“Gertrud” - Carl Dreyer (1964)

Carl Th. Dreyer’s last film, Gertrud (1964), is a difficult-to-classify work that has drawn a wide range of critical responses.  Made when the director was seventy-five years old, the work was initially widely criticized for its slow-moving, almost static, tempo and technique when it was released, and it proved to be a commercial disaster [1].  Later on, though, the film began to attract a devoted following [2,3], and in fact some noted reviewers, such as David Bordwell, who had early on panned the film, later reversed themselves [4]. By 2012 the British Film Institute’s two published rankings of all-time greatest films, as voted on by wide-ranging lists of international  film critics and film directors, had Gertrud ranked 43rd and 59th, respectively [5,6].  Even so, there has never been a consensus about the film, both in terms of its aesthetic value and its intended message.

The film’s story is based on a 1906 stage play of the same name by Swedish playwright Hjalmar Söderberg about an upper-class woman who seeks her own romantic fulfillment.  Although Dreyer made some changes to Söderberg’s work and relocated the setting to Denmark, the story still maintains the same cultural milieu of that period and so has drawn some comparisons to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). 

So some critics have judged Gertrud to have a fundamentally feminist theme and see the lead character, Gertrud, as being a forerunner feminist heroine [7].  Others found Gertrud to be so maniacally self-centered that they considered her to be a sadistic witch [8].  Still others have found the static staging of the story to be so absurd that the whole thing should be looked on as a comedy [9].  Following a different tangent, Jonathon Rosenbaum felt that the film reflected the lifelong traumas and concerns of Dreyer, himself [10,11]. 

From my own perspective Gertrud is less about women’s place in society and instead more about an even more fundamental issue – love and the various ways people may approach it.  In this connection it is interesting to consider Rosenbaum’s incorporation of thoughts about early 20th-century psychoanalysis [11] (which is explicitly referenced in the film as a contemporary revolutionary intellectual movement), and I will discuss them further below.

The story of Gertrud concerns, almost exclusively, five principal characters, all of whom are accomplished figures from upscale Danish society – Gertrud and the four men with whom she has personal relationships:

• Gertrud (played by Nina Pens Rode) is an attractive former opera singer who is married  to Gustav Kanning.
   
• Gabriel Lidman (played by Ebbe Rode, who was the real-life husband of Nina Pens Rode) is a prominent Danish poet who has returned to Denmark from abroad in order to receive an award for his poetry on the event of his fiftieth birthday.  He was Gertrud’s lover prior to her marriage to Gustav Kanning.
   
• Gustav Kanning (Bendt Rothe) is a successful lawyer who is about to be appointed to a cabinet position in the Danish government.
   
• Erland Jansson (Baard Owe) is a brilliant young pianist and composer who is currently having an affair with Gertrud.
   
• Axel Nygren (Axel Strøbye) is a prominent physician and intellectual who now resides in Paris but who has returned to Copenhagen for the occasion of Gabriel Lidman’s award ceremony.

The story is told not in a realistic dramatic fashion (nor is it an example of either theatrical German kammerspiel or German Expressionism, which has sometimes been suggested), but is instead a presentation of lengthy artificial conversations that are delivered in rhetorical fashion. Many of these are presented in long shots lasting five or more minutes.  Often Gertrud’s face is artificially highlighted, while her male counterpart’s face is shrouded in shadows.  The two interlocutors in the conversation often do not face each other, but instead seem to be rhetorically looking away and speaking to themselves – as if they are self-exploring their own thoughts on the topic.  

This introverted and reflective style of presentation is what drives many viewers mad.  The first time I saw the film, the audience openly jeered the film during the presentation – just like when the film was first shown in Paris.  On the other hand, this very style of presentation has its fascinating side, too, and this is sometimes sensed only after repeated viewings (as was the case for me). 

The narrative of Gertrud can be broken down into seven parts, most of which consist of extended conversations between Gertrud and one of the four men.

1.  Gustav and Gertrud

Gustav and Gertrud have a lengthy conversation at home about their troubled relationship.  Gustav first tells her that they are to attend a banquet the next night celebrating the poet Gabriel Lidman, where Gustav is to give a speech.  But there are other things on Gustav’s mind.  After having his attempted kiss spurned, he complains to her that the door to her room has been locked to him for more than a month. Then their conversation is interrupted by a visit from Gustav’s mother. After the mother departs, Gertrud informs Gustav that she is leaving him and is in love with another man.  She says she rejects Gustav for his lukewarm attitude toward love, his prioritized preference of his professional life, and his relegation of his wife to a minor domestic roll.  She tells him,

“I must come before everything.  I don’t want to be an occasional plaything.”

She then tells him that she is going out alone to the opera that evening.

2.  Gertrud and Erland

Gertrud meets Erland by a pond in the park, and they vow their mutual affection for each other.  She tells Erland that she is free now.  At her request they then go to his flat, where she poetically tells him that “life is a long, long chain of dreams”.  They then retire to the bedroom to make love for the first time.

Meanwhile Gustav, missing Gertrud, goes to see her at the opera and learns that she never went there to attend it.

Back with Gertrud and Erland after their lovemaking, Gertrud asks him not to go to a party at the dwelling of a courtesan named Constance that he had said he had been invited to that evening by some of his male friends.

3.  The Banquet for Gabriel Lidman

At the celebratory banquet for Gabriel Lidman, Gabriel is touted as the “great poet of love”.  But in his acceptance speech, Gabriel says there are actually two important things in the world: love and thought. Then Gustav gives his own speech honoring Gabriel, during which Gertrud becomes ill and must retire to a side chamber.  There she is attended to by Professor Axel Nygren, and they renew their old friendship.  After Axel leaves, Gustav enters the room and tells Gertrud that he knows she wasn’t at the opera the previous night (we know she was with Erland).  Then Gustav is summoned out of the room to speak to the Vice Chancellor hosting his event, and Gabriel comes in to the room to speak to her.

4.  Gabriel and Gertrud
Much of this scene is embodied in a single ten-minute shot of Gabriel and Gertrud speaking alone to each other.  Gabriel says he is still madly in love with Gertrud and has never gotten over Gertrud having broken off their relationship years earlier. He also agonizingly tells her that he attended a party the previous evening at the home of a woman named Constance, where he heard Erland Jansson crudely boasting about his latest romantic conquest, Gertrud.  Gertrud is unmoved by Gabriel’s suffering and coldly tells him that she still loves Erland anyway.  At this, Gabriel cries and departs the room.

Now Gustav and Erland enter the room and inform Gertrud that she has been asked to sing an aria for the Vice Chancellor.  She agrees, but in the midst of her performance, she faints to the floor and appears to pass out.

5.  Gertrud and Erland again

Gertrud again meets Erland by the pond in the park and pleads with him ( in a five-minute shot) to run away with her.  Evidently despite Erland’s crude boasting about his conquest of her, she is still madly in love with him.  Erland wants to continue their affair but not commit himself to a total union.  He finally confesses that he can’t run away with Gertrud because he has made another woman pregnant and is committed to that woman.  Gertrud glumly realizes that her affair with Erland is over and tells him that.  Before departing, Erland scoffingly tells Gertrud that she is too proud to have a real love relationship.

