Vampyr (1932)

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr arrives from 1932 with the quiet confidence of a film that has nothing to sell. It was financed by Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, who purchased the leading role for himself and adopted the pseudonym Julian West so his family might not learn of the arrangement. The supporting players were plucked from Paris metro cars, shops, and cafés, largely non-professionals who had never stood before a camera. This is a casting method born of budget and a taste for unvarnished faces, not a program of inclusion. The result looks like the people Dreyer happened to encounter, which is a different thing from a statement.

The story concerns Allan Gray, a student of the occult who wanders into Courtempierre and finds a manor household in the grip of a vampire named Marguerite Chopin. There is a blood transfusion, a stake driven through a preserved heart, a doctor suffocated beneath milled flour, and an out-of-body sequence in which Gray watches his own corpse sealed in a coffin. Dreyer drew on Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly, a collection that contains the lesbian vampire tale Carmilla, though the finished film keeps none of that material on screen. What remains is atmosphere: gauze over the lens, washed-out light, long shadows that detach from their owners. The film is a dream, and dreams do not argue.

Dreyer said at the Berlin premiere that he had no particular intention beyond making a film unlike any other. He succeeded. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no villainous system to indict, no identity to celebrate. The women are endangered and must be protected. The aristocracy paid for the whole eerie business. The mill is a death trap, not a metaphor for industry. A century of criticism has praised the disorientation and the craft, and that praise is deserved. As a document of social instruction, it offers nothing at all, which is its own kind of integrity.