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VampyrRating:
Release Date: 21 July, 1998 Retail Price: $24.99 OUR Price: $22.49 You SAVE: $2.50! Cast: |
Vampyr Reviews
Vital contribution to early film.
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.
I want to make a movie called Kino Video.
. . . I'd film it on 16mm, project it on a napkin, and film *that* on 35.
This is a work by Carl Dreyer, that brilliant Dutchman who brought us The Passion of Joan of Arc: a film he made for the French. This one seems to have been made for Germany's UFA like his film Mikael. It's in German, with (as you've read) the worst subtitles imaginable (the version I saw even has a scene with what appear to be Swedish subtitles, from a previous print). So odd that Kino used a gothic font, as Germany itself abandoned it for its unreadability.
In Joan of Arc Dreyer is obsessed with the close-up and held shots, attempting to convey by showing everything. In Vampyr, Dreyer has produced a film caught up in the preverse knowledge of the camera eye's ability to exclude: in many ways quite the opposite of his previous, better known work. And yet there are things about it that show Dreyer's heritage.
The weak image of women as "prey" to the vampiric male archetype reminds us of Dreyer's own mother, who died in a failed abortion. It is also a reversal of Goethe's "frau an sich."
The use of intertitles instead of dialogue and the lack of dialogue in general show his past in silent films. He understands what a privilege sound is, and that he should only use it as necessary, not simply because it is technologically now available. I don't know if the intertitles of the History of Vampyr book are original, but they're certainly functional - if the timing on them is a bit off.
Showing the UFA (that is, Lang's) influence on Dreyer is the consistent use of the Death's head. Often in Lang this image is superimposed or dissolved to, suggesting the cogs of fate turning, or what Tom Gunning calls "the destiny machine." This is especially prominent in Der Muede Tod. In Vampyr, Dreyer uses the same image, but acheives an overall, nearly nihilistic, pervasion of death by cutting, instead of dissolving. The two films also share similar endings.
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."
Bergman will later explore this idea in his Hour of the Wolf, with similar results and techniques. Much later, David Lynch will burst onto the scene with Eraserhead, a film which I think owes a good bit to this work. Watching Vampyr, I think you'll agree that its influence - Dreyer's influence - is quite broad, and that it deserves a better job than this.
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