Masters of Cinema Cast – Episode 55 – Vampyr

Joakim is joined by Adam Gonet from The Art Shelf  to discuss this spooky classic. Enjoy. From Masters of Cinema: The first sound-film by one of the greatest of all filmmakers, Vampyr offers a sensual immediacy that few, if any, works of cinema can claim to match. Legendary director Carl Theodor Dreyer leads the viewer, as though guided in a trance, through a realm akin to a waking-dream, a zone positioned somewhere between reality and the supernatural. Traveller Allan Gray (arrestingly depicted by Julian West, aka the secretive real-life Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg) arrives at a countryside inn seemingly beckoned by haunted forces. His growing acquaintance with the family who reside there soon opens up a network of uncanny associations between the dead and the living, of ghostly lore and demonology, which pull Gray ever deeper into an unsettling, and upsetting, mystery. At its core: troubled Gisèle, chaste daughter and sexual incarnation, portrayed by the great, cursed Sybille Schmitz (Diary of a Lost Girl, and inspiration for Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss.) Before the candles of Vampyr exhaust themselves, Allan Gray and the viewer alike come eye-to-eye with Fate — in the face of dear dying Sybille, in the blasphemed bodies of horrific bat-men, in the charged and mortal act of asphyxiation — eye-to-eye, then, with Death — the supreme vampire. Deemed by Alfred Hitchcock ‘the only film worth watching… twice’, Vampyr’s influence has become, by now, incalculable. Buy Vampyr Subscription options: Subscribe to the main CriterionCast RSS feed (or in iTunes) to get all of the shows here on the site. Subscribe directly to the Masters Of Cinema Cast RSS feed (or in iTunes) to just get this show Episode Credits:  Masters Of Cinema Cast (Twitter / Website / Instagram / Tumblr / Facebook) Joakim Thiesen (Twitter) Tom Jennings (Twitter / Website)