Very Special Film example essay topic

Vampyr doesn't play like a horror, or even a suspense film, though there are a few scenes of each. Instead it is a mystery, with information gradually given to the audience. The plot follows an aimless young man, a devotee of the occult, who visits an inn where numerous odd people are about. There is little talking as Dreyer is a visual story teller.

Vampyr is the kind of film where dialogue like 'the wounds have almost healed' and 'why does the doctor only come at night' are given without explanation. We make sense of what is going on as he starts to piece together what is happening and who is causing it. Dreyer effectively establishes a mood by use of shadows of objects and people. The leading actor remains a cipher; if this was a book, it would be entirely in the passive voice. Things happen to the characters; they don't initiate actions (which on initial viewing seem unrelated).

The film picks up when a man leaves a book in a room- 'to be opened after my death. ' He is killed and the book is about vampires. Vampire mythology was less well known to audiences than now, and while a Hollywood film would have used dialogue to explain, Dreyer relies on exposition pages from the book. Dreyer frequently shows actions by shadows cast by the characters we already know. This fits with the film's style of indirection with plot by inference rather than by direct narrative. The film is filled with memorable images: a skull turning to watch; a shadow walking over to join its subject sitting in repose; point-of-view filming from inside a glass-topped coffin as the lid is nailed down and then carried out to the churchyard for burial.

The story goes that the first few days of filming was damaged by a light leak in the camera, but Dreyer liked the effect so much that he had the rest of the film photographed to match. As a result, the image quality on this picture has never been as pristine as a film from the 1932 could look. Rudolph Mate was one of the finest cinematographers in Europe, and we can be sure that the photography looks exactly as Dreyer wanted it- the sense of a dimly remembered dream. Amidst the fogginess, shots of machinery in a mill are as sharp as a tack. Of special note is that the horror is created, in large part, by suggestion rather than a heavy sledgehammer approach, In the most famous sequence of the film, the man dreams of being buried alive and it's all shown from his viewpoint!

Vampyr transpires in no earthly world at all; but clearly in the realm of absolute vision. Vampyr is a veritable initiation into the mysteries of death. It fits the form of what Parker Tyler has called trance-film, the prototype of which is Caligari: in which an essentially passive hero experiences events which function primarily as manifestations of the unconscious. Dreyer goes so far as to exaggerate the unearthliness of landscape and characters, 'spiritualizing' all in twilight and mystic air, so all perception is as through a glass darkly; as if there were a distance greater than space between this region and our mortal eyes.

Moreover, the characters' movements are automatic and fated, as though the real actors were invisible forces; and their voices float so hollow and distant on the sound-track as to hardly belong to the speakers, rather suggesting disembodied spirits. The shading of Vampyr is awfully fine, since the action itself is treated matter-of-fact ly even when bizarre, and the point of view is never fantastical but literal and realistic. Indeed, there appears to be a more or less traditional and coherent story, with the implicit promise that all may be explained. But it never is.

Causal connections between events are deviously lacking, and stranger powers rush into the vacuum. Logic is undermined, and the 'plot' can be followed at best with the aid of our most hidden resources. This subversion of 'reality' reaches its climax toward the end, when the scene of David Gray finding the bound heroine is repeated exactly, a visual echo and more, the very ghost of event. By such ellipsis and abstraction, Dreyer relates crucial emotional images without adequate reason; creating an apparent reality as immediately convincing as dream, but as ultimately elusive. Thus, the viewer is truly taken in. And not only are we involved in the structure of dream which is the film; the characters are entranced within the trance.

So we experience 'the strange adventures of David Gray' the way he does; and the crucial vision of evil and death which he suffers, his own funeral, we see right along with him, through his eyes, staring up out of the coffin. The whole film becomes ultimately the kind of dream-vision had in 'primitive' cultures, whether induced by solitude, hunger, or drugs; a revelation of the terrible secrets of existence, often in the form of a journey, an adventure of the dreamer's spirit in other worlds or underworlds. In this case, the matter of life and death is epitomized in the figure of the vampire. Through experience of this, David Gray is shocked to awareness and pressured to pass from innocence and ignorance to consciousness of forces that must be confronted. First he - or his spirit - shrinks from the horror, then investigates it, and finally resists it. And, as I mentioned, Dreyer subtly brings us right along on this rite of passage into the dark world and back.

