VAMPYR

Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932

Some films have acquired a canonic or iconic status that places them beyond subjective evaluation. The great films of the canon, such as Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, Vertigo, Rules of the Game, Otto e Mezzo, Andrei Rublev, Persona, etc., effectively defy personal taste in the sense that they are wholly justified on their own terms, regardless of what anyone might think.

I became aware of cinema as art at a Wellington Film Festival screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1974) in 1979. This seemingly plotless film (a cryptic and very Russian expression of personal and collective memory) went right over my head—or so I thought. Given my expectations of movies at the time, Mirror made little obvious sense, and yet I left the theatre elated. It was a near-religious experience, a life-changing encounter with a language that spoke directly and intimately through sound and image. It wasn’t what was being said so much as how. It was the first time I encountered a film that required active participation from the viewer rather than waiting passively to be entertained.

Thanks to the Auckland Film Society in the 1980s, I received a crash course in world cinema that introduced me to masters such as Miklós Jancsó, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Theo Angelopoulos, Ozu Yasujiro, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Victor Erice and Carl Theodor Dreyer. Films by these and other artists have had their hooks in me ever since.

One director who is often strangely absent from many best director lists (which tend to be very American-centric, it must be said) is Carl Dreyer, whose last five feature films (at least) are unique masterworks by any standard: Gertrud (1964), Ordet (1955), Day of Wrath (1944), Vampyr (1932), and The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927). Some, such as Noel Burch, claim that Master of the House (1925) and Mikael (1924) are equally great.

—-

Until recently, it was impossible to see Vampyr as Dreyer intended, given the dire condition of the prints in circulation. But even the worst of them couldn’t undermine the extraordinary impact of the dreamlike images Dreyer created with cinematographer Rudolph Maté, which evoke a somnambulist atmosphere of limbo, spiritual malaise, and palpable dread. The ‘through a glass darkly’ character of the visual and narrative ‘fog’ suggest a dream logic that was accentuated by Dreyer’s brilliant formal discontinuity and a murky sound design that added to the sense of a parallel world of threatening forces. The result is a horror film for those who don’t generally care for them, the only film that Alfred Hitchcock thought was worth seeing twice.

The best print of Vampyr I've seen to date is the restored version released by Masters of Cinema in 2008, which includes two commentaries: one by film scholar Tony Rayns and the other by director Guillermo Del Toro. Rayns mostly discusses the formal aspects of the film, while Del Toro frames it as a metaphysical/existential meditation on spiritual transcendence—rejecting Darkness and embracing Light.

Del Toro’s commentary is full of perceptive observations, such as 'Time' being the biggest vampire; the Memento Mori quality of the film; the use of off-white to signify death; and the effectiveness of non-professional actors, a career-long practice in which Dreyer cast actors according to their resemblance to characters on emotional or implicit terms. This is evident in the performances of Henriette Girard as the vampire and Baron de Gunzberg (or Julian West as he was credited) as Allan Grey, where their lack of skill serves rather than detracts from the “otherness” of their roles.

Filmmakers have often used the horror and vampire genres as frameworks for subtext, such as the guilt-ridden implications in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995), which equate vampirism with American imperialism. One can only speculate—some 75 years down the track—what Dreyer’s subtextual intentions may have been, although the physical and (more to the point) psychological damage of the 1914-18 world war might have informed the film to some degree, and one can only speculate whether the homosexual aspect that De Gunzberg brings to his Christ-like character (some 35 years before Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew) had any specific resonance for Dreyer.

It’s interesting to note that Dreyer railed against what he called the “holy organisation of the film industry” that dominated film production everywhere. He set up an independent film company with financial support from De Gunzberg and chose a vampire tale as his first (and only) independent production—a film about bloodsuckers that may have been a comment on the vampire-like practices of commercial film companies. Just as the story depicts a battle between carnal passion and spiritual piety (a battle for souls infected by insatiable forces), Dreyer used his film to do battle on behalf of the poetic soul of cinema, struggling against the ‘infection’ of artistically limiting dictums and insatiable commercial forces! Subtext anyone?