6.  Gertrud and Gabriel again

At the Kanning home, Gabriel is visiting and speaking with Gustav.  But Gustav is called out of the room, and again Gabriel and Gertrud have a chance to speak alone together.  Gabriel desperately asks her to run away with him, but again Gertrud demurs.  She quotes a line from one of his poems that was apparently his creed:

“I believe in the pleasure of the flesh and the irreparable loneliness of the soul.”

And she confesses that her marriage to Gustav was merely an entry into the pleasures of the flesh after the failure of her love affair with Gabriel.  Then she relates to Gabriel, by means of an extended flashback, the story of how she came to give up on her love for him.  In the flashback, which is presented in overexposed lighting to highlight its imagined recollection, Gertrud comes to Gabriel’s flat while he is away and lovingly begins tidying up.  This tidying scene lasts 2:20 and slowly embeds the viewer into Gertrud’s loving mood.  Still in the flashback, she notices a scrap of paper on his desk on which he had written,

“a woman’s love and a man’s work are mortal enemies.” 

This made her realize that Gabriel could never devote himself totally to love, and it was the moment for her when their relationship was finished.  After telling Gabriel about this past moment, he still begs her to run away with him, but she tells him that they cannot now resurrect something that is dead.   She goes out to the kitchen and phones Professor Nygren to tell him she will be coming to Paris to join his group at the Sorbonne to study the new field of psychoanalysis. 

Gustav now returns to the room and reports that he has accepted the governmental cabinet position.  However, Gertrud reminds him in front of Gabriel that their marriage is finished and his appointment is meaningless to her.  After Gabriel sadly departs, Gustav begs Gertrud to remain with him and that he will even tolerate her having an extra-marital affair.  However, after Gertrud tells Gustav that she never really loved him, he orders her to get out.

7.  30-40 years later
In a coda that Dreyer appended to Söderberg’s original play, Gertrud is seen some 30-40 years later living alone.  She is visited on her birthday by Axel Nygren, and they exchange cordial greetings, with Axel giving her a copy of his latest academic book.  He courteously chides her for not answering all his letters, and asks with a smile, “so do you still care about me a little?”  She assures him that she does, and they reminisce about their longtime friendship since those days in Paris – “a friendship that never turned to love”, Axel remarks, pointedly. Most critics consider their relationship to have been passionless, but Axel’s remarks suggest to me that he may have wished it to be otherwise.

Gertrud, though, is now thinking of her final days.  Not wanting to have her private things examined by other people after her death, she returns to Axel all the letters he had sent to her, which he promptly burns in the fireplace.  He asks her if she has ever thought of writing poetry, and she proceeds to recite her only poem, which she had written at the age of sixteen:

                Just look at me.
                Am I beautiful?
                No, but I have loved.

                Just look at me.
                Am I young?
                No, but I have loved.

                Just look at me.
                Do I live?
                No, but I have loved.

And she tells him that she has made arrangements for her tombstone epitaph to read only “Amor  Omnia” (which means “love is all”). 

Then Axel politely makes his departure.  She watches him go and then disappears behind her closing door as the film ends.

My reaction to Gertrud the first time I saw the film, like that of a number of critics, was that the main character was too demanding and obsessed with her own emotional needs.  Her overreaching demands cut herself off from full engagement with life, which we know is inevitably a compromise for everyone.   But after watching the film again, I can feel more sympathy and appreciation for Gertrud, perhaps because I have known some people quite like her and who were devoted to love.  And the male characters around Gertrud are not so artificial as they first might appear.  All four are realistic and recognizable types.

• Gustav Kanning did place his career interests ahead of his domestic concerns, but he did also seem to love Gertrud, too.  In the end, he is even willing to accept a humiliating arrangement as a cuckold just so he can continue to be part of her life.
   
• Gabriel Lidman loves Gertrud passionately, and his fault was not placing his career ahead of Gertrud, but merely placing it on an equal footing with his relationship with her.  Gertrud,  however, demanded total submission to love.  In the end, he, too, seems to be willing to give in to her demands, but she has lost her feelings for him.
   
• Erland Jansson loves Gertrud, but there are limits.  He is already committed to another woman he has made pregnant.  He is a rational modernist trying to balance things in the world.  When Gertrud asks him if he believes in God, he answers, perhaps echoing Dreyer's own view, “I don’t know; there must be a higher spirit, somewhere, otherwise so many things are inexplicable.”
   
• Axel Nygren is cautious and polite, but it seems to me he wished to have a romantic relationship with Gertrud, too. His deferential demeanor masked a hidden ardor that never came to flower.

And what about Gertrud, herself?  How does she contrast with these four types of amorous comportment?  Jonathon Rosenbaum, seeing an influence on Dreyer from early 20th-century psychoanalysis studies, has cast the difference between Gertrud and her men as representative of a fundamental gender difference – a difference between narrative and image [11].  Men, according to this view, are driven by narratives, while women are captured by image.  This is an interesting suggestion, but I consider it to be overly Procrustean. 

I would say that Gertrud is not like Goethe’s Faust or Sartre’s Anny (in Nausea), perpetually waiting for that perfect moment and hoping to fixate on it.  Gertrud is just as dedicated to the dynamics of narrative as the men were and not just focused on the static image.  Moreover, Gertrud is not a hedonist like Kierkegaard’s “A” expositor in Either/Or, merely seeking an endless “rotation” of momentary hedonistic pleasures.  No, she is someone seeking the truly immersive romantic narrative.  This is evidenced in her two recollections shown in overexposed flashback, where she is shown fully engaged in her loving mode of being.  Like all narratives, these are dynamic, not static. 

What distinguishes Gertrud from her men is that her narratives are more open-ended and intensely guided by her passion for “the other”, her loved one (“life is a long, long chain of dreams”, she said).  In fact she is so focused on her romantic narrative that she shows no compassion when she is out of love for someone, even when that person is still in love with her.  This is her failing.  Her intense willingness to give all of herself to her beloved is accompanied by a narcissistic demand to receive the same from her beloved.  Love needs to be immersed in the give-and-take of life in order to be able to offer its gifts and to realize its potential.  Gertrud was unwilling to do that.

And yet I can understand Gertrud’s feelings and have known loving people like her.  In fact to some degree I see a little bit of myself in all the characters in this story – the four men and Gertrud, too.  Perhaps some of you will feel the same way, as well.
★★★½

Notes:

1. “Screen: A Dreyer Film: New Yorker Presents Danc's 'Gertrud'”, The New York Times, (3 June 1966).   
2. Martin Bradley, “Gertrud (1964): Danish master filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's final film”, A Potpourri of Vestiges, (April 2013).   
3. Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), "Carl Theodor Dreyer GERTRUD (1964, 119 min)", Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (XIX:9), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, (27 October 2009).
4. David Bordwell, “Dreyer Re-reconsidered”, David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, (14 June  2010).  
5. “Critics’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).
6. “Directors’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012). 
7. Emilia van Hauen, “… But Am I Loved?”, Carl Th. Dreyer, (23 May 2010).   
8. Dennis Delrogh, “Can Witches Suffer Too?”, The Village Voice(16 December 1974).   
9. Phillip Lopate, “Gertrud”, The Criterion Collection, (20 August 2001).  
10. Jonathon Rosenbaum, “Watch with Mother”, The Guardian, (30 May 2003).  
11. Jonathon Rosbenbaum, “Gertrud as Nonnarrative: The Desire for the Image”, Jonathon Rosenbaum, (7 January 1986).        

