Vampyr
Carl Theodor Dreyer (1932)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was Dreyer’s last silent film but Vampyr can hardly be termed a talkie – it’s short on spoken dialogue, rather longer on on-screen text. Save for the initial scene-setting, the text mostly comprises passages in a book on vampire lore that characters in the film happen to be reading – passages sometimes lengthy enough to dilute the tension wrought by imagery and soundtrack. Dreyer and his cinematographer Rudolph Maté achieve many visual effects beyond this viewer’s powers of description. The post-recorded sound can be startling, making voices seem surprisingly, unnervingly close. Yet Vampyr is more impressive as a series of illustrations of inescapable mortality than as a horror drama about the undead.
The screenplay, which Dreyer wrote with Christen Jul, is inspired chiefly by ‘Carmilla’, one of the supernatural stories in Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 collection In a Glass Darkly (which also includes ‘Green Tea’). Vampyr has an odd structure. Its full German title translates as ‘Vampire: The Dream of Allan Gray’. A prologue to the film does indeed describe Allan as a dreamer but that use of the English word implies woolgatherer, though the prologue also explains that he has spent too much time learning about the occult, including devil worship. Either way, Allan (Julian West) seems a candidate ripe for a comeuppance. He doesn’t really get one, despite seeing himself, during an out-of-body experience, dead and buried. Over the course of this short (73-minute) feature, Allan, rather, seems decreasingly central to the narrative.
This isn’t just because the actor playing him is underwhelming, though there’s no denying he was indispensable to the film: Julian West was the nom d’écran of the French socialite and magazine editor Nicolas de Gunzburg, who agreed to finance Vampyr on condition that he played the lead. The title character is the elderly Marguerite Chopin (Henriette Gérard), who lies in her grave but whose vampiric influence is extensive. The strongest characters in terms of screen presence, though, are the malignant village doctor (Jan Hieronimko) and a young woman called Léone (Sybille Schmitz), respectively the vampire’s pawn and victim. Léone languishes in bed, her strength ebbing daily, until Marguerite Chopin’s grave is eventually prised open and a metal bar hammered through the old woman’s heart.
The physical and spiritual transformations of Sybille Schmitz’s face are remarkable but it’s the frightening diversity of memento mori that register most powerfully – a scythe-bearing ferryman, a charnel house, the skull embossed on a medicine bottle, the perfectly preserved body of Marguerite Chopin that rapidly morphs into a skeleton once her heart is penetrated. In the final sequence, Dreyer cuts between Allan Gray, accompanied by Léone’s younger sister Gisèle (Rena Mandel), crossing a fog-shrouded river and reaching a sunlit clearing on its other side; and the vanquished doctor who suffocates under a mountain of flour gradually released into the chamber of the mill where he’s hiding. The hero and heroine’s escape is thoroughly upstaged by the malefactor’s demise. Dreyer confirms as much in the closing shot – the mill machinery’s inexorably turning wheels.
24 May 2022