Vampyr

Vampyr

Released in 1932, directed by Carl Theodore Dreyer

Vampyr rests uneasily within a strange, narrow category of outsider art, namely art made by high-culture practitioners who decide to dabble in commercialism, without bothering to understand how commercial art works. It was made in the context of the silent film extinction. Sound film had originated in America and had quickly rendered silent films nonviable; but outside England European studios didn’t immediately have the technical know-how to make talkies. Dreyer’s last film, The Passion of Joan of Art, had been expensive, silent, and unprofitable; no one was interested in giving him funding for another in the same vein. So, he decided to make a movie that would make some money, and with a parodic Nordic combination of seriousness and lack of concern for finer contexts, settled on something about vampires “because vampires were fashionable”, and read forty or so mystery novels in order to extract the necessary elements for a commercial film (yes that doesn’t totally scan).

With no studio willing to back him, he produced Vampyr independently. For funding he struck an agreement with Nicolas de Gunzburg, a wealthy aristocrat (later an influential figure in American fashion and mentor to Calvin Klein) – de Gunzburg would finance the film, and in exchange he would be allowed to play the lead. Filming was done in and around Paris, and each scene was done three times, in English, French, and German, so that Vampyr could show in the maximum number of markets. Since this was going to be a commercial film it had to have sound; but all of the sound would be recorded in post-production – the speech during filming was to get the right lip movements.

Before going on, a word about the sound. Vampyr came out well into the sound era, the people in the movies were at this point fully verbal. They talked, normally, they had conversations and sang. This was not the direction that Dreyer was interested in pursuing for Vampyr. In Vampyr people do not talk normally; they are able to talk, but they rarely choose to do so. Thus the extreme taciturnity of the characters is a major element in creating the film’s dreamlike, non-cognitive mood. Conversations are carried on in cryptic snatches, with an agonizing silence between each eyedropper-drip of verbiage. As well, words are generally not used to convey useful information – you can imagine Dreyer going through the script, and crossing out anything of assistance to the viewer, while inserting non-sequiturs and banalities (after we see a man die – very clearly – several precious lines are then used up by characters discussing the fact that he is dead). To make up for this non-solicitousness, Dreyer uses beautifully hand-lettered title cards that give out general plot information. The effect is to make Vampyr feel like a fascinating missing link between silent films and sound – which again it is not. It’s a film made well into the sound era with a strange miserly aesthetic towards speech. Audiences responded with displeasure (at a showing in Vienna they demanded their money back, and when they weren’t refunded they rioted), and the commercial film did not make commerce. Dreyer committed himself to a sanitarium for several weeks after the release.

So, the film. De Gunzburg, whose primary actorly virtue is a pair of enormous eyes that allow us to clearly decipher the direction of his gaze at any given moment, plays Allan Gray, a drifter who turns up at a rural inn, meets a man whose daughters are menaced by a vampire, sees the man killed by a shadow, and in turn assists in killing the vampire by driving a stake through its heart. This is all nominally taken from the short story Camilla, by Sheridan La Fanu. But the plot takes up very little of the film’s time and energy, and in spirit it is much closer to the fiction of Algernon Blackwood, and particularly to the vein he taps in The Willows, where the supernatural is not portrayed as any kind of physically conceivable manifestation (a ghost in a sheet), but rather as a complete disordering of our experience – a sort of wounding of our ability to use the fundamental tools of reason. Thus Gray’s exposure to the vampire does not manifest as a confrontation (there is barely any tension in the entire film, and when the vampire is killed it’s quick and easy to do); but rather as a series of drifting, oneiric episodes, during which the danger is real but impossible to put into words or even a coherent sequence of thought.

The first of these episodes occurs after Gray’s first night at the inn. In the morning he wanders outside, as one does, and sees, walking along the river, the reflection of a man without any accompanying man. He follows the reflection to a large rambling decrepit house, where he finds, in keeping with the theme, shadows without owners. He goes deeper. There are more shadows, an entire shadow band, much wandering of the camera (which throughout the film is constantly losing track of characters, only to pick them up later in surprising new locations), much picturesque decay; finally Gray meets an irascible, wild-haired doctor who asks if he has heard anything. The dogs? answers Gray. The child? We have no idea what he’s talking about (in fact he’s referring to scenes that Dreyer cut, while deliberately leaving in this reference to them). The doctor shows him out, back to the light of day, ready for his next meandering encounter with the unreal. While this does relate to the plot – the doctor it will turn out is the vampire’s henchman – it is not very related.

From here we turn to the menaced daughters, one already bitten. There’s an extended sequence in their manor (which Gray simply wanders into – in a way the film is just a record of a particularly eventful walk he went on), much of which centers on a manual concerning vampirism that has just come into Gray’s hands. In the sequence that most displays Dreyer’s off-kilter approach to commercialism, various passages from the manual are displayed onscreen, looking authentically aged and mottled (Dreyer spent two whole days just filming these pages, blowing on a nearby candle to get the flickering light just so); and as each new fact about vampirism is doled out, some little episode occurs to illustrate it. Thus, when we learn, by reading a lot of fairly close-printed text, that those bitten by a vampire develop a taste for blood and will even feed on their own family members, we get a sequence where the bitten daughter, lying in bed, turns predatory towards her sister. This is all done by her expression, and is played with complete avidity by the actress, Sybille Schmitz. It’s the film’s one moment of charisma, which comes from Schmitz’s feralness and flaring nostrils - she would go on to have a strange, complicated live-wire life, the basis for Fassbinder’s The Longing of Veronika Voss.

Finally the time has come to track down and kill the vampire, who as it turns out is an old woman with leonine hair. Gray runs out of the manor, intent on action, but then sits down on a bench and falls asleep, and has a long dream about being buried alive. This falling asleep bit is the most mockable thing in the film, but let me defend it here vigorously. In how many films does the protagonist set out to confront a supernatural being, and then… they do. They might have to interact with the being in a certain special way – wield a cross, shoot a silver bullet – but that’s just physics. Whereas, an actual supernatural experience, a disjunction, should definitionally be at a tangent to such direct interactions. Dreams, scraps, images, neuroses, numbnesses, shocks, faints, fixations – are all better proxies for experience outside our experience than a stake through the heart. Although we do get that too, in a perfunctory scene, post-dream, that was cut down by censors who thought that the original, longer sequence of Gray hammering away was too morbid.

Vampyr was not well-liked for a long time; and even recently David Thompson for example has decried its lack of humor. It is true that there are funny things about it that are unintentional; and that whenever you have unintentional humor it tends to make any accompanying seriousness look over-serious. Nowadays though, and outside Thompson, the film is critically beloved, and is perfectly tailored to modern taste – it’s ur-Lynchian and deeply hypnogogic. For a while it was only available on a low-quality VHS transfer, which must have been something to see. Recently though it has come out on blu-ray through Criterion, and is probably slowly working its way towards making back its budget.

NOTES

For both artistic and financial reasons (sets are expensive) Vampyr was largely filmed on location - an abandoned factory, an abandoned castle (which the cast also lived in during filming). The most striking location to me however is the inn in which Gray spends the night - the dowdy fusty rooms, dirty wallpaper, dirty lamps, and low ceilings are both homey and squalid, evocative of traveling life in horse-carriage times.

The doctor character is killed at the end of the film by being trapped in the shaft of a flour mill, suffocated by and buried under the sifted flour. Witness features a similar death, and I wonder if both films aren’t drawing from Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat, which features the earliest grain-related cinematic death of which I am aware.