The Passion of Carl Dreyer, a major retrospective of one of cinema's most influential directors, from 1st-29th April 2012 at the IFI.
Although the IFI has regular screenings of
classic films, usually when they are re-released in new or restored versions,
large retrospectives devoted to the work of one director are somewhat rarer.
Such programmes are difficult and sometimes expensive to mount, not least
because print sources and rights holders (often completely different entities)
are not always easy to locate. One has to have good reason to undertake such a
mission, especially if it involves importing prints from four different
countries, setting up your own electronic subtitling system, running 35mm
projectors at slower speeds than normal, translating inter-titles, and
arranging musical accompaniment for silent titles. Getting the Carl Dreyer
season on screen involved all these tasks, but I’m sure that seeing the work
will prove it worthwhile, perhaps even revelatory.
Dreyer’s reputation as one of the all-time
great directors largely rests on a few well-known titles, The Passion of Joan of Arc (his last silent picture), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943) and Ordet
(The Word, 1955). But his range
was much greater than even these extraordinary films suggest, and his
relatively short filmography (fourteen features) includes comedies and romantic
dramas as well as tragedies. He started out working in a highly commercial Danish
studio system whose rigid codes and working methods he often managed to
subvert. He went on to make films in Sweden, Germany and France before
returning to Denmark for the latter part of his career. From the beginning he sought
to establish a quality cinema that could stand comparison with the other arts.
His inspiration came from literature and the theatre, but his work was always
highly cinematic and drew from such masters of the silent screen as Victor Sjöström,
Mauritz Stiller, Sergei Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith.
Ordet, restored and re-released from April 13th-19th
The IFI retrospective is not complete and
excludes Dreyer’s first two features, The
President (1919) and Leaves from
Satan’s Book (1919), which are more than mere apprentice works but where
the influence of Griffith’s Intolerance (1916)
is so overwhelming that it drowns out the director’s characteristic subtlety.
Dreyer’s first major film is The Parson’s Widow (1920), a ribald yet tender tale set in 17th century rural Norway. Demolishing
the myth that Dreyer lacked a sense of humour, The Parson’s Widow is a charming comedy about a young theology
student who enters a competition to become a village pastor. He wins the post,
but then discovers that a local custom dictates that he must marry his
predecessor’s seventy-something widow. The film begins as a robust comedy,
complete with physical gags and a stunning use of landscape, but it gradually
morphs into a sensitive portrait of the things that unite and separate the
generations.
Dreyer’s next film, Love One Another (1920), suffers from some of the melodramatic
excesses and simplifications of his early work, but it’s still an impressively
mounted epic about the anti-Semitic pogroms in 1905 Russia. Not the least of
its achievements is Dreyer’s deft handling of the incredibly complicated plot
of Aage Madelung’s source novel. As usual, Dreyer put an enormous amount of
effort into getting every detail of period and setting right, but the
characterisations are too schematic and crude (“everyone is either very, very good
or very, very wicked, and is given an acting performance to match”, as critic
Tom Milne observed) to make for the kind of development and revelation of
character that is a hallmark of Dreyer’s best work.
Once Upon a Time
Long considered a lost film, Once upon a Time (1922) has now been
restored by the Danish Film Institute, with stills and titles being used to
fill in the gaps created by missing scenes. A work of exceptional visual
beauty, it’s a sort of variation on The
Taming of the Shrew, part folk-lore and part fairy-tale, about a bored
princess who rejects all her suitors until confronted by a prince who whisks
her off to a humble cottage in the forest. Dreyer said that, in retrospect, he
regretted concentrating on the whimsical-magical atmosphere at the expense of
characterisation, but this is still a lovely and wholly enchanting film.
