The Fallen World of Appearances

With two novels behind him, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) Saul Bellow applied for a Guggenheim grant three times before it was accepted in 1948. The Victim, published by Vanguard Press, sold just 2,257 copies. He spent the next five years moving between Europe and America writing The Adventures of Augie March. His story, "Looking for Mr. Green" was published in the magazine Commentary in March 1951. Commentary had been founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee as a successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record, whose editor had died in 1944. Norman Podhoretz characterized the periodical as one that would usher the American Jewish intelligentsia "out of the desert of alienation ... and into the promised land of democratic, pluralistic, and prosperous America."

The year before "Looking for Mr. Green" was published Bellow wrote an unpublished essay, "The Sharp Edge of Life," that presented what was, for him, the central problem for the novelist:

The great issue in fiction is the stature of characters. It starts with something like the psalmist’s question, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” Responses range from “a little lower than the angels” to “a poor, bare, forked animal.” The struggle of the novelist has been to establish a measure, a view of human nature, and usually, though not always, as large a view as belief and imagination can wring from observable facts.(1)

Bellow's short stories come at the reader the same way his novels do - there is no apparent effort to be concise or control the exuberance of his language. At 8,500 words, "Looking for Mr. Green" concerns George Grebe, St. Olaf’s College, instructor in classical languages, Fellow, University of Chicago, now employed, thanks to the Great Depression that reached all the way to academia and back, in delivering public relief checks in Chicago's West Side. In his mid-thirties, Grebe isn't bitter at all about his new line of work. Like everyone else who has a job, he knows its essential value when so many have no work at all. His boss, who passed the bar exam and makes twelve dollars more a week than Grebe calls it "the fallen world of appearances":

I’ll tell you, as a man of culture, that even though nothing looks to be real, and everything stands for something else, and that thing for another thing, and that thing for a still further one—there ain’t any comparison between twenty-five and thirty-seven dollars a week, regardless of the last reality.

Grebe's boss asks him what his education could possibly have prepared him for, and sends him to "the Negro district" with a pocketful of relief checks. It's a part of Chicago he doesn't know, between Cottage Grove and Ashland, and he's told to expect no one to trust him or help him to find any of the people he's carrying checks to, because he's white. He sets off, at first responding well to the leg work. But "it was dark, ground-freezing, pre-Thanksgiving weather ... He could find the streets and numbers, but the clients were not where they were supposed to be, and he felt like a hunter inexperienced in the camouflage of his game." One name in particular stubbornly refuses to yield up the man who owned it - Tulliver Green.

After searching all day and past 6 o'clock when he should've quit and gone home, he doesn't give up searching for Mr. Green. Looking at the ruins of the city around him, Grebe is driven to wonder what all of it means:

Okay, then, Grebe thought further, these things exist because people consent to exist with them—we have got so far—and also there is a reality which doesn’t depend on consent but within which consent is a game. But what about need, the need that keeps so many vast thousands in position? You tell me that, you private little gentleman and decent soul—he used these words against himself scornfully. Why is the consent given to misery? And why so painfully ugly? Because there is something that is dismal and permanently ugly? Here he sighed and gave it up, and thought it was enough for the present moment that he had a real check in his pocket for a Mr. Green who could be real beyond question. If only his neighbors didn’t think they had to conceal him.

In Bellow's 1950 essay, "The Sharp Edge of Life," he wrote:

I believe simply in feeling. In vividness ... Only feeling brings us to conceptions of superior reality ... A point of view like mine is not conducive to popular success. I believe with Coleridge that some writers must gradually create their own audience. This is, in the short run, an unrewarding process. The commercial organization of society resists it, and let us face it, there is widespread disgust, weariness, staleness, resistance, and unwillingness to feel the sharp edge of life.

We have for hundreds of years had an idolatry of the human image, in the lesser form of the self and in the greater form of the state. So when we think we are tired of Man, it is that image we are tired of. Man is forced to lead a secret life, and it is into that life that the writer must go to find him. He must bring value, restore proportion; he must also give pleasure. If he does not do these things, he remains sterile himself.

Philip Roth wrote: "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists: William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century. Bellow's special appeal is that in his characteristically American way he has managed brilliantly to close the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon." Not Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Faulkner and Bellow.

