Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
exhaustive, in part because of the avantgarde's own insistence that film is a specific if
compound medium, whether basically 'photogenic' (as Epstein and others believed) or
'durational' (film was first defined as 'time-based' by Walter Ruttmann in 1919). The
modernist credo that art is a language brought the early avant-gardes close to Kuleshov
('the shot as a sign'), to Eisensteinian montage, and to Vertov's 'theory of intervals' in
which the gaps between shots -- like silences in post-serial music -- are equal in value to
the shots themselves.
Even the supposedly unified constructivist movement (itself made up of both rationalist
and spiritualist traits) included 'cinematology' (Malevich), the Dada-flavoured films of
Stefan and Franciszka Themerson (whose Adventures of a Good Citizen, made in Poland
in 1937, inspired Polanski's 1957 surreal skit Two Men and a Wardrobe), the abstract film
Black-Grey-White ( 1930) by László Moholy- Nagy as well as his later documentary
shorts (several, like a portrait of Lubetkin's London Zoo, made in England), the semiotic
film projects of the young Polish artist and political activist Mieczyslaw Szczuka and the
light-play experiments of the Bauhaus. For these and other artists filmmaking was an
additional activity to their work in other media.
FROM EUROPE TO THE USA
The inter-war period closes emblematically with Richter's exile from Nazi-occupied
Europe to the USA in 1940. Shortly before, he had completed his book
The Struggle for
the Film
, in which he had praised both the classic avantgarde as well as primitive cinema
and documentary film as opponents of mass cinema, seen as manipulative of its audience
if also shot through (despite itself) with new visual ideas. In the USA, Richter became
archivist and historian of the experimental cinema in which he had played a large role,
issuing (and re-editing, by most accounts) his own early films and Eggeling's. The famous
1946 San Francisco screenings, Art in Cinema, which he co-organized, brought together
the avant-garde classics with new films by Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, Curtis
Harrington, and Kenneth Anger; an avant-garde renaissance at a time when the movement
was largely seen as obsolete.
Richter's influence on the new wave was limited but substantial. His own later films --
such as Dreams that Money can Buy ( 1944-7) -- were long undervalued as baroque
indulgences (with episodes directed by other exiles such as Man Ray, Duchamp, Léger,
and Max Ernst) by contrast to the 'pure' -- and to a later generation more 'materialist'
-abstract films of the 1920s. Regarded at the time as 'archaic',
Dreams
now seems
uncannily prescient of a contemporary post-modernist sensibility. David Lynch selected
extracts from it, along with films by Vertov and Cocteau, for his 1986 BBC
Arena
film
survey. Stylish key episodes include Duchamp's reworking of his spiral films and early
paintings, themselves derived from cubism and chronophotography, with sound by John
Cage. Man Ray contributes a playful skit on the act of viewing, in which a semi-
hypnotized audience obeys increasingly absurd commands issued by the film they
supposedly watch. Ernst's episode eroticizes the face and body in extreme close-up and
rich colour, looking ahead to today's 'cinema of the body' in experimental film and video.
Richter's own classes in film-making were attended by, among others, another recent
immigrant Jonas Mekas, soon to be the energetic magus of the 'New American Cinema'.
Two decades earlier, the avant-garde had time-shifted cubism and Dada into film history
(both movements were essentially over by the time artists were able to make their own
films). By the 1940s, a new avant-garde again performed a complex, overlapping loop,
reasserting internationalism and experimentation, at a time as vital for transatlantic art as
early modernism had been for Richter's generation. Perhaps the key difference, as P.
Adams Sitney argues, is that the first avant-garde had added film to the potential and
traditional media at an artist's disposal, while new American (and soon European)
filmmakers after the Second World War began to see filmmaking more exclusively as an
art form that could exist in its own right, so that the artist-film-maker could produce a
body of work in that medium alone. Ironically, this generation also reinvented the silent
film, defying the rise of naturalistic sound which had in part doomed its avantgarde
ancestors in the 'poetic cinema' a decade before.
Bibliography
Curtis, David ( 1971),
Experimental Cinema
.
Drummond, Phillip, Dusinberre, Deke, and Rees, A. L. (eds.) ( 1979),
Film as Film
.
Hammond, Paul ( 1991),
The Shadow and its Shadow
.
Kuenzli, Rudolf E. (ed.) ( 1987),
Dada and Surrealist Film.
Lawdor, Standish ( 1975),
The Cubist Cinema
.
Richter, Hans ( 1986),
The Struggle for the Film
.
Sitney, P. Adams ( 1974),
Visionary Film
.
Carl Theodor Dryer (1889-1968)
The illegitimate son of a maid and a factory-owner from Sweden, Dreyer was born and
brought up in Copenhagen, where his adoptive family subjected him to a miserable and
loveless childhood. To earn a living as soon as possible, he found work as theatre critic
and air correspondent for a Danish newspaper. He also began to write film scripts, the
first of which was made into a film in 1912. The following year he began an
apprenticeship at Nordisk, for whom he worked in various capacities and wrote some
twenty scripts. In 1919 he directed his first film, The President
(Præsidenten),
a
melodrama with a rather clotted Griffithian narrative structure which nevertheless showed
a strong visual sense. This was followed by the striking Leaves from Satan's Book
(Blade
of Satans bog),
an episode film partly modelled on Intolerance, shot in 1919 but not
released until 1921. The young Dreyer proved to be something of a perfectionist in
matters of
mise en scène
and in the choice and direction of actors. This provoked a break
with Nordisk and the director embarked on a independent career which led him to make
his remaining silent films in five different countries. The Parson's Widow (
Prästänkan
,
1920) was shot in Norway for Svensk Filmindustri. While owing a stylistic debt to
Sjöström and Stiller, it shows a marked preference for character analysis at the expense of
narrative development. This impression is confirmed by Mikael, made in Germany in
1924, the story of an emotional triangle linking a painter, his male model, and a Russian
noblewoman who seduces the boy away from the master, depriving him of his inspiration.
