Carl Theodor Dreyer

We could not have had Carl Theodor Dreyer’s cinema, which of course would have been a real disgrace for humanity, which would have been deprived of enduring works of art. And it is that the great Danish filmmaker was born in Copenhagen on February 3, 1889 as a result of the relationship of Jens Christian Torp, a wealthy Swedish landowner from Grantinge (Sweden), with his housekeeper, Josephine Nilsson. His father only wanted to avoid scandal, so he ignored his offspring and sent the woman to give birth far from her, in the capital of Denmark. She, without resources, gave the newborn up for adoption and died two years later trying to abort. These facts would not come to know the future film director until he was 17 years old, when he traveled to Sweden to find out the whole truth of his origins. Would this past influence the conception of the heroines of your films, Joan of Arc, Inger, Gertrude and company? No doubt yes.

Meanwhile, he is first welcomed by a working-class family, the Petersen, and finally by the Dreyers, who give him the name Carl Theodor. It does not seem that love reigned in the home presided over by a printer worker with socialist and irreligious ideas. In this disaffection weighs a daughter born out of wedlock, and that the adoptee is not, in the end, flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood.

In the complete study of the filmmaker written by José Andrés Dulce, three probable national influences on Dreyer are mentioned: the naturalist Georg Brandes, the philosopher Sören Kierkegaard and the writer Hans Christian Andersen . As a young boy, he works as an apprentice at the Copenhagen Electric and Gas Company, and at the telegraph office. It does not seem that he intends to progress there, and instead he is attracted to writing for the press, so that in the Berlingske Tidende newspaper he signs articles on topics as amazing as aeronautics; and it is that Dreyer himself took out his pilot’s license. Curiously, it seems that his first professional contact with cinema came about here, when he criticizes in an article the cost of the aerial scenes in the film The Triple Somersault; As a result, he will be hired as a consultant by the producer Kai van der Aa Kühle, launching his career as a filmmaker. In 1911, that is, at the age of 22, he married Ebba Larsen, the daughter of a merchant, his wife until his death, who bore him two children.

At the Nordisk Film production company, in addition to being a technical and artistic adviser for the films, he became an editor of intertitles, and became a scriptwriter. It is of course the silent film era, and for more than six years he writes multiple scripts, close to forty, an invaluable school of learning to one day get behind the camera. Such a day came in 1919, the year in which he made his directorial debut with Præsidenten , where he himself adapted a novel by Karl Emil Franzos about a woman accused of having killed her newborn son. Few suspect when the film is released how close this plot is to Dreyer. The idea of ​​non-birth will reappear years later in Ordet (The Word) , due to Inger’s miscarriage.

Pages from the Book of Satan (1921), divided into four segments set in the Palestine of the Passion of the Lord, the Seville of the Inquisition, the Paris of the French Revolution, and the framework of the Finnish civil war, is undeniably indebted to Intolerance (1916) by David W. Griffith , not only because of its structure, but also because of its theme, an intolerance that will later be scourged in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), perhaps the best film about the maiden of Orleans, with some arrogant and spiritual close-ups of Maria Falconetti, and an approach of rigorous asceticism, which strips the narrative of any artifice. He will always shoot in black and white, about which he will say “you work with lights and shadows, with lines on lines; and in color, with surfaces on surfaces, shapes on shapes and colors on colors”, so that he will not get to explore what he calls “color constellations”, that will be for others. Páginas also allows us to intuit a film that he did not become, The Judgment of Jesus , in whose preparations he was still submerged when he reached his death in 1968.

Titles like La viuda del pastor (1920) and El amo de la casa (1925) deal with domestic stories, family dramas that investigate the miseries that certain homes contain; the second is truly brilliant, an advanced defense of women and the value of housework in the face of rampant authoritarian machismo, but served with fine irony, and respecting all the characters, a rule of conduct that he will follow in all his films. Michael (1924) takes him to Germany, and handles a story set in the artistic world that has a script by Thea von Harbou; Perhaps most surprising is the absence of an expressionist imprint that the time and place seemed to demand, in addition to a father-son type relationship with the question of ingratitude and youthful unconsciousness involved. Also in Germany, she shot the surprising The Vampire Witch , also known by its original title, Vampyr , fantastic and vampire cinema, but of course, Dreyerian fantastic cinema. It was Dreyer’s first sound film, and it ended in failure, despite its fascinating images, those nightmarish scenes of the protagonist’s burial with POV shots from inside the coffin. More than a decade had to pass before he could direct again. As happened to another famous filmmaker, Orson Welles, Dreyer will have a hard time making the movies he wants. For example, he refused to shoot in 1934 an adaptation of “Pan”, the work of Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun , because Nazi Germany does not offer him an environment in which he feels comfortable to work.

Although, there is no good that does not come by evil, this allows us to discover his brief facet as a film critic in the 30s, when he wrote film reviews in the Berlingske Tidend; he is so harsh in his judgments -of Clarence Brown ‘s Anna Karenina (1935) he will say after praising the technical questions that “the characters become clichés”-, that in three months they will ask him to abandon this task.

In 1943 he delivered Dies irae , a new plea against intolerance, which is related to The Passion of Joan of Arc , and which some consider to have influenced Ingmar Bergman ‘s The Seventh Seal , although the religious vision of the Swede is quite different from that of Dreyer, this one is a believer, the other is involved in a distressing search for God where Lutheranism is much more suffocating. In any case, the story of infidelity shines with a fantastic Lisbeth Movin as the young wife of a Lutheran pastor, attracted to her stepson, a diabolical action in pursuit of love perhaps more prosaic than the witchcraft that certain inquisitors want to see, but equally destructive.

Two people arrives two years later, a commission that he makes his own with his great talent, and once again, the silence, only broken by two indisputable masterpieces, the miraculous Ordet (The Word) (1955) -even for incredulous people it seems inevitable venerate this film about the relationship of faith and science, and the way to approach religious practice- and a jewel about what love is and its ups and downs, Gertrud (1964), in which the option of solitude gives off an infinite sadness. What in another could be artificial -very sustained sequence shots, management of the scenic space, sentences loaded with content, a certain hieraticism, the use of mirrors, doors, bird cages and candles…-, in Dreyer it helps to create audiovisual stories. unforgettable.

An unrepeatable filmmaker, nobody has impregnated his films with spirituality and humanism like him, only Lars von Trier , a compatriot who filmed his script for Medea (1988) , has dared to make a cinema so risky and faithful to his vision of things, in that sense he never sold his soul directing what he did not want. He used to prefer making short documentaries, works developed between 1946 and 1955, or supervising the programming of the movie theater he ran.