Bewitched
Carl Dreyer's films are both breathtaking experiments in cinematic form and overwhelming emotional experiences. Mark Le Fanu salutes the sublime mysteries within the Danish master's work.
Among the work of all the great masters of cinema, the filmography of Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer must be one of the sparest. Not that his career started unpromisingly: eight films (all of them interesting) were completed in the eight years between 1918 and 1925. But by the mid 1920s the Danish film industry had collapsed and after that everything this great director attempted had to be struggled for. In the four decades between the release of The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc) in 1927 and his death in 1968 he managed to produce only five further full-length works. One of these - Two People (Två Människor), shot in Sweden in 1944 - is generally considered a write-off (though possibly it has its admirers). But the remaining four, like Joan, count among the strangest and most beautiful films in existence - films that every generation of film-lovers needs to meet and puzzle over. For it's pointless not to admit that these are difficult, uncompromising objects, as far distant as it's possible to be from a cinema of pure entertainment. Still, there's no art without some solicitation towards pleasure. And the pleasures of Dreyer are perhaps not as rarefied as his formidable reputation might make one fear.
The tendency in film criticism devoted to Dreyer has been to turn him into some kind of formalist, and one can see why the approach is attractive: the experimental aspect of his cinema is inescapable. In Joan of Arc there are the extraordinary close-ups of Renée Falconetti - indeed, the whole film is a close-up, as if the director were attempting to sketch a metaphysical grammar of the face. Even if you knew nothing about the stage of development silent film had reached by the end of the 1920s, you would suspect this film (in some magnificently bold way) was in breach of the rules.
Vampyr (1932), the film that followed Joan, is in some ways even more avant-garde. There's an emphasis on shadows, doubles and all sorts of ghostly trompe-l'oeils. The constant de-centring of the action towards the edges of the frame pushes the film at times towards the limits of readability. Further, perhaps, than Dreyer wanted it to go: the total critical and commercial failure of the movie issued in a nervous breakdown, and amounted, I think, to the biggest single set-back in his career.
He spent the rest of the 1930s quietly, in study and writing. (Dreyer is a superb theorist of cinema.) His next film Day of Wrath (Vredens dag, 1943) is more 'classical', as befits a come-back work. Still, classicism itself, in all the arts, has elements of formalism. The long travelling shots across the faces of the bowed and attentive 17th-century inquisitors attired in their black robes and white ruffs signal the profound visual affinity this movie bears to the universe of Dutch and Danish painting. The film is 'hieratic', composed, superbly lit and balanced: in some (not necessarily derogatory) sense, a monument of aestheticism.
By the time we arrive at Dreyer's two last films, Ordet (The Word, 1955) and Gertrud (1964), those long travelling shots become themselves the paramount point of formal interest. It's well known that in a certain kind of art cinema after the war (also in Hollywood, especially following the introduction of Cinemascope in the early 1950s) shots grew appreciably longer than in the heyday of editing in the 1930s. So what Dreyer was attempting in his magisterial eight-minute takes was not in itself contrary to the spirit of the age. Yet the exceptionally rigorous way he exercised the style introduces, again, an element of formalism that's unavoidably part of both films' interest. Everything is slowed down to walking pace - until it seems that walking itself (or sitting in or rising from chairs) becomes the very subject of the movies. Both Ordet and Gertrud were adapted from stage dramas, and one can see in these films a highly abstract meditation on the dialectical relationship between cinema and theatre. What is it, Dreyer seems to be asking, that makes a film different from a play - granted that you give yourself the licence to bring into film (through the use of these exceptionally long takes) something of the experience of real time and live performance that is the property of the stage?
Theatrical: yes, that is what Gertrud is (even more than Ordet). The somnambulistic languor with which Nina Pens Rode broaches the central role is extraordinary. Then there's the strange way the characters, ensconced on their sofas or sitting upright behind 19th-century escritoires, seem to be talking not to each other but past each other (or else to themselves, from the depths of some symbolist reverie). All these aspects bespeak a more heightened level of stylisation, an even greater concern with pure form than anything Dreyer had so far attempted. One reaches for the phrase - and hesitates. Could this be the thing called 'pure cinema'?