“Day of Wrath” - Carl Dreyer (1943)

Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968), though esteemed by critics as one of the great filmmakers, is someone whose works are relatively unknown to modern audiences [1,2]. Over the last thirty-six years of his career, he directed only six films – notably The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (1955), and Gertrud (1964) – and they are all singular creations that defy easy categorization. Nevertheless, each has the common feature of being imbued with Dreyer’s uniquely expressive human focus that seems to point to some transcendent reality beyond everyday circumstances [3]. One might say his films are “spiritual”, but Dreyer’s films go beyond the usual religious connotations of that term (Dreyer, himself, was not particularly religious) and seem to probe the very nature of existence itself.  All of the five above-listed films are engaging in this manner, but there is one work that stands out as not only being Dreyer’s best film, but also one of the greatest films ever made – Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag).

The story of the film is based on the Norwegian play Anne Pedersdotter (1908) by Hans Wiers-Jensse, which was set in the late 16th century during the height of the witchcraft trial hysteria, when many women were burned at the stake for allegedly being witches under the influence of Satan.  In this story the principal character is accused of witchcraft.  Dreyer had wanted to make a film of this play since seeing it for the first time in 1925, and he was finally able to achieve his goal, resetting the film in Denmark, some twenty years later during the German occupation.  Many people have felt that the depiction of dogmatic oppression in the film alludes to the Nazi oppression of Jews of that time, but Dreyer always denied that Nazi oppression was a major theme of the film [4].

Dreyer was more concerned with existential themes, such as what can guide us towards a meaningful and compassionate path in life. Clearly there are multiple perspectives on something so general as this, but Dreyer, with his Day of Wrath, gives it one of its most poetic and poignant cinematic expressions.

A fascinating aspect of Dreyer’s films is his cinematic style of expression.  For one thing certainly all his films have an expressionistic flavor, and Day of Wrath is particularly seasoned with it. And yet his reserved human characterizations set in spare, conventional settings seem to offer an unusual psychological naturalism, too. He seems to achieve this compound of expressionism and naturalism by means of his characteristic mise-en-scene, involving

• a steady diet of medium composition shots, often shot from a lower angle;
• shadowy, chiaroscuro lighting with facial highlighting that enhances the atmosphere;
• slow, deliberate tracking shots about a room, sometimes concurrently including a reverse pan;
• emphasis on the light-sculpted human face – in particular there are many extended reaction shots of principal characters in response to a preceding remark or event.

Interestingly, Dreyer’s camera often lacks a consistent narrative point of view – as if the camera disavows standing in for a quasi-charatcterological “invisible witness”, as it does in many films, but instead takes on a more abstract narrative role.  This can sometimes be jarring, with camera-axis-crossing cuts cropping up in key scenes, but in Dreyer’s films it can somehow strangely add to the transcendental feeling of the viewing experience.

In Day of Wrath there are two main psychological perspectives (vital autonomy versus guilt-laden supervision), and they are presented by showing the characters who represent these two perspectives in parallel for much of the film.  This parallel presentation of two conflicting moods is a key aesthetic feature of the film. The story is not really partitioned into separate acts, but instead seems to have a continuous, dreamlike flow to it.  Nevertheless, we can identify three phases to the story.

1.  A Witch is Condemned

In the opening sequence an elderly woman, Herlofs Marte (movingly played by Anna Svierkier), is declared on 12 May 1623 to have been suitably denounced by three “upright” parishioners for being a witch and therefore must face trial. We will soon see that such church trials invariably entail extended torture, a forced confession, and then a public execution of being burned at the stake.  The first shot of Herlofs Marte, a tracking shot lasting 2:38, shows her apprehension at home when she overhears shouting outside on the street calling for her arrest.  She sneaks out the back way and off into the village outskirts.

In parallel with Herlofs Marte’s flight, the film introduces Anne Pedersdotter (Lisbeth Movin), a young woman in her twenties married to an elderly Christian pastor, Absalon Pederssøn (Thorkild Roose).  Absalon’s adult son, Martin (played by Preben Lerdorff Rye, who would later star in Ordet), who is the child of Absalon’s deceased first wife and is some years older than Anne, returns home from abroad and meets his new “mother” Anne for the first time. We are also introduced to Absalon’s stern mother, Merete (Sigrid Neiiendam), who clearly disapproves of her son having married such a young and attractive woman as Anne. Throughout the film Merete is shown in scowling reaction shots silently expressing her disgust with Anne and everything she represents.

Shortly thereafter when Anne is alone at home, she is furtively approached by Herlofs Marte, who is seeking a place to hide from the punitive townspeople. Herlofs Marte desperately informs Anne that Anne’s now-deceased mother had once “confessed” to being a witch, but that the confession had been suppressed by Absalon so that he could marry Anne.  So it should be her moral duty to protect another woman from the accusation of witchcraft. 

Although Anne does help Herlofs Marte to hide, the poor woman is discovered and taken into custody to confess.  Subsequently in private, Herlofs Marte threatens Absalon that she will reveal his cover-up of Anne’s mother unless he helps her now.  Although Absalon is alarmed by this threat, he is too much a part of his authoritarian rule-governed system to help her (even though he helped another woman in such circumstances when it suited his purposes), and he merely tells the woman that he will assist her to find salvation in the afterlife.  She tells him, desperately,

“I fear neither Heaven nor Hell.  I am only afraid to die.”

Meanwhile Anne and Martin go walking out in the fields together and display a growing friendship.

Eventually Herlofs Marte is duly tortured until she confesses to being a witch.  Then in a truly memorable scene, with Anne (after an atmospheric 49-second tracking shot showing her wary approach   to her lookout) looking on in alarm from an upstairs window, the woman is bound to a stake and burned to death.  So this first third of the film has set up the forbidding social landscape in which of the rest of the story involving Anne, Absalon, and Martin will take place.

2.  Anne and Martin
The second phase of the film depicts the growing attraction between Anne and her stepson Martin.  In the background is the ever-scowling grandmother, Merete, who tells her son Absalon that he will finally have to choose between God and Anne.

Absalon, worryingly trying to mollify Anne’s anguish over Merete’s harshness, tells Anne about her mother’s confessed witchery.  In a moment of passion at this apparently rare moment of intimacy between the two of them, Anne embraces Absalon and tells him to express his passion for her:

“Hold me and make me happy”

But Absalon nervously withdraws from the embrace and tells her he has too many things to worry about now. 

Meanwhile Anne, far from being horrified by the revelation of her mother's presumed witchery, silently wonders if she herself has inherited some witchcraft powers to summon the living and the dead. After Absalon leaves the room, she quietly whispers to herself, “Martin, come.” And he does. And they kiss, thereby confirming their mutual passion.

