Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ordet: My Summer with the Danish Filmmaker

Appendix F: Dreyer on film style

A work of art, like a human being, has a personality, a soul. It is revealed in the way the artist expresses his conception of whatever subject he treats. If the artist’s inspiration is to be embodied in an artistic form, style is necessary. Through style the artist achieves unity, and through it he forces other men to see with his eyes. Invisible and intangible, style permeates a genuine work of art and cannot be separated from it. A work of art is always the outcome of the labor of a single man. But a motion picture is created by the exertions of a collection of men, and a collective cannot produce art unless an artistic personality gives the collective its energy and direction. Dreyer on film style Appendix F Appendix F 136 The first act in the creation of a motion picture is the author’s, and his labor is the basis of the film. But thereafter all devolves upon the director, and it is he who forms the style of the film, who unites and brings to life the contributions of the individuals in the collective. The film becomes tinged with the director’s feeling and sentiments. This must happen. Otherwise, in the hearts of the spectators, there will be alien moods, and merely personal reactions. It is the director’s style that endows a film with a soul, that lifts it into the realm of art. The director alone can give a film a face—his own. This is the director’s great responsibility. I would like to recount the things that determined the style of Day of Wrath.* I shall commence by discussing the photography and the rhythm. In talking pictures the spoken word too easily displaces the visual, actors are too garrulous, and the eye is infrequently invited to rest upon some fine, or some telling, pictorial effect. In Day of Wrath I attempted to restore to the visual the priority which is its due. But I did not introduce scenes merely for their pictorial beauty, merely to delight the eye. I adhered to the rule that unless a sequence advances the action it is detrimental to the picture. No matter how beautiful it may be. Because bright tones in a picture lighten the mood of *Day of Wrath tells two stories simultaneously: the personal one of a young wife who falls in love with her stepson, and the social one of witchcraft and the suppression of the demonic forces called by that name. Dreyer on film style 137 the spectator and dark tones subdue it, my cameraman and I agreed that the historical period, and the story, of Day of Wrath, would be suggested best by slightly veiled photography , with soft gray and black tones. Now the human eye easily accepts horizontal lines and reacts against vertical lines. The eye is diffident toward stationary things but is attracted by objects in action. Which is why the eye follows smooth and rhythmic panoramic camera movements with pleasure, and why, as a general rule, one must try to keep a picture in a continually flowing, horizontally gliding motion. By the sudden introduction of vertical lines an immediate dramatic effect can be produced. For instance, the scene in Day of Wrath in which the ladder is raised prior to being thrown into the fire. I come now to the question of rhythm. In recent years there has been a conscious striving for a new rhythm, a special talking picture rhythm. I am thinking of certain American and of almost all the good French psychological films. In them the scenes were worth seeing and the lines worth hearing. In them there was a stability in the rhythm that makes it possible for the spectator to repose in the picture, while listening to the spoken words. In Day of Wrath I strove for this rhythm. In some of the dramatic sequences (e.g., the two young people at Absalom ’s bier) I used, instead of rapidly changing pictures, what I would characterize as long, panoramic close-ups which rhythmically followed the actors, sensing their way from one actor to the other, depending upon which action was to be stressed next. In spite of, or perhaps because of, its almost Appendix F 138 wave-length rhythm, this sequence is one of the passages that affect the spectator most completely. Day of Wrath has been aspersed as...