Master of the House / Du skal ære din hustru (1925)

Denmark

Director Carl Theodor Dreyer

Screenplay Carl Theodor Dreyer, based on Svend Rindom’s play Tyrannens fald (1919)

Production Company Palladium Film

Photography George Schnéevoigt

Art Direction/Set Decoration/Editing Carl Theodor Dreyer

With Johannes Meyer (Viktor Frandsen), Astrid Holm (Ida, his wife), Karin Nellemose (Karen, his daughter), Mathilde Nielsen (Nanny Mads), Clara Schønfeld (Mrs Kryger, Ida’s mother), Johannes Nielsen (Doctor), Petrine Sonne (washerwoman), Aage Hoffman (Dreng, Victor’s son), Byril Harvig (Barnet, Victor’s son).

Runtime 92 mins. Silent with English subtitles, black and white

DVD: UK, 2006 Distributed by British Film Institute (region 2) Aspect Ratio 1.33:1. cert U

Extras My Metier (Torben Skjdt Jensen, 1995, 94 mins) – documentary on Dreyer's life and work. Good Mothers (Dreyer, 1942, 12 mins), They Caught the Ferry (Dreyer, 1948, 11 mins). Illustrated booklet including an essay by Casper Tybjerg (University of Copenhagen) and extracts from essays by Tom Milne and James Leahy.

Day of Wrath / Vredens dag (1943)

Denmark

Director Carl Theodor Dreyer

Screenplay Carl Theodor Dreyer, Poul Knudsen, Mogens Skot-Hansen, based on the play Anne Pedersdotter (1908) by Hans Wiers-Jenssens

Producers Carl Theodor Dreyer, Tage Nielsen

Photography Carl Andersson

Production company Palladium Film

Music Paul Schierbeck

Editor Anne Marie Petersen, Edith Schlüssel

Art Direction Erik Aaes

Sound Erik Rasmussen

Costume Design Karl Sandt Jensen, Olga Thomsen

With Thorkild Roose (Absalon Pederssøn), Lisbeth Movin (Anne), Sigrid Neiiendam (Merete), Preben Lerdorff Rye (Martin), Anna Svierkier (Herlofs Marte), Albert Høeberg (The Bishop), Olaf Ussing (Laurentius), Preben Neergaard (Degn)

Runtime 95 mins. Danish language with English subtitles, black and white

DVD: UK, 2006 Distributed by British Film Institute (region 2) Aspect Ratio 1.33:1. cert PG

Extras Feature commentary by Casper Tybjerg (University of Copenhagen), The Fight Against Cancer/Kampen mod kraeften (Dreyer, 1947, 15 mins), A Castle Within a Castle/Slot I et slot (Dreyer/Jorgen Roos, 1955, 8 mins). Illustrated booklet including essays by Casper Tybjerg and Philip Kemp.

Ordet (1955)

Denmark

Director Carl Theodor Dreyer

Screenplay Carl Theodor Dreyer based on the play by Kaj Munk (1932)

Producers Carl Theodor Dreyer, Erik Nielsen, Tage Nielsen

Production Company Palladium Film

Photography Henning Bendtsen, John Karlsen, Erik Wittrup Willumsen

Production Design Erik Aaes

Editor Edith Schlüssel, Carl Theodor Dreyer

Music Paul Schierbeck

With Henrik Malberg (Morten Borgen), Emil Hass Christensen (Mikkel), Preben Lerdorff Rye (Johannes), Cay Kristiansen (Anders), Birgitte Federspiel (Inger), Ann Elisabeth Rud (Maren), Susanne Rud (Lilleinger), Ejner Federspiel, (Peter Skraedder), Gerda Nielsen (Anne Skraedder), Sylvia Eckhausen (Kirstin Skraedder), Ove Rud (Pastor), Henry Skjær (The Doctor), Edith Trane (Mette Maren), Hanne Agesen (Karen, a servant)

Runtime 119 mins. Danish language with English subtitles. black and white

DVD: UK, 2006 Distributed by British Film Institute (region 2) Aspect Ratio 1.33:1. cert 12

Extras Ordet Og Lyset (Helga Theilgaard, 2001, 33 mins) – documentary about cinematographer Henning Bendtsen and the making of Ordet. Thorvaldsen (Dreyer, 1949, 10 mins). Storstrom Bridge (Dreyer, 1950, 7 mins). Illustrated booklet including essays by Casper Tybjerg (University of Copenhagen) and Philip Horne (University College London).

