After The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer made the great 1932 Vampyr –The Strange Adventure of Allan Gray, recently released on DVD in a restored print by Eureka (and Criterion in the US). It is one of the greatest and strangest works in the history of cinema. This experimental sound film, still extending the visual language of silent cinema, is a serious vampire movie, independently made, recording the melancholy, disturbing, sometimes terrifying experiences – hallucinatory and close to incomprehensible – of the sensitive young hero Allan Gray (Julian West – pseudonym of Baron Nicholas De Gunzburg, the film's backer as well as its star) in the haunted French village of Courtempierre, which is dominated by a vampire in the form of a severe old woman called Marguerite Chopin. With its fluid, rapid, disconcerting camera movements, its play of light and shade, its mournful music (recalling a late Beethoven string quartet), its chilling, unforgettably intense images and subdued, wonderfully modulated performances, Vampyr is a surreal, poetic masterpiece, like a profound but inexplicable dream full of shadows and visions. And it suggests a way in which cinema can be, as it were, a matter of life and death.
At one point near the climax the injured Gray slumps on a bench; and while his exhausted body remains solidly in place, his transparent dream-self or ghostly projection rises and walks out of the frame, leaving him behind. It's a primitive cinematic effect in a way – a double exposure – a trick of the kind exploited by the cinema's first great trickster, Georges Méliès, who is said to have introduced the double exposure to movies in 1898. But the double exposure had been even then nothing new – by 1898 still photography had been going for over half a century.
The always stimulating American film historian Tom Gunning quotes Sir David Brewster, inventor of the stereoscope, jocularly noting that it was open to the photographer "to give a spectral appearance to one or more of his figures and to exhibit them as 'thin air' amid the solid realities of the stereoscopic picture". If a subject moves during a long exposure of a scene, that person will become less real than the scenery – will become a ghost – something exploited by Victorian proponents of spirit photography, who claimed to capture ectoplasms and haunting half-presences hovering around the living. The notion that photography captures something of a person's spirit is in fact by no means uniquely a property of non-Europeans unfamiliar with the camera. Gunning points out Honoré de Balzac in his 1847 novel Le cousin Pons, for instance, declaring that Daguerre's invention proves "that a man or a building is incessantly and continuously represented by a picture in the atmosphere, that all existing objects project into it a kind of spectre which can be captured and perceived."
The effect of transparency given by double exposure is not necessarily spooky. In Buster Keaton's brilliant 1924 silent comedy Sherlock Junior (which one guesses Dreyer had seen), the ingenious main action starts when the hero, a hapless film projectionist framed by a love-rival for the theft of a watch, falls asleep on his stool beside the projector. His transparent alter ego, rising from the stool to watch the film he's projecting, sees it magically turn into a drama about his beloved, his rival and the crime. The dream alter ego leaves the booth, walks up the aisle, climbs up into the screen and enters the action – where he becomes master-detective Sherlock Junior. Cue a succession of astonishingly brilliant sight-gags.
Transparency in Keaton marks the beginning of a fantasy, entirely explicable in terms of the dreamer's situation as we've seen it – and quite funny. In Vampyr, something altogether more uncanny happens. Having left his body, Gray's dream-self enters a building and finds a coffin. He draws back the sheet covering it and finds none other than himself, his body again, laid out for burial, eyes wide open. It's a chilling moment. But not more so than the scene which follows, where he sees the coffin lid being screwed down on him. He seems now to have become the self inside the coffin – at least, we now find ourselves looking up with him through the small square pane of glass set in the lid (like an emblem of the cinema screen). This nightmare of premature burial intensifies with the unforgettably terrifying image of the stony-faced old woman Marguerite Chopin – the vampire – leaning over to peer down at him through the glass with grim satisfaction. And then he is carried to the grave – all seen by us from the point of view of a dead man...