Last week, I stumbled on an essay by novelist Michael Chabon in The Paris Review called "What's the Use?". Chabon wondered if art was of any use whatever in a world as terrible as ours has become (notice Chabon's use of the word "blade."):

Maybe the world in its violent turning is too strong for art. Maybe art is a kind of winning streak, a hot hand at the table, articulating a vision of truth and possibility that, while real, simply cannot endure. Over time, the odds grind you down, and in the end the house always wins... Or maybe the purpose of art, the blessing of art, has nothing to do with improvement, with amelioration, with making this heartbreaking world, this savage and dopey nation, a better place.

Maybe art just makes the whole depressing thing more bearable. I don’t mean that we should think of art solely as offering a kind of escape from the grim reality of reality, though personally I can’t think of higher praise. To experience the truth in art reminds us that there is such a thing as truth. Truth lives. It can be found. And there is no encounter more powerful than the encounter between the slashing, momentary blade of truth and a lie-entangled mind.

And what is that truth, the truth of art, that freeing blade, that slaking drink in the desert of the world? It’s this: You are not alone. I am not I; you are not you. We are we. Art bridges the lonely islands. It’s the string that hums from my tin can, over here looking out of my little window, to you over there, looking out of yours. All the world’s power over us lies in its ability to persuade us that we are powerless to understand each other, to feel and see and love each other, and that therefore it is pointless for us to try. Art knows better, which is why the world tries so hard to make art impossible, to immiserate artists, to ban their work, silence their voices, and why it’s so important for all of us to, quite simply, make art possible... We are each only one poem, one painting, one song away from another mind, another heart. It’s tragic that we need so much reminding. And yet we have, in art, the power to keep reminding each other.

I don't think Bellow wondered so much about being reminded. To him, art was there to reconcile us with life. Reading his glorious fictions reminds us what a glorious thing it is to be alive.


(1) In 2012 "The Sharp Edge of Life" was included in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor.

The Song Remains the Same

Earlier this month I published a post that I called "Self Explanatory", inspired by my expectation that I would soon be returning to the States. I had to remove the post a week later because it isn't going to happen - not soon, anyway. I was lifted off the ground, I felt, and carried aloft like I was in a hot air balloon. Rising and rising ever higher, only to be pulled back down to the ground, right back to the spot of my take off. The reason why is almost ridiculously simple: the friend of mine who wanted it to happen almost as much as I did (a true brother from another mother) miscalculated the depth of the hole I am in and hence the length of the lifeline that might save me. 

Perhaps I should've left the post where it was. I had committed errors of judgement on this blog before, usually pertaining to some political outcome, that didn't pan out. But I didn't remove the posts in which my errors were laid out for posterity, or try to edit them to look more presentable. I predicted, for example, in the spring of 2016 that Donald Trump would withdraw from the race for the Republican nomination after he lost the Iowa Caucus to Ted Cruz. I also predicted that Brett Kavanaugh's nomination for the vacant SCOTUS seat would be withdrawn. As Steve Allen once said, "I stand corrected. I should be, I'm wearing surgical hose."

But there was important information in the post I took down that needs to be known, about an incident that radically altered the course of my life twelve years ago, and because I am anxious about having to tell the story again (it seems to me that I've already told the story dozens of times to members of my family and my friends), I would like to officially put it out there in the ether. This is my story:

I created this blog on September 26, 2007. On November 7 of that year, I left my dear sister behind in Anchorage, Alaska aboard a Northwest Airlines flight to my destination and, because of the 16-hour time difference and 9 hours in the air, I landed here on November 8. In a blog post published two days later, I announced the move: 

Saturday, November 10, 2007
So There I Was
I've been using this blog as a pseudo-diary, so I may as well admit the latest event in my life at mid-way. 

Before the month was over, however, an event occurred that changed everything. A fellow American, whom I had enlisted to help me find a cheap apartment so that I could move out of my not-so-cheap hotel, stole my passport and demanded $200 for it's return. That was the amount he claimed that I owed him for holding an apartment for me. Having looked at the apartment, that was completely bare of furniture, and for which he was asking more than half my monthly pension as rent, I turned it down. Feeling cheated, since he was a friend of the owner of the hotel where I was staying, this fellow expat seized the opportunity to hold my passport for ransom. Knowing full well what answer I should give him, I asked another expat what I should do. Perhaps more experienced than I was in the precariousness of a foreigner's fate without a passport, he told me to pay the $200. But I did not. Instead, I contacted the American embassy on New Year's Eve and reported the passport had been stolen. I also informed the thief of what I'd done, to which he replied with threats of violence should he ever find me and with the news that the evidence against him - my passport - had been destroyed.

