Vampyr - Criterion Collection
by Carl Theodor Dreyer
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Actor: Albert Bras, Baron Nicolas de Gunzberg, Henriette Gerard, Jan Hieronimko, N. BabaniniDirector: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Rudolph Mat?
Cinematographer: Louis Nee
Composer: Wolfgang Zeller
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: German (Original Language); English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, DVD, NTSC, Silent, Special Edition, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 75 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-07-22
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
DVD Reviews of Vampyr - Criterion Collection
DVD Review: Disappointing "Classic"
Summary: 2 Stars
Vampyr is a film designed to baffle the viewer - and it succeeds brilliantly. With no coherent story line or identification of the characters, and with its disconnected jumps from one scene to another, this viewer was left completely at sea.
The Criterion release adds a screenplay book and a smaller booklet about the film and its history. The special features on Disc 2 are also interesting but neither these nor the commentary provides much clarity about what is going on.
Criterion did what it could to render the poor-quality film elements viewable, but picture quality is only fair. Sound, conversely, is quite good.
This is not in the same league as other Criterion titles such as The Third Man and M.
DVD Review: Early atmospheric vampire film
Summary: 5 Stars
"Vampyr"(1932) is Theodor Dreyer's (a Danish director) first talkie film based loosely on the book "Camilla"(1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu. Fanu's novel is notable for introducing females into the Vampire genre. The movie, though in sound, is still largely a silent picture with little actual talking and features the haunting music of Wolgang Zeller. This particular film was restored using French and German prints. There are some sequences, or images, missing from the final film, such as the one on the front cover of the Criterion box, which is part a pan shot that was later cut.
"Vampyr" is a very atmospheric and expressionistic film that follows more the logic of dreams than reality. Shadows dance on walls, or pass on the grass, like phantoms, detached from anything real. Ghostly images of Allan Gray drift off from his sitting body walking around the grounds and the building's interiors. It has been said that the film is somewhat autobiographical and reflected Dreyer's own drifting into insanity. Soon after making this film Dreyer had a mental collapse and entered himself into a sanitarium for rehabilitation. Dreyer wasn't to make another film until eleven years later in 1943, when he made "Day of Wrath".
This Criterion set is quite marvelous. It has a 214 page book with the Fanu's sotry "Camilla", the screenplay by Theodor and Christen Jul, another booklet with critical essays by Mark Le Fanu, Kim Newman, and Koerber, and a 1964 interview with Nicolas de Gunzburg. There are two discs. On Disc One is the original German version with a HD digital transfer from the 1998 restoration by Martin Koerber and the Cineteca di Bologna with English subtitles and audio commentary by scholar Tony Rayns. On disc Two there is a documentary by Jorgen Roos chronicling Dreyer's career, a visual essay by scholar Casper Tybjerg on Dreyer's influences in creating "Vampyr", as well as a radio broadcast from 1958 with Dreyer reading an essay about filmmaking. "Vampyr" was only the third vampire film ever made and the second using sound,
preceeded only by Murnau's silent film, "Nosferatu"(1922) and Tod Browning's "Dracula"(1931).
DVD Review: FUNDAMENTAL HORROR IS WHERE FEAR DWELLS
Summary: 5 Stars
"VAMPYR" (1932)
None other than Alfred Hitchcock deemed Carl Theodor Dryer's "Vampyr" the "only film worth watching - twice!"
The first sound film by one founding architects of cinema itself, delivers a palpable, sensual experience that few works of film can match. Director Dryer is a hypnotist and the film will put you in a waking dream that scratches blood from the skin of the supernatural.
This strangely layered film is about the journey of a man named Allan Gray who is drawn to a countryside inn by ghostly forces. Allan gray is played convincingly by "Julien West," who in real life was the secretive Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg! At the inn, Gray becomes involved with the family that lives there and the ghosts and demons that also seem to be part of the family. But it's Grays attraction to the sexually charged virgin daughter Giselle that seals his fate and final his confrontation with the ultimate vampyr - Death itself. Interestingly, Giselle is played by the "great, accursed Sybelle Schmitz," whose real life was as interesting as her screen personas.