When the Russian writer Maxim Gorky saw the Lumières' first programme of their invention the Cinematograph in July 1896, he didn't seem altogether elated by the new medium, writing that "Last night, I was in the Kingdom of the Shadows." Seeing people move on film for the first time – but without colour, sound, or solidity – he seemed to himself to have witnessed a horror:
"If one could only convey the strangeness of this world. A world without colour and sound. Everything here – the earth, water and air, the trees, the people – everything is made of a monotone grey. Grey rays of sunlight in a grey sky, grey eyes in a grey face, leaves as grey as cinder. Not life, but the shadow of life. Not life's movement, but a sort of mute spectre... It is terrible to see, this movement of shadows, nothing but shadows, the spectres, these phantoms."
We tend to think of new technologies as dispelling old superstitions in a blaze of modernity – but human sensibilities and belief-systems tend to lag behind, producing what has been called the technological uncanny round the fringes of the bright hi-tech image (think of, say, Ring and its cursed videotape). When Gorky saw the people "captured" on the Lumières' film, he wrote, "you think of the legends in which some evil genius causes an entire town to be seized by a perpetual sleep and you think you have seen some Merlin work his sorcery in front of your eyes." Film produces here a half-life, a limbo, an illusion of life. Which is technically correct, of course. As Robert Donat wrote in his foreword to The Magic Box, a biography of film pioneer Claude Friese-Greene,
"The secret of moving pictures is that they don't move at all. The movies aren't movies; they are stills – stills and stills and stills ad infinitum. They stream on to the screen in infinitely rapid succession, each separated from the next by a tiny space of darkness as the shutter drops in place to hide what is in fact the only movement the film ever makes – a shifting from frame to frame off-screen. The pictures never move upon that screen. They only move in our mind's eye."
The half-life of film, in other words, freezes people – it doesn't truly preserve their life and movement. And as Gorky says, too, people on the film screen are only "shadows" cast by a strip of film passing in front of a lamp.
Another silent masterpiece of horror, FW Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, an unauthorised version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, again associates transparency with the uncanny and fantastic. Stoker's 1897 novel, set in the 1890s, is full of its own modernity (as Coppola's film adaptation realised, it dates from the era of cinema's invention). But all the original's paraphernalia – telegrams, Kodaks, typewriters, phonographs, bicycles, the Underground, electric lamps, the Aerated Bread Company – are stripped away by Murnau's decision to set Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens back in 1838 – the year before the invention of photography was formally announced. Even so, some of its inter-titles echo Gorky's creepy vision of the Cinematograph: "The images of life will fade into pale shadows"; "Ghostly dreams will feed on your blood"; "Beware that his shadow doth not burden your dreams with terrible fears". When the estate agent Knock tells Hutter to go to Transylvania, he calls it "the land of ghosts". It is as if at least part of its imaginative energy were involved in a meditation on the spectral, spellbinding possibilities of cinema itself.
The world Murnau's invasive Count – Orlok, played by the legendary Max Schrenk – threatens to bring about is the world of a perpetual half-life. Though seemingly a physical reality at first, Orlok's haunting figure is often presented amid or against shadows, and when he finally climbs the stairs to the heroine's bedroom is seen – horrifyingly – as a shadow. But it is made clear, so to speak, as the film goes on that he is essentially transparent, not fully here. Carrying his coffin into the house opposite the heroine's in Wisborg, for instance, he dissolves into transparency in order to pass through the wall. That this is an essential aspect of his vampirism seems to be the rationale for a bizarre scene where a professor shows his students, under the microscope – and we see it too – a real, sinister, see-through organism devouring another. It is "a polyp with tentacles – transparent, nearly weightless – no more than a phantom." And yet, although a ghost, it can devour another organism; scientific method reveals a sinister ancient threat; nature is full of mysteries.
One possible reason why these moments when early cinema uses double exposure often seem so striking, and so rich, is the subliminal rhyme, or reflexive correspondence, between the images and the medium on which they are carried – that of film, a membrane so thin and transparent it seems to have no substance. Double exposure, we might say, makes the transparency of celluloid visible within the only-apparent solidity of the film image, in a way which corresponds to an intuition or a doubt harboured by many people – even if only unconsciously – about the reality, the solidity, the reliability, of the world we experience. It's one way of expressing the nagging thought, hardly dispelled for us now by computers and the technology of the virtual, that we are surrounded by phantoms and unseen presences – by a kingdom of shadows.