seven

First impressions of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr, 1932:

Its foggy, roaming narrative is striking, and leaves a deep impression of having encountered, observed, and possibly partaken in the activities of the floating, disembodied ghost of a horror film.

The movie is inhabited partially by shadows - minions of the vampire, demonic murderers (the ghosts of executed criminals, we are told) take the form of human shadows that creep along walls, work in the yard, and keep watch, but that also run in fields, dance with one another, and play joyous, upbeat, in fact lively music. For me one of the most memorable scenes is one in which the shadows dance very formal dances as the music fluidly swings back and forth from the dark and eery (and incidental) music alread in the film to the dance being played, in the frame, by a shadow string band. That the incidental music is not superceded by or replaced by the dance, but rather fluidly becomes the dance, draws questions as to the objectivity and disinterest of the film itself. Undoubtedly, the film owes its overall tone at least as much to its music as to its imagery - to blend the film-as-object with its subject so seamlessly lends to the feelings of disembodiment and complicity, and ultimately makes the film more absorbing and more subltly arresting. And when the dance suddenly is stopped, requiring the music to be stopped as well, it is not by the editor or the composer - that is, not by the film - but by the character of the vampire, who shouts at them to stop their noisemaking. They do, but her frustration with them underlines their role as mischievous, uncontrollable factors - apparently of their own fruition, posessing an agency separate from the vampire's and the film's.

The vampire herself is a hunched old woman, her living accomplice a wild-haired and -mustached doctor, her victims two beautiful young women, and the hero(?), Allan Gray, a... well, a blank canvas. A demonologist of some kind, his sense of horror or shock in the face of Satanic activity seems faint, or maybe displaced. It's there - he is afraid - but his actions all seem to be driven less by fear than by a sort of rote curiosity; even when running from murderous shadows, rowing the surviving girl (by now, inexplicably/inevitably, his lover) to safety, or pounding an iron stake through the vampire's heart, the hero's actions are as thick and inscrutable as the fog that pervades nearly every frame of the film. He is so jadedly uninterested in being interested in the nuance and detail of his surroundings, that sometimes the camera leaves him for some time to explore an area, returning to him in a new location. The camera achieves the same location by a different route, and operates without its subject, as its subject seems to operate fluidly without the camera. It is unsettling, as a viewer, to identify with the camera rather than with the protagonist - but it is only natural; the viewer is curious of things that Gray has no interest in. Gray moves linearly through the story - in a way, he's a character and simultaneously is the plot (although, strangely, his role as hero, protagonist, and plot catalyst is almost completely subsumed for some time by another character) - while the camera (and thus the viewer) move in and out, in every dimension, floating through the fog.

There is a long sequence near the end of the film in which Gray splits in two, leaving a faint version of himself sitting on a bench as another faint version of himself wanders into a mortifying hallucination (whether it is a hallucination, dream, spell, or simultaneous reality is arguable - but he has recently lost a lot of blood, and hallucination seems as good - if not as dramatic - an option as any). He walks into the vampire's house, where he sees himself (another other Gray) in an open coffin. When the doctor arrives, Gray hides, and watches as the doctor's henchman seals Gray into the coffin. We see the view from a window in the coffin lid, and the Gray we've been following seems to be the one in the coffin. The coffin is carried through a field, by the bench the other Gray is sitting on. The coffin and those carrying it disappear, and Gray-on-the-bench wakes up. This is the feeling the entire film has - the literal disembodiment, reembodiment, and re-reembodiment of the protagonist is exactly the floating, distractable, hazy and untethered tone of the film. It leaves itself sitting in one place now and then, strays from the path, finds itself, only to find itself again where it left off before.

It's loopy, disorienting, and eery. Watching it is like losing yourself - it requires losing yourself - in the fog. The other night I was driving back from Portland with Ryan, and the fog was so thick we were both thinking that our surroundings had entirel lost dimension. Every way you looked looked like space - there was no landmark to judge distance, everything seemed, relative to everything else, very far away and very still; but it was all so fluid, and we were obviously moving. Vampyr is like that - it's like being lost in fog, and recognizing something in the rare clear patch, but not being sure if you recognize it from before the fog, or from seeing it in the fog. Vampyr has a way of inventing landmarks and creating familiarity. But at every turn, it proves the familiar to be foreign, strange, and dubious.