Visions and Victims by Amanda Doxtater
Vampyr (1932) was a horror film of subtle derangement. The most disturbing elements, especially the violation of women by a vampire, were observed at a distance or strongly suggested. Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer seemed to have lingered in the silent movie age; a woman’s facial expressions signal her transformation into a vampire; dialogue throughout the film is sparse (no one has much to say to anyone else) and yet Dreyer makes occasional, jarring use of disturbing sounds. The visuals can be unsettling, especially the coffin with the glass window opening onto the face of the dead—and the perspective shot, from the dead man’s point of view, through the window as his coffin is carried to burial.
Dreyer is the subject of a new monograph, Visions and Victims. The author, Amanda Doxtater, assistant Swedish studies professor at the University of Washington, has spent a good deal of time in the Danish Film Institute’s Dreyer collection. Visions and Victims is not a biography of the director, but an effort to fit his oeuvre into a category called “art melodrama” as read from a feminist perspective.
Dreyer made only 14 films over a career that spanned 1919 through 1964. Doxtater focuses on only five, including Vampyr. Her extensive archival research aided her in placing Vampyr into the context of the Danish film industry where Dreyer worked and that cinema’s more sophisticated (than Hollywood) understanding of victimhood. Doxtater terms many of his films as “quintessentially art melodrama” wherein “situations of extreme embodiment bring about the possibility for extreme kinds of reflection.” And being transformed into a vampire certainly calls for extreme embodiment and reflection!
Like other films for Dreyer’s Nordisk studio, Vampyr is populated in part by people who seem to be sleepwalking, as if no longer in control of their volition. But then, as Doxtater points out, the varied and morphing facial expressions one of the victimized women display “multiple, distinct feelings in quick succession,” showing (not telling) that “her mind and will are in conflict.”
Doxtater’s description of Vampyr is spot on. Dreyer’s continuity editing is disorienting. “It’s unclear whether it’s day or night, dream or waking, and the spectators have no clear sense of time elapsing,” she writes. Vampyr suggests an alternative reality as effectively as anything made in the past 90 years.
Visions and Victims: Art Melodrama in the Films of Carl Th. Dreyer is published by University of Wisconsin Press.
