THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF THE MAYTAG MAN
by Christopher S. Long
I have no idea if the brave soul who
scribbled the words “Maytag Man!!!” on the title page (pictured
above) of my library copy of Carl Th. Dreyer (edited by the late,
great Jytte Jensen) intended anything beyond a mere pun, but it still
seems inspired. Not only does Maytag make dryers (ah, you get it
now!) but the Maytag Repairman is “the loneliest man in town.”
Carl Thedor Dreyer is known today as
one of cinema's truly isolated visionaries. He didn't start out that
way. Barely in his twenties, the young man who had run away from his
adoptive family as a teenager had found his way into the heart and
soul of the biggest Danish film studio (Nordisk) right at the height
of a film boom in 1913, just as cinema was transitioning to the
feature-length narrative film. Dreyer was a valued employee, a true
young hot shot given a chance to direct at a young age.
By his second film (the amazing “Leaves
From Satan's Book” of 1921) it was already clear that Dreyer was
ill-equipped to work within a hierarchical system of any kind. Though
he lost a very vocal battle with his studio bosses over the budget
for the film, he walked away from what could have been a cushy studio
gig to pursue a career as, in effect, a freelance contractor, an
uncompromising path that took him to several countries and eventually
to the complete box-office failures of two of his masterpieces, “The
Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928) and “Vampyr” (1932).
This is when Dreyer's path became a
particularly lonely one. After “Vampyr” he spent most of the next
decade failing to get film projects off the ground and eventually
turning full-time to journalism, covering the courtroom beat in
Copenhagen. It paid the bills, but Dreyer's true passion was always
cinema and he was delighted to finally get the opportunity to direct
his next film, “Day of Wrath” (1943) after a decade on the
sidelines. Alas, it was another commercial flop, due in no small part
to the understandable fact that Danes enduring years of Nazi
occupation were in little mood for a downer film about the
persecution of witches. Maybe if he'd made it into a musical...
My students from my recently-completed
class on Dreyer at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute already know all
this, at least if they were listening which I'm certain they all
were. My intent with this informal post is to fill in a few of the
gaps in Dreyer's later career that we had to skim over for time
considerations, and to provide a few links and reading suggestions
for anyone looking to continue their Dreyer study beyond the four
films we screened in class: “The Passion of Joan of Arc,”
“Vampyr,” “Day of Wrath,” and “Ordet” (1955).
The post-war years produced many
developments (the rise of film festivals and a global art-house
audience, for example) that would eventually bolster Dreyer's
reputation, but after “Day of Wrath” flopped, he spent most of
the next decade directing state-funded short documentaries and
propaganda films. By propaganda I mean, for the most part,
educational “issue” movies. These films are seldom masterworks
but Dreyer wasn't like most directors.
The best of the bunch is a short titled
“They Caught The Ferry” (1948). You can watch it just above, but
I recommend you click on the “YouTube” button in the bottom right
to get a bigger image in a new screen. If Dreyer's late features
represent a move towards increasing stasis (if you've seen “Ordet”
or “Gertrud” you know what I mean) this short film suggests that
Dreyer had more than one gear (that's another bad pun, sorry.) Based
loosely on a novella by Nobel Prize-winning Danish author Johannes V.
Jensen, the short is intended to demonstrate the perils of reckless
driving. With its cuts from the blazing tires of a motorcycle to the
vertiginous scenery whisking by to the speedometer pushing inexorably
clockwise, it's enough to make you wonder what Carl Dreyer's “The
Fast and the Furious” might have looked liked.
1950's “The Storstrom Bridge” is
shot and edited more in the spirit of the poetic city symphony films
like 1927's “Berlin: Symphony of A Great City” though Dutch
filmmaker Joris Ivens' “The Bridge” is a much closer antecedent.
Dreyer's short is an ode to the then-longest bridge in Northern
Europe, constructed between 1933 and 1937 and spanning the strait
between the Danish islands of Falster and Masnedo. The link embedded
above has no subtitles though that's only an issue for one screen's
worth of information as the rest of the film is dialogue-free. If you
want the English subs, just click on this link.
THE LONG TAKE
As we discussed in class, Dreyer's
career would become substantially less lonely in the '50s with
government funding, his job running the Dagmar theater, and the
critical and commercial success of “Ordet.” The film's success is
somewhat surprising considering the glacial pacing of the film.
Whereas Dreyer was a strong proponent of montage in the '20s and
'30s, he came to believe that in the sound era cinema needed to
explore the power of the long take as much as possible. He even
fantasized about the possibility of an entire film composed of just a
few shots; too bad he wasn't around to tell us what he thought of
“Russian Ark” and its 90-minute unbroken take.
