#blutsauger

Blutsauger / Bloodsuckers. A marxist vampire comedy Julian Radlmaier. 2021

House Ulitsa Sovetskaya, 7, Borovsk, Kaluzhskaya oblast', Russia, 249010 See in map

Some of you may know I work at a movie theater and as such I have developed...opinions on movie posters. I have no background in graphic design or marketing, I simply have to look at these all day.

Spencer

Yes I know this was a 2021 release, but we were still showing it in February so I'm counting it. And I mean...look at it, it's gorgeous. I am absolutely in love with this poster and I made sure we put it up whenever possible (there was an alternative one that was nice but not this beautiful).

Everything Everywhere All At Once

No best of 2022 list is complete without EEAAO and that extends to the poster. This poster has everything. So much of the stuff that happens in the film is represented on it and it also captures its ridicoulous energy. No notes.

Blutsauger - Eine Marxistische Vampirkomödie

Now this is a german movie that no one saw, which is a shame cause I adored it. And it's poster too. Once again it representes a lot of the stuff that happens in the film while also perfectly capturing it's energy. The painting/collage look of it is great and I loved having it around.

The Batman

Now this isn't a poster we had at my theatre but one I spotted "in the wild". I saw three of these next to each other in London and from afar they really looked like spray painted question marks. It's only when I got closer that I realized what they were and instantly fell in love.

Where The Crawdads Sing

And finally the one I like the most out of the ones whe currently have up. It reminds me of this haunting of Hill House poster I really like

Stylistically, the film is somewhat reminiscent of Roy and Wes Anderson. Am I right, or where does the inspiration for your style come from?

I hear that all the time. But I think that they and I still have common role models in the past. For me, for example, it's Jacques Tati, from whom the desire for rhythmic movements through choreographed long shots comes.

As great as Wes Anderson is, for me, something messy, awkward is always important as well. That's why I also like to work with layers so that every element isn't perfectly styled and timed through and there's a certain resistance of the world and reality that can be found in the film.

How did the idea for the film come about?

For me it's usually weird commutation effects, a basic idea that changes 1000 times and then eventually that comes out. I originally had a very different idea for the film, which was to be set in Los Angeles on the coast.

I've always been interested in Eastern European history and the Soviet Union, and they've been in my other films. Then I read a biography of Sergey Eisenstein in which there was a detail that gave me the basic idea for the film. It was about the shooting of the film October, which Eisenstein made in 1927 for the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. There the figure of Leon Trotsky appears as a historical character, but he had to be cut from the film under orders from Stalin.

Moreover, the biography said that Trotsky's body actor is a kind of dentist in real life. This struck me as a very weird detail. What kind of dentist should he be, and how did he become an Eisenstein actor?

At the same time, I was reading a novel by a Soviet writer at the time about a character who leaves the Soviet Union in the '20s and ends up in Germany and later in America. So a movement out of early socialism into capitalism. Then the third building block was that there are a lot of vampires in 'Das Kapital' by Marx. And after all, everything then came together to form a universe.

Although the film is set in the 1920s, modern objects such as a Coke can or a motorcycle appear, again and again, indicating the topicality of the theme. Are there any ideas from the revolution or Marxism that are still realistic or desirable today?

Absolutely. The film is not meant to be propaganda for a Marxist agenda. But what I'm interested in is the basic perception of society as a class society, where a few own a lot and many own little and are very limited in how they want to live their lives. And the question of how the structures determine who does what work in society. And as well the human level- what do you have to spend your time on? This is described in Marx's Capital as a fundamental problem.

The whole critique of capitalism is also very coherent in my opinion. But Marx himself has only a few answers how a socialist society should look like. My film doesn't provide any clarity there either. It's more about certain ethical questions. People lost their faith in the socialist solution in the 1920s, as they do today, and now they seem to find themselves in such a hopeless situation. In such a dangerous situation, from which there seems to be no progressive way out, there is a danger that society might tip over into something fascist. However, the film does not describe the emergence of National Socialism, but how in a capitalist class society minorities are quickly used as scapegoats for the conflicts.

You also wrote the screenplay, for which you were even awarded the Lola in 2019. How long did that take and what was your writing routine?

The process was wave-like. I wrote a treatment first, which I don't normally do. But that had to do with grant application routines and made the film relatively plot-heavy for me, as opposed to otherwise. Because a relatively large, historical, political construct is being opened up, I was afraid that things would be misunderstood. I wrote a basic version of the book pretty quickly in 6 weeks. But then there was a very long time for fine-tuning, during which I changed some dialogue sentences and scenes. So long until I had the feeling that the overall message of the film was right and more complex than just 'the capitalists are evil vampires'.

Could you describe the creative process from the idea to the production?

While writing the treatment, I already had an idea for the casting - who could play which role, since I often work with the same people. Many are friends and acquaintances. Sometimes I also adapt the roles to the players a little bit. So when the book is finished, a lot of preliminary work has already been done. In the final writing phase, a lot of preparation is done in parallel. For example, we look for locations that not only fit the finished script description but also interest us on another level. I didn't do much research in historical books, because the goal was not to depict something, but rather to search in reality. So the process can be described as a back and forth between making something up and checking it against reality, which then affects the plan again. Then when you shoot you have hopefully accumulated most of it. It's also a kind of differentiation process in which you become more and more small-scale.

Interview conducted during the Berlinale 2021 by Anne Robben. Many thanks to the festival and the NOISE Film PR agency.