Vampyr

Rating:
Summary: Good film, abysmal DVD production
Review: Wait for a Criterion release (or equivalent). This is a very poor quality DVD- especially evident given the strength and creativity of Dreyer's original material. The subtitles in large gothic script are extremely annoying. The only haunting feeling one has from viewing this DVD is that of being robbed by Image Entertainment.

Rating:
Summary: Sickness unto death.
Review: Watching Carl Dreyer's *Vampyr* reminds me of having a fever: the surreal becomes real; the mind wanders; delirium seems incipient. Both experiences make you feel wretched. But as far as the movie goes, that's OK: art reserves the right to be full of misery, occasionally. In a brave new world, all art would be happy-happy . . . rather fortunately, we live in the real world, in which movies like *Vampyr* are necessary. It's not so much a vampire story as it is a meditation on death. Befitting the subject, the movie looks like an intangible nightmare: photographer Rudolph Mate shoots the thing through a gauze-like fog -- initially an accident, but Dreyer, who knew striking visuals when he saw them, insisted that Mate photograph the entire movie that way. Dreyer's vampire is an ugly old broad who scuttles through corridors and the stricken landscapes like an arthritic crab. Her antagonist, the amusingly named "Allan Gray", tends to sip tea and read books or catch a nap on a park bench while the villagers die around him. At least he's always impeccably dressed, I suppose. (Julian West -- not his real name -- not only played this part but apparently funded the whole project.) The least distinction of *Vampyr* is that it was the best vampire movie of its time, even better than Murnau's silent curio *Nosferatu*, and certainly better than Tod Browning's contemporaneous laugh-fest *Dracula* featuring that goofy Lugosi fellow. Its preoccupation with death and dying, and its gradual massing of death-imagery, wouldn't be equaled until Ingmar Bergman trod similar thematic ground some decades later. [As for the DVD, let us simply say that "Image Entertainment" strikes again: yes yes, the photography is milky, but the print is still unrestored. The picture quality is supposed to look surreal, not awful. And the erratically-used, gigantic subtitles in gothic script before black backgrounds that cover half the screen is such a bad idea that it defies critique. I'm so sick of this company. But since they're among the few companies who have cinematic masterpieces like *Vampyr* in their catalog, we will have to continue to put up with these jerks.]

Rating:
Summary: A painterly film
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: dreampyr
Review: What's truly unnerving about Vampyr is it's not so much about monsters
as psychic monstrosity. Most movies objectify our fears and horrors,
materializing them into goblins, slashers, vampires, and whatnot. In
Vampyr, we are to forced to confront our state of mind, our fears as
they surface and take shape, then dissolve, then return to haunt us
yet again.

In most vampire movies, dracula is a frightening creature, a prince of
the dead. He's a badass but can be scared off with garlic or killed
with a wooden stake. In Vampyr the horror is really the fascinating
but dreaded border between life and death, even between waking life
and sleep. This horror is both elusive and omnipresent(therefore more
unsettling) because it shows how imperceptively we slip from life into
death, from wakened state to helpless slumber. Vampyr charts out that
vast but intangible territory between being alive and dead, being
alert and dreaming. It's cinema as hypnosis, even beyond cinema as

meditation of, say, Tarkovsky. (Though I didn't much care for Dead Man
by Jarmusch, I thought, at its best, there were Dreyerian touches;
namely that white man can only think of life and death in violently
dialectical terms whereas for the Indian there is no clear boundary
between the two; thus, white man Depp's slip into death as guided by
the Indian becomes truly epic)

I think among the great filmmakers, only a handful had talent
comparable to Dreyer's. Mizoguchi was one. Ugetsu, like Vampyr, puts
us in a trance and til it's over we're transfixed. The effect on the
audience is total, musical. Kurosawa was one of the greatest but his
images never accumulated this kind of power. Kurosawa's films were
houses constructed of wood whereas Mizoguchi's films are trees
themselves. Organic and alive. Bresson was perhaps another one yet
his ascetic aesthetic sometimes went for threadbare expression that
remained too stark and cerebral to attain the kind of power in films

such as Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr.

