Vampyr

Criterion Collection, $39.95

Early soundies, besides stoning many blackbirds with a single title – French, German, and English versions of the same film were often shot simultaneously – inhabit a netherworld custom-made for the crypt. In the velvet-lined case of Great Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968), first intertitles and then long passages from a book play a leading role in the silent scream of 1932’s Vampyr, filmed about the same time as Dracula but released the following year. Fluttering light, milky screens, and voyeuristic camerawork track the film like nine out of Dreyer’s 14 total titles – sans sound – but the voices out of the abyss are all too audible. Here, when anyone speaks (German – the English version is lost, and the French master helped piece together this composite), their words often erupt from the audio track in barked challenge, as if talkies were still a novelty to test. Predictably, to a lesser degree than Dreyer’s monumental, silent The Passion of Joan of Arc, this stakeout visualizes its horror rather than wags tongues ripe for cutting. Vampyr‘s titular witch, another of Dreyer’s nonactors, takes her place in the mausoleum of cinematic bloodsuckers, though don’t put her ashes next to Nosferatu, because as Tony Raynes’ illuminating commentary track details, Dreyer was no fan of F.W. Murnau’s genre progenitor. Funny, then, that Vampyr flashes German expressionism with iconic determination. The heart-stopping coffin scene belongs on the uppermost shelf of filmdom’s nightmare vault. In fact, the whole tale of Allan Gray, “preoccupied with superstitions of centuries past,” and his arrival at the roadside inn of his deepest dreams, falls together both as disorienting as the director/original screenplaywright intended and, by the final scene, as effective. A 30-minute documentary from 1966 captures Dreyer meeting French Diabolique Henri-Georges Clouzot, while a 23-minute radio-cast of the Copenhagen-born filmmaker delivering a paper in English (“Art is not reproduction but subjective choice”) proves as methodical as his filmography. Dreyer’s screen story comes bound with Vampyr‘s unholy book of secrets as well. “Here the silence of death prevails,” he wrote. That whimpering sound is you. – Raoul Hernandez

This article appears in August 1 • 2008.

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Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.

San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.