124-128 Carl Theodor Dreyer Box Set

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domino harvey
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#51 Post by domino harvey » Sun Mar 09, 2008 2:30 pm

miless wrote:I like how Ebert skips over Day of Wrath and attributes Vampyr to the 40's... His argument would still be proven (and he could simplify his argument to 'one film every deacade').

Couldn't he look this shit up on imdb?
My favorite Ebert tactic lately has been his looking up information on Wikipedia and then mentioning it in reviews

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miless
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#52 Post by miless » Sun Mar 09, 2008 2:46 pm

domino harvey wrote:My favorite Ebert tactic lately has been his looking up information on Wikipedia and then mentioning it in reviews
he's slowly becoming an old pastor who tries to fashion stories with 'youth related materials' (those internets, with their wikipedias) but fails, terribly.

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Morbii
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#53 Post by Morbii » Fri Mar 14, 2008 5:07 am

"Ordet" is the focus of Ebert's latest "Great Film" (Mar. 8). Definitely an interesting read - I just about felt like popping the disc in right now, but it's 2AM and I'm kinda drunk.

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domino harvey
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#54 Post by domino harvey » Fri Mar 14, 2008 5:12 am

Morbii wrote:"Ordet" is the focus of Ebert's latest "Great Film" (Mar. 8). Definitely an interesting read - I just about felt like popping the disc in right now, but it's 2AM and I'm kinda drunk.
To drunk to look up, apparently

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Morbii
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#55 Post by Morbii » Fri Mar 14, 2008 5:28 am

domino harvey wrote:
Morbii wrote:"Ordet" is the focus of Ebert's latest "Great Film" (Mar. 8). Definitely an interesting read - I just about felt like popping the disc in right now, but it's 2AM and I'm kinda drunk.
To drunk to look up, apparently
Nah, too "drunk" to take in a film like that. I HAVE already seen it, but still, I'm not sure I could handle it at the moment. When I've been drinking I think I generally prefer actiony fare.

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miless
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#56 Post by miless » Fri Mar 14, 2008 12:57 pm

apparently you're too drunk to get the point of Domino's response.

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Morbii
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#57 Post by Morbii » Fri Mar 14, 2008 6:14 pm

I get it now; but when I posted I couldn't have SWORN that the last response was Tommosso's (the order of replies is completely different today). I had thought I was just really only about halfway there at most, but maybe not.

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#58 Post by Rich Malloy » Tue Aug 26, 2008 2:29 pm

"A European Masterpiece Reborn".... brand new print from original camera negative for "DAY OF WRATH"?

Andrew O'Hehir goes nuts for the new print of "Day of Wrath" now showing at IFC Center, NY. Key comments:
... Carl Theodor Dreyer, a director universally acclaimed in film-history textbooks (mainly for his 1928 silent masterpiece "The Passion of Joan of Arc") but almost unknown today beyond the most intense universe of film buffs. Maybe this new digital restoration of "Day of Wrath," made from the film's original camera negative, will do something to change that. As far as I know, the movie is currently available in the United States only as part of the Criterion Collection's Dreyer box set, in a much inferior print.

The digitally restored edition of "Day of Wrath" plays Aug. 29-Sept. 4 at the IFC Center in New York. Other engagements and DVD release should follow.

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Dadapass
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#59 Post by Dadapass » Mon Nov 10, 2008 11:25 pm

Should I not get this set now, due to the wrong aspect ratio of Gertrud and the new restored print of Day of Wrath, which should become available soon(maybe) on DVD?

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tojoed
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#60 Post by tojoed » Tue Nov 11, 2008 4:54 am

Dadapass wrote:Should I not get this set now, due to the wrong aspect ratio of Gertrud and the new restored print of Day of Wrath, which should become available soon(maybe) on DVD?

I was going to get this box in a trade, but the deal fell through. I ended up buying the BFI editions (for about £30) which are fine. I think you can currently get this for about $50-60, so I would say you should get it. I doubt whether Criterion are about to do a re-issue.