Taking his threats seriously, I got out of town early in 2008 and fled south to a tiny island where I have been living ever since. I finally got my replacement passport in 2016, since my pension was just barely enough for me to live from hand to mouth, with nothing to spare.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish by posting this information the first time was to sum something up, to tie this misadventure up into some more presentable condition, and try to make sense of it. At 61, I've become an old man since I first came here at the much tenderer age of 49. There is a scene in the marvelous Sam Peckinpah film, Ride the High Country, in which two old men, Steve Judd and Gil Westrum, played by old Joel McCrea and old Randolph Scott, haggle over the scant wisdom they've accrued in their lives.

Steve Judd: Would it surprise you to know that I was once a law-breaker?
Gil Westrum: Well! Bless my stars.
Steve Judd: About the age of that boy back there; skinny as a snake and just about as mean. Ran around with the Hole-in-the-Wall bunch; gun-happy, looking for trouble -- or a pretty ankle. Had the world by the tail, so to speak. Then one night Paul Staniford picked me up. He was Sheriff of Madera County then. There'd been a fight, and I was drunk; sicker than a damn dog. Well sir, he dried me out in jail, then we went out back and he proceeded to kick the bitter hell right out of me.
Gil Westrum: That took some doin'.
Steve Judd: Not much. You see, he was right and I was wrong. That makes a difference.
Gil Westrum: Who says so?
Steve Judd: Nobody; that's something you just know. Anyhow, when I was able to walk again, I realized I'd learned a lesson: the value of self-respect.
Gil Westrum: What's that worth on the open market?
Steve Judd: Nothing to some people; but a great deal to me. But I lost it. These last years, the only work I was able to get was in places like Kate's back there... bartender, stick man, bouncer, what have you. Not much to brag on. Now, I'm gettin' back a little respect for myself. I intend to keep it, with the help of you and that boy back there. Good to be workin' again, Gil.
Gil Westrum: Yeah. [Pause] Partner, you know what's on the back of a poor man when he dies? The clothes of pride. And they're not a bit warmer to him dead than they were when he was alive. [Pause] Is that all you want, Steve?
Steve Judd: [Considers] All I want is to enter my house justified.

That last line seems a bit stoic, but it has a ring to it.
In our era of identity politics, in which people are so busy defining themselves and searching out whatever tribe or category they belong in (the narrower the better), it's comforting to summon forth what a genuine individual had to say about himself when the time arrived for him to sum it up. In his last collection of poems, In the Clearing, from 1962, Robert Frost included some lyrics that have a somewhat more intentional ring to them, that sound as if Frost were trying to justify his long life and his poetry. One of them, "Escapist - Never," comes as close as any other of his poems to a kind of self-definition.

He is no fugitive – escaped, escaping.
No one has seen him stumble looking back.
His fear is not behind him but beside him
On either hand to make his course perhaps
A crooked straightness yet no less a straightness.
He runs face forward. He is a pursuer.
He seeks a seeker who in his turn seeks
Another still, lost far into the distance.
Any who seek him seek in him the seeker.
His life is a pursuit of a pursuit forever.
It is the future that creates his present.
All is an interminable chain of longing.

Well, Robert Frost needn't have tried to sum up anything - least of all his redoubtable work as one of the foremost American poets of the 20th century. But this late poem sends a shiver of recognition through me. A bit stoic, but it has a ring to it.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

In the depths of silence, there is always oneself. (Carl Th. Dreyer)

Poor Joan of Arc has been been used as an instrument of so many different, and often contradictory, causes that it is by now next to impossible to find the living, breathing woman underneath the cant. She is like a medieval manuscript on which, over the centuries, the original text has been almost completely obscured by palimpsests. Shaw wrote in his preface to Saint Joan: 

She is the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a professed and most pious Catholic, and the projector of a Crusade against the Husites, she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs. She was also one of the first apostles of Nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare as distinguished from the sporting ransom-gambling chivalry of her time. She was the pioneer of rational dressing for women, and, like Queen Christina of Sweden two centuries later, to say nothing of Catalina de Erauso and innumerable obscure heroines who have disguised themselves as men to serve as soldiers and sailors, she refused to accept the specific woman’s lot, and dressed and fought and lived as men did.

