Carl Theodor Dreyer’s ORDET Clip
by Andre Soares
Religious films often make me cringe because their religion is all dogma and no spirit. In most of those productions, drippiness and cutesiness replace depth and mystery. Hollywood movies in particular have usually suffered from that sort of stomach-churning faux reverence. Carl Theodor Dreyer, however, was no Hollywood filmmaker. A (even more austere) Ingmar Bergman predecessor, Dreyer made films that were stark, somber, deliberate, and visually arresting, while often focusing on mystico-religious themes.
Released in 1955, Ordet / The Word is one of Dreyer’s most well-respected efforts. A tale of love and faith, this Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion winner chronicles the travails of a Danish family disrupted by conflicting emotions, desires, and religious philosophies.
The clip above shows the final moments in the film, when The Word is so powerful it can defeat death. In just about anyone else’s hands, that scene would have turned into the apex of syrupiness. In Dreyer’s hands, it’s genuinely moving — and this from a total non-believer.
In the Ordet cast: Birgitte Federspiel (best known internationally for playing one of the two elderly sisters in Babette’s Feast), Emil Hass Christensen, Henrik Malberg, and the outstanding, Word-uttering Preben Lerdorff Rye, who believes (and looks like) he’s Jesus incarnate.
Clip posted by OzuKardozi.
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In Christian theology Christ who speaks the Word is also in some sense the Word incarnate; the disturbed son who speaks the word, and for nmuch of the picture professes to be Christ, is an obvious model for the incarnation; although I love Dreyer to death, nobody ever accused him of being subtle.