One hesitates, of course, because as a critical approach formalism has its limits. The work of art, if it's going to be a work of art, ought to possess some content other than its own form. There must, in short, be other reasons to admire Dreyer than his technical mastery of mise en scène - extraordinary as that is. And maybe it's not too difficult to find them.
A key thing is that Dreyer is one of the few really great cinéastes (Bresson, Tarkovsky and Bergman are three others) able to deal in a serious way with the claims and pretensions of religion. It's a subject Dreyer meets from the inside not the outside - and not because he was brought up within the church. On the contrary, his home and academic backgrounds seem to have been staunchly anti-clerical. (The café and journalistic circles he mixed in, in Copenhagen, in the early years of the 20th century were socialistic and free-thinking: Georg Brandes was the group's intellectual hero, Social Democracy their rallying cry.) Nonetheless, Dreyer seems always to have been fascinated by religion. One of the first films he directed (after years of script-writing at Nordisk) was Leaves from Satan's Book (Blade af Satans Bog, 1919), in which he follows his then idol D.W. Griffith in attributing the main cause of intolerance over the ages to the machinations of organised state Christianity.
This is the central theme, of course, of The Passion of Joan of Arc. No one who has seen that film can forget the chilling psychological authenticity of the scenes of torture and bloodletting; also the dignity and humility - the Christ-like forbearance - with which Joan faces her clerical captors. This is a point that seems to me sometimes in danger of being overlooked (or misunderstood, or even wilfully ignored). For just as the bishops and priests who presume to judge Joan are shown, unambiguously, to be in the grip of a false and evil Christianity, so, equally, the conduct of Joan under the torment of her torturers testifies to the fact that goodness does exist in the universe, and that Christianity can be lived truly. The deposition of Joan's trial on which the film's dialogue is based was, according to Dreyer, "the greatest document of our history". He means, I think, not only the greatest, but the most inspiring.
Sixteen years later Day of Wrath returns to the subject of Christianity's role as a persecuting agent. We are in Denmark in the mid 17th century, at the time of the notorious witch trials. Anne (Lisbeth Movin), who has just married a widowed priest old enough to be her father, falls in love with the priest's son from his first marriage, who is visiting the family home during a break from his theological studies. Cue for the priest's elderly but still formidable mother to accuse the young home-wrecker of witchcraft - an accusation made the more plausible (in her eyes at least) by the fact that the girl's mother, at some time in the distant past, had shown signs of harbouring a similar disposition, and had been spared retribution only through her son's (misguided) intervention.
So is Anne a witch or isn't she? Naturally, Dreyer doesn't believe in witches - and neither do we, the modern audience. But neither is Anne timid or innocent. In her smouldering glances, no less than in the sincerity of her love for the young theological student who has stumbled into her life, Anne dramatises (most beautifully and subtly) a defiance of convention that can only be called bewitching or witchlike. In some profound, moving and tragic way she is a witch (as perhaps, in another way, Joan is too). And since she is a witch, she will perish for it... As for organised Christianity, there's no mistaking Dreyer's indignation at the crimes that have been committed in its name, for the best and worst reasons imaginable (there's no pity here for superstition or foolishness). Yet it's part of the film's realism, and of Dreyer's historical scrupulousness, that the dignitaries of the church are presented as whole human beings, in their own shades of grey, and that the church itself, as an institution, should be painted with a weight and eloquence that resist the reductiveness of caricature.
If these two earlier films pay a qualified respect to religion (in the midst of unanswerable criticisms), what is the modern viewer to make of Ordet? Can anyone define the film's true meaning? Everything about it (but nothing so much as its stupendous climax) is swathed in an impenetrable mystery. And at the centre of the film, untouchable, are the Christian mysteries themselves: the incarnation, the resurrection, the promise of eternal life.