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zedz
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#61 Post by zedz » Tue Nov 11, 2008 4:28 pm

Dadapass wrote:Should I not get this set now, due to the wrong aspect ratio of Gertrud and the new restored print of Day of Wrath, which should become available soon(maybe) on DVD?
If you have a look at the previous page of this thread, you'll see that the "wrong aspect ratio" business is not as simple as all that, since the Criterion transfer actually contains more horizontal information. Given that this framing was stipulated by the cinematographer, I doubt that Criterion will ever 'correct' their transfer. The film looks fine anyway, as you can see from the comparison, the amount lost from the top of the frame (the real danger zone compositionally) is very small.

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Dadapass
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#62 Post by Dadapass » Wed Nov 12, 2008 1:52 am

Thanks for responding,
I completely forgot about the comparisons on the previous page, I don't think the aspect ratio will take anything away from the movie.

skweeker
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#63 Post by skweeker » Fri Mar 27, 2009 1:35 pm

IMHO it would be best if the viewer first acquaints herself with the writings of Mr. S. Kierkegaard prior to viewing this wonder-full film, if she wishes to fully understand its humour.

For beginners

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kaujot
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#64 Post by kaujot » Fri Mar 27, 2009 2:58 pm

How sexist. :?

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HerrSchreck
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#65 Post by HerrSchreck » Fri Mar 27, 2009 3:15 pm

Yes, Wikipedia entries are neccessary starting points if one desires a proper understanding not only of Gertrud, or the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, or all of Carl Dreyer.. but all the best of our vintage global culture.

Let's drink to the present disposition of that culture Image

skweeker
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#66 Post by skweeker » Mon Mar 30, 2009 12:53 pm

Ah...I was referring to Ordet: have not (yet) viewed the other titles. Sorry 'bout that.

And wikis will serve for most things, as a starting point: perhaps a consult of the nearest Ivy league's "general library" catalog would suit some better....if access to one of their more specialized faculty libraries' catalog cannot be had. You get the drift.

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Sloper
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#67 Post by Sloper » Sun May 10, 2009 1:10 pm

The recent digression on boom mic shots in the Plan 9 thread reminded me about this...

All three of the films in this set have quite prominent boom shots: in Day of Wrath, when Absalon is visiting Laurentius, there seems to be a microphone poking out from the bed curtains; there are a few barely noticeable ones in Ordet; and the worst offender of all is Gertrud, with at least five... It’s Gertrud I’m really interested in. Here are the timings (Criterion/BFI):

2.24/2.00 (top left, door frame)
1.00.43/58.03 (top middle)
1.24.35/1.20.50 (top left)
1.33.32/1.30.20 (on the painting, this goes on for a while)
1.50.30/1.45.51 (some piece of equipment casts its shadow over the entire wall during the camera move)

What’s interesting is that some of these, especially the first one, are considerably less noticeable on the Criterion edition, where the image is cropped at the top. Since this edition was personally supervised by Henning Bendtsen, is it possible that he deliberately cropped the image in order to hide the mistakes? It seems like a ridiculous idea, I know, but I’d be interested to hear others’ opinions.

The Criterion box-set refers to ‘Dreyer's famously perfectionist attention to detail’, and he is often described as a perfectionist by those who worked with him. This word ‘perfectionist’ always makes me think of Stanley Kubrick – I don’t much like his films, but he’s my idea of a perfectionist film-maker – and in this context I’m reminded of the helicopter-shadow at the beginning of The Shining, which Kubrick apparently explained as a quasi-deliberate assertion of his own presence as the ‘overseer’ of the film, or something like that. It would be hard, I think, to rationalise the shadows in Gertrud in quite the same way. They can’t be deliberate. However, I think they provide a kind of insight into the film, and into one of the central themes of Dreyer’s work – namely, the nature of perfectionism.

