25 Vampyr

[milton s]

How did the father know Allan was at the hotel? He had just checked in. Could it be Allan was summoned to the town of Courtempierre to do a job? In that case the father would be expecting him. The job? To save his daughters life.
This may be why Allan was investigating the area.
Who were the shadows dancing around at night? Possibly the ghosts of previous victims.
Whatever happened to the blood that was removed from the hero Allan? They don't show it but its possible it was bottled & given to the old lady. The doctor made a hasty exit after signaling at the window with a candle. Allen yelled out: "Doctor I'm losing my blood!"
The doctor replied: "I have your blood right here."
So it was not used as a transfusion.

Vampyr has lots of mysteries unsolved.

[milton s]

If Allan's blood was not used to prolong Leone's life, it appears the vampyr lady and the doctor had already decided to do away with Leone. When the vampyr lady shows up early in the film, she hands a bottle of poison to the doctor. This same bottle was left at Leone's bedside table & was grabbed out of her hand by Allan before she could drink it. After awhile the blood of a victim begins to lose its vitality and they need a brand new healthy victim. Leone's sister Gisele was snatched in a quick getaway and was held captive at the Doctor's house.

[yoloswegmaster]

Upgrade coming in May 2022.

[Drucker]

Just when you want to count MOC out they come back with something like this. Awesome.

[Finch]

The cover for the hardbound slipcase is great, pity they stuck with the cluttered poster artwork for the keepcase. Also, their website says they are using a 2k restoration from the DFI rather than the 4k scan advertised on the Cineteca Bologna site. I'd be interested in hearing the rationale behind this. The DFI resto was done in 2020, the Italian one followed last year. Is it based on superior materials than the Bologna 4k scan (inclined to doubt that)? If it is not, were the owners of the 4k scan possibly asking for too much money, or was it simply not yielding enough of an improvement to justify the extra expenditure on licensing the 4k scan?

materials from several European archives (including the BFI, CNC and DFI) have been meticulously scanned and assessed to create the highest quality and most faithful version of Vampyr possible.

I wish we had a full breakdown of what the 4k scan contains because of MoC's inclusion of "most faithful" in their blurb. "Highest quality" might be a bit of a stretch when there is a higher resolution scan in existence but again, the Danish restoration "might" be based on better preserved sources. Gah, too many question marks that frankly dampen my enthusiasm for this disc at this point. Hopefully we get clarification or someone with more knowledge of both restorations is able to chime in.

Bonus-wise, we gain a bigger still booklet and three new video interviews.

[Orlac]

The problem with restoring Vampyr is that Dreyer removed some scenes after the Berlin premiere, now lost, causing a plothole. And the Berlin censors removed some footage prior to that which does exist (it's in the French version, which never seemed to have been restored).

So any restoration of the German version has two obstacles to face, whereas the French version likely only faces one -to be fair, I haven't seen the French version so can't confirm its overall survival state.

And the bizzare English version is only avaliable on the grey market, literally!

[FrauBlucher]

Trailer
https://youtu.be/acZJwgwmk4w

[Finch]

Okay, someone asked Eureka about the two restorations:

We are aware of a 4K scan having been made by Deutsche Kinemathek and Cineteca di Bologna in 2021. This was taken from the 1998 preservation material, which was created by photochemically copying the various elements found in a number of archives.

This new DFI restoration has gone back to each archive and scanned the originals, all of them a generation closer to the original negative than anything seen before.

Eureka also confirmed their release will be encoded by Fidelity in Motion/David MacKenzie.

Just watched the YT trailer. Looks lovely.

[ryannichols7]

amazing work by Eureka compiling the extras, definitely looks to be really definitive. I definitely support their decision to use the DFI restoration, I know people are put off by lower resolution but if the restoration is more recent I think that's far more important.

there's been a lot of fanfare for this title on Eureka's social media, I really hope they can sell through it quickly and be encouraged to do more of Dreyer's early silents with the DFI. it's crazy how those still haven't made their way to disc yet

[Calvin]

It sounds like the DFI did a thorough job on it so I'm not put off in the slightest. However, I am baffled as to why the Deutsche Kinemathek and Cineteca di Bologna would do a 4K scan within 12 months of the new DFI restoration; scans and restorations are not free, so why spend money on something that seems - on the face of it - to be unnecessary? They would have had to have been in contact with the DFI to do it, so it's not like they would be unaware. They could have done a 4K scan of The Parson's Widow instead!

[FrauBlucher]

The limited edition pertains to the packaging and the booklet, not the release overall??

[tenia]

From their webpage :
* Limited Edition Hardbound Slipcase [3000 copies]
* A 100-PAGE BOOK - featuring rare production stills, location photography, posters, the 1932 Danish film programme, a 1964 interview with Baron Nicolas de Gunzberg (producer and actor "Allan Gray"), an essay by Dreyer on film style, and writing by Tom Milne, Jean and Dale Drum, and film restorer Martin Koerber [3000 copies]

Everything else will be reissued in a standard release, as usual for Eureka, providing I suppose it makes financially sense to do a 2nd pressing as a standard re-release.

[FrauBlucher]

I thought so but wasn't positive.

