Lars von Trier's adaptation of Carl Theodor Dreyer's screenplay of Euripides' Medea translates every word printed in the literary text into images, replacing each connoted meaning with its "corresponding," yet unambiguous, image. In the script, the word is thinned until it is minimized; Euripides' text fades away to be transformed, multiplied, into images that complete it, giving it a "body" and returning the gaze to its deepest essence. This film representation has the visual quality of the relief of a pictorial work of German Romanticism, a reference that we also find in later works by the director, where nature transmutes as a transcendent element, uniting with the sacred. Trier adopts this perspective on Euripides' tragedy, and the result is a film that follows the linear development of the plot set out in the work, but where the large quantity and complexity of procedures of the film adaptation give it, if not a structural change with respect to the literary text, then a great breadth of signifiers due to the richness of its images. The purpose of this proposal is to connect the specular with the spectacular: to establish a dialogue between literature and cinema, so that, starting from literary texts, we can accurately evaluate the adaptation procedures used by Lars von Trier to bring Euripides' tragedy Medea to the screen. The iconic visual artistic elements used in the film will be analyzed to communicate the original pre-literary meaning of the Medea myth linked to the ineffable.

ABSTRACT This article explores Carl Theodor Dreyer’s evolving approach to the gestures of the mystic in La passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Ordet – two films which stage the mystic’s perennial struggle to articulate mystical experience to sceptics – focusing on the expressive capacity of the mystic’s gestures in silent and sound cinema. This article contends that Dreyer’s transition from gestural to vocal expression mirrors a broader theological and cultural shift from the Catholic logic of ritual and embodiment to the Protestant valorisation of the Word. It is argued that in Le passion de Jeanne d’Arc Dreyer fragments cinematic space and relies on the affection-image to cultivate a corporeal intimacy between the viewer and the mystic, allowing the former to experience the sublimity of the latter’s experience directly through her gestural expression. Conversely, due to the presence of sound in Ordet, Dreyer reformulates his construction of cinematic space such that it is spatially coherent and unfragmented. I advance an argument that this aural space precludes gestural expression from revealing the mystic’s inner life, requiring that the mystic be disembodied to express himself both to his family in the film, and to the viewer, as the Word.

This article reads Carl Theodor Dreyer’s seminal film Vampyr (1932) using the concept of ambient ecohorror. By relegating the vampiric threat to off-screen space and approaching horror indirectly, Vampyr relies on a technique of drawing our attention elsewhere, to the ambient, material environments in which the film’s protagonist is enmeshed. Emmanuel Levinas’s formulation of existential horror using the concept of il y a (‘there is’) provides a philosophical template for understanding the ambient qualities of horror in Vampyr . The article also uses a variety of eco-materialist approaches to understand the film’s singular importance to the history of horror and to resituate the film as a foundational work of cinematic ecohorror.

Ebben a cikkben a jogállam fogalmát a témakörrel foglalkozó német szerzők gondolatain keresztül szeretném bemutatni. Ismeretes a jogállam angolszász, német és francia megközelítése. A jogállam eszme legismertebb német kutatói Robert von Mohl és Carl Theodor Welcker jogtudósok voltak, de szót ejtünk a jogállam paradigma kapcsán Kant, Fichte és Humboldt nézeteiről is. Természetesen a jogállam fogalom lényege minden demokratikus gondolkodó esetében ugyanazt jelenti, egy emberi humánumot szolgáló, jogszabályokon alapuló demokratikus hatalomgyakorlást, melyben érvényesülnek a legalapvetőbb államszervezési elvek, alkotmányos értékek és maradéktalanul érvényesülnek az emberi jogok.

The cruelty of war, the constant presence of death and destruction, the lack of education and play, the constant state of readiness have crippled a generation of children. In the post-war years, one of the primary tasks of social workers was to help both children and adults to find their way back to their traditional roles. For children to become children again, they had to be provided with a safe and healthy environment, with opportunities for learning and play. The examples that will be presented were part of a longer series of efforts that believed in the possibility of democratic functioning based on extensive local communities and self-government, and saw it as a way of reforming the political system or urban planning. The paper first introduces the post-war situation as a terrain of ruins and then presents the importance and main ideas of the Danish Carl Theodor Sørensen and British adventure playground movement and the activist work of the British landscape architect Marjory Allen. The final part turns to the example of Gaudiopolis, the children’s care insitution associated with Gábor Sztehlo in Budapest and gives a detailed account of its structure, constitution, specific agenda and activities.