Maurice Drouzy, in his introduction to Söderberg’s play, calls Gertrud ‘une perfectionniste de l’amour’, and in an obvious sense this might seem to be true. Gertrud seeks an ideal, unattainable love, and having repeatedly failed to attain her goal, she retreats into solitude. The sense that she is overly demanding, even ungrateful, is much stronger in the play than in the film. Söderberg’s heroine is sarcastic, impatient, petulant, and generally displays a far greater range of emotions than the pared-down version who appears in Dreyer’s film. The stage-Gertrud is transparently turned off by Lidman’s advanced age – after explaining her reasons for breaking off the affair (the note, etc), she finally comes out and says (forgive the awkward translation, from a French translation): ‘Do you want the plain truth, Gabriel? I could love you again if you could rejuvenate [rajeunir] yourself into a thirty-year-old. As for the man I’m in love with now, he would love me if I were eighteen or twenty.’ There may be a good deal of irony in these lines, but it is just one of many speeches that couldn’t possibly have come out of the film-Gertrud’s mouth.

As drawn by Söderberg, the character bears comparison with Hedda Gabler or Miss Julie, or Masha in Three Sisters – more dignified, certainly, than the examples just mentioned, but still essentially a rather worldly, frustrated woman. Indeed the play as a whole is a good deal more worldly than the film: there is more class satire in the depiction of all the major characters (who are commented upon by a small chorus of unnamed peripheral figures), these characters have a wider range of emotions and seem more ‘human’ than those in the film, and of course the story ends with Gertrud simply throwing herself out into the streets. Without the transcendent conclusion of the film (and without Axel Nygren for her to run to), we can only imagine that Gertrud will suffer the ignominious fate foretold by Gustav.

Of course the play had to be edited down for the purposes of the film – many would say there’s too much talk in the film already – but it is astonishing just how much Dreyer altered and added to the play, and the alterations nearly all serve to reduce these ‘worldly’ elements I’ve referred to. The play was a huge success in 1906; the derision that greeted the film in 1964 was due not only to its ‘old-fashioned’ theatrical source, but also to the extreme austerity Dreyer had imposed upon it. In his chapter on Gertrud, David Bordwell ends up basing his argument on the (extremely feeble, unexplained) assumption that this is a ‘boring’ film, impossible to enjoy in any normal sense; the truth is that this film speaks to us from an elevated plane. It represents – better than any other film I know of – a kind of heightened reality, in which everything that is not essential is neglected or ignored. Hence there are no peripheral figures, hence the play’s humour is all pretty much gone, hence the immobility of the characters (which would kill a stage production stone dead) – and hence the mistakes.

The boom shadows are not the only mistakes. In the birthday reception scene, Gertrud talks with her husband and then goes out to rest, exiting to the left; we cut to Lidman entering from the door we might assume she was heading towards, but she’s already gone, and later enters from a door to the right. Later still, the same thing happens (more noticeably) when Lidman breaks down in tears and has to go out. These are quite literally careless mistakes, in the sense that Dreyer just doesn’t seem to care about them: getting the characters out of the room doesn’t worry him, because it’s just a mundane detail. Deliberate violations of the rules of cinema were integral to films like Joan of Arc and Vampyr; perhaps Dreyer’s aged, watery eyes really didn’t notice the shadows on the walls in Gertrud, but to me the whole film radiates a kind of transcendent insouciance about such things. Nothing gets in the way of or distracts from what the film is about: the score, the camera movements, the very slowness (or rather, deliberateness, concentration) of the film contribute beautifully to the pervasive sense of agitation and urgency, the sense that this film needs to say something.

The perfection Dreyer seeks does not entail the creation of some technically ‘perfect’ work of art. This aspirational perfectionism is associated with the men in the film: Gustav’s political ambitions, Lidman’s all-consuming art (and his desire for material wealth, more evident in the play), Jansson’s taste for debauchery and especially his quest for an ideal of womanhood, and ideal from which Gertrud falls short.

