Memories of a Great Filmmaker

A Summer with Carl Theodor Dreyer

May 29, 2012

11:52 a.m.

Denmark was one of the creative centers of early filmmaking and Carl Theodor Dreyer was one of that nation's great directors. He often worked abroad, directing his psychological masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927) and the eerie Vampyr (1932) in France. Finding financing was always a problem, but in the summer of 1954 he was at work on what proved to be his second last film, Ordet (The Word). Enter Jan Wahl, a 21-year old Fulbright scholar from Toledo, Ohio, studying that year in Copenhagen. Wahl was a film buff at a time when cinema history was hard to reconstruct. Home video didn't exist, but through a cumbersome process, some old movies (often in severely censored form) could be rented. There was hardly more than one serious book on film to be found at most libraries. And yet, Wahl found himself drawn to the decades-old work of Dreyer, who was scarcely known in the U.S. He wrote the director requesting a copy of Vampyr and, after arriving in Copenhagen, was invited to spend the summer in a remote Danish town on the set of Ordet. Wahl's memoir, Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ordet: My Summer with the Danish Filmmaker (University Press of Kentucky) is a touching account of his encounter with one of the great silent directors who survived into the talking age. Describing Dreyer as a “saintly, soft spoken man,” Wahl had the opportunity to watch and listen as the perfectionist director wrestled a masterpiece out of imperfect cameras and gear. Profoundly shaped by the power of the greatest silent films, Dreyer was an intensely visual filmmaker, using the medium to “isolate, narrow-down, penetrate into, pierce, and magnify” characters and situations. Transcending realism was his goal, not mirroring the surface of reality. “We have got stuck with photography and now are confronted with the necessity of freeing ourselves from it,” Dreyer insisted. “We must use the camera to drive away the camera.” Appended to Wahl's account are several short essays on the art of film by Dreyer and a filmography.