Courtesy: Albert Serra photograph: Román Yñán Història de la meva mort (Story of my Death), production still, 2013. The Catalan director also contributed an extended meditation on the names of Jesus ( Els noms de Crist, The Names of Christ, 2010) to the group show ‘Are You Ready For TV?’ at MACBA, Barcelona, in 2010, and at dOCUMENTA(13), in 2012, he presented the 101-hour project Three Little Pigs (2012), for which, over the course of the summer-long exhibition, he filmed costumed actors performing soliloquies based on texts from, or quotes by, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Adolf Hitler, with the actors speaking as if to themselves, never looking directly into the camera. His 2006 film Honor de cavalleria (Honour of the Knights), for instance, was a variation on Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605 – 15), while El cant dels ocells (Birdsong, 2008) relays the biblical tale of the Three Wise Men’s search for the Christ Child.
What should come as less of a surprise is that, as in previous films, Serra found narrative inspiration for Història de la meva mort in noted historical and literary figures.
A visit to an expert in the field of evading death consequently seems apposite although Serra’s Count Dracula follows a set of stringent behavioural rules that aren’t quite as might be expected: sunlight, for instance, doesn’t seem to present him with the same issues vampires usually experience during the day. The film’s title hints at the purpose of Casanova’s trip: the Epicurean atomist, master pontificator and quintessential womanizer is seeking information about the one thing everyone thinks they understand but don’t: death. Yet it is precisely this imagined expedition that forms the subject of Albert Serra’s Història de la meva mort (Story of my Death, 2013), which won the Golden Leopard at last year’s Locarno International Film Festival.
Given the area’s associations with mortal danger, it seems improbable that the renowned Italian libertine Giacomo Casanova would have made the perilous journey to the region by horse and carriage back in the 18th century. Transylvania, on the southern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe, has been notorious for centuries as the setting for Count Dracula’s fictional home.