Source: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Stiftung

Venue: Goethe-Institut Irland, 37 Merrion Square East, Dublin 2

Friday 28 October. 10am – 2pm.

Tickets: €10 (incl €1 booking fee)

A one-day symposium involving both academics and artists, will explore Nosferatu’s importance within cinematic and wider cultural history. This will be presented in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Irland. 

Order of Events

9.30am – 10.00am 

Arrival – complimentary tea and coffee

10.00am – 11.30am

Screening of NYsferatu followed by Q&A with Andrea Mastrovito (via Zoom from Buenos Aires). Moderated by Matthew Nolan.

About NYsferatu: A film by Andrea Mastrovito, which was presented at the Bram Stoker Festival in 2019. A rotoscope (an animation technique tracing over footage to produce realistic action) recreation of the classic 1922 horror film Nosferatu, set in present day New York, it features 35,000 hand-drawn images, replicating the eerie, flickering shutter effect of early cinema, and aims to challenge the classic interpretation of the vampire as an outsider, rather addressing the obstacles immigrants meet when they experience economic exploitation, discrimination and xenophobia.

11.30am – 11.45am

Break – complimentary tea / coffee.

11.45am – 12.30pm 

Keynote presentation by Dr Piotr Sadowski followed by Q&A.

12.30pm – 1.00pm

Lunch (not supplied) / Free time 

1.00pm – 2.00pm

Panel discussion chaired by Conor Murphy (film producer and academic) featuring Dacre Stoker (film producer and author), Damian Lennon (artist and academic) and Dr Eve Watson (psychoanalyst).

Nosferatu100 

Sex and death, those two great mainstays of the horror genre, have rarely been as poetically evoked as in FW Murnau’s silent masterpiece. If Nosferatu wasn’t quite the first vampire movie, it was the first adaptation of Dracula, albeit an unofficial one; Bram Stoker’s estate sued the producers and all copies of the film were ordered to be destroyed. Fortunately for the history of cinema it was an order that could not be enforced in Germany. The film follows the story of Dracula closely, though names have been changed. The Dracula character, Graf Orlok, was played by Max Schreck as a hideous walking corpse with a bald head, pointy teeth and long fingernails; Jonathan Harker becomes Thomas Hutter, Mina Harker is Ellen, Renfield is Knock and Van Helsing becomes Professor Bulwer.

Many of what would become conventions of vampire pictures were established here – the vampire’s thirst for blood, the power of sunlight to destroy the creature and vampirism as a metaphor for sexuality, contagion and xenophobia. Despite Orlok’s hideousness, the Mina character sacrifices herself to him with an erotic abandon notably absent from her relations with her human husband, and the vampire is unable to tear himself away from her neck before sunrise.

Orlok, like so many monsters before and since, is finally undone by his all-too-human desire. This half-day symposium will examine the films’ enduring cultural and artistic legacy a century after it first screened in 1922.

Biographies 

Conor Murphy has been deeply involved in filmmaking and film lecturing over the last two decades in Ireland and across Europe. Since 2014, Conor has been the Editor-in-chie of the Open Access online journal “Studies in Arts and Humanities” (www.sahjournal.com).

Dr Piotr Sadowski is a lecturer, scholar, and author.  He teaches in the Department of Film and Creative Media in Dublin Business School, Ireland.  He is also a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin.  

Andrea Mastrovito is an Italian multi-media artist (born 1978 in Bergamo) now New York-based. He received his MFA in 2001 from Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti in Bergamo. He won the New York Prize, awarded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2007 and the Moroso Prize in 2012. He’s been commissioned for many public installations and his works have been acquired by dozens of public and private collections in Italy, Europe and U.S.A.

Dacre Stoker, a Canadian citizen and resident of the United States is the great grandnephew of Bram Stoker. He is a member of the Transylvania Society of Dracula, the London Dracula Society, and the Horror Writers Association. Dacre’s most recent work, Dracul, written with J.D. Barker serves as a prequel to Bram’s Dracula they thought existed only in the old Irish tales. Dracul has as one source, Bram Stoker’s Lost Journal: The Dublin Years, published in 2012, the centenary of Bram Stoker’s death. Dacre ’s research continues to take him on countless trips to the places Bram Stoker and his family spent their lives and to the locations featured in Dracula and Bram’s other fiction, confirming again and again that Bram’s “fiction” was based on many, many facts.

Dr Eve Watson is one of the director practitioners at Leeson Analytic Centre and has been in clinical practice since 2003. She has been involved in psychotherapy training, education and research since 2005 and is published in Ireland and abroad in topics such as sexuality, culture, literature, film, psychoanalysis, and the role of psychotherapy in the modern era. 

Dr Matthew Causey is an American academic, film and theatre maker, singer-songwriter and actor. He is professor emeritus at Trinity College Dublin and former director of the Arts Technology Research Laboratory in the School of Drama, Film and Music. He is author of ‘Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: from simulation to embeddedness’ (Routledge 2006). Recent publications include the essay ‘Postdigital Performance’ in ‘Theatre Journal’ (2017). He co-edited ‘The Performing Subject in the Space of Technology: through the virtual towards the real’ (Palgrave, 2015) which includes his chapter, ‘The Right to be Forgotten and the Image-Crimes of Digital Culture’.

Dr Sarah Cleary lectures across a range of subjects from the Gothic to media literacy and researches the juxtaposition between the media and the alleged negative effects of popular culture on children. Passionate about promoting Horror Studies beyond academia, she is an academic consultant on Irish daytime chat shows and in the media. In tandem with her research, Sarah also works as a Film Executive and regularly hosts the podcast Deadly Doses, which features a diverse range of horror industry professionals. Her monograph, The Myth of Harm, will be published in 2022 with Bloomsbury.

Damian Lennon is a lecturer at Dublin Business School specialising in critical literacy skills, media and writing. He is also a minimalist poet and founder-member of the expressivist improvising music group Zeropunkt.

SOLD OUT

Age Suitability: 18+

Duration: 4 hours

Accessibility: The Goethe Institut Building is wheelchair accessible.

The Goethe Institut on Google Maps. Click here for a map link to the venue.