Search - Vampyr - Criterion Collection on DVD

Germanic ideal of a vampire's bloodlust- UNDEAD UNDEAD UNDEA

W. T. Hoffman | Pennsylvania, United States | 05/24/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This cinematic piece of visual poetry defies easy catagorizing. Is it a vampire film? Oh, sure, but if you merely desire a little bit(e) from the traditional DRACULA story, you will soon find yourself disappointed. It could be argued, that most of this film, is a sleepwalker's hazy recollections in the morning, or a hallucination by a skitzoid young man, instead of a surreal odyssey into the damnation of the living dead, doomed to drink blood to remain young. This main protagonist, Herr von GRAY, is a sensitive man, given to the study of occult books, fantasizing about vampires, ghosts and death. He arrives at a small, poor country Inn, and that's when all surreal HELL breaks out. The director, DREYER, was famous in the French avant guarde film world, such as it was back then, for his previous film "THE PASSSION OF JOAN OF ARC" from 1927. OH, and guess who designed the sets, and was the art director for VAMPYR? None other than Herman Warm, who designed sets for CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, an undeniable masterpiece of German pre-WWII "Bauhaus" influenced set design. If just WARM were involved in this film, as art director, it would still be well worth seeing. Oddly enough, the director chose to work with mostly non-actors, for the authenticity. He did use two actual actors. The lead was an actor, a wealthy German Baron who also co-produced, and financed the film. He plays the lead man, GRAY, who entering the Inn, finds that he has entered a world of nightmares. He looks out the window, and sees a man with a scythe going on a boat. ITS THE SPECTOR OF DEATH ITSELF. Next, a man's shadow walks down the stairs outside the Inn, and sits down on a bench. Then, a man also walks up to the bench, sits down, and we realize that the SHADOW BELONGS TO THE MAN WHO JUST SAT NEXT TO IT. Then, they leave together, with the shadow reconnected to the man. SO, a land of SHADOWS is brought into vivid existence, thru clever technical effects. Another oddity to the film, is a near total lack of dialouge. That helps the film, but having a lot of back story to read as pages flash up on the scene, one wonders why it was not given to some kind of voice over. No doubt the presence of very little dialogue throughout the film, only lends to that uneasy, dreamlike quality. Often, one is tempted to see this as a silent film, but of course, there is SOME talking going on here and there. Next a woman is seen having her blood sucked from her body. We end up reading a book with GRAY about Vampires, and the local legend of an Evil woman who turned the whole town into vampires, before she was stopped. Extreme close-ups of the bizarre gothic wood cuts in the book, and then, a long shot thru a bookcase with a human skull once more visually brings in the leitmotif of death, and the German romantic ideal of death. Next, we have some screens of a man seen pitching hay, but the film is running backwards. Apparently, in this dream nightmare world, time and action can move backwards. All parameters of logic are ignored, and the nightmare advanced on the viewer. Then its dark, and we are moving around outside, in dense, impenetrable fog, searching for the master vampire's grave, so they can be killed while she sleeps. This part of the film had been overexposed from light leaking into a faulty camera, but the director liked the foggy, washed out effect it gave the print, so he used it for all the outdoor shots. Yes, deliberate filming in the "lo-fi" esthetic...I loved it. So, the film goes on like this, with one part of a nightmare leading to another. One of the women in the Inn, who was bitten by the vampire, needs blood. One of the GREATEST turn arounds on the typical vampire film occurs here. Instead of your Van Helsing doctor who gives us the medical/metaphysical information to defeat the vampire, we have instead a doctor who assists the vampire in finding suitable victums. So, the duplicitious doctor bleeds Gray, in order to help save the dying young woman's life, who is really a transforming vampire, needing her first blood meal, at Gray's expense. However, this puts him into some kind of psychic link with the vampire, that nearly kills him. Next, we see Gray sitting down, and his image splits, with a transparent doubleganger image, or his dream-spirit, going off and wandering around the inn, and the local town. By this time, even tho I have watched the movie at least three times, I start to lose the thread of whatever logic or daytime sanity I use the plot for. In fact, I can only imagine that the surrealist film Le Chien d'Andelou influenced the Director, with the non logic of the images in relation to the movement of the film, and the unexpected, nauseating horror of some of the scenes. (Gray's bloodletting was especially creapy, mostly because of the crudeness of the hypo used to get blood. )That leads me to the most bizarre, unsettling image from the entire film. In the end, the evil Doctor who was in cahoots with the head vampire is killed. He runs, or is chased, into an old mill, filled with an impossible amount of gears and strange machinery. He flees into a cage-like chamber, that looks like an elevator shaft. He becomes locked in this fenced in little area, when the waterwheel starts up the gears, and flour from above starts to fall down upon the evil doctor. At first, he is covered with flour, and he looks like a ghost. Then, the flour slowly fills up around him, until he's buried alive far above his head in flour. Again, i can't figure out how they shot some of the last images, because it DOES look like the doctor is buried. As the images become more threatening, more surreal and disturbing, as the film unfolds, the best is saved for last. The buried alive scene, is a visual crescendo of the macabre. That image seems to unlock a very primal fear of death, for those of us who are buried whole. Premature burial is the probible basis of some of the horror surrounding the idea of the dead living..or being alive in your own tomb. So the cinematic images of death, and blood, and ghosts, disembodied souls, vampirism as a deadly disease, and premature burial just leaves you unable to shake what seems to be a nightmare. Our subconscious wakes and screams, and you try to piece the frightening images into some semblence of linear logic. But that negates the dark beauty of this film. This film belongs to the realm of night, and nightmares, of frightening, ambiguous images that function as a cinematic memento morti . Anyway, I highly recommend this film. This new print far improves on the older DVD edition of the film by "Blackhawk film". They mastered off a badly damaged print, with punched out words appearing during the film's transistion between reels, and a soundtrack which was so faint and fuzzy, you might as well have been listening to a silent film. Naturally, they fixed those horrible gothic lettered subtitles, which took up a third of the scene as well. The Blackwater edition does give you a little extra, to compensate for their poor print they used to master from. It's a little piece of stop animation filmed in 1934 by a Pole, called The Mascot. Altho you wont have that, you will have what is (besides Murnau's original NOSFERATU, and Leghosli's DRACULA), one of the greatest meditations on Death, and the vampire legend, ever filmed. I'm glad Critilion restored the film, and gave it the full deluxe treatment. A word of advice, however--this film seems to grow on you. It might sink its teeth into you the first night you watch it, but it needs to feed on your subconscious, drop by drop. After you spend a few more nights watching the film, slowly absorbing the morbid imagery, you will be hooked. Only then will the film, as all great works of art, transform you into something new. (Let's hope its a better informed cinema fan, and not a....creature of the bad pun. That would be a hellish fate.)"