Of all the directors with multiple entries in the Sight & Sound Top 50, Carl Theodor Dreyer may be the one we are least familiar with these days.
Photo: BFI
Unlike Coppola, Scorsese, Hitchcock, Ford, many of Dreyer’s greatest films are largely out of print. Kubrick’s films are regularly restored for new formats. Fellini, Tarkovsky and Bresson will often receive retrospectives or film society screenings. The name Bergman has become a kind of cinematic shorthand, even for people who haven’t seen his films. But Dreyer is falling further and further out of fashion.
Despite a directing career lasting 45 years, from The President in 1919 to Gertrud in 1964, he only made 14 feature films (four of which are in the Sight & Sound Top 250). Some have speculated that his perfectionism meant that it took ever increasing time between pictures, but the relatively parlous state of the tiny Danish film industry also played a part. His most famous films, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr, were made outside Denmark.
In the last version of this project his final film Gertrud snuck in to the Top 50 at number 43 but has now dropped to equal-136. That leaves only two of his films in the top 50 – The silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc at equal 21st and Ordet (aka The Word) at equal 48th.
Like a few films in this list, at first look you might wonder what it is about them that makes for inclusion. Ordet was Dreyer’s second-to-last film, made in 1955, and it looks and sounds very similar to the stage play that it was based on.
We seem to witness all the scenes from the same ‘fourth wall’ side of the action. The camera rarely moves. The actors seem to be proclaiming a bit rather than speaking. But then you realise that it is what they are saying that matters the most. And that, despite Dreyer’s stable or slow-moving camera, whenever you need a close-up of an actor, you invariably get one.
Photo: BFI
The subject matter is also a rare one for the period – although not for Dreyer himself. It’s about faith and – in some cases the damage that it can do and in others the transformational power it can have.
The Borgen’s are a prosperous farming family in rural Denmark in 1925. The second son, Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye), has had a breakdown while studying in the city and now believes himself to be Jesus Christ. The oldest son, Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen) is atheist but lives happily with his devout wife Inger (Birgitte Federspiel) and their two children along with patriarch and patron of the local parish church, Morten (Henrik Malberg).
The youngest son, Anders (Cay Kristiansen) has fallen for the daughter of the local tailor – a match that Morten does not approve of, mainly for class reasons. Tailoring is a working-class profession and the imbalance in their circumstances will mean that the girl’s family may come to them for money.
Photo: BFI
Both families have Christianity in common, but the tailor is the head of a conservative revivalist church while the Borgens are much more traditional. Petersen, the tailor (Ejner Federspiel) refuses to countenance the relationship until Morten Borgen converts to his version of the church. Neither of the two fathers will allow the marriage, leaving two very unhappy young people.
Then tragedy intervenes. Inger falls ill during childbirth and the baby is lost. The next morning, Inger also passes away and at her funeral the two elderly patriarchs realise that there are more important things than their sectarian squabbling.
Photo: BFI
And, in one final extraordinary twist, Johannes the Christ figure has the last word in proceedings.
It’s not surprising that there are not very many films that approach faith – and a crisis of faith – seriously (and by seriously I mean not in a campaigning or evangelical way). After all, faith and spirituality is a largely internal process and not that easy to map onto a cinematic context. But there are some good recent ones: Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (about Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian farmer who resisted Hitler at the cost of his life); Paul Schrader’s First Reformed which stars Ethan Hawke as a parish priest who loses his faith – and his mind and Scorsese’s Silence about two Jesuit priests attempting to make converts in 17th century Japan.
Ordet is one of those films that takes faith seriously. How one’s relationship with God should inform your relationships with the people around you rather than the other way around, and how there are miracles everywhere, but some don’t call attention to themselves.
Ordet is not available on any NZ streaming service and is not available for digital rental either. Aro Street Video has the DVD (on its own and in the Dreyer box set “Master Filmmaker”. Wellington Public Library has the same two options, but Auckland does not have either.
Dan Slevin is spending 2023 watching each of the Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time (according to the BFI/Sight & Sound magazine).