ABSTRACT Film historians have long known that the version of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) shown at its French premiere was heavily censored by the state and the Catholic church. Exactly what was cut, however, has never been entirely clear, meaning that almost all of the critical literature about the subject has been forced to accept the testimony of those who claim to have seen it at the time. An overlooked source that would help resolve the debate is the score commissioned for its Paris premiere. It includes vital evidence in the form of intertitles and actions that correspond to a print acquired by the British Film Institute in 1947. A detailed comparison of screen and musical time convincingly demonstrates that the 1947 print is a copy of the censored version, and a broader analysis of empathetic musical gesture and specially written lyrics for choir and soloists supports that contention. This analysis underlines the valuable contribution that film-music studies can make to film history in helping reveal for the first time exactly what it was to which the authorities objected in Dreyer’s famous film.

When we think of Joan of Arc in the movies, we picture Renée Falconetti’s face as framed by Carl Theodor Dreyer in 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc: Tear-soaked eyes gazing skyward, a face the size of a movie screen. The weeping face becomes the film’s supreme emblem, triggering the saint’s transcendence, until the face covered in tears strips itself of its particularities to achieve Passion. Focusing on the same theme, Robert Bresson’s Le procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962) shows us a body stripping itself of its matter to be free from the shackles of corrupt humans. In 1957, with his film Saint Joan, Otto Preminger extracts the soul from the body to represent Jeanne’s never-before-seen background. The filmmaker makes Jeanne appear as a ghost to implement a certain inventiveness in elaborating her image. Jean-Louis Leutrat demonstrates that a form of fantasy is born “between cinema, appearing-disappearing, melancholy, a certain luminous unreality and tears”. In the light of this idea, Jeanne would be a reincarnation of her own tears. Through these three films, and based on the idea of a certain dynamic of tear in terms of Poetic representations, we notice a complementary evolution that helps the regeneration of Joan of Arc as a Saint.

A History of Danish Cinema

Furious Feedback and the Revolutionary Ode to Noise

Abstract Can the transcendence of the sacred be represented through the potential of cinema, a medium based on the ontological reproduction of the Real? Can the dimension of the completely Other, whose limits and boundaries are hardly identifiable, come to the screen and become sensitive and perceptible? This contribution, taking as references the phenomenological dimension of the sacred proper to the investigation of Father Amédée Ayfre and the more stylistic one studied by Paul Schrader, intends to propose a reflection on how the miraculous event, understood as an objective suspension of physical laws, of narrative verisimilitude, in which the procedures of representation and rendering in images are configured as a fracture with respect to the customary nature of aesthetic expression of reality, are made evident in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet.

Recent decades have seen the rise of film installation as a consequence of cinema’s displacement in the digital age. This expansion of film exhibition to the gallery has given rise to what Raymond Bellour terms an other cinema, or a cinematic praxis that opens new possibilities for the theorization of the moving image, its history, and its relation to other disciplines. In a cinematic landscape marked by intermediality and transnationality, expanded cinema offers a path forward for filmmakers and moving-image artists in and from Latin America. In this article, I study the relation between cinema and madness in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and the 2004 film installation La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Rozelle Hospital) by Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez. I argue that through his citation of Dreyer’s signature close-ups, his direct intervention in the original work, and his staging of projection, Téllez theorizes the relation between spectatorship and an embodied unreason by enacting a mimetic encounter between the audience and the mentally ill. Téllez embraces the legacy of avant-garde cinema, which sought to highlight film’s ability to suspend a cognitively oriented perception. By experimenting with the material basis of exhibition, Rozelle Hospital imagines a new audiovisual politics that stages an ethical encounter with the mentally ill through an embodied spectatorship.

ABSTRACT The author examines the paradoxical dramatic dynamics of the Dreyer's masterpiece, according the Matte Blanco's theoretical model, as a tormented path of self awareness that consists in a progressive immersion in the unconscious. Anne, the young wife of an old Lutheran pastor, marginally involved in the witchcraft trial of a friend of her mother (now dead, but suspected to be a sorceress as well), falls in love for his son-in-law, leaving the child-wife position held so far. It's a new very strong vital drive for Anne, to which she adds the belief to own the magic powers of the witches: the ability to evoke the living and the dead, kill with thought and communicate through dreams. All the emotions are at an infinite level of intensity. Nevertheless, after she's left by her lover and after her husband's wished-upon death, the protagonist confesses her presumed witchcraft before the husband's coffin and, in the derangement of ambiguities, affective contradictions and shift of position, she attains a sort of mystic epiphany (significantly represented by the flow of filmic images): maybe a contact with the deepest layer of the mind where, according to MatteBlanco, the symmetrization is total.

