Silent Film Sources - Reviews

Vampyr  

Screenplay: Christen Jul and Carl Th. Dreyer  

With Julian West as Allan Gray  

Cinematography: Rudolph Mate. Music Wolfgang Zeller  

Sound recording system: Tobis- Klangfilm  

The Main Characters: Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Sybille Schmitz, Jan Hieronmiko, Henriette Gerard, Albert Bras, N. Babanini, Jane Morn.  

There is little talking as Dreyer is a visual story teller. Vampyr is the kind of film where dialogue like "the wounds have almost healed" and "why does the doctor only come at night" are given without explanation. We make sense of what is going on as he starts to piece together what is happening and who is causing it. Dreyer effectively establishes a mood by use of shadows of objects and people. The leading actor remains a cipher; if this was a book, it would be entirely in the passive voice. Things happen to the characters; they don't initiate actions (which on initial viewing seem unrelated). 

The film picks up when a man leaves a book in a room- "to be opened after my death." He is killed and the book is about vampires. Vampire mythology was less well known to audiences than now, and while a Hollywood film would have used dialogue to explain, Dreyer relies on exposition pages from the book. 

Dreyer frequently shows actions by shadows cast by the characters we already know. This fits with the film's style of indirection with plot by inference rather than by direct narrative. The film is filled with memorable images: a skull turning to watch; a shadow walking over to join its subject sitting in repose; point-of-view filming from inside a glass-topped coffin as the lid is nailed down and then carried out to the churchyard for burial. 

The story goes that the first few days of filming was damaged by a light leak in the camera, but Dreyer liked the effect so much that he had the rest of the film photographed to match. As a result, the image quality on this picture has never been as pristine as a film from the 1932 could look. Rudolph Mate was one of the finest cinematographers in Europe, and we can be sure that the photography looks exactly as Dreyer wanted it- the sense of a dimly remembered dream. Amidst the fogginess, shots of machinery in a mill are as sharp as a tack. 

The image is windowboxed throughout with a soft matte surrounding the picture, rather than the usual hard matte. While conceptually appropriate, the Gothic type used for the main titles and subtitles is quite hard to read when there is a lot of text on the screen. The subtitles are presented with a black background which takes over the frame and is very distracting. Fortunately the dialogue is as sparse as Dreyer's style, so there are not many titles, though, in silent film fashion, the director uses explanatory titles to advance the plot. Upon first viewing, the film works primarily as a succession of images. However, on reflection, the plot comes together and the film has a significant impact. 

The packaging notes that the transfer is made from Dreyer's personal print, which was complete, though it had some wear. Unfortunately, the image quality of the video release is degraded by overuse of Digital Video Noise Reduction (DVNR) which is sometimes used to clean up prints with lots of white speckles. This resulted in an overlay or haze that remains on a scene after the camera moves. Images ghost and the video noise travels with the image. The DVNR process works best on sharp images and is at a loss here. This is the finest of the available versions of Vampyr- just not the finest possible version. 

Accompanying Vampyr is the marvelous 1934 short The Mascot by Ladislas Starewicz. Review © 1998 David Pierce)