There are now parallel cuts showing Absalon brooding inside alone while Anne and Martin are outside among the birches loving each other in another poetically beautiful scene.  Anne tells Martin, “Hold me tight. . . Make me happy.”  And he does.

From the earliest signs of the growing passion between Anne and Martin, the viewer knows that their forbidden love is an impossible dream.  We know it cannot survive and that it faces a doom that is the essence of tragedy.  But Anne’s growing glow is undeniable.  At a family Bible session, Anne quietly and joyfully reads a passage from the “Song of Songs” (a Biblical celebration of sensual love), much to the displeasure of the frowning Merete.

There is then a truly wonderful scene of Anne and Martin alone together outside in a rowboat and talking together.  Anne is joyful; Martin, like us, is worried;

Martin: How alive your hand are. . . your fingers. . . your wrist.
. . . . . . .  I can feel your pulse beating.

Anne: Beating for you!

Martin: The sun is coloring your cheeks. 

Anne: Not the sun, happiness!

Martin: Happiness? How long will it last?

Anne: Forever!

Martin: Anne, where will we end up?

Anne: Wherever the stream leads us!

Martin: One day. . .

Anne: Don’t think about it.  So much can happen.

Martin: I see my father before me all the time.

Anne: I see only you.

3.  Final Accusations
Absalon has gone out during stormy weather to conduct the last rights for a dying fellow church official.  At home, Anne is seen to be increasingly assertive, and her hair is correspondingly less covered.  Alone with Martin and thinking aloud about Absalon, she wonders, “I often think, if he were dead . . . “ That, of course, would change everything.  She further wonders to herself (and in a parallel cut to the home-returning Absalon, the unseen narrative witness wonders along with her) just what strange powers her human mind may actually possess.   

When Absalon finally returns, he is obsessed with death and sin.  After Martin retires for the night, Absalon confesses to Anne his sin of robbing her of her youth.  Anne responds vindictively, confirming his guilt and even accusing him of abandoning the marriage bed and leaving her childless.  She harshly tells him further that she has wished that he were dead and that she and Martin are now lovers.  With that Absalon cries out and falls down dead.

Did Anne cause Absalon’s death?  Martin is unsure, but after making Anne swear her innocence over Absalon’s coffin during the vigil, he promises to stand by his love if she is accused. Later, though, at Absalon’s funeral, Merete vengefully asserts that Anne did indeed kill Absalon and ensnared Martin with the help of the “Evil One”: she is denounced as a witch. Martin, weakening under the maternal social pressure of guilt, caves in and turns against Anne. 

Anne has now been abandoned by everyone, including the person to whom she had hitched her fate.  She is asked before the funeral congregation to avow her innocence, and in the film’s closing shot she tearfully succumbs and confesses that she must be a witch.


From the outset is was clear that theirs was a forbidden love over which was cast a dark shadow of impending tragedy.  Even so, Anne’s final submission to effectively self-immolation comes as a disturbing shock at the close of the film.

At the end of the film, we are left to contemplate what it is that drives so many people towards cruel punishment. Everyone errs, even Anne, but why must so many people be cruelly punished or executed for the sake of “justice”?  Although most of the characters in this story are obsessed about guilt, there are no clear identifications of the guilty and the innocent in this tale.  They are all too human.

• Anne fell deliriously in love, but she also lied when the occasion suited.
• Herlofs Marte did dabble in witchcraft, but she seems very human, too.
• Merete, mostly concerned about scandal and her family name, was resentful, but she did love her son.
• Absalon’s whole life was concerned with guiding people away from sin, and yet he is revealed to have sometimes been a hypocritical opportunist.  Nevertheless, he comes across as a basically well-meaning and innocent person.
• Martin, like Absalon, was caught between love and loyalty to a doctrinaire ideology.

Religions and ideologies such as Marxist-Leninism have all been formulated with the intention of leading the human world to justice and optimal welfare. But all those ideologies that do not recognize the importance and rectitude of individual human rights can always serve as tyrannical instruments that justify cruelty [5]. So it was with Protestant Christianity in the witch-hunt era, and so it has continued ever since.  At the very heart of our salvation must be a social doctrine that emphasizes compassion and eliminates punitive resentment.

A connection can be made in this regard to our understandings (usually misunderstandings) of femininity. There is a mystery about life that far exceeds the capacity of our rational understanding, and women embody this mystery right in front of us. In light of these eternal mysteries, authoritarian communities in the past often attributed unknown causal powers to women and then blamed them for causing the inexplicable and unwanted.  Women were often the natural targets for blame concerning the otherwise unaccountable. Narrative accounts of this kind of persecution are what we see in Day of Wrath and also in Satyajit Ray’s similarly exquisite Devi (1960) [6].  But we must remember that women are not only naturally mysterious, they are also naturally compassionate.  And furthermore, perhaps that compassion and that mystery are inextricably parts of the same thing.

Dreyer’s films, especially here in “Day of Wrath”, show an appreciation for femininity unlike most filmmakers other than Kenji Mizoguchi and Satyajit Ray.  As I remarked in my review of Vampyr [7],

"Dreyer, like Mizoguchi, always had a fascination and sensitivity for the feminine role in human interactions . . . Like Kenji Mizoguchi, the feminine role is not an abstraction for Dreyer, but is always a very physical presence in his films. Yet it is far distanced from the typical male fantasy of a feminine abstraction. . . . Von Sternberg’s women are idealized and viewed from the man’s perspective. But throughout Dreyer’s career, his women, like Mizoguchi’s, are grounded in the physical world, and yet have some strangely 'spiritual' dimension, too."

Anne in Day of Wrath is full of life and sensuality – and full of the wonder for life, too.  Dreyer prohibited actress Lisbeth Movin, who played Anne, from wearing makeup in the film, in order to promote her natural feminine allure – not the abstract beauty of fantasy.  And sure enough, Movin is compellingly beautiful in the role.  Indeed, after their first kiss, Martin told Anne that her eyes were not childlike (as Absalon had described them), but “deep and mysterious”, in whose depths he saw “a trembling, quivering flame”. This is the mysterious feminine allure that in this film is crushed by resentment-filled dogma. For our future salvation we should not turn away from this feminine mystery, but instead look in its direction.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Derek Malcolm, “Carl Dreyer: Day of Wrath”, The Guardian, (6 April 2000).    
2. Gary Morris, “Carl Dreyer: Day of Wrath, Ordet, Gertrud on VHS”, Bright Lights Film  Journal, (1 July 2000). 
3. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, University of California Press (1972).
4. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Figuring Out Day of Wrath”, The Criterion Collection, (20 August 2001). 
5. Gary Saul Morson, “The House Is on Fire!”, The New Criterion, vol. 35, no. 1, (September 2016). 
6. The Film Sufi, “‘Devi’ - Satyajit Ray (1960)”, The Film Sufi, (14 November 2013).  
7. The Film Sufi, “‘Vampyr’ - Carl Dreyer (1932)”, The Film Sufi, (8 October 2009).     