When the head of the student league delivers his speech in praise of Lidman, he is illuminated not only from behind by the sea of burning torches, but also from above by a sort of divine light – its source is not evident, but it underlines the melodramatic pomposity of the student’s speech, and emblematises the masculine aspirational ethos as it is represented in the film. The students’ song, which is only subtitled in the Criterion edition, repeatedly associates Lidman’s poetry with the flames of the torches, and is even more insistently fixated on the idea of setting and attaining one’s ‘goals’. A blond girl looks on, smiling and waving a handkerchief; later we also see, beside her, an equally conventional-looking but somewhat older woman; both serve the purpose Jansson, Kanning and Lidman expect of a good wife, celebrating male achievement unobtrusively, from the sidelines.

No wonder all this light gives Gertrud a headache (it does, literally – she asks Lidman to turn the lights off in the next scene). She is herself creative, and she emanates her own light, rather than being illuminated from above or guided by any flaming torch. Even when Lidman has turned off the lights, he still looks like her shadow. She is usually dressed in white (except for the last two scenes), and her golden hair contrasts with the men’s dark hair (the only exception is the aged Nygren in the final scene). In the scene from which the Criterion edition’s cover-shot is taken, when Lidman sits behind Gertrud facing left while she looks towards the camera, the portrait on the wall behind them shows a woman with a strange black shadow curving out of her to the left – the shadow corresponds to Lidman’s position behind Gertrud. (You could write a book about the things on the walls in this film.)

Gertrud’s light, and ultimately her consolation, derive from within. When she remembers her first visit to Jansson’s apartment, the scene is bathed in that hazy, blinding light so characteristic of Dreyer’s films. In the play, when Gertrud remembers how much light there was in the apartment, this is one of many instances when she reveals how attracted she was by the composer’s youth and freshness, but in the film the point is quite different. When we see the apartment again (this scene isn’t in the play), it is dark, Jansson’s lighting of the candles can only remind us of Lidman performing the same ritual with Gertrud’s mirror, and that strange unearthly light remains outside the window. Gertrud departs into this light at the end of the scene, and we see Jansson, still in the dark, waving goodbye to her, just as Nygren will wave goodbye when she retreats into solitude at the end.

The same light pervades Gertrud’s memory of Lidman’s apartment. It represents an internal quality of this character – this is what her memories look like, or rather what her mind looks like. The final scene is lit in the same way, and almost the last thing Gertrud says is that Nygren’s visit will one day be a memory like the others she now subsists upon. She becomes absorbed by them and feels as though she is staring into a ‘dying fire’ – what a beautiful description of this lighting style, and a moving conclusion to Dreyer’s last film. The implication is that this very scene is a memory: when we see the closed door at the end, we have returned to the present, and the bells indicate that Gertrud has died. We recall the last line of her poem: ‘Do I live? No, but I have loved.’ This poem is recited, in the play, by a ghost who visits Gertrud (very odd scene, apparently left out after the first performance), but Dreyer turns it into her ‘gospel of love’. She calls it an ‘evangelium’, and the religious allusion is not accidental.

Dreyer never got to make his film about Jesus, but as an atheist I’ve always read the gospels as a kind of allegory about transcending the things of this world and finding some inherent, enduring meaning in life: Dreyer could hardly have treated this theme more effectively than he does in Gertrud. It is a film about a woman who finds love – that perfect ideal she seeks so desperately – within herself; it is, accordingly, a film made according to its own laws, tolerant of its own mistakes as Gertrud is of her own (as she says in that last scene, ‘I have made many mistakes, but I have loved’), and as hard to comprehend as Gertrud herself, unless you can access that plane of heightened, refined reality on which it operates.