And Shaw did Joan a further disservice by using her to his own purposes, no differently from all the others.  Did Joan herself know that she was all the things Shaw said she was? Of course she didn't. She wasn't a fool, but was no genius, either. She was very much a young woman of the 15th century, when Christianity was still a religion of ecstasies, when average people could claim that they met angels and had conversations with them without being presumed psychotic. But the Devil was equally real to them, and the Church was the only agent of salvation - which is why Joan was burned. Not because she was a witch but because she had challenged the Church's authority. 

Separating fact from fiction in the case of Joan of Arc is especially difficult. When Orwell pointed out that history is written by the winners, he couldn't have chosen a better example than Joan's.  Two sides fought it out for control of France in the Hundred Years War.  Joan appeared as if out of nowhere at the age of 16 and almost as quickly was spirited from the scene. To the French she was sent by God. To the English, she was sent by the Devil, since surely God must be on their side. She was captured and delivered into the hands of her enemies, who went to the trouble of putting her on trial. Shaw argued that the case for the prosecution was argued successfully, leading them to no other conclusion but that Joan was a heretic who had superseded the authority of the Church. On these grounds she was found guilty and sentenced to be burned at the stake on May 30, 1431.

Upon winning the Hundred Years War, the French reopened the case against Joan and reversed the tribunal's verdict. In 1909 the Vatican beatified Joan, which is a required step to eventual sainthood. And in 1920 she was canonized as a saint. New books about her, her exploits and her miracles were written and published. It was only a matter of time before film, the new artistic medium for the masses, would get around to telling her story. Two films went into production at the end of the 1920s. One, La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, had a big budget and thousands of extras and concentrated on the heroic Joan, victorious in battle, the curious figure of a young woman in shining armor armed with nothing but a banner, leading  the French to victory before being betrayed and martyred by the enemies of France. It was released in 1929. 

Every bit of this history only leads us further away from Joan the young woman who was put to death in an exceedingly cruel way five hundred years before - by now almost a hundred years more. Carl Theodor Dreyer was chosen to direct another film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, this time concentrating on Joan's trial and execution. Some objected to a Dane being entrusted with the story of a French heroine, but he was by then one of the most distinguished filmmakers in Europe, and he was the perfect choice for our rediscovery of Joan. The moment Marie Falconetti, who is Joan in Dreyer's film, enters the first scene, in men's clothes with her hair cut short, with chains on her hands and feet, everything Shaw informs us of the significance and meaning behind her shortened life becomes suddenly immaterial. Dreyer brings the real woman into our presence. He gave enormous authority to Falconetti and worked with her indefatigably. He concentrated our attention on the faces of his characters by using close-ups almost incessantly, disturbingly to audiences at the time who were unused to the unrelieved intensity. (The actors also wore no makeup, so that the very texture of their skin is revealed.) Of course, the close-up is a photographic narrative device to heighten the intensity of a scene, but Dreyer knew there was little or no room for relief during the trial scenes. The only thing that brings relief is the unusual - and ingenious - shifting of the camera angles, often breaking the time-honored rules of line-of-sight. 

For the actors, the experience must've been overwhelming, especially since Dreyer chose to shoot in sequence, as each scene is presented in the script, which was in itself based on the record of the trial. The climactic moment during the shooting came when, prior to Joan being taken to the place of execution, Dreyer did what Falconetti begged him not to do: her already short hair was trimmed further down to the scalp, in preparation for her being burned alive. The execution scene is more overpowering than any sequence in Eisenstein (even if Eisenstein discounted the film for its "individualism"). The flesh and blood presence of a human being who is shown being tied to a pillar, beneath which bundles of wood are set alight, Falconetti's tear-stained face being obscured by smoke and her look of terror when she feels the flames touching her flesh. Antonin Artaud, the creator of a Theater of Cruelty, is ironically shown below the pillar holding a crucifix on a long staff up for Joan to gaze upon as she is dying. Then the strangest thing happens, which is mentioned nowhere in the historical record. The people who at first had gathered for the carnival and who have witnessed the ritual burning alive of a young and healthy human being are suddenly inspired to revolt. The English soldiers, armed with weapons known as "ball-and-chain flails" smash into the crowd and beat them back, before raising the fortress' drawbridge.

Sometimes, fledgling cinephiles, overwhelmed from their first encounter with films that have come to define the art of cinema, and some of the required reading, both scholarly and critical, that provides them with needed background and context, will thenceforth proceed from film to film expecting a comparable emotional connection, a personal response whose intensity comes close to that first experience. Like a powerful intoxicant or like love, every subsequent encounter becomes an increasingly desperate - and futile - attempt to repeat the first time - the first high, the first love. 

