Carl Dreyer's World

Abstract

To VISIT Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, filmed in France in 1928, after seeing his more recent Danish production, Day of Wrath, is an extraordinarily exciting experience. These two films, produced at an interval of nearly twenty years, scarcely reveal the difference in their ages. The motion picture is always more likely to date itself than any other art, partly because it relies as no other art ever has upon technology. But these two films, remembered together, seem to be of the same moment; their passionate directness is of no specific day. Such agelessness in any art is usually the result of a highly personalized style. The artist who is branded as of his age dates within his lifetime; the individualist who goes his own way-Blake, El Greco, Berlioz, at their most original-is as fresh today as ever. A style that represents a coherent and considered judgment of life, even in the flickering light of the cinema, transcends fashion or technical development. Dreyer's style is wholly pictorial. One of these films is a sound film, the other silent, but in both it is visual images that we remember. There are some striking effects on the sound track of Day of Wrath, but we remember the faces, lights, and shadows more vividly than the sounds. Even the use of the hymn from which Day of Wrath draws its title is impressed upon us pictorially; we cut from the agonized face of the ancient witch as she falls forward upon the bonfire to the witnessing choirboys as they sing the austere hymn whose song is so discordant with its angry words. But it is the blank innocence of their angelic faces that jars our hearts more than the sound of the high, unrepentant voices. Carl Dreyer's style seems an extraordinarily simple one, and at