[Stefan Andersson]

An article about the film:
https://michaelazerrad.typepad.com/you_ ... ampyr.html

Interesting quote:
"Myths, as Jung famously said, are the dreams of cultures, and Dreyer interweaves myth and dreaming very pointedly at the beginning of the film. An old man stands by a river bank, bearing a large sickle, an iconic symbol of death. The man clangs a bell, summoning a small rowboat, a very definite allusion to Greek mythology, and the way departed souls would summon the boatman Charon to ferry them across the river Styx. But as the film progresses, it becomes apparent that the boat was not taking the man to the underworld, it was taking him away from it. Gray has transgressed into a contemporary Hades that happens to be about 70 miles south of Paris. (In that sense, it anticipates another dream-like black-and-white film, Jean Cocteau's 1949 Orphée.)
Another allusion to classical myth apparently happened by accident: Gray finds his way to a creepy abandoned mill and happens upon a strange man on the stairs; he asks the man about the sounds of barking dogs and crying children. The question was a reference to a scene that was cut from the film, but interestingly, the growling of the three-headed dog Cerberus and the wailing of innocent children are the first two things that Aeneas hears when he enters the underworld with the Sibyl."

According to this article, the film was shot entirely on location, in the French town Courtempierre.

Screenplay in French:
https://www.carlthdreyer.dk/en/carlthdr ... res/vampyr

Another interesting quote:
"There are other scenes that were included in the script and shot that do not exist in any current prints of Vampyr. These scenes reveal the vampire in the factory recoiling against a shadow of a Christian cross as well as a ferryman guiding Gray and Gisèle by getting young children to build a fire and sing a hymn to guide them back to the shore."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampyr - footnote 14 references Casper Tybjerg´s video essay on the Criterion edition.

[hearthesilence]

An article about the film:
https://michaelazerrad.typepad.com/you_ ... ampyr.html

Cool, I didn't know Azerrad wrote about film too. (Know him primarily through his rock criticism, especially with regards to the alternative and post-punk era.)

[Finch]

Since the film was shot in France and also dubbed into French in post, do we know why only the German version has been restored? Is the French print fucked beyond repair or what?

[Orlac]

Since the film was shot in France and also dubbed into French in post, do we know why only the German version has been restored? Is the French print fucked beyond repair or what?

The original intention was to shoot a German, French and English take of each dialogue sequence, then dub them in post-production

From my memory of the previous restoration notes, only the German version was consistently the same language. There was at least one sequence, where the vampire tells the shadows to be quiet, where it remained German in the other versions in order to keep the music and dialogue synchronised.

I'm not sure how much of the French version exists, but it does have the footage removed from the German version by local censors (currently an extra on the Criterion release). Dreyer also removed more footage after the riot at the Berlin premiere, and did not retain that footage for the French version, as I'm given to understand.

Dreyer also prepared an English version, of which a little survives (it was used in the version distributed by Raymond Rohaur), and you can see (barely, it's a very blurry and noisy transfer) the American version, CASTLE OF DOOM, online - https://archive.org/details/TheCastleOfDoom1934. I don't think Dreyer's English dub was released intact anywhere.

[Orlac]

Here's the restoration notes - https://www.carlthdreyer.dk/carlthdreye ... ampyr-1932

And the specfic note on the language issues

here was a very primitive machine for mixing two optical tracks that somehow would marry music, words, and effects, but basically the editors would rather avoid using it. This explains the bizarre fact that the Vampyre stops the music in the dancing sequence with the German word "Ruhe!" (=Silence!) in all three versions of the film. Obviously this exclamation was composed by Wolfgang Zeller as an integral part of his music, and thus was recorded on the music track, of which only the German version made it into the final choice of takes to be used.

[pistolwink]

Is there evidence that Dreyer's English version was ever completed and released? Some version of the film was released in the US as Not Against the Flesh as a kind of exploitation item, but that could've been subtitled or dubbed/recut by an American distributor.

I would have sworn this film had some kind of art-house release in the US, but there's no record of it playing in New York in the Times, for example. There is a review from the paper's correspondent in Berlin which was extremely ambivalent. Here's an excerpt:



The rest is much more critical, even savage.

[Orlac]

More information on the NOT AGAINST THE FLESH version

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/monster ... l#p1449992

The reviewer in Film Daily also seems singularly certain about NOT AGAINST FLESH being in English, as opposed to subtitled. I will admit that this rather stands out among General Foreign Sales Corp. product, which was almost entirely composed of German-language and occasional Spanish-language fare that usually received a swift New York opening. In the case of GFSC's German-language releases, these invariably opened at the 79th St. Theatre where they drew a steady audience from among the many German speakers in Yorkville, before then moving on to engagements at venues such as the Little German Theatre in Buffalo or the Stratford Theatre in Poughkeepsie. Titles released through GFSC in this manner during 1934 and early 1935 included: DIE - ODER KEINE; HOCHZEIT AM WOLFGANGSEE; KAISERWALZER; LÜGEN AUF RÜGEN; MARION, DAS GEHÖRT SICH NICHT; MUTTER UND KIND; DER SCHIMMELREITER; and TRENCK. And it's possible to find showings of all of these titles listed in the NYC press at the time, with the Daily News or New York Times reviewing just about all of them. Indeed, the only GFSC release of which I can find no trace of playdates in the New York press is... NOT AGAINST FLESH.

[FrauBlucher]

Beaver... some caps look better than CC but others can't tell

[Drucker]

Seems mostly that the restoration cleaned up a lot of the visible damage, but the underlying scan seems to be the same based on the caps.

[tenia]

Very weird since the technical blurb seems to state the DFI did new scans.

[hearthesilence]

The grain is better on the optical printer shot where we see him looking at his own head in the coffin - it looks like Criterion's de-grained it a touch. The long shot of the field seems to have better grain texture too but that could be due to improved contrast. Scratch repair aside, the general PQ on most shots is close enough to make the differences negligible IMHO. I'll probably skip this which is a shame because I watched the Criterion BD about a month ago and I remember wondering if a new scan could improve things as the master did look a bit dated. Given the work they detailed in the notes, it's possible better source material and other factors make a pristine looking copy unlikely.

[FrauBlucher]

I do want to see other caps. Beaver's caps always lack a little something