Vampyr by Carl Theodor Dreyer was made in 1931/1932 in three original versions in the German, French, and English language. The original negatives for picture and sound are lost. However, incomplete prints of the German and the French version exist and could serve as a basis for the restoration. The new German version was produced in 1998 at the initiative of ZDF/ARTE as a project of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek and Cineteca del Comune di Bologna.

Vampyr was shot by Dreyer  as a silent movie, to be later post-synchronized in order to produce 3 versions: French, German and English. The work of post-synchronisation was done by using the same picture negative for all versions, except a few shots where the actors acted in the different languages to ensure a good lip-sync. To make the post-production even more complicate, German censorship imposed a cut of approximately 55 meters, thus forcing Dreyer to partly re-edit and re-synchronise.
All existing prints are somewhat incomplete and damaged (in both sound and image); worse, many of them are subtitled in different languages.
The project of restoration (meant to restore both the German version – which will be shown now – and the French one) was based on all existing original nitrate prints in order to restore the film to its original qualities of images and sound. In particular, the sound was object of a complex work of editing and digital restoration to bring back its original qualities (and limitations!), inevitably lost in any known version of the film.
The censored shots were found in the French version, and they will be shown at the end of the film.
Concerning the completeness of the present (German) version, we can say that approximately 200 meters are missing if compared to the length on the censorship cards. But considering the completeness of the sound, and the fact that all prints are basicly identitical, we cannot be absolutely positive about the fact that these missing meters have ever been included in any distributed version, nor we can indicate where the missing parts were meant to be in the film.

“It is like this, as the image of a body more elusive than movement itself, only producing an illusion of velocity because it can only be perceived at an extreme speed, that Dreyer’s vampire dies right before our eyes. He gets trapped in the movement of the gears of the machine in a rain of white powder (in the body of a cockroach sifting with the powder of an hourglass through the funnel) and in the profile of a squirrel that desperately runs into a cage: dying between the gears of the machine, like the hands fallen from the face of the watch. He dies because all of a sudden time decides to slow down. […] The limited movement that crushes the vampire and, like running the machine backwards, reduces eternity to dust. The action of such a powder and its musical accompaniment immortalizes all of the children lost in the trees – the movement or the limited effort that must establish a counterclockwise evolution of time is represented by the immobility of the clock’s apparatus to our eyes. Of the least important causes is the action that sets it in motion and pushes the incessant mechanisms one against another. It is the scale of movement represented by the very small wheel, an infantile mechanical gear and the only room for which we unknowingly have the key, before it provokes the giant’s footsteps that trample all over the white, before it opens time’s orifice: this uniquely white flux. Liszt’s white hair is superimposed: one of the vampires found a girl, a runaway, sitting on a stone park bench at night. For a moment he is behind her, then she faints on the bench and he goes away bouncing like an animal. He withdraws himself jumping like a kangaroo with old Liszt’s powdered wig. […] It is not however the death, nor the end of his suspension, but the incredible disappearance of a human body from within the image. (J.L. Schefer, L’homme ordinaire du cinéma, Cahiers du Cinéma-Gallimard, 1980)