Carl Theodor Dreyer

Carl Theodor Dreyer
Dreyer in 1965
Born	(1889-02-03)3 February 1889 Copenhagen, Denmark
Died	20 March 1968(1968-03-20) (aged 79) Copenhagen, Denmark
Nationality	Danish
Occupation(s)	Film director, screenwriter
Years active	1919–1968
Spouse	Ebba Larsen ​ (m. 1911)​
Children	2
Awards	Golden Lion at the 1955 Venice Film Festival for Ordet (The Word)

Carl Theodor Dreyer (Danish: [ˈkʰɑˀl ˈtsʰe̝ːotɒ ˈtʁɑjˀɐ]; 3 February 1889 – 20 March 1968), commonly known as Carl Th. Dreyer, was a Danish film director and screenwriter. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his movies are noted for emotional austerity and slow, stately pacing, frequent themes of social intolerance, the inseparability of fate and death, and the power of evil in earthly life.

His 1928 movie The Passion of Joan of Arc is considered to be one of the great movies of all time, renowned for its cinematography and use of close-ups. It frequently appears on Sight & Sound's lists of the great films ever made, and in 2012's poll, it was voted the ninth-best film by film critics and 37th by film directors.

His other well-known films include Michael (1924), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (The Word) (1955), and Gertrud (1964).

Life

Dreyer was born illegitimate in Copenhagen, Denmark. His birth mother was an unmarried, Scanian maid named Josefine Bernhardine Nilsson, and he was put up for adoption by his birth father, Jens Christian Torp, a married Danish farmer living in Sweden who was his mother's employer. He spent the first two years of his life in orphanages until his adoption by a typographer named Carl Theodor Dreyer and his wife Inger Marie (née Olsen). He was named after his adoptive father, but in accordance with Danish practice, there is no Senior or Junior added to their names to distinguish them from each other.

His adoptive parents were emotionally distant, and his childhood was largely unhappy. He later recalled that his parents "constantly let me know that I should be grateful for the food I was given and that I strictly had no claim on anything since my mother got out of paying by lying down to die." He was a highly intelligent school student, who left home and formal education at the age of 16. He dissociated himself from his adoptive family, but their teachings influenced the themes of many of his films.

Dreyer was ideologically conservative. David Bordwell stated "As a youth he belonged to the Social Liberal party, a conservative group radical only in their opposition to military expenditures." Dreyer recalled "Even when I was with Ekstrabladet, I was conservative...I don't believe in revolutions. They have, as a rule, the tedious quality of pulling development back. I believe more in evolution, in the small advances."

Dreyer died of pneumonia in Copenhagen at age 79. The documentary Carl Th. Dreyer: My Metier contains reminiscences from people who knew him.

Career

Early works

French poster for The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

As a young man, Dreyer worked as a journalist, and he eventually joined the film industry as a writer of title cards for silent films and subsequently of screenplays. He was initially hired by Nordisk Film in 1913.

His first attempts at film direction had limited success, and he left Denmark to work in the French film industry. While living in France he met Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, and other members of the French artistic scene.

In 1928 he made his first classic film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Working from the transcripts of Joan of Arc's trial, he created a masterpiece of emotion that drew equally on realism and expressionism. Because the Danish film industry was in financial ruin, Dreyer depended on private financing from Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg to make his next film, Vampyr (1932), a surreal meditation on fear. Logic gave way to mood and atmosphere in this story of a man protecting two sisters from a vampire. Both films were box office failures, and Dreyer did not make another movie until World War II.

Later career

By 1943, Denmark was under Nazi occupation, and Dreyer's film Day of Wrath had as its theme the paranoia surrounding witch hunts in the seventeenth century in a strongly theocratic culture. With this work, Dreyer established the style that would mark his sound films: careful compositions, stark monochrome cinematography, and very long takes.

Dreyer made two documentaries in the more than a decade before his next full-length feature film, in 1955, Ordet (The Word), based on the play of the same name by Kaj Munk. The film combines a love story with a conflict of faith.

