When Maigret met Magritte.
I'm not, in seems, the first to compare Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour (The Night at the Crossroads) to Carl Dreyer's Vampyr. It's an odd congruence—Renoir's film is a policier based on one of Georges Simenon's popular Maigret novels, and Dreyer's is a supernatural thriller based on a vampire yarn by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu—which perhaps needs a little unpacking.
The first sense of a resemblance starts early, in the odd way in which the movie moves. This was the thirties, another country far more distant than France, and they do things differently there. The rhythms are different, the camera placement is eccentric, the movement of the camera has a cumbersome quality. While Dreyer's camera has a somnambular drift of its own, Renoir's does move with a greater sense of narrative emphasis...but what he chooses...
I'm not, in seems, the first to compare Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour (The Night at the Crossroads) to Carl Dreyer's Vampyr. It's an odd congruence—Renoir's film is a policier based on one of Georges Simenon's popular Maigret novels, and Dreyer's is a supernatural thriller based on a vampire yarn by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu—which perhaps needs a little unpacking.
The first sense of a resemblance starts early, in the odd way in which the movie moves. This was the thirties, another country far more distant than France, and they do things differently there. The rhythms are different, the camera placement is eccentric, the movement of the camera has a cumbersome quality. While Dreyer's camera has a somnambular drift of its own, Renoir's does move with a greater sense of narrative emphasis...but what he chooses...
- 6/3/2010
- MUBI
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