Monday, 18th March 2002 I’LL BE DAMNED!
featuring: VAMPYR (1932) David Gray checks in to a creepy hotel. The titles tell us he is a dreamy young man who has studied the occult.He checks into his room & goes to bed. An old man enters his room and warns him that "she must not die." He leaves a package "to be opened after my death." Gray gets out of bed and experiences a series of strange events. He sees shadows of a man with a peg leg (the shadow finds its owner and rejoins it). He meets an old man with a mustache who asks, "do you hear that?". Gray replies that he hears children and dogs. The old man tells him with a sinister stare that there are no children or dogs here. The man with the package gets shot at this point. Gray runs to help and meets the rest of the inhabitants of the hotel. It turns out that the man with the mustache is a doctor, and that one of the young daughters of the hotel owner is sick with some strange malady. Gray opens his package, which turns out to be a book about vampires. Vampire mythology was less well known to audiences than now, and Dreyer uses exposition pages from the book.Gray dreams he leaves his body sitting on a bench, then finds himself in a coffin with a window in it. He wakes up and realizes that the wife of the doctor is really a vampire. Gray helps drive a stake into her heart and she turns into a skeleton. The doctor runs into a flour mill and is buried under a pile of flour. And David Gray floats away on a boat with the pretty sister of the afflicted girl.
The story is presented in an extraordinary way. The special effects are simply beautiful. The shadow effects are stunning.The whole film has a white, diffused, dreamy look. (Francois Truffaut once wrote an essay called "The Whiteness of Carl Dreyer".) There are several shocking images besides David Gray's funeral dream. Some are trick shots imitated many times over the years, others are atmospheric shots that have never been duplicated. Notable is Dreyer's only use ever of superimposition, to create shadows & transparent spirits to reinforce the strangeness. The sound track is quite successful too, with eerie music and strange noises which serve as characters' voices, from the canine growls of the old villain to the distant, unearthly tones of David Gray's love. Poignantly, the hoarse voice of the possessed girl alters at the moment of her final liberation to the pure high pitch of the ethereal heroine.
Dreyer effectively establishes a mood by use of shadow,frequently showing actions by shadows cast by the characters. This fits with the film's style of plot by inference rather than direct narrative. The film is filled with memorable images: a skull turning to watch; a shadow walking over to join its subject sitting in repose; point-of-view filming from inside a glass-topped coffin as the lid is nailed down and then carried out to the churchyard for burial. The story goes that the first few days of filming was damaged by a light leak in the camera, but Dreyer liked the effect, and had the rest of the film photographed to match to give the sense of a dimly remembered dream. Amidst the fogginess, shots of machinery in a mill are as sharp as a tack.
Vampyr is a masterpiece of world cinema. the most beautiful horror movie of all time. It is a mystery;initially percieved as a succession of images, the plot comes together gradually on reflection. It is trance-film, the prototype of which is Caligari;a passive hero experiences events which are primarily manifestations of the unconscious. Things happen to the characters; they don't initiate actions (which on initial viewing seem unrelated). The characters' movements are automatic and fated, voices hollow & distant, suggesting disembodied spirits. There is little talking. Dialogue like "the wounds have almost healed" and "why does the doctor only come at night" are given without explanation.
The matter of life and death is epitomized in the figure of the vampire. Through experience of this tremendem, David Gray is shocked to awareness,passing from innocence to consciousness of forces that must be confronted. First he shrinks from the horror, then investigates, and finally resists it. Dreyer subtly brings us along on this rite of passage into the dark world and back. The action is treated matter-of-factly even when bizarre, the point of view literal and realistic. There seems to be a traditionally coherent story, with the implicit promise that all may be explained. But it never is. Causal connections between events are deviously lacking. Logic is undermined, and the subversion of "reality" reaches its climax toward the end, when the scene of David Gray finding the bound heroine is repeated exactly, a visual echo and more, the very ghost of event. An early image of a reaper and scythe in silhouette graphically establishes Vampyr's preoccupations. Even when the hero & heroine get across the Stygian waters, the picture doesn’t appreciably brighten. But youth and love do survive and escape age &death. And death has its salubrious side. It is a deliverance for the Count &the bedridden girl, animated as they are by evil spirits. But unnatural and horrible for the hero, David Gray, as he is borne, alive and healthy, but trancefixed, in a coffin toward his grave.