From the moment when our cinephile understands that a repeat of their first experience is unattainable, they're faced with a choice: suffer further disappointment by measuring every film by that first high standard, or compromise by allowing that, if their filmgoing lives are to prosper and yield as much exaltation (with pleasure to spare) as possible, it's wiser to lower their expectations, and lessen their disappointments.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the films that have stood out since its first release as an inimitable work, comparable in stature with a half dozen - if that many - others. Its reappearance and restoration was one of the events in the incredible history of the film that only deepened its legendary status. I hadn't had a chance to see it until the Criterion DVD was released when I was in my forties. Criterion provided me then with the option of watching the film with a musical score composed especially for the occasion or of watching it in silence, as Dreyer himself wished. I watched it in a silence that intensified the hypnotic power of the film's images. It was one of the most overpowering experiences of my life, comparable in its gravity and effect to finishing War and Peace or Moby Dick. I was transformed by watching it, enlarged, uplifted only to feel noticeably heavier upon coming back down. When he saw the film in 1929, Mordaunt Hall, in the New York Times wrote:  "As a film work of art this takes precedence over anything that has so far been produced. It makes worthy pictures of the past look like tinsel shams. It fills one with such intense admiration that other pictures appear but trivial in comparison." Ninety years later, with the addition of innumerable films to our understanding of what a great film can be, I am in complete agreement.

The Long Lost Art of the Good-Bad Movie

I recently had a chance to see Sidney Lumet's film The Pawnbroker. Surprised to find myself underwhelmed by it, because Lumet would eventually become an excellent filmmaker (Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, Prince of the City), I was curious to discover what contemporary film critics had to say about it. Through circuitous links, I managed to find a review that Dwight MacDonald wrote for Esquire. Clearly, MacDonald, author of Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (1962), was too good a thinker and writer to bother about film. Yet bother he did, from 1960, when you could find playing in New York City on any given week a new film by Truffaut, Fellini, Resnais, Antonioni, or Bergman - at the peak of their powers - until Macdonald detected a chill in the air in 1966, when the effulgence of great films slowed to a trickle and he asked Esquire if he could start a Politics column instead.
Here is how Macdonald opened his review of The Pawnbroker:

FILMS
JUNE 1, 1966 | DWIGHT MACDONALD

The good bad movie is a lively, authentic and, in its modest way, quite respectable product Hollywood used to make in the Thirties and Forties before it succumbed to the ravages of Culture, like a primitive tribe coming into contact with civilization and exchanging its simple folkways for Mother Hubbards, pidgin English and syphilis. Most of the Bogart and Cagney movies come under this head, also a lot of Western, gangster and horrorscience films, plus a long line of “screwball” comedies like Nothing Sacred, Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby and such works of the late Preston Sturges (1898-1959) as Sullivan’s Travels, The Lady Eve, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, The Great McGinty and Mad Wednesday, also known as The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. In 1957 Manny Färber published a celebrated piece in Commentary on what he called “underground films” —not to be confused with a contemporary school that has appropriated the name but whose films are the opposite of those Färber was describing, being both uncommercial and untalented. Färber, as perverse and original a film critic as exists or can be imagined —you can catch his act currently in Cavalier, one of those quondam “girlie” magazines that, following Playboy’s profitable example, is mutating from libido to literature— Färber in his article celebrated such Hollywood directors as Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh, the very titles of whose movies showed what he meant: White Heat, The Crowd Roars, They Drive By Night, The Roaring Twenties. His connoisseurship was so acute that, while he included in his underground pantheon John Ford and William Wellman, he excluded from the strict canon their more ambitious (and most generally admired) efforts, such as The Informer and The Public Enemy. He found them slightly bogus. To his impeccable taste, even Ford’s Stagecoach was infected with the Art—he reserved his enthusiasm for “the pre-Stagecoach Ford.” Anticipating Harold Rosenberg’s “action painting,” Färber wrote of “action directors” whose “dry, economic, life-worn movie style . . . made their observations of the American he-man so rewarding.” Like Rosenberg, he pushed his aesthetic far beyond the limits of what is usually considered art. The non-artist, indeed the anti-artist was his hero: “Hawks and his group are perfect examples of the anonymous artist who is seemingly afraid of the polishing, hypocrisy, bragging, fake educating that goes on in serious art.” They “accept the role of hack” and work best “with material that is hopelessly worn-out and childish.” There’s something in this idea, especially as applied to the 1930-1950 Hollywood, so long as it is not pushed too far. Like most ideas, however, it was pushed too far, first by the Cahiers du Cinéma group in Paris—independently of Färber, as far as I know—and then by their Anglo-American epigones who, after the most delicate calibrations on the politique des auteurs yardstick, concluded that Hitchcock’s The Birds and Preminger’s The Cardinal were masterpieces.

