KKLAK!
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Just recently watched Carl Theodor Dreyer’s hallucinatory near-silent horror, Vampyr. It’s an unnervingly phantasmagoric experience; all enigmatic, unexplained images, and, considering it’s from the thirties, is amazingly technically impressive. The camera is very mobile, and there are lots of brilliant effects like disembodied shadows dancing over the walls. Even the performances, though mannered, aren’t hammy (in the way, say, Metropolis can’t help but seem now) - and, rather wonderfully, the hero is played by an aristocratic (and very dapper) Vogue editor rather than an actor… Everything about this film was slightly different to what you’d expect; its contemporary setting and modernists influences (it categorically rejects gothic trappings), and even the fact that the titular vampire is an old, silent woman, while typical vampire motifs like fangs and crucifixes are entirely absent. It’s so great when to watch something you consider to be very old, and then be reminded that if something is truly well-made or inventive, the age becomes irrelevant.

Just recently watched Carl Theodor Dreyer’s hallucinatory near-silent horror, Vampyr. It’s an unnervingly phantasmagoric experience; all enigmatic, unexplained images, and, considering it’s from the thirties, is amazingly technically impressive. The camera is very mobile, and there are lots of brilliant effects like disembodied shadows dancing over the walls.

Even the performances, though mannered, aren’t hammy (in the way, say, Metropolis can’t help but seem now) - and, rather wonderfully, the hero is played by an aristocratic (and very dapper) Vogue editor rather than an actor…

Everything about this film was slightly different to what you’d expect; its contemporary setting and modernists influences (it categorically rejects gothic trappings), and even the fact that the titular vampire is an old, silent woman, while typical vampire motifs like fangs and crucifixes are entirely absent.

It’s so great when to watch something you consider to be very old, and then be reminded that if something is truly well-made or inventive, the age becomes irrelevant.

  1. kklak posted this