Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Writer: Carl Theodor Dreyer, from the novels by Jacob Breda Bull
Stars: Einar Sissener and Tove Tellback
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Index: That's a Wrap!
When people ask me which film I believe is the best ever made, I tend to say The Passion of Joan of Arc, a French silent movie by the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. That won’t pop up in this project for another couple of years, but this is the movie he made before it.
Frankly, it feels like a film by someone else, because it’s built not of majestic close ups but sparse pastoral long shots. There are scenes in farmhouses and a vicarage, but mostly, they’re of fields and the river and more fields. Even as the tension is ratcheted up during the closing scenes, it’s still a relaxing movie that allows us to slow down to the pace of the countryside.
There isn’t much of a story, mostly because Dreyer improvised it as he went, albeit loosely based on a couple of novels by the Norwegian author Jacob Breda Bull, Glomdalsbruden, which means The Bride of Glomdal, and Eline Vangen. It seems to me that the former is likely to be the bulk of the story even though the latter is the longer work. Sadly I can’t find details online.
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