Inger, the good country wife, dies in childbirth, leaving her family inconsolable. At the funeral there appears, after an absence, her mad brother Johannes, seemingly cured of the religious mania which for years has tormented his family, and which has taken the form (quite common among schizophrenics) of the delusion that he is, or speaks for, Jesus Christ. Yet his cure, it seems, is illusory. In front of Inger's grieving husband and the rest of the family he offers to bring the dead woman back to life again. Naturally, the onlookers are horrified. But turning to Inger's young niece, and speaking to her the words Christ spoke to the little children, Johannes makes the miracle happen. Inger breathes, slowly opens her eyes, and from within the confines of the coffin wakes up dreamily from the sleep of death. And we, the audience, believe it.
What can belief mean in this context? Neither you, nor I, nor probably Dreyer himself can say for certain. The only thing relevant - the only thing the audience can hang on to - is the beauty, power and rightness of the outcome. Everything bows, as it were, to the scene's sublime and overwhelming emotional force, which penetrates and demolishes even the best-protected scepticism.
Ordet is one of the world's cinematic masterpieces. The viewer still doesn't know, after it's over, (and I'm sure it doesn't matter) whether it 'proves' Dreyer was a Christian or not. It's not, after all, an original work - being adapted from a play by Danish pastor Kaj Munk (at first a Nazi sympathiser; later shot by the Germans).
Neither Vampyr nor Gertrud in any case is the remotest bit Christian. About Vampyr it's sufficient to say that this strange, unsettling fable, taken (very freely) from Sheridan Le Fanu's 19th-century ghost story Carmilla, is one of the key horror movies in film history - as important as Nosferatu in establishing the archaeology of the genre. (The finest analysis of the film is probably still that of S.S. Prawer in his 1980 book Caligari's Children: Film as Tale of Terror.) But we do need to return to Gertrud, if only to set it up for a final comparison with Ordet. For ever since the notorious reception given Dreyer's last film at the Cannes film festival in 1964, when it was barracked and booed by the audience, it has been the work that has most divided his partisans: some (such as Lars von Trier) claiming it as a supreme final testimony, others as evidence only of the director's senile self-indulgence. It is indeed an extraordinary exercise in style. But what about its content?
The relevant context for Gertrud seems to me to be late-19th-century feminism. The film follows the path of the eponymous heroine in her search for a love object (a husband, a lover: she has no bourgeois prejudices) who can be met with, and lived with, in terms of spiritual equality. The Swedish dramatist Hjalmar Söderberg wrote the original play in 1906 after he'd broken up with his mistress Marie von Platen, and one might be tempted to consider the transmutation of this still-living woman into Gertrud as a pointed act of revenge. For undoubtedly there's something monstrous, even castrating, about the self-absorption of the heroine's high-minded idealism. Dreyer took only what he wanted from Söderberg, but some of the dramatist's ambivalence towards the feminist project survives. Thus the message on the medallion Gertrud shows her elderly admirer in the final scene bears a retrospective irony: "Love conquers all." But what kind of love has left the woman lonely and celibate?
Yet the serenity Gertrud shows is neither false nor self-deluding. Within the framework of a lifetime (and, says the film, what is life anyway but a dream?) who shall say what victory or failure means? The exemplary beauty of Gertrud's concept of love is that, for all its high-mindedness, it is anchored in the erotic - it belongs inescapably to the body. So this stately, slow-moving and 'old-fashioned' film that was famously mocked at its opening contains - to win over even the most sceptical viewer - one of the most beautiful screen kisses in cinema. The entire sequence of Gertrud's tryst in the park with the young pianist, and their subsequent afternoon love affair, is imagined, incarnated and executed with a delicacy that defies paraphrase. True to its symbolist aesthetic, the film seems to be hinting that there are concepts and feelings that are beyond reason or reasoning. Gertrud's profession is singing, and in the musical counterpoint set up between voice and piano (as equally in the wonderful connecting interludes which the film's composer Jørgen Jersild scored for string quartet) the movie finds its true language. Woven into its cadences are hidden the characters' passionate, tormented and ultimately unknowable destinies.