MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: VAMPYR (1932)

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Saturday, May 1, 2010

VAMPYR (1932)

Between his unmatched films on witches sacred & profane (LA PASSION DE JOAN D’ARC/’28 and VREDENS DAG / DAY OF WRATH/’43, Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer made this vampire pic. An odd choice for the severe master, but VAMPYR is not your typical horror film. A dream journey, a chase after reality, a film where plot is as porous as shadows on a mist. It cannot really be explained, only experienced. For decades, film-goers had to put up with dupe prints that turned the intentionally misty look of Rudolph Maté’s exquisite sfumato photography into mud. (And with a badly cropped picture.) But the current Criterion DVD (or in Europe - Masters of Cinema) is a great improvement. VAMPYR can now be properly seen, if not fully understood. There are unforgettable moments - a dance of phantom couples spinning down a white corridor, a doppelgänger in a coffin, suffocation by flour: nightmare images as soft & inevitable as the fall of loosed feathers. You’ll discover your own indelible mysteries & horrors. "Shadow-Play’ is an old, poetic term for cinema; never was it so justified.

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A last thought before we go.

Well, enough from me. But before we sign off, here's a great quote from Emile Zola's L'OEUVRE (THE MASTERPIECE), which is about painting rather than the yet to be invented medium of film, but which points a fine critical eye toward the whole idea of art criticism. It's a good, if chilly, thought to keep in mind, especially when you surf the net.

"Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is?

"Suppose the artist's paradise turned out to be as nonexistent as the Catholics, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty pretty dabbling better than honest to goodness painting. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn't give a twopenny damn.

"Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than well-balanced, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to an initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcibly impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves...

"Perhaps that's the sort of thing that's best left unsaid. It's certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders!"- Emile Zola

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Saturday, May 1, 2010

VAMPYR (1932)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE