But what do the splinters reflect?

[sovay]

So first rushthatspeaks and I watched Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). And then we watched Bergman's Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen, 1968). And now we're going to bed.

Uh huh.

Comments

[sovay]

Looking forward to reviews.

Thanks. I'll need some time to myself first, but I will see if I can.

Vampyr is one of the most truly dreamlike movies I know.

Yes. And it has its own logic, even if no one inside the film talks it through. For example: rushthatspeaks believes that the old man drew the vampire's attention to himself by making some supernatural effort to appear to Gray, which tallies with my feeling that he can't possibly have left the book for Gray in person in the conventional sense—not when he's seen at home later that night in the same dressing gown, the same disheveled evening air, and dies of a stroke which Gray sees is a bullet from the soldier's shadow's gun, insubstantial and fatal as elf-shot. (I love the way that shadows operate in the film, in the true folkloric sense of separated or lingering souls. The soldier's serves the vampire, but I doubt those couples waltzing a danse macabre on the wall where the wheels spin have anything to do with her except that her presence has raised them: vampirism as radioactivity, a field of malign influence that is nothing the vampire consciously puts out; she seems to notice its effects only when they inconvenience her, like the whirling shadows and the noises she commands to stop.) We wondered if she would even have seen Léone's father if he hadn't tried to interfere supernaturally, putting himself on her radar. We weren't sure she was ever, even at the end, aware of Gray. He could have died of her all the same. The story is not as vague as it seems as first slow exposure; it's not intended to confuse. And yet there are ways in which I have trouble telling how much time the story takes, whether it's really one night or a day or two or whether it even matters; it's all the same decaying photograph to Gray. Space in the movie keeps going wrong in small or large ways, dislocating the characters; time does the same thing. It's one thing to vanish, but every now and then a character is seen before they appear. No one is where the camera left them. Strange gaps and lacunae. You're exactly right that dreams do this: and then we were by the sea, but it was still the train somehow; the sound of the wheels and the waves were the same. Symbols keep repeating until they stop being important as props and exist only as themselves. I don't think the man at the river's edge with the scythe is ever explained within the world of the film. It would have been trivial. We don't need it. We know what he's doing there.

Nicolas de Gunzburg also bears a distinct and startling resemblance to H.P. Lovecraft, which we weren't expecting. Allan Gray is very much a Lovecraft protagonist, immersing himself in occult studies until he's one of those fevered, neurasthenic narrators who would be talking in adjectives if this weren't such an intensely visual, verbally minimalist story. Rush pointed out that we can get quite some ways into the film before receiving objective confirmation of the supernatural at work rather than Gray's imagination; the film doesn't make particular use of this ambiguity, but it's there. I really would love to know if Lovecraft ever did see this movie, and if so, what he thought. He loved Leslie Howard in Berkeley Square (1933).

Hour of the Wolf doesn't quite work for me, but I'm oddly fond of it.

I loved it: it was a horror movie that followed so few rules of the genre, I couldn't tell if Bergman was deliberately working against them or if it was just what happened when the usual tropes came out the other side of his brain. I don't know if the things that were haunting Johan were demons in the classical sense, but they were some of the scariest monsters I have ever seen in a film. They were not human and they never looked like they were trying to pass for it, except just enough to be wrong.