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

Chapter 4. Lambs in the front yard

There was a tiny bluish, oval-shaped glass, a type of lens Dreyer usually wore about his neck on a cord, made for him by a famous Venetian glassblower. If you looked into it, you could anticipate how objects might appear on-screen, since color values were transmuted to tones of black and white and gray. He’d gaze through it intently, standing in a field. Sometimes he assumed the role of a camera—squaring his hands in front, holding an invisible camera box. He would move forward as if rolling on a track, making a panorama of the landscape, gliding into it, then, just as rapidly, coming to a halt to focus and balance his composition. He would remain a little apart from the remainder of the company. When he’d finally settled on the movement of his “camera,” the equipment would be moved into place. Lambs in the front yard 4 Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ordet 36 At seven in the morning we were at the farm that was to be Borgensgaard, owned by Valdemar Kristensen, a distant cousin of the Munks. The location was about a ten-minute ride from the Vedersø Klit Hotel. The enclosed buildings of the farm were directly beside the winding dirt road. A cobblestone court lay in the middle; the living part contained thirteen rooms and was two hundred years old. The pig pen, hen roost, and stable had been added on forty years previously , in about 1915. Fru Kristensen, who was pregnant (as was Birgitte Federspiel, who was to play Inger), showed me the thirty newborn piglets. “Everybody has babies here,” she laughed. “Our dog Polly is fat with child too. She’s the lucky one; she gets to sleep under the oven. “They took a picture of me already. I had to run across our field to get help for Inger, who was struck ill in the story. They took it three times, but I had to run twenty times in all because Dreyer wanted me to ‘run nervously.’” Next she told me she had to scurry back to the washtubs , but if I ever got bored, I should come inside; she had a copy of The Poems of Robert Burns. It rained heavily at 6:00 a.m. The sky had been pitch-black. Now it was more blue-gray, yet the sun was not out yet. Some members of the company waited in the farm’s drawing room; others huddled inside the van or the old Dodge. Among the latter was Henning Bendtsen, the bearded cameraman, as well as two apprentices, Erik Willumsen and John Carlsen. I ran from the van to the Dodge to the drawing room, Lambs in the front yard 37 wondering who wanted coffee: Jesper Gottschalch, Dreyer’s assistant; Karen Petersen, the secretary or script girl; the makeup woman; and six crew members who handled sound, set up the camera tracks, or held the reflecting screens and such. The shot we waited for was the one that opens The Word. Gottschalch was anxious. “The tone of this film has to be evolved in these early scenes. Herr Dreyer depends on the skill with which the technicians respond to his descriptions. It will be hard for him. Danish cameramen, even the best, are used to bad equipment, small budgets, always pressed for time, and in general not having the training to be able to carry out subtle effects. What Dreyer needs is sympathy—he won’t always get it. He is too much of a perfectionist to suit them all. This isn’t merely a job. This they must understand if they have intelligence. They must succumb to his personality; that’s what it adds up to.” The name BORGENSGAARD in metal letters had been fastened to the house on the wall nearest the road. Gottschalch left to help two members of the crew, Herr Fuglsang (“Birdsong ”) and his son Bruno, try the silver reflecting screens on it. Clouds overhead were separating in slow motion. Young Carlsen said, “This will be the greatest experience I have ever had. Every time Vampyr and Day of Wrath are shown I go to see them. Did you ever see such pictures? I want to learn a lot here. Look what we are given to use! Two old, old cameras. A silent one, a little German Arriflex model. And the big sound camera isn...