“Ordet” - Carl Dreyer (1955)

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (The Word, 1955) was another unique exploration of cinematic expression from the famed Danish director. All of the films from his long but sparse career (he directed only six films over the last 38 years of his career) seemed distinct from each other and from the rest of the international film production community, and Ordet is no exception.  And yet there’s enough expressive intensity to all his works that they seem to carry a common reference to a transcendent reality beyond the here and now [1].  This is one of the reasons why many critics and film scholars now regard Dreyer as one of the greatest filmmakers. Dreyer’s expressive intensity and single-minded approach to production didn’t usually translate to success when his films were released, though: Ordet was his only commercial success.

In addition to Ordet’s favorable financial returns, many critics have heaped the film with their highest praise, asserting that it is not only Dreyer’s greatest work, but perhaps the greatest film of all time [2,3,4].  Nevertheless, many of these same critics seem to be at a loss for words as to why they were so overwhelmed by the film.  Indeed several of them say that the film doesn’t even have a plot, but that it still has stupefying greatness, anyway.

I do think Ordet is a very good film, and I will explore some of its features that make it so.  There are two interesting aspects of Ordet to consider.  One is the film’s spiritual themes,, and the other is  Dreyer’s interesting and peculiar mise-en-scene.

Ordet is based on Kaj Munk’s 1925 stage play I Begyndelsen var Ordet (In the Beginning was the Word, or simply, The Word).  Munk was a Lutheran pastor whose opposition to the Nazi occupation (1940-1945) led to his martyrdom in 1944.  Dreyer saw Munk’s play when it was first performed in 1932, and from that moment he had the intention of making a film based on the play.  It took him twenty-three more years to realize that vision.

The story of Ordet is set in rural West Jutland and centers around the family of a prosperous farmer, Morten Borgen.  Because of the multiple-personality perspective of this tale, there are a number of significant characters:

• Morten Borgen is an elderly widower and the patriarch of the Borgen family.   He has three sons. Mikkel, Johannes, and Anders.
• Mikkel Borgen, the oldest son, is married to Inger.
• Inger, Mikkel’s wife for eight years, has two daughters and is now pregnant and shortly expecting a third child.
• Maren Borgen, the older of Mikkel and Inger’s two daughter, is about seven years of age.
• Johannes Borgen, Morten’s next eldest son, has been insane since suffering a mental breakdown while studying theology to become a preacher.
• Anders Borgen, the youngest of Morten’s sons, wishes to marry Anne Petersen, the daughter of Peter Petersen, a local tailor in town.
• Peter Petersen, the tailor and father of Anne, belongs to a different Lutheran sect from that of the Borgen family.
• Anne Petersen, Peter’s daughter, is in love with Anders Borgen.
• the Pastor is a Lutheran minister who has newly arrived in the township.
• the Doctor is a medical doctor who treats Inger for her medical condition.

I enumerate all these characters, because they all represent significant perspectives with respect to the main spiritual themes of the film.  We can consider the overall narrative to comprise four sections or acts.

1.  Johannes    
The film opens showing the mentally-ill Johannes wandering about the moors asserting that he is Jesus Christ and warning the multitudes, “woe unto you for lack of faith” (lack of faith in the “fact” that he is Jesus).  The Borgen family, knowing that Johannes is not of sound mind, chase after him.  Later during a family discussion, we learn that Johannes went mad while studying the works of the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who famously wrote attacks on the Danish Church a century earlier.  It is in this section that we learn of an important difference between Morten and his son Mikkel.  While Morten is a upstanding member of his parish and devoutly religious, his son Mikkel confesses that he lost all faith in God and believes one must rely on human reason.

The viewer will get the impression in this section that Johannes will be a key narrative thread, but actually Johannes soon more or less disappears into the background until the closing stages.

2.  Anders and Anne
Now the story moves to the concerns of Anders Morgen and Anne Petersen, who wish to marry  but need permission from their parents.  Here, too, the viewer may believe that the love story between Anders and Anne will be a major narrative thread, but in fact Anders and Anne are not significant characters in this story.  The real issue here concerns the religious differences between Morten Borgen and Peter Petersen which block their children’s union.

The problem is that Morten Borgen is a lay leader of the local Lutheran congregation and is proud of having restored Christian religiosity to the area, while Peter Petersen is the leader of the Inner Mission evangelical sect in opposition to the mainstream views of the Borgen-led parishioners.  Morten initially opposes the marriage, but when he learns that Petersen has rejected Anders’s formal proposal, he is insulted by the indignity and reverses himself.  He now vows that Anders and Anne will marry no matter what Petersen thinks.

3.  Inger’s Plight     
49 minutes into the film, a new situation arises.  Inger’s pregnancy takes a bad turn, and a doctor is urgently summoned.  It turns out that Inger is in a life-threatening situation, but after the doctor surgically aborts the fetus, he assures the family that she will be all right.  They all rejoice, and there seems to be no evident remorse about the death of the stillborn child.  Only Johannes is grim, and he tells them that if they had believed in him (that he is Jesus), this tragedy would not have happened.

 “You are seeking grapes on thorn bushes.  The vines you pass by.”

Inger’s innocent daughter Maren then comes to visit Johannes in his room, and he tells her that Inger will soon die and that only he could possibly resurrect her, if the others would let him.

This thread has now taken prominence, because it unites all the characters’ concerns.  Morten Borgen has been praying for Inger’s recovery, while Mikkel and the Doctor count on modern science.  In this connection the subject of miracles comes up.

In an earlier discussion between Morten and Inger in Act 1 about Johannes’s condition, Morten had lamented that miracles no longer happen because we are lacking true faith in God.  But Inger responded that she believes God’s miracles are happening all the time but that we don’t notice them.  Now here in this part of the story, the Pastor and the Doctor get into their own discussion about belief in miracles.  The Pastor confesses that God no longer performs miracles, because they would be in violation of His own laws of nature that He has set up.  It was only during the exceptional situation with His son, Jesus, the Pastor says, that God permitted miracles.  The Doctor just smiles and says he believes in the scientific miracles like those that he performs.

Johannes is more doleful.  Now he arrives and pronounces ominously to all of them that he has just seen Death with his scythe arrive on the scene and is about to take a life.  And so it eventuates.  Shortly after the Pastor and the Doctor depart, Mikkel goes in to Inger’s room and discovers that she has passed away.

4.  Life  
This departure of the most compassionate and understanding character in the story with thirty more minutes remaining is unsettling.  Inger, it seemed, was the person who had held things together.  But her death does bring them all together to mourn her passing.

Inger’s death is duly reported in the newspaper, and the burial is about to take place.  Peter Petersen repents his past stubbornness and comes to the Borgens to offer his daughter’s hand in marriage to Anders. The Pastor utters words of blessing, assuring them all that Inger is going to a Heavenly place and it is we who must suffer her absence. Morten assures the grief-stricken Mikkel that Inger’s soul is now with God.  But Mikkel sobs, “her body is here.  I loved her body also.”  Yes,  when a loved one passes away, we know, as Mikkel knows, that it was in a physical form that we interacted with and cherished that loved one.  And that physical form is left here on earth to rot away.  That beloved form of interaction is lost forever.

