The Brooklyn Academy of Music will be running the Carl Th. Dreyer retrospective, appropriately and monolithically titled DREYER, from March 13 - March 31.
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"What she learns is that love simply exists, enshrined as securely in her failures as in her aspirations to perfection. Independent of volition (hence the switch from free will to Racine), independent of time (the poem that leaps the fifty years from childhood to join the epitaph she has chosen for her gravestone), and essentially a secret mystery that can be known but not possessed as by right (the letters that Axel burns, one may be sure, are destroyed so that this secret may remain unpublished, and rise like a phoenix from the ashes), the love Gertrud sought so vainly is present throughout the film in the haunting and haunted depths of its images."
-- Tom Milne, The Cinema of Carl Th. Dreyer, 1971. P. 177.
"[Dreyer’s] most supernatural film, glowing with a more secret magic than any previous work."
-- Elliot Stein (on Gertrud), quoted in Tom Milne, The Cinema of Carl Th. Dreyer, 1971, p. 170.
"Gertrude, the film of her, the greatest declaration of love of woman in the history of the medium."
-- Stan Brakhage, The Brakhage Lectures, 1972. P. 75.
"Occasionally in the same frame with Massieu or a soldier, almost never in the same frame with a judge, Jeanne inhabits a space apart. It is not just that in several scenes we can only infer the relative distances and positions of the characters. More important, we can no longer assume that a constant, homogeneous set of spatial relations exists."
-- David Bordwell, The films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, 1981. P. 79.
"Dreyer’s manipulation of space hardly stops there. Even when space is fully exposed in his shots, it takes on a strange elasticity, expanding and contracting according to the pattern of Dreyer’s montage. In The Parson’s Widow, Dreyer is already delaying the long, “establishing” shots that allow us to make spatial sense of a setting before it is divided into close-ups of the characters within it. In The Parson’s Widow, Dreyer often begins a scene in close-up, putting off the establishing shot until the middle or end of the scene, at which point it may not correspond to the image we’ve formed in our minds. The room is larger or smaller, the characters closer together or further apart, than we would have guessed from the close-ups. At other times, Dreyer will begin with an establishing shot and then go on to undermine it: an example from The Parson’s Widow finds the three main characters sitting loosely around a fireplace, a scene that becomes much more intimate in the shot breakdown when the warmth and tightness of the close-ups seem so to draw the characters closer together. And in The Passion of Joan of Arc, there are, famously, no true establishing shots at all; it space is wholly subjective, wholly plastic.
…[In Mikael] the division of the mise-en-scene into close-up and long shot is a representation of the conflict of spirit and body that defines Dreyer’s profoundly Protestant view of the world. Protestant, that is, but not puritanical: Dreyer cannot support a strict division, just as his most “spiritual” close-ups contain, in their highlighted textures, an element of physicality, of sexuality. For Dreyer, the crisis of Protestantism is centered on the question of love, which can be both a sexual and a spiritual quantity. For Dreyer, both kinds of love contain the possibility of the sacred: he does not rule out one kind in favor of the other, but looks instead for a resolution, a new quantity that might contain them both. Mikael, through its use of long and close shots, becomes the most successful of Dreyer’s silents in portraying that quantity, which might be described (very inadequately) as a kind of spiritual sexuality, a love that caresses the soul."
-- Dave Kehr, “A Love that Caresses the Soul,” The Chicago Reader, c. 1989. Read More
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