Chloé Kent - OUTSIDE READINGS #5 - Dreyer's Vampyr

In my Vampires class, we watched a film called Dreyer's Vampyr. This class analyzes film and vampirism in context to the society at that time. Vampyr is a 1932 French-German horror film, and the interesting thing is this film is part of the development of capturing voices in addition to a soundtrack.  While the film is a talkie, there was still minimal dialogue in the film. The lack of talking is pretty understandable, as this film was made in three different languages.  This kind of editing three languages is completely revolutionary at this time, so the less dialogue, the less time spent recording the different versions of the film. I also found it interesting that even though this is a 'talkie', they still used many placards with paragraphs that would establish the plotline. I wondered if this was not only because of the fact they recorded the film in three languages but also because art of film had yet to find a way to further the plot through dialogue and action rather than words. Writers would have been used to writing scenes that expanded the plot only through text and physical actions, so dialogue was probably still considered subordinate in scripts at this time. Despite the lack of dialogue, I found the film successful because when characters did speak, you knew their words were significant because of the amount of effort required to make those words possible in three different languages.