Dreyer’s growing reputation led him to make
many films abroad, and one of the most exotic is Michael (1924), an expensive art movie produced by the mighty Ufa
studios in Germany. Based on a 1902 novel by Herman Bang, this period romance
is both elaborately theatrical and remarkably restrained. At its centre are an
aging artist (brilliantly played by Swedish director Benjamin Christensen of Häxan fame),
his handsome young protégé and a cash-strapped princess who’s really a femme fatale intent on robbing the old
man. Despite the large budget, elaborate décor and overpowering atmosphere of
German expressionism, Dreyer concentrates on the characters and their
interactions. Betrayed by his love object, who falls for the princess, the
artist becomes a hermit and loses the will to live. Significantly, though, he
manages to create one final magnificent painting before he dies, uttering the
words, “Now I can die in peace, for I have seen a great love.” A chamber piece
about a handful of characters in which all significant things remain unspoken, Michael is pure Dreyer and pure cinema, with
the camera concentrating on the characters’ glances, facial expressions and the
objects that surround them.
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The Bride of Glomdal
Before moving on to Master of the House (1925), which is arguably the finest of
Dreyer’s silent films, it’s worth saying a little about The Bride of Glomdal (1926) since this little gem is not well known
or highly rated by most critics. Like The
Parson’s Widow, it is firmly rooted in the landscapes and traditions of
Norway and tells a familiar story about thwarted young love. Tore, son of a
poor farmer, loves Berit, daughter of a rich one, but she is promised by her
father to another man whom she does not love and whom she refuses to marry.
Injured in a fall from her horse while running away, and cast out by her
father, Berit is cared for by Tore’s parents until reconciliation is effected
through the local parson. The marriage goes ahead, but not before Tore,
subjected to a revenge plot by his furious rival, has had to make a hazardous
crossing of the river on horseback and by swimming the rapids.
The
Bride of Glomdal may be a minor film—Dreyer himself described it
as “a little folk tale”—but Master of the
House is a deceptively simple masterpiece. In his book on Dreyer,(1) Tom
Milne provides a wonderful account of the film, from which the following is an extract.
Master of the House
“Master
of the House (sometimes also known as Thou
Shalt Honour Thy Wife, a direct translation of the somewhat forbiddingly
biblical title chosen by Dreyer; the original play was more appropriately
titled The Fall of a Tyrant) is my
own personal favourite among Dreyer’s films with the possible exceptions of Vampyr and Gertrud, and its golden simplicity almost defies description. Ida
Frandsen (played by the enchanting Astrid Holm), married some fifteen years, is
a perfect wife and mother, but her tetchy husband Victor (Johannes Meyer) finds
fault with everything she does. She bears it all patiently until her mother and
Victor’s old nanny, unable to stand it any longer, crossly persuade her to hit
back by leaving him, temporarily at least. Reluctantly she does so, only to
find her absence prolonged by a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, nanny takes
charge, deliberately undermining Victor’s creature comforts until he at last
realises, not only how hard Ida worked, but how much he loves her, and they are
reconciled. From this rather unpromising material, drawn from a play by Svend
Rindom who collaborated on the adaptation, Dreyer fashioned a richly detailed
film that is charming, funny and intensely moving in roughly equal proportions.
[. . .]
“Within its limits, Master of the House is perfection, with the raw materials of cinema
so rigidly pared down and controlled that the faces, gestures and movements
become the landscape of the film. As Dreyer himself put it: “What I look for in
my films, what I want to do, is to penetrate, by way of their most subtle
expressions, to the deepest thoughts of my actors. For it is these expressions
which reveal the personality of a character, his unconscious feelings, the
secrets hidden deep within his soul?” Clearly Dreyer had no further to go in
the area of human reality, but before he began to probe the secrets of the
soul, he paused for the joyful interlude of The
Bride of Glomdal, rightly considered as a minor event in his career, but
wrongly held by almost every critic who has written about Dreyer’s work to be
an inferior film.”
Peter
Walsh
IFI
The Passion of Carl Dreyer retrospective continues at the IFI from 1st-29th April 2012. for more information on films and bookings, please contact our Box Office on 01-679 3477 or visit the season's page [here].
Dreyer’s later films will be
covered in a forthcoming blog.
(1)The Cinema of Carl Dreyer by Tom Milne (Tantivy Press,
1971)
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