Vampyr: Der Traum Des Allan Grey

"Vampyr" may not be a complete classic to me, but if so, the fault isn't entirely with the people who made the movie. Rather, it's with the people who presented the film on Turner Classic Movies.

The story, as far as I could figure it out: Allan Grey stops to stay with a family, and encounters a vampire. Well, okay, I don't really know if there's more or less to the story, as it was incredibly confusing at times. The story is not the real point of the film, however; the images are.

Some of the images in this movie are incredible. A man shovels dirt, but the dirt comes towards his shovel instead of flying away. Shadows move around that seem to have no apparent source. The main character briefly turns into a ghost and finds his own body in a coffin. The movie has so many brilliant images that it's worth seeing for them alone.

The director, Carl Theodor Dreyer, seems to have planned the movie out as a silent film, then found himself making it with sound. There is little dialogue, much of it unimportant to the plot. (More on this later.) Much of the soundtrack is musical, with sound effects here and there. There are apparent cutaways to text to explain parts of the plot. It's ironic that his previous film, "The Passion of Joan of Arc," ended up a talkie without sound while this film has sound but is essentially silent at heart.

So if I like the images so much that I can overlook the odd, unexplainable story, why am I not so happy with the film? Quite simply, the presentation is terrible. There's a border around the edges of the screen, which is distracting. The text intertitles don't quite match the print's scratchiness; they're too clean. (This is a problem with lots of not-quite-restored silent movies; the prints are so scratched that it feels like the uber-clean titles have come in from another universe. Is it really that hard to simulate scratches on text?) White dots appear frequently on the screen. The dialogue is muffled and difficult to hear, although really, if it's in another language, I really shouldn't be complaining.

Worst of all, however, are the subtitles. All the text (in English, anyway) is done in an ugly Olde English font that is difficult to read, albeit not impossible. But what really pushes it from bad to horrendous is that the subtitles have black bars underneath them, obscuring the lower third (and sometimes, the lower half) of the screen. Apparently, it's not bad enough that you can't see at least 10% of the frame due to the border; now they have to cut off thirty to fifty percent more. In a mixed blessing, much of the unimportant dialogue is left unsubtitled, so when they're saying "Va! Va!" to each other, you don't have to deal with the black bars. But when a plot point comes up, prepare to be annoyed.

Apparently, the Image DVD of "Vampyr" has the same exact problems. The image is scratchy, the text is rendered in terrible fonts and with black-bars underneath, and the image is cropped. The Criterion Collection has apparently found some decent-looking clips from the movie that don't suffer from those issues and used them in a documentary on Dreyer. (I haven't seen it; the images are on DVD Beaver.) Would it be too much to ask for Criterion or somebody to get to work restoring this movie, cleaning up as much of the scratches and dots as they can, using a clean, Arial-type font for subtitles, and making the sound non-horrendous? A movie like this deserves a good, clean look and feel, and the current presentation is simply a crime.