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Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)
🕑 Added 2022-05-06 23:19:05 +0000 UTC
This is the one major Dreyer film I'd never seen, and wow, what an oversight. Made twelve years after The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Vampyr picks up the Expressionist mantle and runs with it, producing a film that is more formally daring in almost every way. To be fair, Robert Wiene wasn't much of a director, and much of what made Caligari unique was allegedly contributed by others. If Dreyer's only innovation was moving the camera, that alone would place Vampyr leagues ahead of the more canonical film.
But that mobile camera serves as a blueprint for the more systematic use of pans and pivots Dreyer would use in Day of Wrath and especially Ordet. In Vampyr, Dreyer is simultaneously articulating space and destabilizing it, providing a correlative to the utter confusion of Allan Gray (Julian West) as he sinks further into the realm of supernatural horror. With his quick, mechanical tilts and shifts -- especially one amazing maneuver that seems to move the camera between floors in a fraction of a second -- Dreyer provides a concrete sense that we are observing an environment being controlled by a decidedly inhuman force.
As a story, I suppose Vampyr is fairly disconnected, although only slightly more so than Caligari. Expressionism tended to favor visceral impact over logic, and this sometimes meant that visual shocks were administered to the viewer without an obvious narrative motivation. (Consider the dance of the False Maria in Metropolis, which has no real purpose except to display the seductive power of evil science.) It takes some time for West to actually end up in the scenario with sisters Giséle (Rena Mandel) and Léone (Sybille Schmitz) and the bizarre, Renfieldesque doctor (Jan Hieronimko). While staying at the village inn, West is caught in a maze of shadow-presences and disorienting hallways, all of which makes him psychologically vulnerable to the eventual entreaties of the girls' father (Maurice Schutz). But strictly speaking, the first fifteen minutes of this very short film are probably expendable.
But so what? Dreyer uses specifically filmic techniques to render Vampyr indescribably weird. Deploying slow-motion, reverse-motion, and a ghostly superimposition sequence that seems amazingly advanced for 1932, Dreyer holds story fragments together with an all-enveloping mood, and in so doing may have set the template for virtually all horror cinema to come. When in doubt, make shit look unbelievably fucked up. Also: bonus points for the POV shots of Allen in the coffin being taken to the graveyard. The upward dislocation actually reminded me of Side/Walk/Shuttle. To wit:
Comments
Michael Sicinski
I have not, but I will track it down!
James Hansen
Have you read Brakhage’s essay/lecture on this? It’s kinda wild. I love teaching this film, basically for experimental editing/cinematography, but I’m not sure I’ve ever sold a single student on it 🤣🤣🤣