Gertrud (1964)

Denmark

Director Carl Theodor Dreyer

Screenplay Carl Theodor Dreyer based on the play by Hjalmar Söderberg (1906)

Producer Jørgen Nielsen

Production Company Palladium Film

Photography Henning Bendtsen

Art Direction Kai Rasch

Editor Edith Schlüssel

Music Jørgen Jersild

Costume Design M.G. Rasmussen

Sound Knud Kristensen

With Nina Pens Rode (Gertrud Kanning), Bendt Rothe (Gustav Kanning), Ebbe Rode (Gabriel Lidman), Baard Owe (Erland Jansson), Axel Strøbye (Axel Nygen), Vera Gebuhr (the Kannings' Maid), Anna Malberg (Kanning's mother), Edouard Mielche (The Rector Magnificus)

Runtime 112 mins. Danish language with English subtitles, black and white

DVD: UK, 2006: Distributed by British Film Institute, (region 2) Aspect Ratio 1.66:1. cert 12

Extras Carl Th. Dreyer und Gertrud (Christiane Habich/Reinhard Wulf, 1994, 29 mins), documentary on the making of Gertrud, The Village Church/Landsbykirken (Dreyer, 1947, 14 mins). Illustrated booklet with essays by Casper Tybjerg (University of Copenhagen) and Ilona Halberstadt (editor of PIX).

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The films of Carl Theodor Dreyer are ideal for the DVD medium. Though intensely cinematic, they do not suit impatient audiences geared to the faster pace of mainstream cinema. Viewed on DVD their slowly revealed marvels can be savoured more fully; their difference from other films something to rejoice at rather than be annoyed by.

Criterion brought out a box set of Day of Wrath, Ordet, Gertrud and the long documentary My Metier in 2001, but for Europeans without multi-region players the BFI’s collection will be more accessible. No-one can match Criterion for pristine quality, but the BFI come pretty close and the extras – which include My Metier, a good selection of Dreyer’s shorts and documentaries, and a persuasive and articulate commentary by Casper Tybjerg for Day of Wrath – are more generous. There is also some advantage in the films being sold separately rather than as a box set, though the illustrated booklets, each filled out with the same biographical sketch by Mark Nash and Casper Tybjerg’s essay ‘Film Art as Passion’, are disappointingly repetitive. No doubt tight budgets are to blame; but in the days before it became obsessed with logos and mission statements the BFI might have attracted critics of the quality of David Bordwell or Paul Schrader, both of whom have written perceptively about Dreyer, to share their insights.

Of the four films, the least known is Master of the House (1925), a silent comedy about a petty tyrant who is made to appreciate his wife by his indomitable old nanny. The BFI make up an attractive package by adding the 90-minute documentary My Metier and the brilliant and macabre short They Caught the Ferry; the booklet is the best of the set, with long extracts from essays by Tom Milne (from Sight and Sound in 1965) and James Leahy (from Senses of Cinema in 2003) reminding us that interest in Dreyer extends over a considerable period and goes beyond his best known feature films. In striking contrast to the anguish of La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, made three years later, Master of the House shows Dreyer comfortably at home with comedy-tinged domestic drama. His adherence to realism – according to Milne he insisted that the set be built like a real apartment with gas, water and electricity laid on – gives the film the solidity of a social document. The cumbersome chores Ida and the children carry out to ensure Viktor’s ease and comfort make us realise how much grinding hard work was necessary to maintain a home in the age before labour-saving devices. The reversal that occurs when Ida is removed from the scene (by her mother and Viktor’s old nanny, determined to teach him a lesson) is funny, but it is increasingly imbued with pathos. Without the cosseting of his wife, Viktor is exposed to unpleasant reality and Dreyer allows him some sympathy in his consternation and despair. He is not a bad man – his tyranny stems from irritable self-preoccupation over his failing business rather than maliciousness or sadism – and his wife still loves him. Reconciliation will not change their worrying financial situation but Viktor (unlike the men in Dreyer’s last film Gertrud) deserves a second chance to hold a woman’s love.