By this I don’t mean that those who don’t like this film are stupid or worldly, but Dreyer is a famous example of the artist who cares more about the ‘world inside’ than the one that surrounds him, and Gertrud represents the apotheosis of his exploration of this interior world. Thus it is, by definition, less accessible than his other films, but also more rewarding. Bordwell says the film is more than just empty, it ‘is’ emptiness (something like that, I don’t have his book to hand; and I should say I thought parts of it were very good), but this only shows how little affection he has for the film, and how little attention he has paid it. In fact, Gertrud is one of the fullest, most coherent, and most meaningful works of art I have ever encountered; a lifetime is too short to fathom the depths of this film.

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mikkelmark
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#68 Post by mikkelmark » Sun May 10, 2009 4:41 pm


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zedz
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#69 Post by zedz » Tue May 12, 2009 4:52 am

Well I guess that post justified the existence of the Plan 9 squabble! Nice work.

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martin
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#70 Post by martin » Tue May 12, 2009 11:05 am

A German Dreyer box has just been released from Kinowelt/Arthaus with the same 4 films as released by BFI (Master of the House, Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud).

According to a (obviously reliable) post on cinefacts.de, Gertrud is a new version:
Für die Kinowelt-Dvds wurden für die drei Tonfilme von der dänischen Produktionsfirma Palladium die neuesten Restaurationen zur Verfüngung gestellt. GERTRUD ist nun endlich in der Premierenfassung mit den Gedichten zu sehen, die bislang auf den erschienenen DVDs fehlten. Außerdem gibt es umfangreiches Bonusmaterial.
My German is not fluent (nor is my English) but here is an attempt at a translation or summary: "Kinowelt used the newest restorations available from the Danish company Palladium. Gertrud is finally presented in its premiere version with the poems, which has so far been missing on previous dvd-releases. There are also extensive Bonus features."

Does anyone know what this is about - perhaps some of the native Germans here (since i may have 'lost' something in my translation)? "The poems"?
Does this mean, that the new Gertrud released in the Arthaus box is a different version than the Gertrud they released individually just six months ago or so?

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Sloper
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#71 Post by Sloper » Tue May 12, 2009 11:14 am

There were short poems (four, I think) at the beginning of each part of the film, composed by Dreyer himself. They were ridiculed at Cannes, and Dreyer removed them. Adrian Martin talks about this in his commentary on the Madman release, and gives the full text of each poem. To be honest it sounded like Dreyer did the right thing by taking them out, but it would certainly be interesting to see the film with them included.

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martin
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#72 Post by martin » Tue May 12, 2009 11:30 am

I see. Thank you (excellent post above, btw)!

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Tommaso
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#73 Post by Tommaso » Tue May 12, 2009 11:45 am

Another poster in the cinefacts-Forum says that the "Gertrud" disc is 1.66 (good), but non-anamorphic. I bet this will cause problems with subs disappearing if you zoom in. The absolut medien disc of Tarkovsky's "Sacrifice" (which otherwise is miles ahead of the AE) has the same problem and is virtually useless, unless you understand Swedish or, in Dreyer's case, Danish.

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swo17
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#74 Post by swo17 » Tue May 12, 2009 11:56 am

The Facets Satantango is non-anamorphic 1.66:1 and you lose no subtitles by zooming in to 16:9, just 6.5% of the frame. (And yes, I just did that math.)

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Tommaso
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Re: 124-128 Dreyer Box

#75 Post by Tommaso » Wed May 13, 2009 6:53 am

I'm horribly bad at maths, but I didn't mean zooming in to fill the whole of the 16:9 frame of course, but just so much as to lose the black bars at the bottom and top of the picture with the bars at the sides remaining as for a normal 1.66 image. No loss of picture involved, then, but in the case of that "Sacrifice" disc, the subs are partly placed outside the picture at the bottom, and thus, you lose them. If this doesn't happen with the Tarr set, all the better. It also doesn't happen with MoC's "Nuits rouges". But not all dvd producers take care of such things, so you'd better check for the new "Gertrud".

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