Now at this point, just before they are about to put the lid on Inger’s coffin, Johannes, who had disappeared into the moors on the day of Inger’s death, suddenly reappears, this time without his customary mournful cowl, and now looks perfectly sane.  He again castigates them all for their lukewarm faith in God’s miracles.  Maren comes up to him and innocently asks him to restore Inger to life.  Johannes smiles when he sees her complete faith in him and looking upward says,

“Jesus Christ, if it is possible, then give her leave to come back to life.  Give me the Word, the word that can make the dead come to life.”

Inger stirs in her coffin and comes back to life.  Mikkel rapturously hugs her and says to her, “Now life begins for us.”  Inger kisses him passionately and responds wondrously,

“Life, yes. . . Life.  Yes.  Life.”

Dreyer’s Mise-en-scene  
An interesting aspect of Ordet is the stark black-and-white cinematography and unusual mise-en-scene that Dreyer uses to tell this story. There are only 114 shots in the entire film, and most of the interior shots are  several minutes long, with three of the key conversations in the film each lasting more than 5:40.  However, despite what must have entailed very careful planning for these shots, they are not particularly fluid, in the manner for example of Antonioni or Mizoguchi. Instead they are very deliberate shots, with the camera moving slowly from a medium frame of one character to that of another as a conversation evolves.  This gives quite a different feeling from the usual experience of the “invisible witness” that represents the viewer’s perspective [5].  In an Antonioni film, for example, the invisible witness sometimes nimbly moves about, even within a single shot, in order to get the best perspective on what is happening.  That can mean shifting to an over-the-shoulder shot of a person listening to another character speaking to him or her and thus enlisting an empathic feeling for the person listening.  Here in Ordet, though, the invisible witness mostly remains static, almost as if this witness is sitting on a chair and watching the proceedings.  This feeling of a static witness is accentuated by keeping the camera framing mostly in medium shots, so that the camera movements are almost like a person turning his or her head to see another part of the room. 

Another interesting thing about these camera movements is that they sometimes precede an action that might be thought to elicit one’s attention.  For example, sometimes the camera pans slowly to a closed door, and only then does the door open and someone enter the room.  This suggests narrative anticipation of the part of the witness that borders on omniscience [5]. 

These two basic camera effects and the way they affect the invisible witness – (1) the static physical location but fluid “head movement” on the part of the invisible witness and (2) the anticipatory camera movements – give an eerie feeling to the visual presentation that is difficult to characterize in words.

There is also a further bizarre camera movement when Maren comes to visit Johannes in his room in Act 3, and he tells her that Inger will soon die.  Johannes and Maren are shown in one of the rare medium closeups in the film, as the camera appears to rotate slowly around them as they speak.  At the same time the room background, in what may be a back-projection effect, rotates around in the opposite direction, but more rapidly than the camera’s rotation.  The direction of the background’s rotation is as you would expect, but its pace of rotation does not correspond to the camera’s movement.  The overall effect is a further eeriness to Johannes and this scene.

I have also remarked in connection with my reviews of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Vampyr (1932) about Dreyer’s interesting emphasis on the human face.  In those films there are more closeups that concentrate on personal expressiveness.  But even here in Ordet, where there are few closeups before the final scenes, there is an emphasis on the face.  This is achieved by having the characters often speaking rhetorically and not looking at the person with whom they are speaking and instead facing the camera (the invisible witness again).  This is particularly true of Morten Borgen and Johannes.  And in general a character often retains a marked and emotive facial expression that has an almost expressionistic feel to it.

The expressionistic presentation of faces is further accentuated by the way Dreyer maintains sculpted studio highlighting on the faces of characters, even as they move about a room.  This is artificial, but the viewer is unlikely to notice it and only experience the expressionistic feeling indirectly.  A noteworthy exception to this lighting effect is the way that Johannes is lit – his face is always kept in relative darkness (until the final resurrection scene, in which his now-sane countenance is also highlighted).

Ordet’s Spiritual Theme  
Reflecting on what has occurred in the film, we can see that this film does have a plot, but it is not about such mundane things as a madman or the romantic love between Anders and Anne.  Instead it is about faith in God and the different ways that people have in trying to come to terms with death and life. I do not believe that Dreyer was putting forth a strictly religious interpretation of faith like that of Morten Borgen – that miracles will occur if only you believe strongly enough.  In fact Dreyer, himself, was not particularly religious, although he was interested in spiritual issues [2].   In this film he shows us people from four different religious domains or spheres that are associated with how people look at the infinite.  These are four distinct approaches that are commonly taken by people, and they are each represented by some key characters in the film.  I say “spheres”, because people can lie somewhere within or outside of these general spheres, which encompass various ways people have of relating to God.

• Johannes  – Spirit.  
  Johannes represents the mystical, the unquestioned belief that there are saviors and miracles.  There is no logic to this sphere, and virtually everyone is outside of this sphere’s compass. Only prophets and people like Johannes are inside this sphere; although other people outside of it may look worshipfully to the mystics from this sphere for guidance. But the few people from within this sphere are darkly mysterious, and that is why Dreyer keeps the mad Johannes’s visual countenance in darkness.

• Morten, Peter, and the Pastor – Religious Mind.  
  A second sphere concerns conventional religious doctrine and practice.  Here we have people who follow various rules to find hopeful salvation.  But they are using the mind to follow their holy path.  Morten complained to Peter that Peter’s faith was too sour, that his own faith was eternal joy, while Peter’s faith longed for death – as he said,
  

  “My faith is the warmth of life, and yours is the coldness of death”.

  However, when Morten prays for a miracle and it doesn’t happen, he has a mechanistic belief that his own lack of faith must have made the pray–>God–>miracle process not work on that occasion. This is similar to the feeble and now-falsifiable "Law of Attraction" notion that gets passed around these days [6].
  
  Many people are within the scope of this particular sphere, although they, like Morten and Peter, may be in opposition to one another.
   
• Mikkel and the Doctor – Scientific Mind.   
  Mikkel and the Doctor are benign humanists who put their faith in human reason.  These are the rationalists, and many modern-day educated people are within the scope of this sphere. They have faith in scientific progress, but the scope of their thinking and their conceived powers is tiny compared to the infinite wonders of life.
    
• Inger – Love and Life.   
  Inger represents the fourth sphere, love. Her idea was that the miracle of love and life was happening all around us all the time.  She doesn’t argue the point intellectually; she embodies it.  In this sense she is another one of Dreyer’s physically embodied existential feminine heroines that are distinctly his.  As I remarked in connection with my review of Dreyer’s Vampyr,
  

  "Dreyer, like Mizoguchi, always had a fascination and sensitivity for the feminine role in human interactions . . . Like Kenji Mizoguchi, the feminine role is not an abstraction for Dreyer, but is always a very physical presence in his films. Yet it is far distanced from the typical male fantasy of a feminine abstraction. . . . Von Sternberg’s women are idealized and viewed from the man’s perspective. But throughout Dreyer’s career, his women, like Mizoguchi’s, are grounded in the physical world, and yet have some strangely 'spiritual' dimension, too."

  The resurrection that happens at the end, in my view, is not just a matter of Maren’s sincere belief  that makes the pray–>God–>miracle mechanism (that Morten referred to) work this time.  No, it was actually a true, incomprehensible miracle that defies our understanding but which Inger embraces, as she does all aspects of life.
     