Dreyer's last film was 1964's Gertrud. Although seen by some as a lesser film than its predecessors, it is a fitting close to Dreyer's career as it deals with a woman who, through the tribulations of her life, never expresses regret for her choices. David Thomson says it "awaits rediscovery as Dreyer's finest film and vindication of his method." Thomson quotes Dreyer:

What interests me—and this comes before technique—is reproducing the feelings of the characters in my films...The important thing...is not only to catch hold of the words they say, but also the thoughts behind the words. What I seek in my films, what I want to obtain, is a penetration to my actors' profound thoughts by means of their most subtle expressions...that lie in the depths of his soul. This what interests me above all, not the technique of the cinema. Gertrud is a film I made with all my heart.

The great, never finished project of Dreyer's career was a film about Jesus. Although a manuscript was written (published in 1968), the unstable economic conditions and Dreyer's own perfectionism left the project undeveloped at his death.

Filmography

Feature films

Year	English title	Original title	Production country	Notes
1919	The President	Præsidenten	Denmark	based on the novel by Karl Emil Franzos
1920	The Parson's Widow	Prästänkan	Sweden	based on the story "Prestekonen" by Kristofer Janson
1921	Leaves from Satan's Book	Blade af Satans bog	Denmark	loosely based on The Sorrows of Satan
1922	Love One Another	Die Gezeichneten	Germany	based on the novel by Aage Madelung
1922	Once Upon a Time	Der var engang	Denmark	based on the play by Holger Drachmann
1924	Michael	Mikaël	Germany	based on the novel Mikaël (1904) by Herman Bang
1925	Master of the House (aka Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife)	Du skal ære din hustru	Denmark	based on the play by Svend Rindom
1926	The Bride of Glomdal	Glomdalsbruden	Norway	based on the novel by Jacob Breda Bull
1928	The Passion of Joan of Arc	La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (Jeanne d'Arc lidelse og død)	France	co-written with Joseph Delteil, author of the novel Jeanne d'Arc (1925, Prix Femina), named the most influential film of all time by the curators of the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival
1932	Vampyr	Vampyr – Der Traum des Allan Grey	France/Germany	loosely based on the short story collection In a Glass Darkly (1872) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
1943	Day of Wrath	Vredens Dag	Denmark	based on the play Anne Pedersdotter by Hans Wiers-Jenssen, hymns by Paul La Cour
1945	Two People	Två människor	Sweden	based on the play Attentat by W.O. Somin, made in Nazi-related exile in Sweden, the film was disowned by Dreyer and withdrawn from distribution
1955	The Word	Ordet	Denmark	based on the play by Kaj Munk
1964	Gertrud	Gertrud	Denmark	based on the play by Hjalmar Söderberg

Short films

• Good Mothers (Mødrehjælpen, 12 min, 1942)
• Water from the Land (Vandet på landet, 1946)
• The Struggle Against Cancer (Kampen mod kræften, 15 min, 1947)
• The Danish Village Church (Landsbykirken, 14 min, 1947)
• They Caught the Ferry (De nåede færgen, 11 min, 1948)
• Thorvaldsen (10 min, 1949)
• The Storstrom Bridge (Storstrømsbroen, 7 min, 1950)
• The Castle Within the Castle (Et Slot i et slot, 1955)

Further reading

• Bordwell, David (January 1981). The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-04450-0.
• Carney, Raymond Francis, Junior, Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Dreyer, Carl Theodor; Skoller, Donald (1973). Dreyer in double reflection. Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80458-8.
• Milne, Tom (1971). The cinema of Carl Dreyer. A. S. Barnes. ISBN 9780498077111.
• Schamus, James (1 January 2008). Carl Theodor Dreyer's Gertrud: The Moving Word. University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-295-98854-2.
• Wahl, Jan (2012). Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ordet: My Summer with the Danish Filmmaker. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-3618-9.

External links

• Official website
• Carl Theodor Dreyer at IMDb
• CarlDreyer.com (archived)
• In-depth article from 1951 on 'The Tyrannical Dane'
• Bibliography
• Thoughts on My Métier by Carl Theodor Dreyer
• Carl Th. Dreyer by Armond White