David Vining's Blog, page 153

Vampyr

Now this is an eerie little movie. Released four years after The Passion of Joan of Arc, his longest hiatus in his career up to this point, Dreyer’s Vampyr is a horror film without any real scares but an incredible sense of unease that steadily builds over its 73 minute runtime. It belongs to a subgenre of film that doesn’t fit comfortably under one main genre easily: the dream. Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and David Lynch’s Lost Highway all exist here moving f...

Some extra thoughts on The Passion of Joan of Arc

I reviewed this film a long time back, being one of my favorite movies, but watching it now within the context of Dreyer’s entire filmography, which I was almost entirely unfamiliar with beforehand, I have some extra thoughts.

What’s most interesting from a filmmaking point of view is how out of character this film is considering what came before. Up until this point, Carl Theodor Dreyer was a gifted but rather conventional silent filmmaker. He had a strong sense of storytelling forms and...

The Bride of Glomdal

This is the first Dreyer film where I’ve simply been disengaged completely from beginning to end. It was originally one hundred and fifteen minutes in its original run way back in 1926, and over time it’s been whittled down to seventy-four minutes. More than a third of the runtime has gone missing, and I think that’s a large part of why this movie doesn’t engage. Between the two melodramatic bookends, the movie is a largely staid affair of people being nice to each other about getting two pe...

Master of the House

It’s been wonderful to discover Dreyer’s comedies. He only made three, but each is amusing and touching in their own way. Master of the House, his last comedy, is the story of a man who learns that he has become a tyrant in his own home, degrading his wife and children every day no matter what they do. It seems like a setup for a simplistic story, but Dreyer’s cinematic adaptation of the play by Svend Rindom draws the characters so well that despite some late stage generalized moralizing man...

Michael (1924)

Now regarded as a landmark of gay cinema, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s adaptation of Herman Bang’s novel, tells the story of a powerful male artist who must let his young male lover and model, the titular Michael, go when the young man finds someone he actually loves. It’s about a manipulative old man dying effectively alone after failing to manipulate his young lover into staying with him. Michael is the work of an artist who has come out of the crucible of his first five feature films as a strong...

Once Upon a Time (Der var engang)

It’s really unfortunate that so much of this film is lost. The Danish Film Institute’s restoration goes as far as possible, but there are still moments where scenes have to get played out in intertitles and use production stills to continue the story. It’s unfortunate because what’s there is actually quite delightful, an earnest and deeply felt fairy tale about a prince and princess falling in love with the help of a little bit of magic. Much like the earlier The Parson’s Widow, the earlier ...

The Tomorrow War

This was excessively stupid. It honestly feels like it was written by AI, not a human. It has all the pieces you expect from a large-budgeted scifi action vehicle starring an established action star, but nothing makes any sense, the emotional catharsis is completely manufactured and feels incredibly fake while being entirely unearned, and it veers wildly from intentionally silly to unintentionally hilarious without a single sense that anyone involved in the movie has any sense of tone in the...

Love One Another (Die Gezeichneten)

I don’t give up on movies, turning them off if they don’t engage me within a certain amount of time. I’ll stick through anything to the end, and I think Dreyer’s Love One Another is an example of that benefiting me. The first hour is the worst filmmaking he’s had in his career up to this point, but the final half hour is, I might say, kind of great. The first hour is all about setting up the events of the last half hour, but it does it in such an unengaging and frustrating way. However, once...

Leaves from Satan’s Book

With a pair of films under his belt, including the well-received The Parson’s Widow, Carl Th. Dreyer set out to make a movie akin to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, a huge series of interrelated stories in an anthology, spanning millennia. While Dreyer’s third film doesn’t reach the highs of Griffith’s masterpiece, ultimately being fairly uneven, there’s more than enough here to recommend it. This is a hugely ambitious work with often striking visuals and an interesting throughline that centers...

The Parson’s Widow

This steadily won me over more and more as it went along. A light comedy with a surprising amount of pathos in the end, The Parson’s Widow, Dreyer’s second film, is a wonderful little find from the earliest days of cinema. There’s a confidence to the filmmaking and subtlety to the performances that had been largely missing from The President, his first feature, that helps provide a strong emotional base on which the movie’s final act requires in order to work.

It’s the story of a young pa...