Truffaut: The Whiteness of Carl Dreyer

Vampyr (Directed by Carl Dreyer)

“Consciously, I do nothing to please the public”, noted Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer. The singular calmness of Dreyer's approach may account for his reputation as a serious and uncompromising artist. In contrast to many other contemporary filmmakers, Dreyer's work appears to come from a different era, they have a monumental timeless quality that eschew contemporary “relevance”. 

Dreyer believed that realism was not a goal to strive towards — it was simply not art. In contrast, Dreyer sought for what he dubbed “psychological realism,” an approach that sought to represent the reality that lies behind the world that people see. Dreyer cut out anything that was redundant to his purpose, and so a minimalist, abstract style evolved. Initially alienating to those unfamiliar with his austere approach, it is however perfectly in character with his work. 

Dreyer's spiritual asceticism however is defined by a rather humanist approach. Dreyer's feature films frequently deal with issues related to discrimination and the role of women living in a patriarchal culture. In these films, Dreyer places emphasis on character above plot, especially when it comes to showing his concerns about human suffering. 

The picture that critics have most consistently ranked as Dreyer's greatest achievement, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), is an excellent way to see the major themes of his work. Because it has come to be regarded as one of the real masterpieces of the pre-sound era, the picture is justifiably believed to be the apotheosis of Dreyer's silent cinema technique. 

This picture was produced in France, and the Société Générale des Films, who were finishing work on Abel Gance's Napoleon, were involved in the process (1927). The Society of Genuérale offered Dreyer complete creative power and an unrestricted budget. While Gance delivered a decades-long spectacle featuring epic battle scenes, Dreyer went in a more straightforward direction, centering his film solely on Joan's trial and execution. Instead of telling the storey of how Joan led an army into battle in an attempt to drive the English out of 15th-century France, Dreyer made an effort to solely focus on her trial and execution. Dreyer condensed the events of Joan's trial into a single day, resulting in a film with a unity of time, place, and action which illustrates Dreyer's desire to explore inner conflicts, especially those involving the inner workings of a locale. 

Dreyer's shots throughout the film focus on Joan and her assailants, mainly in close-ups. They bring the players' faces closer, so increasing our understanding of their internal feelings, but this also reduces the space surrounding them to insignificance. Joan's sense of confusion is heightened by Dreyer's sparing use of cinematic style. And the picture shifts focus to Joan's inner spiritual dimension. Dreyer always maintained that the artist should focus on the internal aspects of a subject, rather than the surface aspects, and there is no better illustration of this concept than in Dreyer's masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc. 

The Passion of Joan of Arc confirms Dreyer's previous demonstration of his skills in silent film, but Dreyer's later work demonstrates even more mastery in terms of dealing with sound. He made his first attempt into the new media by creating a dream-like mood of gothic dread in his film Vampyr (1932). Also contributing to its otherworldly aspects was the fact that Vampyr was created utilising experimental sound technology, which carried over numerous methods and artistic flourishes from the silent period. But with the film "Day of Wrath," Dreyer was firmly on the route to his mature style, which was characterised by an austere and languid pace. 

Dreyer used a pioneering arc-and-pan camera movement in addition to lengthy takes to allow him to remain at a distance from the players in Ordet (1955). An in-depth look at faith and family that leads to a thrilling, heart-wrenching climax. 

Dreyer’s career spanned four decades from the silent era to sound and included comedies and melodramas to the great chamber dramas for which he is best known.

Francois Truffaut wrote this famous article on the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer shortly after the great Danish director’s death in 1968:

When I think of Carl Dreyer, what comes to mind first are those pale white images, the splendid voiceless closeups in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) that play back exactly the acerbic dialogue at Rouen between Jeanne and her judges.

Then I think of the whiteness of Vampyr, though this time it is accompanied by sounds, the cries and horrible groans of the Doctor (Jean Hieromniko), whose gnarled shadow disappears into the flour bin in the impregnable mill that no one will approach to save him. In the same way that Dreyer’s camera is clever in Jeanne d’Arc, in Vampyr it frees itself and becomes a young man’s pen as it follows, darts ahead of, prophesies the vampire’s movements along the gray walls.

Unhappily, after the commercial failure of these masterpieces, Dreyer had to wait eleven years, eleven years out of his life, before shouting ‘Camera! Action!’ when at last he made Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath), a movie that deals with sorcery and religion, and is a synthesis of the other two films. Here we see the most beautiful image of female nudity in the history of cinema – the least erotic and most carnal nakedness – the white body of Marthe Herloff, the old woman burned as a witch.

Day of Wrath (Directed by Carl Dreyer)

Ten years after Day of Wrath, at the end of the summer of 1956, Ordet overwhelmed the audience at the Lido Biennale. Never in the history of the Venice Festival had a Golden Lion been more justly awarded than to Ordet, a drama of faith, more exactly, a metaphysical fable about the aberrations dogmatic rivalries lead to.

The film’s hero, Johannes, is a visionary who thinks he is Jesus Christ; but only when he comes to recognize his delusion does he ‘receive’ spiritual power.

Each image in Ordet possesses a forrnal perfection that touches the sublime, but we recognize Dreyer for more than a ‘cosmetician.’ The rhythm is leisurely, the interplay of the actors stylized, but they are utterly controlled. Not a frame escapes Dreyer’s vigilance; he is certainly the most demanding director of all since Eisenstein, and his finished films resemble exactly what they were in his mind as he conceived them. 

There is no active mimicry from the actors in Ordet; they simply set their faces in a particular manner, and from the outset of each scene adopt a static attitude. The important actions take place in the living room of a rich farmer. The sequential shots are highly mobile and seem to have been inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Rope. (In a number of interviews, Dreyer has mentioned his admira­tion for the director of Rear Window). And in Ordet, white predomi­nates again, this time a milky whiteness, the whiteness of sun-drenched curtains, something we have never seen before or since. The sound is also splendid. Toward the end of the film, the center screen is occupied by a coffin in which the heroine, Inger, is laid out. Johannes, the madman who takes himself for Christ, has promised to raise her from the dead. The silence of the house in mourning is broken only by the sound of the master’s steps on the wooden floors, an ordinary sound, the sound of new shoes, Sunday shoes....

Ordet (Directed by Carl Dreyer)

Dreyer had a difficult career; he was able to pursue his art only because of the income he had from the Dagmar, the movie theater he managed in Copenhagen. This profoundly religious artist, filled with a passion for the cinema, chased two dreams all his life, both of which eluded him: to make a film on the life of Christ, Jesus, and to work in Hollywood like his master, D. W. Griffith.

I only met Carl Dreyer three times, but it pleases me to write these few lines as I sit in the leather-and-wood chair that belonged to him during his working life and was given to me after his death. He was a small man, soft-spoken, terribly stubborn, who gave an impression of severity although he was truly sensitive and warm. His last public act was to gather the eight most important men involved in Danish cinema to write a letter protesting the dismissal of Henri Langlois from the Cinematheque Francaise.

Now he is dead; he has joined Griffith, Stroheim, Murnau, Eisen­stein, Lubitsch, the kings of the First generation of cinema, the genera­tion that mastered, first, silence, and then sound. We have much to learn from them, and much from Dreyer’s images of whiteness.

– ‘The Whiteness of Carl Dreyer’ in ‘Francois Truffaut: The Films in My Life’