Cellist Lori Goldston (famously of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged) performs an original live soundtrack to one of cinema’s most poetic nightmares, Carl Dreyer’s VAMPYR, a waking dream of hauntingly beautiful and unsettling imagery. Before the film we will screen the exquisite, shocking, (and obscure) avant-garde short: Ménilmontant (1926) Vampyr’ is as close as you get to poetry in film.” -Guillermo del Toro Nearly unclassifiable, VAMPYR (1933) remains a cornerstone work of the horror genre. The dreamlike tale of an occult-obsessed student’s visit to a small French village, as he is drawn into the unsettling mystery around a stricken family’s struggle with malevolent forces, remains an unparalleled evocation of the uncanny. Adapting the haunted stories of Sheridan Le Fanu, Carl Dreyer’s ceaseless innovation delivers a tour-de-force of supernatural phantasmagoria and eerie unease, via audacious camerawork. Presented from an all-new 2K restoration by the Danish Film Institute, supported by the MEDIA program Creative Europe, and taking more than a decade to complete – materials from several European archives (including the BFI, CNC and DFI) have been meticulously scanned and assessed to create the highest quality and most faithful version of VAMPYR possible. “The film that Dreyer described as a “waking dream” remains as labyrinthine as it was in 1932, perpetually forcing questions about what exactly is seen and who, in landscapes filtered through scrims of mist, is seeing it. The film invents its own language for mapping the intermingling of different worlds as the dead prey upon the living and the living behave like sleepwalkers under perpetual siege. Yet, for all the mist and splintered spatial continuity, everything feels uncannily palpable. The supernatural combat plays out not on fantastic sets but among grittily real locations: an abandoned château, an abandoned factory, an abandoned abbey, an abandoned mill.” -Geoffrey O’Brien, San Francisco Silent Film Festival Before the film VAMPYR we will screen the shocking avant-garde short, Ménilmontant (1926, 38 mins, Dir. Dimitri Kirsanov). ARTIST BIO: Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer and teacher from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist, amplified or acoustic, is full, textured, committed and original. A relentless inquirer, her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time and geography. Current and former collaborators and/or bosses include Earth, Nirvana, Mirah, Jessika Kenney, Ilan Volkov, Eyvind Kang, Stuart Dempster, David Byrne, Terry Riley, Jherek Bischoff, Malcom Goldstein, Steve Von Till, Lonnie Holley, Cat Power, Ellen Fullman, Maya Dunietz, Mik Quantius, Embryo, O Paon, Tara Jane O’Neil, Natacha Atlas, Broken Water, Ed Pias, Christian Rizzo and Sophie Laly, Threnody Ensemble, Cynthia Hopkins, 33 Fainting Spells, Vanessa Renwick, Mark Mitchell, Lynn Shelton, and many more. Her work has been commissioned by and/or performed at the Kennedy Center, Sydney Festival, Cineteca Nacional de México, Tectonics Festival, Frye Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival (TBA), WNYC, The New Foundation, Paris Fashion Week, Northwest Film Forum, On the Boards, Seattle International Film Festival, Seattle Jewish Film Festival, Bumbershoot, Crossing Border Festival, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Joe’s Pub, the Stone, University of Chicago, and venues large and small throughout North America, Mexico, Australia, and Europe. Lori has previously performed live soundtacks at Epsilon Spires for Carl Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928), Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922), and Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic.
