Peter Wächtler

Peter Wächtler's silent film "Untitled (Vampire)" is a mesmerising portrait of a solipsistic vampire and the secluded life he leads in a castle high in the mountains. In his diaristic accounts, existentialism meets the small comforts of consumption culture in the most bizarre yet plausible manners.

We hear a whole catalogue of technical, moral, and financial instructions, ranging from practical to absurd, each introduced by “It works . . . ,” as in “It works in the shops and in all of the malls; it works when you cut off your microscopic balls. . . . It works if you heat up the nickel, if you save up the dime, and on a blackballer I wasted my prime. . . However, a single glance at the homeless protagonist and his forlorn setting suffices to clarify that none of this advice has worked all that well for him.

An anthropomorphic rat repeatedly wakes up in its bed, leaves, presumably goes about its life, and returns back home in the evening. All we are offered by way of context is a single, hand-drawn shot of the rat’s proletarian room.