It’s nice to speculate that Dreyer employed the generic tropes of spiritual hope and renewal to reflect his aspirational passion for the art form he loved. Online reviewer Acquarello echoes this idea nicely when he likens the rays of light beaming across the landscape in the penultimate image (David and Giséle emerging from misty woods and walking towards a luminous sunrise) to light projected in a cinema. He then equates the final image of gears stopping in the mill (as if by divine intervention) as a metaphor for filmmakers as the creative conscience behind their work. It’s a nice thought, but it’s probably unlikely that such reflexivity would have been foremost in Dreyer’s thinking. Vampyr, like all of his work, primarily aims to express something essential about the human experience.

It would be decades before Vampyr received its critical due. Despite seminal evaluations by the likes of Bordwell, Schrader and Burch, many continued to dismiss the film as technically and artistically flawed. Bordwell wrote about Dreyer’s use of ‘absent cause’, an obfuscation of the narrative by withholding motivational information so that we only see the “late phases of an implicit sequence of actions”. In other words, we are shown consequences rather than causes, which are not only absent but (crucially) rarely explained.

Classical cinema, on the other hand, relies on relatively unambiguous spatial, temporal and narrative relationships, a commitment to coherence that is central to the implicit contract between filmmaker and viewer. Cine-poets like Dreyer subvert this ‘agreement’ to allow greater freedom for filmmakers and viewers alike. Such strategies can be demanding for audiences (then as now), so it’s little wonder that Vampyr was a financial and (at least initially) critical failure. But it’s also one of the reasons why it continues to be so influential and affecting today. It deserves its place in film history if only for revealing that great cinema need not be bound by narrative conventions or audience expectations, trusting that the essential humanity and poetry in a work will ultimately endure. I would like to think that there’s a lesson in that for artists of all hues.

I can't help wondering if Dreyer might have been influenced by the films of Jean Epstein—a filmmaker not as widely known or revered as he deserves—who was a significant figure of “French Impressionism” (sometimes referred to as the “first cinematic avant-garde”) along with Germaine Dulac, Marcel L’Herbier, Louis Delluc and Abel Gance. Epstein rejected the idea of narrative-driven cinema and created works (in the late silent era, no less) that have more in common (arguably) with post-World War Two European cinema. So it's tempting to speculate that Epstein's atmospheric The Fall of the House of Usher (La chute de la Maison Usher, 1928) and Sa tête (1929) were influences for Dreyer.

That said, Vampyr exists in its own unique cinematic space, so much so that it confounded audiences and critics in its day, but even now—well into the 21st century—people still mistake it for just another generic diversion elevated above its station by overzealous enthusiasts. It suggests that appreciating cinema as Art continues to be a hurdle for some. The ability to recognise cinematic art without being diverted by one’s subjectivity might simply be a matter of application—developing a palate for it as one might develop a palate for wine or music. The more one sees and thinks about cinema, the more one appreciates its language. Like a wine buff discerning hints of pencil shavings in Cabernet Sauvignon, a cinema buff might discern existential poetry where others merely see a banal, poorly lit precursor to Christopher Lee.

Vampyr defies generic pigeonholing because Dreyer's focus was primarily cinematic. He used generic tropes as a vehicle to serve his artistic purposes first and foremost, but also to fashion a highly stylised meditation on sacrifice, redemption, the tension between good and evil, darkness and light, and transcending superstition and fear through selflessness and love.

Dreyer was a compassionate filmmaker who made films from the heart. They may seem formal and austere at first, but behind the apparent Danish reserve lies genuine regard for people, optimism for their capacity for selflessness, honesty and love, and ability to express the most profound and affecting truth through simple human interaction—and of course, by making works of art.