Ten years after the release of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), the first and greatest of all vampire films, Carl Th. Dreyer released Vampyr (1932), the next great vampire film, and one that took the genre in a new direction. Vampyr is the vampire film reduced to its essence, to an unrelenting flow of eerie imagery, off-kilter camera movements and a hushed soundscape consisting of sparse, enigmatic dialogue and a muted, foreboding score. Less plot than impressionist montage, the film is an almost surrealist blend of unexplained actions and haunted faces. Imagine Dracula as presented by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.
Criterion has released the film in a two-disc DVD set, complete with bonus features that include an interview with Dreyer, a commentary track, and a book containing the original script and the novella on which Dreyer claimed the film was based—though the final product bears little resemblance to its source.
The film itself looks superb, though it is still not quite the film Dreyer would have wanted us to see. It’s a sound film—the director’s first—produced in several different languages. Dreyer shot Vampyr silent, his actors reading the lines in several languages and later synching the different scores for release in various countries. However, the only version that currently exists in a form suitable for restoration is the German, and thus we are left with something he tried mightily to avoid: his mesmerizing images are overlaid with the distraction of subtitles. Still, given the fate of other Dreyer films, we’re lucky to have any version at all.
At the time, Vampyr seemed a most unlikely project for Dreyer. While it was certainly within reason to expect another masterpiece from this uncompromising filmmaker, Dreyer isn’t the first name that comes to mind when discussing the horror film. After all, this was the man who made The Passion of Joan of Arc just a few years earlier, a powerful and uncompromsing avant garde film that to this day remains one of cinema’s artistic masterpieces.
Dreyer made just 14 films in his career and no two of them alike, altering his style and approach, often radically, to fit his subject matter. He began his career in the silent era in his native Denmark, creating several well-regarded works before venturing into the greater European film industry in search of more plentiful resources and increased autonomy. One of his films from this era, Mikaël (1924), a German production that showed at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival, is considered one of the landmarks of early gay cinema.
But nothing in that oeuvre would quite prepare a viewer for what came next.
Dreyer went to France to make a film based on the trial of Joan of Arc. Joan had only recently been sainted after centuries of excommunication, and though the French were eager to see a film about her, they were more than a little chagrined to find the task handed over to a Dane, and the role of Joan given to an Italian. Rene Falconetti was a stage actress and a very successful one; The Passion of Joan of Arc would be her first and only screen appearance, and thus for decades she has been associated in the public mind with this role, a stunning performance of grace, passion, dignity and sorrow.
Stylistically, it is a radical departure, not just from Dreyer’s previous work, but from virtually anything that came before it. Dreyer relied almost exclusively on close-ups and text to tell the tale, relegating the vast sets to relative obscurity, only allowing them to be glimpsed in a few sequences. The film was a commercial failure, and was recut and altered into many different forms, depending on the prevailing political forces in whichever county it was being presented in. The original negative was lost to fire, and Dreyer re-composed the film from alternate takes; that version too was lost to fire. For decades Passion then was considered lost forever, with no surviving prints of Dreyer’s original film known to exist, until one was accidentally discovered in 1986 in a supply closet in a Norwegian mental institution.
After observing the fate of Passion, Dreyer sought a bit less controversial and more commercially viable project for his next film, and settled on horror as a genre which was not only popular, but conducive to artistic independence; horror films of the silent era had managed to go relatively untouched by censors while remaining uncompromising in artistic merit.
The result is a moody, atmospheric film modeled on the horror genre but more restrained, more obscure and more elliptical in its examination of terror, mystery and the occult. Dreyer’s expressive camera work involves wonderfully disorienting movements that shuttle the camera from one indelible image to another. As the camera circles around rooms, the lens distorts the field of vision, causing walls to appear to shift and move, leaving the viewer at all times on uneven ground, with little in the plot or in the visual terrain to anchor oneself. This is not your typical horror film; it is a dreamlike and hallucinatory experience that is content to leave much of its mystery unresolved.
Consecutive commercial failures left Dreyer unemployed for more than a decade afterward, either unwilling or unable to mount another production. He returned in 1943 with Day of Wrath, followed by Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964), all of which, along with The Passion of Joan of Arc, are also available in Criterion editions.
Vampyr (1932). 75 minutes. $39.95. Criterion. www.criterion.com.
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