Carl Theodor Dreyer, commonly known as Carl Th. Dreyer, was a Danish film director. His movies are noted for their emotional austerity and slow, stately pacing. Frequent themes that his films explore are 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. Dreyer is regarded by many critics and filmmakers as one of the greatest directors in cinema. His 1928 movie The Passion of Joan of Arc is considered to be one of the greatest movies of all time, renown for its cinematography and use of close-ups. It frequently appears on Sight & Sound's lists of the greatest films ever made, and in 2012's poll it was voted the 9th best film ever made by film critics and 37th by film directors. His other best known films include MichaelVampyr, Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud.
Life
Dreyer was born illegitimate in Copenhagen, Denmark. 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. 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." But he was a highly intelligent school student, who left home and formal education at the age of sixteen. He dissociated himself from his adoptive family, but their teachings were to influence the themes of many of his films. Dreyer was ideologically conservative. According to David Bordwell, "As a youth he belonged to the Social Liberal party, a conservative group radical only in their opposition to military expenditures...'Even when I was with Ekstrabladet,' Dreyer recalled, '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.'" Dreyer died of pneumonia in Copenhagen at age 79. The documentary contains reminiscences from those who knew him.
Career
As a young man, Dreyer worked as a journalist, but he eventually joined the film industry as a writer of title cards for silent films and subsequently of screenplays. He was initially hired by Nordisk 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 met Jean 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 of Joan's trial, he created a masterpiece of emotion that drew equally on realism and expressionism. Dreyer used private finance from Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg to make his next film as the Danish film industry was in financial ruin. Vampyr is a surreal meditation on fear. Logic gave way to mood and atmosphere in this story of a man protecting two sisters from a vampire. The movie contains many indelible images, such as the hero, played by de Gunzburg, dreaming of his own burial and the animal blood lust on the face of one of the sisters as she suffers under the vampire's spell. The film was shot mostly silent but with sparse, cryptic dialogue in three separate versions – English, French, and German. Both films were box office failures, and Dreyer did not make another movie until 1943. Denmark was by now under Nazi occupation, and his Day of Wrath had as its theme the paranoia surrounding witch hunts in the seventeenth century in a strongly theocratic culture. With this work, Dreyer established the style that would mark his sound films: careful compositions, stark monochrome cinematography, and very long takes. Dreyer made two documentaries in the more than a decade before his next full-length feature film, in 1955, Ordet, based on the play of the same name by Kaj Munk. The film combines a love story with a conflict of faith. Dreyer's last film was 1964's Gertrud. 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. The great, never finished project of Dreyer's career was a film about Jesus. Though a manuscript was written the unstable economic conditions and Dreyer's own demands of realism together with his switching engagement let it remain a dream.
