Ordet

Kaj Munk's is the only name in the credits, though Carl Theodor Dreyer's eye is unmistakable from the very start. (White linen on a clothesline flap over wheat fields, a lone figure climbs the dunes in a diagonal break from the horizontal organization.) A rural Danish corner, "Borgen's farm is not what it was," widowed paterfamilias (Henrik Malberg) slouched with pipe under Grundtvig's snow-bearded portrait. The elder son (Emil Hass Christensen) is a nonbeliever married to a pious sweetheart (Birgitte Federspiel), the youngest one (Cay Kristiansen) pines for the daughter of Dad's theological foe (Ejner Federspiel). Faith to Kierkegaard means passionate conviction for holding onto uncertainties, reading him has the middle son (Preben Lerdorff Rye) wandering the household like a sermonizing somnambulist, Jesus in his own mind. "Is it crazy to wish to rescue life?" Domestic comedy into metaphysical wonder, no tricks, just Dreyer's bottomless belief in the sacred creed of mise en scène. Subtle humor cracks dogmatic surfaces, squabbling sects boiled down to farmer and tailor sitting on a bench passive-aggressively disparaging each other. "I can't stand your undertaker faces." "Since you are one of the bright and happy Christians, why do you always look so miserable?" King's I'd Climb the Highest Mountain is close in tenor, the camerawork is Tourneur's lateral scans polished beyond eeriness. A poem of bodies passing through doors, a remarkable soundscape of ticking clocks, off-screen barnyard critters, squeaking shoes, the terrible snipping of the doctor's shears as the pregnant wife agonizes on a tablecloth. Addled prophet and little niece converse while the background rotates, an uncanny midpoint between the spectral return in Ugetsu and the hallucinatory embrace in Vertigo. "The man with the hour-glass and the scythe" is seen as a car's headlights reflected in a parlor, Hammershøi whiteness floods the climax in cinema's greatest fusion of the ethereal and the visceral. "And one says the age of miracles is past." The Seventies bring reconfiguration (A Woman Under the Influence) and violation (The Exorcist). Cinematography by Henning Bendtsen. With Ove Rud, Gerda Nielsen, Henry Skjær, Sylvia Eckhausen, Edith Trane, and Ann Elisabeth Groth. In black and white.