Ordet

A slow, lurching dance to the grave

Carl-Theodor Dryer's Ordet is a masterpiece, but it is also, as David Bordwell described it, his most obvious film. The theological arguments that constitute the majority of Kaj Munk's play makes the film seem like a loop of eternal recurrences of the themes explored by Dreyer and his recalcitrant shadow, Ingmar Bergman. The film is daunting, the magnitude of Dryer's achievement makes me too cowed to attempt extended commentary. The play of light and shadow inside the Borgen House is as bold and expressionistic as Vampyr, but with a subtler, more mellow touch. Dreyer's simple pans open up the play, so that the set seems as vast as the unconscious.

One touch I could discern was the use of conveyance as premonition of death. The shots of travel are used to link the movement from farm house to tailor's house and back. As in Dreyer's They Caught the Ferry, an anti-speeding PSA, they serve as a memento mori. A portrayal of life's transience functioning as a meditation on mortality. We are all traveling to the same end.