Cinema of Attraction and Vampyr (1932)

In the article “Now you see it, now you don’t” Gunning introduces the term cinema of attraction and explains it as “the curiosity-arousing device of the fairground, the term denoted early cinema’s fascination with novelty and its foregrounding of the act of display” (42). This is exactly what the film “Vampyr” (1932) by Carl Theodor Dreyer does. The film Vampyr relies heavily on display to suture the viewer into the story world and to advance the story. It addresses the viewer’s curiosity almost immediately. As viewers we are never left wondering is what the main character experienced is actually a supernatural encounter; there is always another character that steps in to confirm our suspicions. In Gunning’s words “The temporality of the attraction itself, then, is limited to the pure present tense of its appearance” (45). The viewers keep watching the film because we are curious to know what other supernatural display is going to make us and the characters feel uneasy.

Gunning also talks about Metz’s view on narrative cinema; he explains that narrative cinema is characterized by making the viewers interact with the story world as voyeurs. However, in Vampyr the viewers are not voyeurs and aren’t all know either; they discover things at the same time as the characters. Throughout the film they are as surprised as the main character. The fact that both the actors and the viewers experience the surprise and the terror afterwards at the same time creates complicity between them. The viewer feels a connection and an acknowledgement from the characters in the film.