Although heavy with symbolist overtones (derived in large part from the original novel by
Hermann Bang), Mikael represents Dreyer's first real attempt to analyse the inner life of
characters in relation to their environment.
Ordet
( 1955)
Dreyer fell out with Erich Pommer, the producer of Mikael, and returned to Denmark
where he made Master of the House (
Du skal ære din hustru,
1925), a drama about a
father whose egotistical and authoritarian behaviour wreaks terror on his wife and
children. Here the closeups on faces take on a crucial role. 'The human face', Dreyer
wrote, 'is a land one can never tire of exploring There is no greater experience in a studio
than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of
inspiration.' This idea is the key to The Passion of Joan of Arc (
La Passion de Jeanne
d'Arc
, 1928), in which the close-up reaches its apotheosis in the long sustained sequence
of Joan's interrogation against a menacing architectural backdrop-all the more oppressive
for seeming to lack precise spatial location.
Dyeyer's last silent film, Joan of Arc was shot in France with massive technical and
financial resources and in conditions of great creative freedom. It was instantly acclaimed
by the critics as a masterpiece. But it was a commercial disaster, and for the next forty
years Dreyer was only able to direct five more feature films. Vampyr ( 1932) fared even
worse at the box office. Using only non-professional actors, Vampyr is one of the most
disturbing horror films ever made, with a hallucinatory and dreamlike visionary quality
intensified by a misty and elusive photographic style. But it was badly received, and
Dreyer found himself at the height of his powers with the reputation of being a tiresome
perfectionist despot whose every project was a failure.
Over the next ten years Dreyer worked on abortive projects in France, Britain, and
Somalia, before returning to his former career as a journalist in Denmark. Finally, in
1943, he was able to direct Day of Wrath
(Vredens dag)
, a powerful statement on faith,
superstition and religious intolerance. Day of Wrath is stark and restrained, its style
pushing towards abstraction, enhanced by high-contrast photography. Danish critics saw
in the film a reference to Nazi persecution of the Jews, and the director was persuaded to
escape to Sweden. When the war was over, he returned to Copenhagen, scraping together
enough money from running a cinema to be able to finance The Word
(Ordet
, 1955) the
story of a feud between two families belonging to different religious sects, interlaced with
a love story between members of the opposing families.
Ordet
takes even further the
tendency towards simple and severe decors and mise en scène, intensified by the use of
long, slow takes. Even more extreme is Gertrud ( 1964), a portrait of a woman who
aspires to an ideal notion of love which she cannot find with her husband or either of her
two lovers, leading her to renounce sexual love in favour of asceticism and celibacy.
While the restrained classicism of
Ordet
won it a Golden Lion at the Venice Festival in
1955, the intransigence of Gertrud, with its static takes in which neither the camera not
the actors seem to move at all for long periods, was found excessive by the majority of
critics. A storm of abuse greeted what deserved to be seen as Dreyer's artistic testament, a
work of distilled and solemn contemplation. Dreyer continues to be admired for his visual
style, which, despite surface dissimilarities, is recognized as having a basic internal unity
and consistency, but the thematic coherence of his work-around issues of the unequal
struggle of women and the innocent against repression and social intolerance, the
inescapability of fate and death, the power of evil in earthly life-is less widely
appreciated. His last project was for a Life of Christ, in which he hoped to achieve a
synthesis of all stylistic and thematic concerns. He died shortly after he had succeeded in
raising the finance from the Danish government and Italian state television for this
project, on which he had been working for twenty years.
PAOLO CHERCHI USAI
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
Præsidenten (The President)
( 1919); Prästänkan (The Parson's Widow) ( 1920); Blade af Satans bog (Leaves from
Satan's Book) ( 1921); Die Gezeichneten (Love One Another) ( 1922); Der var engang
(Once upon a Time) ( 1922); Mikael (Michael / Chained / Heart's Desire / The Invert)
( 1924); Du skal ære din hustru (The Master of the House) ( 1925); Glomdalsbruden (The
Bride of Glomdale) ( 1926); La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc)
( 1928); Vampyr der Traum des Allan Gray (Vampyr / Vampire) ( 1932); Vredens dag
(Day of Wrath) ( 1943); Tvä Människor (Two People) ( 1945); Ordet (The Word) ( 1955);
Gertrud ( 1964)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bordwell, David ( 1981),
The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer
.
Drouzy, Maurice ( 1982),
Carl Th. Dreyer né Nilsson.
Monty, lb ( 1965),
Portrait of Carl Theodor Dreyer.
Sarris, Andrew (ed.) ( 1967),
Interviews with Film Directors.
.
Schrader, Paul ( 1972),
Transcendental Style in Film.
Serials
BEN SINGER