Vampyr (1932)

Germany / France, 75 minutes

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Writers: Sheridan Le Fanu, Christen Jul, Carl Theodor Dreyer

Photography: Rudolph Mate, Louis Nee

Music: Wolfgang Zeller

Editor: Tonka Taldy

Cast: Julian West, Sybille Schmitz, Maurice Schutz, Jan Hieronimko, Henriette Gerard, Albert Bras, N. Babanini, Jane Mora

Danish director and cowriter Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet) based his vampire story on the Irish horror writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s essential 1872 collection, In a Glass Darkly, which includes “Carmilla,” the famous lesbian vampire story. It’s an important point of distinction from the more popular vampire source of the time, which, of course, was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published 25 years later in 1897. Stoker’s epistolary novel was responsible informally (later settled legally) for F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and then, in 1931, for the kickoff of the Universal horror franchise, Dracula. In fact, Vampyr was required to wait for its release until after Dracula and then Frankenstein. These are all notably slow and very quiet dream movies, perhaps Vampyr more than any of them, which moves like thawing syrup. It often reminded me of Eraserhead, which makes me wonder how much influence it might have had on David Lynch.

The star, Julian West as Allan Grey, was the primary source of funding for the picture in exchange for the role. His real name was Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, a French-born member of Russian nobility. In that way Vampyr is a kind of vanity project—in a way perhaps even more so for Dreyer than the baron. Pursuits into horror literature have traditionally not often won respect and admiration. Dreyer may have been taking a kind of calculated risk with his career, moving from Saint Joan of Arc only four years earlier to these creatures of the night.

Gertrud (1964)

Denmark, 116 minutes
Director: Carl Th. Dreyer
Writers: Hjalmar Soderberg, Carl Th. Dreyer
Photography: Henning Bendtsen, Arne Abrahamsen
Music: Jorgen Jersild
Editor: Edith Schlussel
Cast: Nina Pens Rode, Bendt Rothe, Ebbe Rode, Baard Owe, Axel Strobye

I have to say I think the degree of critical regard for filmmaker Carl Th. Dreyer seems remarkable, especially given how unknown I suspect he is at large. His most famous and lauded project is a silent movie from 1928, The Passion of Joan of Arc, which very nearly perished of its own obscurity and lack of commercial success. His next-best, according to critics, is the strange and unsettling Ordet, from the '50s, which practically gets lost in its own religious obscurantism. Dreyer made a few other movies as well, including an early talkie vampire movie, though not many.

It's apparent even from these few pictures that Dreyer and his gaudy middle initial mostly dwelt in realms of the spirit. But for his final movie, made when he was in his 70s with his reputation fully restored, and thus something of an anticipated public event, he picked up his strange fixations and fastidious approaches and moved them to worldly realms of the secular. Gertrud Kanning is a middle-aged woman arrayed with four lovers, let us call them past, present, future, and future imperfect. But Dreyer (an illegitimate son of a Danish farmer and his Swedish housekeeper) doesn't let go of his religiosity so easily, and Gertrud is no libertine. "Ascetic" is probably going too far, but "austere" seems to fit the tone of Gertrud and Gertrud about as well as anything.

Ordet (1955)

Denmark, 126 minutes
Director: Carl Th. Dreyer
Writers: Kaj Munk, Carl Th. Dreyer
Photography: Henning Bendtsen
Music: Poul Schierbeck
Editor: Edith Schlussel
Cast: Henrik Malberg, Emil Haas Christensen, Preben Lerdorff Rye, Cay Kristiansen, Birgitte Federspiel, Henry Skjaer, Ejner Federspiel

There's every good chance this could well be the silliest, most frivolous and beside-the-point SPOILER WARNING ever issued, but I suppose it has to be done. The "twist ending" delivered here, in one of the handful of cinema wayposts given us by master director Carl Th. Dreyer (going well back into the silent era and including The Passion of Joan of Arc, previously discussed), is about as far from the usual kinds of narrative stunts we're supposed to warn about as it's possible to imagine. Not to mention it's almost better to know what's coming, the better to appreciate the pace and careful foreshadowing and development of themes that goes into this. Not to mention that the people who require these kinds of warnings probably have Ordet way down on their to-see lists in the first place.

Among the top 50 films on the list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, only L'Atalante rivals Ordet (with maybe a couple of others, still to come) among the most obscure for me; at least I had the advantage of knowing Dreyer from that long-ago college film class I've mentioned before. Dreyer's career is fascinating, nearly as sparse as his aesthetic, spanning the silent era and penetrating all the way into the '60s, based in Denmark but traveling well afield, with long gaps between projects, and a continuing obsession with religious themes approached from a variety of angles: Joan of Arc, one of the great vampire pictures (Vampyr), 16th-century witch hunting hysteria (Day of Wrath, produced and released during World War II). Ordet, with its radical and homely meditation on faith as lived and experienced, fits perfectly with these.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

La passion de Jeanne d'Arc, France, 82 minutes
Director: Carl Th. Dreyer
Writers: Carl Th. Dreyer, Joseph Delteil
Photography: Rudolph Mate
Editors: Marguerite Beauge, Carl Th. Dreyer
Cast: Maria Falconetti, Eugène Silvain, André Berley, Maurice Schutz, Antonin Artaud, Michel Simon, Jean d'Yd, Louis Ravet

The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of those films with a history notably beset by exceptional troubles, all too easily raising fatuous speculation on God's will. Though it did not suffer the production setbacks of, say, The Exorcist, once Joan of Arc was in the can it encountered a remarkable series of problems. In fact, in the end it was never given many public screenings at all. Vociferous objections came almost immediately from French authorities, British censors, the Catholic Church, and elsewhere, all of whom had a stake in the way the story was told, each with an agenda based on thin-skinned self-interest more than anything else. (On the changes demanded by the Catholic Church, for example, one historian of the film has written that they left only "an annoying, Catholic film in which the Rouen tribunal had become almost sympathetic.")

Then a fire destroyed the original negative. Director Dreyer painstakingly reassembled his film from second takes, deeply disappointed at the overall inferiority of this second version, though others argue there is not that much difference. But the second negative soon after burned in a fire too. The Passion of Joan of Arc thus languished in gray obscurity for decades, as prints of it were found and bowdlerized and otherwise revised to various ends, all of which only increased Dreyer's despair. He fought them but went to his death in 1968 thinking his early masterpiece was little more than a lost cause and footnote to film history.

But expect a miracle, right?