In this article I provide an overview of my natural playground and sensory garden design practices and theories. I discuss how I was inspired by the landscape architect, Carl Theodor Sørensen, and the key role his work and writings played in Denmark and beyond in the development of natural playscapes and in the setting up in 1961 of the International Play Association. I reveal how my first project, while still a student, to design a sensory garden for a special school was to influence my future career and thinking. My time working for the City of Copenhagen began with the design of the first public sensory garden in Denmark, which I describe here. I then highlight another Danish concept: the manned playground and its manifestation in the Nature Playground in Valbyparken for whose design I was responsible, and which I present here. I go on to discuss the dangers of standardized playground equipment designed by adults with no input from children, who prefer to make their own play and benefit from so doing. I describe my design for Murergaarden Daycare Centre and Afterschool Club playground which has no fixed play equipment. I then emphasize further the benefits of 'green' playground design and present the example of the Skovstjernen Daycare Centre, where 'there's nothing but nature and loose parts'. In short, my message is that Nature is the best place for children to play and develop their creativity.

Reviewed by: Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Reception and Aesthetics in Cinema by Stephen Teo Melissa Croteau (bio) Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Reception and Aesthetics in Cinema. By Stephen Teo. London: Bloomsbury, Academic 2019. Pp. x + 285. Hardcover $91.56, ISBN 978-1-78453-982-5. This well-written, engaging volume by Stephen Teo is a welcome intervention in the field of film studies in that it confronts the hegemony of Western theoretical approaches to cinema and provides a counterbalancing model that applies what Teo calls “Eastern theory” to Western film classics. Although Teo’s use of terms such as “Eastern theory” and “Eastern essence” could be construed as perilously totalizing--painting “the East” with a monochromatic brush that beckons toward a regression into Orientalizing--his apologia for the study and his execution of the analyses are sufficiently adept and focused to remediate the occasional sweeping generalization. Indeed, Teo spends much of his introduction and first chapter, which examines the Star Wars saga, explaining his notion of the “Eastern,” which follows a few general principles: 1) it is “distinctive from ‘Orientalism’”; 2) it refers to “an inherent quality in the West”; 3) it is consistently didactic (p. 22). He takes time to elaborate on these ideas, connecting, for instance, (post)colonialism and commercial trade to an “Orientalized West” wherein East and West are “bidirectional interpenetrating” entities (p. 3). In addition, Teo specifies that he is not using any particular Asian film theory in the book but, rather, is applying “Eastern thinking broadly derived from philosophical ideas and vernacular proverbs, maxims, or aphorisms” (p. 12). However, his “Eastern” perspective, as he admits, is rooted firmly in his Malaysian Chinese background, leading to “charge[s] of Sinocentrism” (p. 8). He is clear from the start that this book will “mainly invoke Daoist and Confucianist ideas and beliefs borrowed basically from the Zhuangzi and the Analects,” and this holds true throughout (p. 7). Though this approach is hardly “pan-Asian,” Teo largely succeeds in his stated goal of proving the enriching potential of applying Eastern ideas to Western works. The nine chapters of Eastern Approaches to Western Film cover an eclectic array of Western cinema from Europe and the United States, mainly released during the studio era (1930s – 1960s), though not all the films are studio pictures and the first Star Wars trilogy falls outside of these dates. Some chapters focus entirely or mainly on one film, such as the chapters on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), and other chapters look at several films in one filmmaker’s oeuvre, such as the ninth chapter, “John Ford [End Page 1] and Asian Family Values,” in which Teo deftly discusses multiple Ford Westerns and a trilogy of non-Western family melodramas. He convincingly argues that “Ford’s Westerns may be seen as the most basic Confucian tracts of family and state in the American cinema” (p. 238), making salient points regarding Ford’s seminal and ever-straining binaries of rural versus urban, tradition versus modernity, and the individual versus the family. Teo’s reading of Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) is even more impressive as he takes the tale of an Irishman living in the U.S., played by John Wayne, who returns to his Irish village to establish a family, and connects its themes--nostalgia for a homeland, the immigrant experience, yearning for the natural world, and the primacy of family--to dominant Daoist and Confucian concepts, pointing out that the film would have been quite relatable to diasporic Chinese audiences. The chapters in Teo’s book, then, move from George Lucas’s space opera in chapter one to John Ford’s genre films in chapter nine, revealing that the order of chapters is not tied to a historical timeline but rather to the author’s judgment of how obvious the “Eastern” referents and qualities are in the films. Thus, the Star Wars trilogy is a perfect place to start due to its overt Daoist allusions (e.g. “the Force”), and it is in this chapter that Teo is able to dive more deeply than many other “Eastern” readings of these films by...

