Vampyr - Criterion Collection

What astounds me about early and silent films is the frequent painterliness of the images you see on film. The imagery of Symbolist painting seems especially conspicuous. It seems obvious, for example, that Pastrone's -Cabiria- and D. W. Griffith's -Intolerance- bathed deep in the influence of Gustave Moreau. Griffith's good girls seem sometimes to have stepped out of the canvases of Puvis de Chavannes or Burne-Jones.

This is a Scandinavian vampire film. Where else would you look for visual references, than early Edvard Munch? This is what jumps out at me in this film. In the scenes with the vampire-contaminated girl on her sickbed, Dreyer seems to be wanting to recreate Munch's -The Sick Girl- and -Spring-. The sister [?] in the castle seems to have been made up to look like a somewhat scrawny version of Inger Munch, the painter's sister, who modelled over and over again throughout the paintings.

Of course, expressionist movies and expressionist paintings naturally go along hand in hand. This movie is somewhat hard to watch at times; the pacing is definitely odd and disorienting. On the version I have, the subtitles are done in large black-letter script. Fortunately, they do not often appear, and unlike the text insets are mostly irrelevant to what is going on. This is basically a silent film with a soundtrack added. The soundtrack cuts out at times.

Not for everybody, but not awful, either.

Slow pans, suffused lighting, sparse dialogue, and indelible imagery, elevate this vampire movie, a complete opposite to the bloody neck-biters of Hammer Films Inc. It's not a movie for everyone. Too slow for some, too actionless for others, Vampyr does carry the stamp of a master, Carl Dreyer. The overall effect is to unnerve rather than frighten. Images collect rather than jolt, passing through to the subconscious where the film lingers long after a last flickering frame. Not a ghost movie, the effect is nevertheless ghostly and dreamlike, with daylight apparitions gliding through some nightless nether nether world. A counterpart perhaps closest in effect is 1962's Carnival of Lost Souls, minus adagio pacing.

My videocassette purchase is obviously a copy of the unrestored original. Titles remain in Danish, with the surreal bits of dialogue untranslated into English, (only pages from text appearing on screen are translated). The sound track crackles and pops with age, all of which might scare off the Sensurround viewer. But for me, the effect was heigtened by these infirmirties of age, rather like finding an old arcane manuscript in original form. Despite the film's vintage, Dreyer's remains a sure hand at the helm, with a rare and delicate sensibility that coheres. All in all, Vampyr may well be a work of genius, and a discovery for modern viewers. But unless you have a taste for the unrestored, stay away from videocassette.

This film is truly outstanding. It's possible to even go so far as to call 'Vampyr' the last in the line of German cinema expressionist movies; evidence to suggest the influences of 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' and 'Nosferatu' certainly abounds throughout.

First things first; the film has no tangible plot to follow except that the storyline is loosely strung on a young man's attempt to fight vampirism in a small (Danish?) town. While the lack of plot sounds bad in the abstract, there is so much strength in the movie's other attributes that the issue of story structure soon fades in the viewer's mind. Imagery provides 'Vampyr' with its rasion d'etre. One haunting, shadowy image segues into the next to make for a horror experience that's far subtler than what Universal Studios was starting to crank out at the time of this film's release. Director Carl Dreyer apparently shot some of the scenes through gauze to enhance the ghost-like wispiness of the sequences.

The effect is utterly magical. Combine that with kinks like reverse filming (man 'digging' the grave), an eerie cello/clarinet-led score as well as a virtually absent dialogue and you've got a film that addresses horror on a high level.

It's important to understand this as you watch, although the scenes are consistently textured enough to remind you that you're trapped in a black and white nightmare experience for the entire duration of the picture. The film seems to become more ethereal every minute and by the time the vampiric crone is done away with, the viewer has been through too harrowing an affair to be able to see how a semi-happy ending can make those feelings of disquiet ebb away. It must be said that it took guts to produce this film. 'Vampyr' breaks many conventions, including its [by then] out of fashion clinging to the techniques and dogma of silent cinema when everyone else was rushing forward to flourish in the new glory of sound. But Dreyer's film is also revolutionary against the conventions of film-making in general. Even Weine's 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' didn't dare to be so progressive as to do away with a storyline (its one is very complex, in fact). What results is a work as bizarre in form as Dali's 'Un Chien Andalou' and yet coherent and accessible through its ability to convey fear in a language higher than the banal or everyday.

Thankfully, the print was transferred extremely well onto videotape by Timeless Video. It's just unfortunate that the DVD has apparently failed so miserably in that department. Old films need to be treated with a great deal more respect by DVD and video companies. 'Metropolis' has suffered just as badly if not more at the hands of insensitive corporate butchery. It's just too bad that there aren't many video companies headed by people who genuinely care about the nature of their bread and butter. The consequences are very sad indeed: these are classic movies, not toys. Put it this way; would you just pick up a 70 year-old pensioner and throw him any old way onto a......... .........maybe that's a bad analogy but you get the idea. Hopefully, so will they.

the long shadows. the sharp hedges and the few words

Impossibly, hauntingly lovely horror film. A movie of images, not story. For example: the shadows of people waltzing on the wall; the hero lying in a coffin with a glass window, watching helplessly as he is buried alive; the wicked doctor, assistant to the vampire, being killed slowly in an avalanche of flour in an old mill. I was foolish enough to try to describe this film, and have failed miserably! Still, I hope that any lover of cinema will give this old, almost-forgotten near-silent movie a chance. The time spent won't be regretted as lost.