  Inger’s sphere of Love and Life can include religious feelings, but these would be driven by love and compassion and not by harsh proscriptions [7]. Everyone can be inside the compass of Inger’s sphere, and I believe this is where Dreyer stood, as well.

The magic of Ordet derives from showing people from all the above-mentioned four spheres interacting with each other and engaged in meaningful dialogues. Overall, this is a rich and fascinating film, and repeated viewings may lead you to new insights and different responses about death, life, and love.  I would only say that for me (and Dreyer), Inger’s final word is the word.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, University of California Press (1972).
2. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Mise en Scène as Miracle in Dreyer’s ORDET”, Jonathan Rosenbaum (JonathanRosenbaum.net), (16 February 2016).
3. Roger Ebert, “Ordet”, RogerEbert.com, (8 March 2008). 
4. Chris Fujiwara, “Ordet”, The Criterion Collection, (20 August 2001). 
5. Ray Carney, “‘Knowledge in Space and Time,’ a discussion of Ordet (The Word)”, (excerpts from his book Speaking the Language of Desire: the Films of Carl Dreyer) (1989).  
6. For further comments on the pseudoscientific "Law of Attraction" notion, see
• The Film Sufi, "The Secret", The Film Sufi, (26 April 2008).
7. In terms of my comments on “The Two Religions”, Inger’s spiritual feelings would correspond to “Religion 1", while those of Morten, Peter, and the Pastor would correspond to “Religion 2":
• The Film Sufi, “The Two Religions”, The Film Sufi, (30 May 2015).

“Vampyr” - Carl Dreyer (1932)

Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), an eerie, one-of-a-kind horror movie distinct from the rest of his work, is of interest here for two main reasons:

• How it compares with other classic vampire films, particularly the two best: F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horrors, 1922) and Wermer Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre 1979).
   
• What it might reveal about Dreyer’s fascinating, but somewhat inscrutable, film style.

Dreyer spent his entire career as a journalist and filmmaker, but he only managed to secure funding to make 14 films, only six of which were made during the forty-year period after 1926. After that year the Danish-born Dreyer moved to France, where he thought the opportunities for filmmaking might be better, but despite the magnificence of his next production, The Passion of Joan of Arc, it was not a success at the box office. And though Dreyer had immediate plans to start the production of his next film, a planned horror story, it took him several years to secure the very limited backing for that next French-based production, Vampyr.

By this time sound films had arrived on the scene, and because Dreyer opposed the use of subtitles, he arranged to have Vampyr filmed in three separate languages: English, French, and German. To accomplish this and to satisfy his requirements for linguistic authenticity, he had all the dialogue scenes filmed in three separate versions, one for each language, even though the resulting sound tracks for the dialogue were not captured synchronously, but were later dubbed in each language. Then all these separate dialogue scenes had to be spliced back into the main body of the film, so that they were all in synchronism with the rest of the sound track. After the production was complete and some sections of the film were censored by the German authorities, Dreyer then had to go back and carefully edit all three versions of the film, so that they all remained in synch. This is just one example of the idiosyncratic manner in which Dreyer constructed his productions. But before further consideration of Dreyer’s filmmaking style, it is best first to look at the Vampyr narrative.

Dreyer undoubtedly knew about the iniquitous nature of the intellectual property laws that enabled the widow of Dracula author, Bram Stoker, to bankrupt Murnau’s production company, even though his Nosferatu story was drastically different from the Stoker novel. So Dreyer, who always worked from an existing text, had to find another story to reference and on which to base his production. This ultimately turned out to be J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella “Carmilla” [1] in his collection, In a Glass Darkly. But Dreyer only used the story as a starting point, and he made his own considerable alterations in the ensuing screenplay [2]. More revealing than the original story, though, is the overall narrative theme that Dreyer eventually gave to his film. In this connection it is worth referring to remarks in my review of Murnau’s Nosferatu concerning the thematic contrast between Dracula and Nosferatu.

In the original Dracula, and also in Tod Browning’s authorised remake, Dracula (1931), the story describes a pitched battle between two almost equally matched characters: a representative of darkness, Count Dracula, and a representative of modern science, Doctor Van Helsing. In the end of that original story, Van Helsing succeeds in killing Dracula by stabbing him in the heart. So it’s something like a slam-bang adventure story, only one involving a vampire. Nosferatu, on the other hand, is more cosmic, more haunting and is much closer to the disturbing specters that inhabit our nightmares. Unlike Count Dracula, who is a suave, smooth charmer of women, Count Orlok [the corresponding character in Nosferatu] is a deformed, repulsive rat-like character, signifying pestilence. In addition, the Van Helsing character (Doctor Bulwer) is now diminished to insignificance in Nosferatu, and he is no match for Count Orlok. Orlok is not simply a resourceful adversary, but more an abstraction of horror, an unstoppable force of evil.

In Dreyer’s original screenplay, he seemed to have planned for the vampire to be more like the depiction in Dracula – a graphic and violent monster that must be overcome. But in the finished film, changes were made to make vampire adversary more abstract and distant and thus more like the Murnau and Herzog characterization of an evil force of darkness.

The story itself is at once simple and also enigmatic. It barely has an identifiable structure, meandering as it does from one improbable scene after another, but we could subdivide it into a few basic sections.

1. It begins with Allan Gray (spelled "Grey" in the French and English versions), a young man given to fantasies about ghosts and spectres, coming to stay at an inn in the village of Courtempierre. At night the locked door to his room is unaccountably unlocked by an old man who solemnly proclaims that “she must not die” and then leaves a bound pack on the table with the note, “to be opened upon my death”. Gray goes outside and finds a chateau, where he sees a number of phantasmagoric sights: shadows dancing to mysterious music, and a suspicious-looking man who later turns out to be the village doctor.
2. Gray then wanders outside to a manor, where he sees the old man who had visited his room earlier being killed by a gunshot. He rushes inside to help and meets the old man’s two daughters, Giséle and Léone, the latter of whom is seriously ill, and the elderly servant couple of the manor, who urge him to stay with them. Shortly thereafter, though, Giséle and Gray see Léone walking outside in the yard, and when they run out to her side, they find Léone unconscious on the ground with fresh bite wounds in her neck. When she regains consciousness in bed, she gives a momentary predatory glance at her sister, as if she is somehow possessed. Gray then opens up the package that the old man had given him and discovers that it is a book about vampires, which he begins reading. He learns that the vampires feast on human blood and can force people they bite to become their enslaved minions.
3. The village doctor seen earlier comes to treat Léone and says that Gray must donate some of his own blood to treat her blood loss. After the blood transfusion, Gray becomes weak and falls asleep, during which time the doctor, cooperating with a mysterious old blind woman seen earlier at the chateau, seems about to poison Léone. But Gray regains consciousness just in time to rescue Léone, while the doctor flees the scene. Gray chases outside, but after a fall, he appears to fall into a dream and has an out-body-experience, during which he witnesses a scene in which he, himself, is buried in a coffin by the doctor and the hideous old blind woman. He finally wakens from his dream and rushes to rescue Giséle, who had been tied up by the doctor as the next victim. But the doctor again gets away.
4. The elderly servant of the manor now runs across Gray’s vampire book and begins reading more of it. He discovers that a vampire can only be killed by an iron stake driven through its heart, and he also learns that the vampire in their region must be a woman buried in the local Courtempierre cemetery by the name of Marguerite Chopin. Gray and the servant go to the cemetery and open up her grave (where she appears to be well preserved) and drive a stake through her heart, after which she immediately transforms into a skeleton before their eyes. Then there is cross-cutting between the doctor, who is hiding out in the village mill, and Gray, who gets into a rowboat with Giséle to make a river crossing in the fog. The doctor in the mill becomes accidentally trapped in a flour bin, and the old servant puts the mill machinery into operation, burying alive the doctor with flour. Meanwhile Gray and Giséle manage to find the other side of the river and walk out into the sunlight and salvation.