Dreyer, like Hitchcock, learnt to tell stories through pictures not through words. Dialogue is important in Day of Wrath (1943), particularly in the relationship between Anne and her aged husband Absalom, but it is the visual imagery – of the hunting, torture and execution of Herlofs Marte, of Anne’s transformation from docile innocent to sensual woman to vengeful fury – that makes the film a riveting experience. Made when Denmark was under Nazi occupation, Day of Wrath is full of darkness, cruelty and death. The torture and forced confession of Herlofs Marte find an echo two years later in the Gestapo headquarters sequence of Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. But Casper Tybjerg’s commentary expresses scepticism over whether Dreyer intended to make an anti-Nazi film and points out that German film critics were more enthusiastic about the film than their Danish counterparts. In their own eyes the Nazis were enemies of narrow-minded orthodoxy, not cruel oppressors, so they would have been slow to make the analogy between themselves and the witch-hunting clergy; and Lisbeth Movin’s Anne, an archetypal Nordic beauty who discards her desiccated husband in favour of his more virile son, is much more in tune with Nazi than with Christian morality.

Much of the film is viewed through Anne’s eyes and we are unlikely to share her stoutly unpleasant mother-in-law’s view that she is evil. But Anne is never merely the passive victim of a repressive society. When she learns that her mother had the power of invocation – to summon the dead back to life and send the living to their graves – she is fascinated and determined to see if she too has that power. Even when she is docile and modest, her aura of sensuality and big luminous eyes (child-like, pure, clear to her too-trusting husband, deep and mysterious to her lover, devilishly malevolent to her mother-in-law) distinguish her as a femme fatale, as irresistibly alluring as those of contemporary American film noirs. But when Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944), Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past (1947) and Elsa Bannister in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) go to their deaths we are made to feel they deserve it; Dreyer, who never indulges in misogyny, holds us close to Anne and makes the idea of her death painful and tragic.

 

If Day of Wrath is a dark tragedy, Ordet, which Dreyer made in the mid 1950s (though there is an earlier Swedish version by Gustaf Molander made in 1943) is its mirror image. The final sequence of both films centres on a body in a coffin around which dramatic revelations are made and there are other pleasing symmetries: Preben Lerdorff Rye, who played Anne’s guilt-ridden lover in Day of Wrath, reappears as Johannes; Birgitte Federspiel’s Inger is a homely, domesticated version of Lisbeth Movin’s Anne. Stylistically though, the two films are very different. Camera movement in Day of Wrath tends to be sinister, threatening; in Ordet, where it is a dominant feature (there are only 114 shots compared to Day of Wrath’s 436), it reflects the steady, even pace of rural life.

Not that the world of Ordet is an untroubled one. The conflict between the robust Christianity of the Borgens and the doom-ridden evangelism of Peter the Tailor threatens the romance of young lovers Anne and Anders; tragedy stalks the happily married couple Mikkel and Inger; and Johannes, the second son, is a constantly unsettling presence. He believes he is the risen Christ, a madness Mikkel blames on Kierkegaard (whose Fear and Trembling, a dissertation on Abraham’s unwavering faith in God, was written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio). Like Anne’s mother, he claims the power of invocation, though the only person who takes this seriously is his young niece Maren. She accepts Johannes both as her kindly uncle who will tuck her up in bed at night and the Son of God who can raise the dead. In Day of Wrath, Anne’s flirtation with the supernatural and Martin’s fear that she is in league with the devil lead to the tragic denouement. In Ordet, Maren’s unshakable faith in Johannes’ prophesies dispels tragedy, enabling him to work the miracle that brings the film to its marvellous life-affirming conclusion.