Dreyer took whatever appealed to him from a collection of stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, titled In a Glass Darkly. From “The Familiar” he took the concept of a malevolent being materialized as a bird; from “The Room in the Dragon Volant” the hero, lying helpless in a coffin fully conscious, and from “Carmilla” (the basis of Vadim's Blood and Roses) the vehement passion of the girl vampire for her victim. Cinematographer Maté also worked with Dreyer on The Passion of Joan of Arc and, after Vampyr, moved on to Hollywood .He went on to direct the great Hollywood film noir D.O.A. (1950),producing an outstanding body of work, but he was never allowed to experiment again like he did with Dreyer. The work he did in "Vampyr" was one of a kind. Vampyr is also known as The Strange Adventures of David Gray, Not Against the Flesh, Traum des David Gray, and Castle of Doom. from-Ken Kelman, Great Film Directors. (originally appeared in Film Culture, Winter 1964-65). Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer.Producers: Carl Theodor Dreyer,Baron Nicolas de Gunsburg.Screenplay: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Christen Jul, Photography: Rudolph Mate, Louis Nee.Editor: Carl Theodor Dreyer .Music: Wolfgang Zeller Players:Julian West [Baron Nicolas de Gunsberg] (David Gray).Henriette Gerard (Marguerite Chopin).Sybille Schmitz (Leone),Renee Mandel (Gisele),Maurice Schutz (Lord of the Manor),Jan Hieronimko (Doctor),Jane Mora (Nurse).71 mins.
DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD (1979) Roy Frumkes created DOCUMENT to hear, in Romero's own words, how he creates a movie,& to shoot what Frumkes (a teacher at the N.Y. School of Visual Arts) described as a "kinetic lesson on the set of a film in production." Since his crew was comprised primarily of students, Roy had to find non-union, independent films to cover. He wisely chose a sequel to a popular horror film of the 60’s, DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978). This was long before the endless stream of "Making Of..." specials catering mainly to special-effects fans. DOCUMENT details the process of constructing & distributing an independent feature. The work of make-up wizard TOM SAVINI is not glossed over; there's a high-speed sequence of Tom gluing appliances and pouring blood on Frumkes himself. It's nostalgic to hear Tom say, "No, [there are no makeup schools] that I know of...I had to teach myself." ROMERO is an unsung hero in independent film, especially the low and no-budget horror world. His taboo-breaking tale of zombie flesh-eaters , NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), may have looked grainy & uneven, but audiences had a strong, visceral reaction to the sight of ghouls gobbling up entrails. It wasn't just the gore which shook people up. It was the frenetic pace of the film, the sheer number of jarring cuts from one canted angle to the next, an alienating wide shot of a woman in the field shifting perspective into a hustling medium-shot as she runs along. The juxtaposition of disturbing close-ups on household objects with wide action shots of ever increasing ghouls on the lawn outside.
ROMERO is affable throughout, speaking without pretensions or academic bluster. He plans for a picture rigorously beforehand, with miles of storyboards & hundreds of pages of screenplay outlining minutiae of detail. He combines this careful, pragmatic approach with a spur-of-the-moment, "just shoot it" attitude allowing for new things to happen. Producer Richard Rubenstein expresses his willingness to support Romero's vision and his refusal to compromise an unrated version for potential distributors. There are wonderful interviews with SAVINI, as personable, charismatic and thorough as Romero in his responses,also pulling off the nifty stunt of being thrown from the balcony in some behind-the-scenes footage. Winner of a Gold Award at the Houston International Film Festival. BEST QUOTE: "I'd really like to be a zombie, George. I really would. I'd work hard. I'd shuffle. I'd bleed. Whatever you want me to do." Dir/Scr/Prod. Roy Frumkes, Phot. Reeves Lehman. Mus. Ralf Ulfik. Anim. Henry Jones. Prod Co Roy Frumkes Productions. Feat: John Amplas, Carl Augenstein, Steve Bissette, David Emge, Ken Foree, Michael Gornick, Scott H. Reiniger, Christine Romero, GEORGE A. ROMERO, Richard P. Rubinstein, TOM SAVINI, Gahan Wilson. Narr: Susan Tyrrell. 66 mins. NFVLS.
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