The first time I saw Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Vampyr"...

The old woman calls the shad­ow rev­els to an end…; Vampyr

…was on November 4, 1980. Election day of that year. I had come into Manhattan from New Jersey to spend some time with a pretty-much-former girl­friend (hope, although for what exactly I could­n’t say, tend­ing to spring etern­al back then), on just what pre­text I can­’t remem­ber. She made some joke about keep­ing me out until after the polls closed—she was an avowed Reaganite and wanted some insur­ance for Jersey, or something. 

Or maybe hanging out with the former girl­friend was a side­light, and I had actu­ally come into town to see Godard’s Sauve qui peut, which was play­ing up at the Lincoln Plaza, and I enlis­ted the former girl­friend (I guess that about now I ought to dig­ni­fy her with a name—Debra, it was) to come along on account as she was still pretty much the only per­son I knew in New York (aside from the Brooklyn Kennys) and she was inter­ested in Godard in the way that many non-film/film stud­ies majors at NYU were inter­ested in Godard at the time, that is, kinda/sorta. I don’t know.

The point is we wound up see­ing three films that day. First, the Godard, which at the time, com­ing after such a long peri­od of silence (his last pic­ture to get any kind of mean­ing­ful expos­ure in the States had been Tout va bien in ’72; of course he had been work­ing, mak­ing video and film, the whole time of his putat­ive exile from “com­mer­cial” cinema, but we just wer­en’t see­ing the work) was beau­ti­ful and strange; Godard the pop artist and agit­at­or was gone, replaced by an ele­gi­ac post-classicist. I don’t think that’s how I actu­ally put it to Debra as we walked down Eighth Avenue and into Times Square. 

Times Square is where we saw the second film, one of the “adult” vari­ety. Debra had nev­er seen one before, and was curi­ous (the fact that in September I had worked as a pro­duc­tion assist­ant on one such pic­ture was a factor here), but of course would nev­er have entered any such theat­er by her­self. I was ambi­val­ent about the pro­spect (and no, I did not believe that the view­ing of such mater­i­al would work any kind of aph­ro­dis­i­ac effect on her), but I was a fairly pli­able ex-boyfriend, so there we went. We were nervous, as being around Times Square back then would make you. There was also the fact that we were determ­inedly non-erotically engaged with the mater­i­al. So we chat­ted. “That’s an inter­est­ing angle.” Getting shushed in a porno theat­er was a little dif­fer­ent than get­ting shushed in a con­ven­tion­al cinema. You felt a little guilti­er, for one thing, as if you were inter­rupt­ing some­thing a bit more cru­cial to a par­tic­u­lar viewer. 

And after that, we felt dirty, and icky, and weird, and I con­sul­ted my news­pa­per and saw that Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 Vampyr was play­ing at the Anthology Film Archive. I was 21 in 1980, and I had been dream­ing about this film for at least ten years, ever since I first read Carlos Clarens’ detached, sober, and yet some­how rap­tur­ous his­tory and assess­ment of it in his epochal An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films. “Every fant­ast­ic event in the story is treated matter-of-factly, de-fantasized as it were.” How could this be? Adding to my intrigue were the four faded stills repro­duced in the book, one of them of the depraved, near-zombified vic­tim of the film’s vam­pire, anoth­er of the fant­ast­ic barn where the early rev­el of the shad­ows takes place (a screen cap is above), and two from the sequence of hero Allan Gray’s death-dream, a corpse’s-eye-view of the screw­ing down of the coffin lid and pro­ces­sion to the grave. 

These scant indic­a­tions of the film were all that I had to feed on for years. For, as Clarens noted in his book, which was first pub­lished in 1967, “The film’s career has been mainly sub­ter­ranean.” (This lovely, rue­ful sen­tence rep­res­ents, for me, a mini-apotheosis of Clarens’ prose.) The film nev­er showed on tele­vi­sion as far as I knew. (I had been able to check out a butchered, atro­ciously dubbed print of Dreyer’s next film, Day of Wrath, made over ten years after Vampyr and also recom­men­ded by Clarens, on Channel 9 some time after read­ing the History.) The Anthology print was one of a mere hand­ful in circulation—no, not cir­cu­la­tion, in exist­ence. And, as I was to learn in a little while, the Anthology print had German dia­logue, long blocks of German text, and…Swedish subtitles. 

But still. Sitting in Anthology, which back then had those weird seats with wooden dividers between them, which had the effect of isol­at­ing the view­er (and also, appar­ently, of facil­it­at­ing furt­ive hand­jobs for wan­der­ing sexu­al adven­tur­ers), only able to fol­low the story (adap­ted from a tale by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, the writer who links Stoker to Lovecraft) from the film’s action, and a recol­lec­tion of Clarens’ pré­cis, I felt the full force of a unique cine­mat­ic dream. The text—largely read­ings from a book on vam­pires left behind by the dead fath­er of a blood­suck­er­’s victim—provides the pic­ture’s back­story and reveals the iden­tity of the title vam­pire, as impass­ively hand­some hero Allan Gray (Baron Nikolaus de Gunzberg, the film’s back­er and a future edit­or at Vogue) moves through a world of shad­ows without bod­ies to cast them, phantom wag­ons, skulls, scythes, and more, in an effort to save the life of a woman he’s barely been intro­duced to. 

Vampyr, like Murnau’s Nosferatu, is a film that cre­ates a unique and unre­pro­du­cible atmo­sphere. It is a per­fect meld­ing of geni­us and avail­able tech­no­logy; it is one of the most vividly varie­gated visu­al works ever. Legend and/or his­tory has it that all or much of the film was shot with a sheet of gauze three feet from the cam­era, the bet­ter to cre­ate a milky, dreamy atmo­sphere. But the pic­ture also has its moments of sharp focus, as in this unusu­al shot of the heroine Giselle held cap­tive, one of the film’s few overtly Expressionist touches: 

Coming out of Anthology on that brisk black autumn night, we both felt strangely cleansed, and a little haunted. As much as I had admired the Godard, I felt at some­thing of a remove from it. Vampyr, on the oth­er hand…didn’t grab us by the throats so much as put us under a spell. We belonged to it. We did not think, and we were thought…only if the film allowed us to be. It was a genu­ine exper­i­ence, des­pite the imper­fec­tions of the print and the bar­ri­ers of language.

…Seeing Vampyr in the years since presen­ted sim­il­ar chal­lenges, in theat­ers and on home video. The Image Entertainment laser disc and sub­sequent DVD were from Swedish-subtitled prints, with English subs super­im­posed over those—vexing.

…And that’s one reas­on I rather envy those of you who are going to see Vampyr for the first time now. The Criterion Collection DVD, released today, is based on a 1998 res­tor­a­tion of the film and fea­tures a ver­sion with all its texts rendered in English (the film was, in fact, shot in French, German and English). That’s just one thing. The pic­ture qual­ity is vastly improved over any ver­sion I’ve seen. There are some “rough” patches here and there, but this finally feels, fully, like the film Clarens so beau­ti­fully evoked for me so many years ago.