The final moments of asphyxiation in the blasphemed bodies of the horrific bat-men have probably had more influence on horror cinema than any other.
Long out of circulation in an acceptable transfer, Criterion's recently restored digital edition make this truly terrifying landmark film new again. (Not rated, full frame, 75 minutes)
DVD Review: Beautiful Atmospheric Vampire
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a beautiful film and it's all in the creation of the atmosphere: The boatman with the sickle, the small hotel with dreary pictures, the wide-eyed, suited visitor that will be our protagonist, the shots of the park/forest....
This movie makes the objects participate too and in that respect the aesthetic is thoroughly Surreal and not Gothic. This work is very much in tune with the work of Max Ernst and Magritte, and most of all, Delvaux.
The plot is simple and the suspense is well maintained. The movie works, becaquse very much like "Nosferatu" it suggests so much more than is visible at any point in the scenes. In that respect particularly it stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the later, cheaper Dracula movies that have tons of blood and gore. Here a few drops suggest an entire calamity
Although there is sound it is so seldomly and sparely used it is really more like a silent film. The camera works in a way that we believe to be exploring with the visitor, so we are totally involved in the plot, which ends up, surprisingly, having a happy ending.
DVD Review: A valuable set, for a very intriguing film - an essential contribution to film history
Summary: 5 Stars
A young man, fascinated by the occult, arrives at a small village where his dreams of the supernatural become a nightmare that threatens to destroy him. Drawing upon the worldwide fascination with legends of vampires that existed even in the 1930s, Dreyer set out to make a popular film, and brought his unique sensibilities to bear on a melodramatic subject. Completing his film in the wake of Murnau's Nosferatu and just before Tod Browning's much more straightforward Dracula, Dreyer produced images and effects that remain powerful and compelling today. A reaper, crossing the river. Shadows that dance. The point of view from a coffin. Dreyer manages to create and sustain an atmosphere of dread throughout, that nevertheless cannot mute the astonishment at the subtlety of his inventions.
Criterion's release of Vampyr has everything you could want. There is the German version of the film, with English subtitles, all meticulously restored and looking quite impressive. Additionally, there is an English version of the film, for which the intertitles have all been redone digitally into English - though the dialogue is still in German with subtitles. The commentary, by Tony Rayns, is quite useful - drawing special attention to the way that Dreyer constructs multiple and fragmented points of view in the film. The second disc holds a very intriguing documentary on Dreyer, which complements the more personal documentary ("Carl Th. Dreyer - My Metier") included with the Dreyer set, and an informative video essay on the history and background of Dreyer's take on vampires. Finally, the set includes the entire screenplay, written in a descriptive form that seems closer to a novel, with only the indented dialogue to remind that it served as a screenplay. Highly recommended for vampire enthusiasts and lovers of inventive cinema.
Description of Vampyr - Criterion Collection
With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's brilliance at achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery (as in The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath) was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result-concerning an occult student assailed by various supernatural haunts and local evildoers at an inn outside Paris-is nearly unclassifiable, a host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds creating a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of cinema's great nightmares.In this chilling, atmospheric film from 1932, Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer favors style over story, offering a minimal plot that draws only partially from established vampire folklore. Instead, Dreyer emphasizes an utterly dreamlike visual approach, using trick photography (double exposures, etc.) and a fog-like effect created by allowing additional light to leak onto the exposed film. The result is an unsettling film that seems to spring literally from the subconscious, freely adapted from the Victorian short story Carmilla by noted horror author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, about a young man who discovers the presence of a female vampire in a mysterious European castle. There's more to the story, of course, but it's the ghostly, otherworldly tone of the film that lingers powerfully in the memory. Dreyer maintains this eerie mood by suggesting horror and impending doom as opposed to any overt displays of terrifying imagery. Watching Vampyr is like being placed under a hypnotic trance, where the rules of everyday reality no longer apply. As a splendid bonus, the DVD includes The Mascot, a delightful 26-minute animated film from 1934. Created by pioneering animator Wladyslaw Starewicz, this clever film--in which a menagerie of toys and dolls springs to life--serves as an impressive precursor to the popular Wallace & Gromit films of the 1990s. --Jeff Shannon
Stills from Vampyr (Click for larger image)
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