Word: dreyer
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Passion of Joan of Are. Carl Dreyer's examination of the trial and execution of Saint Joan is the most effective expression of religious suffering and faith on film...
...even as small a part of it as Hollywood. The agonizing tension communicated by the old crusaders--Agee, MacDonald, Warshow--is now lacking. Since the educated came to recognize that talented men have already created lasting works of cinema art, it's become more acceptable to say, sniff, that Dreyer is a poet in light; or, sigh, that John Ford is the lyricist of the American past. Just sit back, go to sleep, and watch the once subversively free art form ossify for want of criticism which demands its best...
...almost all his films. Dreyer pays loving attention to faces and to gestures in Gertrud. His famous The Passion of Joan of Arc is almost entirely a study of the faces of Joan and her tormentors. "What I want to do," Dreyer writes, "is to penetrate, by way of their most subtle expressions, to the deepest thoughts of my actors. For it is these expressions which reveal the personality of a character, his unconscious feelings, the secrets hidden deep within his soul." It's a technique Bergman often uses, as John Cassavetes does in Faces. Bathed in blinding white light...
...Dreyer creates an original and visually satisfying style, but to serve what purpose? As in all his films, the moods that are developed are all-important. Beneath the mood-evoking surface dialogue and action, the real emotions play themselves out, giving the film a kinship with Rohmer's My Night at Maud's. The ideas that pervade Gertrud number among Dreyer's characteristic preoccupations. What is the power of love? What part should love play in a person's life? In contrast to his other films, Gertrud does not raise these questions in a religious context. A brief scene...
Throughout most of his career Dreyer hoped to make a film on the life of Jesus Christ, and he was negotiating its financing the year he died. If he had lived to make the film, it might have resolved some of the problems he raised in his other films. But probably, like Gertrud, his version of the story would have raised as many questions as it answered...