A listing of the Average Shot Length
(ASL) of Dreyer's films from 1928-1964 shows the unmistakable
progression. “Joan” represented an extreme; Dreyer's earlier
silent films had longer ASL's
AVERAGE SHOT LENGTH FOR CARL DREYER'S FILMS
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) –
3.3 seconds
Vampyr (1932)– 9 seconds
Day of Wrath (1943) – 14.8 seconds
Ordet (1955) – 65 seconds
Gertrud (1964) – 82 seconds
Of course there's much more to the
perceived pace of a film than just the average shot length. Many
modern Hollywood blockbuster have ASL's of 2 seconds or less and seem
unbearably tedious. But Dreyer was intentionally trying to slow
things down. He believed that sound cinema had pushed the image to
the side, diminishing its importance in favor of dialogue and he
felt viewers needed to be able to “rest on the pictures” rather
than be rushed to the next scene/conversation without time to
contemplate.
One the most exciting (and frustrating)
things about cinema is that there is no set way any or all viewers
will respond to a visual device. All languages are inherently
ambiguous at some level, this relatively new audio-visual grammar far
more so than the more venerable spoken word. Dreyer's combination of
long takes and tableau compositions impacts viewers in multiple
ways. For some it simply seems stuffy, an inefficient way of telling
the narrative, or just canned theater. Why does he have to linger on
so many details and stretch out so many moments when he could just
get to the point?
For others, the effect of these long
takes and tableau compositions is actually closely related to the
disorienting presentation of space and time in “Vampyr” where
Dreyer was clearly attempting to establish and maintain an uncanny
tone. By making viewers so conscious of the passage of time (the
ticking clocks and other off-screen sounds contributing) and by going
to such great pains to present every nook and cranny of the rooms in
which people interact, Dreyer engages in a process of
defamaliarization, giving the everyday and the mundane a sense of the
otherworldly. Think of how strange a familiar word becomes when you
say it over and over. The film also creates a sense of “something
else” lurking beyond the periphery, storm clouds gathering but
refusing to loose their lightning until the final scene. This style
is a conscious rejection of the sensory and narrative overload of
more traditional narrative cinema and I would argue it can be every
bit as radical as Dreyer's borderline avant-garde work on “Joan”
and “Vampyr.” It is certainly damned weird.
You may or may see that on an initial
screening of “Ordet” or “Gertrud” which certainly have earned
the adjective “difficult” and it's possible you won't see it on a
repeated viewing. I encourage skepticism, but also curiosity. If
you're in the skeptic category, jot down a note to revisit one or
both of these films in a year or two and see if you have a different
experience.
As also mentioned in class, Dreyer's
combination of long takes and tableau compositions provided a
template of sorts for a certain strand of art-house cinema. More
broadly you could just refer to this strand as minimalism, though
more specific versions have been called “slow cinema” or
“contemplative cinema.” I prefer the term “walkout cinema”
for the effect it has on festival audiences. Indeed, a look at the
directors who voted “Ordet” as one of their top ten films in the2012 “Sight & Sound” poll reveals a list of some of the
best-known practitioners of minimalism or so-called slow cinema,
including Pere Portabella, Jose Luis Guerin, and Hong Sangsoo with
“slow” Romanian director Corneliu Porumboui casting his vote for
“Gertrud.” By the way, feel free to lose about two weeks of your
life sorting through the database in that Sight&Sound poll. I
still check it out every few days. I'm particularly fond of seeing
how people's tastes form clusters.
Among the many filmmakers who have
cited Dreyer, and particularly “Ordet” and “Gertrud,” as
major influences are Marguerite Duras, Susan Sontag (who described
“Ordet” as “a kind of ideal experience of my imagination”,
the team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, and even Jean-Luc
Godard.
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| Livin' Lars |
And, of course, Lars von Trier. One
wonders if the influence extends far beyond a shared national
heritage and an idiosyncratic approach to spiritual material. But it
is a comparison Von Trier has strongly encouraged at certain points
in his career. The most direct connection was Von Trier filming
Dreyer's posthumously published screenplay of “Medea” in 1988.
Von Trier also used actor Preben Lerdorff Rye (Martin from “Day of
Wrath” and Johannes from “Ordet”) in his films “The Element
of Crime” and “Medea.” Cinematographer Henning Bendtsen
(“Ordet” and “Gertrud”) also shot Von Trier's “Epidemic”
and “Europa.”
BABETTE'S FEAST
Danish director Gabriel Axel was
obviously a big Dreyer fan. In his 1987 film “Babette's Feast,”
he reunited Lisbeth Movin and Preben Lerdorff Rye (Anne and Martin
from “Day of Wrath”) and also cast Birgitte Federspiel (Inger
from “Ordet.) Cay Kristiansen (Anders from “Ordet”) also has a
role.