Rating:
Summary: Package doesn¿t really match the movie
Review: When I picked up "Vampyr," I thought of all the commentary I have read about the film. I read the back of the package and was a little dismayed that the ending was given right there. Don't worry, the package is wrong, so the ending is not spoiled. And, that is not the only thing that is not right.

First, the movie does have subtitles, but they are not in English. When the hero is reading a book, you see a Germanic or Dutch gothic script, then a translation in English will appear. This covers the whole screen so I would not say it was subtitled. When you do see the subtitles, they are not in German or English. From reading another review, I am inclined to believe it is in Dutch.

There is some classic vampire folklore in the movie, not just what we learn from "Dracula." Don't be dismayed, the vampire, or vampyr, is still a malevolent being. It is interesting to see the other attributes given to these creatures in different cultures.

In regard to quality, I find it is a great film. Since it was originally filmed in 1931, the video was taken from the original film. Because of this, there is quite a bit of distortion and hissing (sometimes sounding like a helicopter in the distance or a trawling motor). This distortion can make the actual words and music sound faint. Although this may look like a silent film, it is not. You just have to listen for it. I think it adds to the eerie effect rather than detracts from it. Think of it like reading an ancient book that has the feel and smell of antiquity.

Carl Dreyer is experimental in his camera tricks. Remember that he is not making errors. He is using these tricks to help add to the ambience. For instance, take a close look at the shadow of the guy shoveling. That is all I will say there.

If you are a vampire or horror enthusiast, this is a must see. If your idea of horror is the typical "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie, then you may want to give this a skip. It is nice to see where other horror directors got their ideas though.

Rating:
Summary: A cornerstone.
Review: Whereas Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, 4 years this film's senior, is obsessed with showing the audience through close-ups and inventive framing, Vampyr is a film possessed of the perverse knowledge that the camera's eye is capable of exclusion. Understanding this, Dreyer is able to create the idea of terror by suggesting it, rather than evoking. The result is a chilling work that may fall numb on Hollywood viewers.

Vampyr is presumably a film produced under UFA, as was Dreyer's film Mikael. This allows me to make parallels to Fritz Lang that might otherwise be stretched. Primarily I speak of the pervasion of the death's head, a symbol found in two of Lang's earliest films: Der Mude Tod and Die Nibelungen. (The former, in turn, is likened to Dreyer's Leaves From Satan's Book by film theorist Tom Gunning.) In Lang this is a mechanical figure of destiny which is fought against with the heart, and to some avail. In Dreyer, it is a biological figure pitted against the heart, to similar ends. Both Vampyr and Der Mude Tod see lovers together at their finales. Lang is simply the more modern of the two, and Dreyer (to me) the more compelling.

There are also the ambigious perceptions of women. Both seem strongly influenced by Nietzsche's (nearly contemporary) idea that women are capable of much and rarely acheive it, falling victim, instead, to the vampire male. Dreyer, of course, reverts to Goethe after exploiting this, and the problem is found to be feminine. Lang refuses this, even in Metropolis. (Again, Lang proves more modern.)

As a talkie this film shows its auteur's history as a silent film maker. Sound is only used when necessary. There are intertitles. There's a bit where a character reads from a book and the passages he reads are shown as intertitles, which I really enjoy.
The unfortunate things are the subtitles - which are, as you've probably read, in a weird gothic font and take up half the screen with their Closed-Caption like backgrounds (intertitles also appear in this font - Germany gave up with the "gothic" type lettering during WW2 because it was so hard for non-natives to read.). I'm not really sure how original the score is, either. It seems as though the movie would be beyond belief without it, or with a more suited example (Einhorn's score for the Criterion Joan of Arc, for example). And the picture quality is really poor, which can be expected. But there are certain things which are strictly the fault of the production company. For example, there are frames of the movie subtitled in other languages, presumably from previous releases used to produce this release.

Of Vampyr, Dreyer said:
"I wanted to create the daydream on film and wanted to show that horror is not a part of the things around us, but of our own subconscious mind."

What a remarkable job he did! Lynch and Bergman, and a few dozen other names to which history has been more kind, owe a great deal to this film.