The vampire in Dreyer’s film, then, turns out to be a mysterious old blind woman who is rarely seen and does practically nothing, even when she is on screen. So the focus is not really on an evil antagonist and how to thwart a clearly recognized threat, but rather a depiction of a dystopic environment contaminated by something evil. Everything is somehow askew, as in a nightmare. Few people actually find Vampyr to be truly scary, but it is the nightmarish quality and sense of dread that puts Vampyr squarely on the side of the Nosferatu films, as opposed to Dracula.

Some aspects contributing to the mystery (or perhaps to the viewer’s annoyance) are associated with some unexplained and unmotivated events in the film’s story. In several cases these problems are caused by all the changes and compromises that Dreyer had to make in order to accommodate the constraints of his limited budget and shooting circumstances. This led to missing scenes and inconsistencies that may make the film more mysterious but are not in fact the result of artistic intention; they are simply shortcomings. For example, early in the film when Gray meets the doctor at the chateau there is a mysterious exchange between the two of them about dogs and a child, which have not been seen in the film. To the viewer this is utter mystery, but in fact there was an important scene in Dreyer’s original script about a young boy chased by dogs controlled by the old blind woman, that for some reason he cut from the film. It is this scene to which the curious conversation refers. To get a feeling for some of these changed elements, I refer you to Peter Swaab’s excellent discussion concerning differences between the original script and the final film [3]. But even setting aside those shortcomings, there are still a number of unexplained and unmotivated events in the film that were apparently intended by Dreyer and are part of the eerie atmosphere of Vampyr, of few of which we can enumerate:

• In the early scene in which the old man (the master of the manor) enters Gray’s room, he somehow manages to open the door (with its key securely in the lock) from the outside. How? Then an unearthly light appears in the room before he enters. What do these events signify? And why is he later shot and killed?
• What lies behind the dancing shadows seen by Gray in the chateau? Is this just a dream?
• In the original script Léone dies at the end, but in the film she appears to recover from her illness after the vampire is destroyed. Her last appearance on the screen seems to show her eyes half-open and still breathing. So her fate is not clearly spelled out.

So overall, there are many things that are unexplained, even taking into consideration all the alterations forced upon Dreyer, and this brings us back to Dreyer’s enigmatic style. In my view that style is certainly expressionistic. Paul Schrader refers to Dreyer’s style as transcendental [4]. Acquarello insists that Dreyer’s style is humanistic [5]. And Peter Swaab claims that Dreyer was heavily influenced by the Surrealists that he met in France [3]. Maybe they are all right, in a way, but you can see that multiple interpretations may apply.

For an early sound film, the viewer may be somewhat surprised to see the considerable amount of prowling camera movement in Vampyr, both in terms of panning and tracking. But this can be attributed not only to the inventiveness of Dreyer (and that of his his cameraman, Rudolph Maté, who had worked on The Passion of Joan of Arc and who would later direct the noir classic D.O.A.), but also to the fact that the film was shot "MOS" (without sound synchronization), which gave Dreyer the latitude to carry out those camera movements. Another curious aspect of Dreyer's mise-en-scène is his penchant for setting interior scenes that are spare, often with starkly white walls, and yet contain a few very specific and oddly arranged artifacts. The architectural minimalism serves to accentuate the specificity of the characters. The visual composition is coupled with a relatively heavy emphasis on closeups (particularly, the wide-eyed reaction shots of Gray), many of which are unmotivated and reference no established point of view, which are consequently disorienting to the viewer. The visual emphasis on Gray’s reactions continually puts the viewer in his position of trying to construct something coherent out of material that is intrinsically incapable of total coherence – much in the way that we, ourselves, may try to make sense out of our own nightmares in the morning.

Another element of interest is the acting. The only professional performer was Sybille Schmitz, in the role of Léone, whose own private life turned unfortunately macabre: she later had drug problems, went mad, and finally committed suicide. Nicolas de Gunzburg, using the stage name, Julian West, played Allan Gray and was also the producer of the film. His relatively sensitive and effete demeanor represents something of a male ingenue, and this colors the mood of the film throughout. Dreyer, like Mizoguchi, always had a fascination and sensitivity for the feminine role in human interactions, and there has been considerable commentary concerning Dreyer’s own past and how this may have affected his own psychological makeup (again, see Swaab [3] for more). Like Kenji Mizoguchi, the feminine role is not an abstraction for Dreyer, but is always a very physical presence in his films. Yet it is far distanced from the typical male fantasy of a feminine abstraction. Falconetti’s androgynous presence in the title role of The Passion of Joan of Arc is physical and unshakeable, but its strength is different from the masculine way in which strength is often characterized. It asserts a purity and sincerity that reflects an inner fortitude. Indeed, Mizoguchi’s focus on and representation of women has often been compared with von Sternberg’s, but perhaps Dreyer and Mizoguchi are more closely aligned in this respect. Von Sternberg’s women are idealized and viewed from the man’s perspective. But throughout Dreyer’s career, his women, like Mizoguchi’s, are grounded in the physical world, and yet have some strangely “spiritual” dimension, too.

In the last analysis we can not say that Vampyr is one of Dreyer’s great films. Like The Passion of Joan of Arc, it, too, was a financial failure, and Dreyer was to lapse into a decade of obscurity, which included a mental breakdown in 1934. Today, Vampyr seems like a piece of broken pottery that can never be fixed. The history of lost and damaged prints make reconstruction of the original intentions difficult (although heroic efforts have been made), but in fact the film may have been broken from the very beginning. What remains today, however, is still of interest for those fascinated with Dreyer’s unique manner of cinematic expression.
★★★

Notes:

1. Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla”, in Writing Vampyr, (2008) The Criterion Collection, New York.
2. Carl Theodor Dreyer and Christen Jul, “The Screenplay” in Writing Vampyr, (2008) The Criterion Collection, New York.
3. Peter Swaab, “'Un Film Vampirisé': Dreyer ’s Vampyr”, Film Quarterly, 62:4, (2009), http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/pdf/10.1525/fq.2009.62.4.56.
4. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style In Film (1972), Da Capo Press, New York.
5. Acquarello, “Carl Theodor Dreyer”, Senses of Cinema (2002), http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/dreyer.html.