THE DREYER FAMILY
Dreyer revealed little about his
private life. He married Ebba in 1911 and they remained together
until his death in 1968. Biographers Jean and Dale Drum suggest that
while their marriage was a devoted one, Carl often put film and his
career ahead of Ebba and that she sometimes suffered for it. Ebba
worked on most of Dreyer's films in a general all-purpose mode,
though most often in the job then described as “script-girl”
which meant it was her job to maintain continuity throughout a shoot,
to make sure costumes and décor matched from shot to shot, that
everyone had the right script pages, etc. She also dealt with the
cast and crew when her husband didn't quite want to. Ebba passed away
in 1977.
 |
| Ebba and Carl |
The Dreyers had two children. We know
little about son Erik save that he was described as having a drinking
problem and relied on his father for financial support Daughter Gunni
may or may not have suffered from mental illness though it is
possible she also suffered from lingering problems from a disease she
contracted in her twenties. Gunni lived with her parents well into
her forties. Gunni died in 1990, Erik in 1977.
DREYER READINGS AND RESOURCES
One of the best online resources is the
Dreyer site which is presented both in Danish and in English. I
assume you'll want a link to the latter. This site offers many short
summaries of films, some video links as well as links to a handful of
research articles and PDFs of original documents (though most in
Danish). It's comprehensive if not particularly in-depth.
David Bordwell has been, in my opinion,
the most perceptive writer on Carl Dreyer and I recommend his book
below. You can also get a sampling of some of the online criticism by
Bordwell and his wife Kristin Thompson, another brilliant critic, at this link.
Not directly related to Dreyer at all,
but if you ever wake up at night wondering what the average shot
length in a particular film is, you might be able to find it at the Cinemetrics website.
FILMS AND BOOKS FOR ADDITIONAL RESEARCH
I recommend all of the films directed
by Carl Dreyer, of course. However, I would first point you to the
1926 silent “Master of the House” which is now available on a
Blu-ray released by Criterion. “Gertrud” is another Criterion
release. Criterion also released an interesting documentary “Carl
Th. Dreyer – My Metier” (1995, 90 min.) directed by Torben Skjodt
Jensen. I highly recommend it.
We also mentioned another Danish film
in class, “Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages,” a 1922 silent
directed by Benjamin Christensen. I am reluctant to link to full
copies of the film online due to their questionable legality, but you
can check out a trailer here. I would describe it as history related
though the haze of a paranoid fever-dream with a the occasional orgy
thrown in for the whole family. Christensen was one of the few
accomplished Danish directors who preceded Dreyer, and Dreyer
respected him very much. In fact, Christensen played a major role in
Dreyer's “Michael” (1924).
As far as books on Dreyer, there are
many to choose from. I think David Bordwell's is the best, but it is
also a close formal reading with in-depth shot analysis and may not
be suited to all tastes. The MOMA book on Dreyer, edited by Jytte
Jensen, is deceptively slim and loaded with pictures, but is more
substantial than you might expect and readily accessible. “Dreyer
in Double Reflection” contains articles by Dreyer or transcripts of
Dreyer interviews that provide a sense of just how much his opinions
about film evolved over the years, not just his shift to longer takes
but also his changing belief in the primacy of the writer vs. the
director. The BFI booklet on “Vampyr” by David Rudkin is an
intriguing combination of heartfelt appreciation and careful textual
analysis.
Director/screenwriter/scholar Paul
Schrader published a book called “Transcendental Style in Film”
in 1972 in which he discusses the work of directors Robert Bresson,
Yasujiro Ozu, and Dreyer. He identifies commonalities in what he
calls “transcendental style” though he comes to the conclusion
that Dreyer doesn't really fit the model as well as the other two
directors. It's rather esoteric and I think a lot of what Schrader
identifies as transcendental style has since been subsumed into
studies of art-house narrative, but it's interesting.
For a discussion of the project that
consumed much of Dreyer's final twenty years and which may be the
most famous film never shot (along with Stanley Kubrick's
“Napoleon”). It includes the mostly-completed manuscript and
background on the project, including Dreyer's passionate battle against anti-Semitism [TEXT CORRECTED: I had previously left out a word and thus accused Dreyer of anti-Semitism which is not true at all - sorry, Carl!] One of his primary motivations was to make a
film that did not blame the Jews for the death of Jesus.
Partial List of Recommended Books:
“The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer”
by David Bordwell
“Carl Th. Dreyer” (Museum of Modern
Art, ed. Jytte Jensen)
“Vampyr” (BFI Film Classics) by
David Rudkin
“Dreyer in Double Reflection” by
Donald Skoller
“Transcendental Style in Film” by
Paul Schrader
“My Only Great Passion” by Jean
Drum and Dale D. Drum
“Carl Theodor Dreyer's Jesus”
May the Maytag Man never be lonely
again!
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