“Through style one infuses a film with a soul, and that is what makes it art,” wrote the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. Throughout his career, which spanned the silent era to sound and comedies, epics, and melodramas to the searing chamber pieces for which he is best known, Dreyer infused every film he made with a soul, and in the process created a body of work acclaimed as one of the greatest of all time.
“When he speaks, it is with such subdued tranquility, one is forced to listen,” says one character about another in Dreyer's Gertrud, a quote which tellingly applies more to the director himself. “He loves stillness, an inspirational stillness.” Casting an almost hypnotic glaze over many of Dreyer's films, the austere long takes, still camera, elemental set designs, and frequent absence of a soundtrack strip away the unnecessary and turn what's left-emotion, human contact, faith, and love-into almost hallucinatory forces.
"Dreyer's work is always based on the beauty of the image, which in turn is a record of the luminous conviction and independence of human beings. His films are devoted principally to human emotions,” wrote David Thomson in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film. “Dreyer's greatness is in the way that he makes a tranquil picture of overwhelming feelings."
Jason Sanders
Film Notes Writer