Carl Theodor (1839-1909), a royal Duke in the ruling house of the Kingdom of Bavaria, was born to a life of wealth, privilege, and leisure. As was usual for sons of the nobility, he trained as a military officer. He fought in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and was decorated for his service in battle. Inspired by the tragedies he observed during the War, he decided to become a physician and received his medical degree from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. After working in general medicine, he embarked on an extensive post-graduate program of study in ophthalmology. Starting in 1880, he practiced ophthalmology full time and devoted his life to his patients. He performed most of his work gratis and he personally underwrote most of the costs for his practice. His wife, the Duchess Marie José (1857-1943), a princess of the royal house of Portugal, was as committed to his medical career and philanthropy as he was, and she served as his assistant in the clinic and the operating room. Her untiring support made it possible for Carl Theodor to maintain his busy schedule. After his death, she established a Foundation to administer his clinic and operating facility in Munich.

Abstract In 1952, the Italian film historian Lo Duca, having discovered a lost print of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), created a sonorized version of the film. This article details the history of the project and examines the use of baroque music with the moving image more generally. It also considers the vicissitudes of using pre-existent recordings and proposes a notion of aleatoric synchronization.

In his movie, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), the Danish director, Carl Theodor Dreyer, presents a powerful representation of the medieval martyr. Dreyer’s film is not about Joan’s life itself, only the trial and her execution, i.e. her passion-story. During the trial the main focus is on the question about the truth of her revelations and whether she really is the daughter of God, she claims to be. Despite her young age it is evident that she poses a significant threat to the spiritual as well as worldly authorities. Her threat to the spiritual authorities has to do with her doubting their monopoly on salvation. When she refuses to recant, and to stop dressing as a man (which she claims to be God’s will), her destiny is set. The soldiers mock her and put a crown (made out of straw) on her head, before she is sent to the stake. She is burned with a sign above her head with the words idolater, heretic and apostate written on it. The aim of this article is to explore Dreyer’s portrayal of Joan of Arc in his film as a female Christ-Figure. At the same time, I will argue that the film can serve as an important dialogue partner in ongoing Christological discourse. The conclusion is that Dreyer’s Joan provides a vivid image of Jesus Christ that challenges our fixation on Jesus’ maleness, and helps us to understand better what we really mean when we claim that God, dressed-in flesh, became human, like us, female or male.

In 1752, the soprano Maria Dorothea Wendling (née Spurni) and her husband, the celebrated flautist Johann Baptist Wendling, were both engaged as musicians at the Mannheim court of Elector Carl Theodor. Dorothea—who later premiered the role of Ilia in Mozart’s Idomeneo—was surely well aware of the realities of her chosen career, since her parents were Cammermusici (chamber musicians) who had served at both the Württemberg court and that of the deposed Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński at Lunéville. Detailed investigation of archival documents uncovers new information regarding Dorothea Wendling’s family background and provides, in the process, fresh insights into the daily lives of court musicians during the first half of the eighteenth century. Having been employed as a lutenist at the Württemberg court for a period of seven years prior to her marriage to the recently widowed horn player Franz Spurni in 1726, Dorothea Spurni (née St. Pierre) was shocked to discover that her wages were significantly altered to reflect her new marital status (including the allocation of a lower class of salary wine). Further documents relating to the couple throw fascinating, but depressing, light on the employment conditions and financial hardship endured by some German court musicians—female and male alike.

Some critics of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael (1924) have cast the queer bond between the title character and the master painter Zoret as too frail to warrant a queer designation for the film. Especially Zoret's paternal commitment to Michael in conjunction with Michael's rejection of his guardian in lieu of a romantic relationship to an impoverished Russian aristocrat, Zanikow, was seen as cause to doubt queer aesthetic commitments in the film's narrative. Drawing on scholarship on queer phenomenology, queer failure, and pederasty, this article contends that there is a great deal of queerness residing in the film. It reads Zoret's ardent regulation of Michael's unideal behavior as a response to living life queerly in Weimar Germany in order to show how the paternalistic commitment is in line with pederast adoration, a relational dynamic that also gives access to other queer personal histories embedded in the film.

On the border of darkness. The language of sainthood in film portraits of Joan of Arc The unusual history of the patroness of France — Saint Joan of Arc — became the inspiration for many creators of culture, including film directors, who most willingly chose this figure from among all the Christian saints. The article firstly presents the history of life of the French saint and in the next part consists of the analysis of the film language of the devoted to her three emblematic movies in which the well known film creators tried to “show” the sainthood of Joan or/and to assume an attitude towards the phenomenon of sainthood. The first movie analyzed by the author of the article is The Passion of Joan of Arc 1928 by Carl Theodor Dreyer, the second one is The Trial of Joan of Arc 1961 by Robert Bresson, who used an ascetic idiom to present the sainthood of Joan. And at the end of the text the film by Luc Besson — Joan of Arc 1999 — is discussed as a postmodern deconstruction of the figure of the saint.