Casual Relations was a 1974, low budget experimental film by auteur Mark Rappaport, which consisted of vignettes of people in their casual relationships – mostly filmed in portrait form with voice over and background sound – so, for instance, we watch one woman sit in a chair, in front of a TV – the screen in her view but not ours. And as she fidgets, uses a phone etc we hear the films she watches, all lifted from actual cinema releases.
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| dreams |
There are two reasons for the mention, both fleeting visitations. Firstly when we meet Elen, who slept through her alarm after a night of broken sleep that ended with nightmares. The nightmares are represented to the viewer in the form of stills from Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, occasionally merging images of Elen with the still. Rappaport also used some footage from the film later in his film. The idea of using Orlok as a representation of a nightmare worked, the public domain nature of the film probably didn’t hurt either.
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| bite |
The other reason is a sequence highlighting Elizabeth – a woman who makes money doing glamour photography and occasionally filming “stag films”. She tells us that she once filmed a motion picture, “A Vampire’s Love”, but that it was never released. We see moments of her, in the film, with the vampire as she reports on him pursuing her and her repealing him with a couple of apotropaic elements – namely crosses and garlic – of him biting her, her going to stake him but being unable to do so, turning and them terrorising the neighbourhood but also killing the other vampires. There was some nice vampiric imagery in this section and, of course, she was acting as a vampire.
The imdb page is here.
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