The softness of the Image Entertainment DVD released in 1998 tended to render many shots as little more than a mush of gray blurs. This deliberate vagueness, combined with the natural film grain, makes it difficult for digital technology to render the original qualities of the photographic image accurately. The chatelain (Maurice Schutz) visits Allan in the middle of the nightįor a digital rendition, an even larger problem lies in the visual style chosen by Dreyer and his cinematographer Rudolph Maté, which uses a lot of diffusion (actually gauze over the lens) to add a soft, luminous fog-like texture to much of the imagery. This took a decade of work, with the final task of removing dirt and scratches (more than a quarter-million individual fixes) performed by restorer Claus Greffel at the Danish Film Archive, working alone during the pandemic. That reconstruction focused on the German edition (which unfortunately had been slightly cut to satisfy the German censors) and forms the basis of the new digital restoration, just released on Blu-ray by Masters of Cinema. The effort to reconstruct as nearly complete a version as possible back in the ’90s involved multiple archives, each of which possessed battered copies of the various different-language editions – Dreyer had made his first sound film simultaneously in German, French and English – none of which was entirely intact. Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) poses particular problems for digital presentation, beyond the well-documented history of the production and the availability (or lack thereof) of film elements. Death haunts the small village of Courtempierre Vampyr (Carl Th. Rather, in recent experience, it’s actually two very old movies – one ninety years old, the other 103 – which have been meticulously restored with digital tools. For me this is never the latest big-budget spectacle digitally massaged to the nth degree (I found the widely praised Everything Everywhere All At Once far more irritating than engaging). (Who even thinks about how strange it is to record high-definition video with the phone in your pocket?) But occasionally something comes along which suddenly shocks you with its quality. We’ve become so accustomed to digital technology after more than two decades of continuous development and improvement that we tend to take it all for granted. The blood-drinking witch (Henriette Gérard) peers into hero Allan Gray (Nicholas de Gunzburg)’s coffin in Carl Th.
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