protagonist is a woman haunted ( probably by another woman|). The woman then is found at crossroads between a constrained but respectable domestic normality and deviant, or excessive, sexuality. She is, in line with the sexual politics of the 1940s through the early 1960s and her survival in these films is by no means guaranteed. Indeed, film has proven to be the most effective social technology in the twentieth century for fielding the Gothic. In all films something has been sensed, without making a full appearance, yet it is bound through set visual codes to the effect of the beyond.