Gertrud, which is based on a 1906 play about a talented, intelligent woman who rejects married respectability for an ideal of love she never finds, was dismissed by many critics as stagy and old-fashioned when it was released in1965. Now that film-makers as diverse as Lars von Trier, Carlos Reygadas and Michael Haneke employ long takes where the action unfolds painfully slowly, it now looks alarmingly modern. Such a strange film cries out for an intelligent critical commentary. Neither Criterion nor the BFI oblige, though the BFI does give us Christiane Habich and Reinhard Wulf’s Carl Th. Dreyer und Gertrud, a documentary in which cinematographer Henning Bendtsen and several of the actors puzzle over what Dreyer was trying to do.

The haughty, unsympathetic upper class characters, the lack of action, the stilted dialogue delivered by actors who hardly seem to look at each other still present problems. The key, perhaps, lies in the scene immediately before Gertrud gives herself sexually to the young composer Erland Jansson. He is puzzled by her passion for him and asks ‘Who are you?’ This sets her off on a strange rapturous litany: ‘I am many things: the morning dew, dripping from the leaves of the tree; white clouds sailing where no-one knows…. I am the moon, I am the sky….. I am a mouth. A mouth seeking another’s mouth….It is a dream. Life is a dream….Life is a long, long chain of dreams drifting into one another.’ Such poetic mysticism is not typical of the film’s dialogue, which deals with deep emotional issues formally and with unsentimental honesty. But that formality, like the rapture, creates a dreamlike distance that is enhanced by the stylised settings and the carefully choreographed camera movements.

Once one accepts the film’s dreamy, trancelike quality then it begins to work its quiet magic. Jacques Rivette, along with Godard one of the film’s fiercest defenders, notes ‘the regular tide of the long takes, the mesmeric passes of the incessant camera movements, the even monotone of the voices, the steadiness of the eyes – always turned aside, often parallel, towards us – the strained immobility of the bodies, huddled in armchairs, on sofas behind which the other silently stands, fixed in ritual attitudes which make them no more than corridors for speech to pass through, gliding through a semi-obscurity arbitrarily punctuated with luminous zones into which the somnambulists emerge of their own accord…’ (Quoted by Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Gertrud: The Desire for the Image’, Sight and Sound, Winter 1985/6). Even the banquet held in honour of Gertrud’s former lover Gabriel Lidman – the only sequence that is not a conversation or a soliloquy – has a nightmarish quality: the torch-lit procession, the ritualistic chanting, the verbose, meaningless speeches. Gertrud feigns illness during her husband’s eulogy and is led off into a room where a huge picture depicts a naked woman surrounded by hounds, just as in a dream she had recounted to Erland. Later, as Gabriel lights the candles flanking a mirror, Gertrud appears in it as if she is a spirit he has conjured up.

Hjalmar Söderberg’s play followed in the footsteps of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House in showing a woman determined to break out of rigid bourgeois restraints. Dreyer superimposes his own concerns about the emotional costs involved in the struggle to live according to one’s ideals. He is a film-maker who makes his own rules and they are different for each of his films, particularly for his five widely spaced sound films (the others are Vampyr, 1932, and the disowned Two People, 1945). Gertrud will not please all viewers, but Dreyer is a true artist, and each of his films offers a vision that can change one’s ideas not only about cinema but about life.

Hopefully the BFI’s DVD operation will survive the latest round of cuts afflicting this troubled organisation. With the release of films like these and the spread of other interesting films released in 2007, it provides a vital service. At £19.95 they are by no means cheap, but the careful buyer will generally be able to take advantage of discounted prices. Don’t be put off by Dryer’s reputation for austerity: these films are a joy to watch.

Contributor details
Robert Murphy is Professor in Film Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.