Carl Theodor Dreyer (Danish:[ˈkʰɑˀlˈtsʰe̝ːotɒˈtʁɑjˀɐ]; 3 February 1889 – 20 March 1968), commonly known asCarl Th. Dreyer,[1] was a Danish film director and screenwriter. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers in history, 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.[2][3][4][5][6]
Dreyer was bornillegitimate inCopenhagen. 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."[7] 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 theSocial Liberal party, a conservative group radical only in their opposition to military expenditures."[8] Dreyer recalled "Even when I was withEkstrabladet, 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."[8]
Dreyer died of pneumonia in Copenhagen at age 79. The documentaryCarl Th. Dreyer: My Metier contains reminiscences from people who knew him.
As a young man, Dreyer worked as a journalist, and he eventually joined the film industry as a writer oftitle cards forsilent films and subsequently of screenplays. He was initially hired byNordisk 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 metJean 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 ofJoan 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 BaronNicolas 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 avampire. Dreyer 's greatness lies in handling Vampyr from the vampire theme in terms of sexuality and eroticism and partly from its highly distinctive dreamy look. Some of the moods and images conveyed are truly uncanny : the long voyage of a coffin from the apparent viewpoint of the corpse inside ; a dance of ghostly shadows inside a barn ; a female vampire's expression of carnal desires for her fragile sister ; an evil doctor 's mysterious death by suffocation in a flour mill and a protracted dream sequence that manages to dovetail eerily into the narrative proper . However, both films were box office failures and Dreyer did not make another movie until World War II.
By 1943,Denmark was under Nazi occupation, and Dreyer's filmDay of Wrath had as its theme the paranoia surrounding witch hunts in the seventeenth century in a stronglytheocratic culture. With this work, Dreyer established the style that would mark his sound films: carefulcompositions, stark monochrome cinematography, and verylong 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 byKaj Munk. The film combines a love story with a conflict of faith.
Dreyer's last film was 1964'sGertrud. 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."[9] 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 aboutJesus. Although a manuscript was written (published in 1968), the unstable economic conditions and Dreyer's own perfectionism left the project undeveloped at his death.
_by_Erling_Mandelmann.jpg)
.jpg)