An early image, of a reaper and his scythe in silhouette, graphically establishes Vampyr's preoccupations. The death-scented smoke from Joan of Arc seeps into this film as a thick mist pervading the whole landscape. There is not a sunny frame in the whole movie. Even when the hero and heroine get across the Stygian waters, the picture does not appreciably brighten, as they walk through tall trees arranged in disquieting symmetry, straight row after row. But youth and love do survive and escape age and death, the land of the old, the old Count, the old servants, the old doctor and old vampire who drain the life-blood of the young (as the old doctor bled and weakened Joan). And death again, as it did for Joan, has its salubrious side.

It is a deliverance for the Count and the bedridden girl, animated as they are by evil spirits. On the other bony hand, it is unnatural and horrible for the hero, David Gray, as he is borne, alive and healthy, but trance fixed, in a coffin toward his grave. So Dreyer's old themes operate in a very new way in Vampyr. And other changes accompany those in plot and character conception. Camera movement is less insistent and consistent than in Joan, and the image is a blend of that film's abstraction with the picturesque qualities of earlier work. Most notable as technical departure is Dreyer's only use ever of superimposition, to create shadows which leave bodies and return, as well as transparent spirits; supernatural effects to reinforce the other strangeness.

The sound track is quite successful in this too, with its precisely eerie music; and the strange noises which serve as characters' voices, from the canine growls the old villain intermittently emits, to the weirdly distant, unearthly tones of David Gray's love. A poignant touch occurs when the hoarse voice of the possessed girl alters, at the moment of her final liberation, to the pure high pitch of the ethereal heroine. A very special film, obscure enough in origin, though a little is lit up by tracking traces of its literary basis. Dreyer took, it looks like, whatever appealed to him, I mean, struck his fan (ta) cy, out of a collection five stories wide by Sheridan Le Fan, titled In a Glass Darkly. Thus, from The Familiar, comes the concept of a malevolent being that materializes as a bird; from Mr. Justice Har bottle, a procession emerging from a closet (the peg-legged henchman comes out of the clock in Vampyr); from The Room in the Dragon Volant, the hero, fully conscious, lying helpless and immobile in a coffin gazing upward; and, from C armilla (the basis of Vadim's Blood and Roses), the vehement passion of the girl vampire for her female victim. The apparent randomness of selection does indicate how much Vampyr is imagined rather than thought-wrought.

Other influence, specifically Griffith's, may be discerned in the film's finale. The situation of a villain meeting his death in a granary, buried under heaps of cascading flour, is the same as the conclusion of A Corner in Wheat. The machinery which grinds out doom here is much like the torture apparatus in Joan of Arc, with its inexorable wheels, and the wheel again turns, less elaborate and abstract, in the inquisition of the witch in Day of Wrath. The conclusion, with good triumphant and evil destroyed, would be more comforting were it the integral function of a complete process; and not the fluke of a fanciful providence and literal deus ex machine.

But the happy end is just a fragment of a figment of fantasy, and the afterimage of the whole is disturbing, a dark taste in the eye. -Ken Kelman, Great Film Directors. (originally appeared in Film Culture, Winter 1964-65). The story is not the drawing card of this film. Rather, the eerie and moving visual images which Dreyer captured. The special effects are still impressive today.

The scenes with the disembodied shadows are incredible considering that there was no computer imaging technology 70 years ago. The film is not so horrific as it is lyrically creepy. There are so many famous images from 'Vampyr' which are found in most film history books. I've seen many stills from this film and found that the movie is still full of other images which are just as striking as the famous shot of the vampire looking into the hero's coffin during a nightmare. The camera is rarely if ever stationary. There are many tracking shots which must have been an influence on Scorsese.

People enter and leave the shot which may travel from outside and through several rooms of the house. All of this makes the movie fly by as there is little or no static in the movie. 'Vampyr' challenges the conventions of movie making. It also challenges the viewer. The small indie film maker would do well to get this film and study it frame by frame. Many lessons on how to stretch the boundaries of the art form are on display.

It is ironic that nearly 70 years later, not many filmmakers have achieved what Dreyer did with primitive technology. 'Vampyr' is a groundbreaking work of art which should be on everyone's must see list.

Bibliography

me, I. Belly busting. (London: 1994. ).