Of late, however, the auteur ideologues seem to be losing heart —what can one do with Mamie after all ?—and the good bad movie is no longer a live issue. The problem today, with Culture booming and exploding everywhere and movies competing with novels and plays as okay subjects for critical exegesis, is rather the bad good movie, the movie with serious intentions and pretentions that turns its back haughtily on the box office in order to make a Meaningful Statement about alienation, social injustice, the mechanization of modern life, the difficulty of communication, the impossibility of love, and other important matters, the movie that is directed up to the hilt, avantgarde-wise, the movie that lays it right on the line for the Browning Societies of our time, the audiences of the “art” movie houses— over six hundred now as against twelve in 1945— and the film clubs that are proliferating in our colleges. I intend no Philistine sneer, or at least not only a Philistine sneer: those grimly bluestocking Browning Societies awakened many a Victorian to the pleasures, and difficulties, of poetry; and our cinematic equivalents today are doing the same for the art of the movies, as well as making it economically possible, the American market being as big and rich as it is, for a dozen or so directors, all foreign, to create an international renaissance of the art. But seriousness is not enough; it needs to be adulterated with skepticism, common sense and even a little humor. Our cinéastes, from ignorance or kultur-snobbism or both, tend to take the intention for the act and to accept as the genuine article such counterfeits, to name a few bad good movies that come to mind, as Mickey One, The Servant, He Who Must Die, Sundays and Cybele, This Sporting Life, The Loved One, La Terra Trema, The Cool World, The Balcony, Hallelujah the Hills!, King and Country and The Trial, plus at least half the films shown at last fall’s Lincoln Center Film Festival and considerably more than half the movies that Jean-Luc Godard has spawned since Breathless.

Premature Burial

Just when you thought it was safe to return to my blog, here I am again doing my best to do damage to a well established reputation.  I'm only doing it this time because I was provoked by an otherwise well-intentioned notice of a film I already dealt with many years ago, Carl Theodore Dreyer's Ordet (1955).(1) In an interview conducted for The Criterion Collection with Mark Le Fanu, whose book, Believing in Film: Christianity and Classic European Cinema, has just been published, he talks about how much the Dreyer film has meant to him through the years:

I'm not sure, even today, how much of a Christian I am. Belief is a complicated thing, by definition. Yet I’d like to think I know what’s at stake in the matter. As I say in the book, I had a Christian upbringing, and it sticks. For me, the greatest film that shows the power and depth of religion is Carl Th. Dreyer’s Ordet. My first encounter with this masterpiece—I can’t remember how many years ago—was an overwhelming experience, as I know it has been for many other people too.

That film is so profoundly religious on the one hand and totally blasphemous on the other. There’s nothing orthodox about it. The idea of a miracle bringing the dead back to life in a modern context—and of it happening by virtue of belief—is such an audacious thing. In the utterly austere, brooding, sincere way that Dreyer brings it out, the events are so strong that you almost can’t work out what has really happened. Do you believe it? Does Dreyer believe it? (2)

My difference of opinion with Le Fanu (and virtually every other critic in lockstep with him) has nothing to do with my own atheism. Religious conviction is one thing, but an artist finding the means to communicate that conviction is just as important. Watching a film like George Stevens's The Greatest Story Ever Told (1963) is insufferable precisely because, despite Steven's avowed faith (no matter how unexamined it may have been), the smugness with which he presented his devotion to us completely overwhelmed whatever chances the viewer might have had to be moved by them.

About Ordet, in 2011 I wrote:

With his two previous films, Vampyr (1932) and Day of Wrath, Dreyer revealed an obvious interest in the supernatural. Both of those films originated with the assumption that such things as vampires and witches were real, and the effectiveness of the films has a sometimes hair-raising impact on the viewer, not at all mitigated by our knowledge that such things may be more fictional than real. But vampires and witches are nothing compared to what we are expected to swallow in Ordet, in which a clearly deranged man who is convinced he is Jesus Christ, raises his sister-on-law from the dead.

The scene takes place at the very end of more than two hours of the most tedious filmmaking conceivable, with actors moving very little, standing or sitting stock-still as if for a portrait and staring at a spot just past the camera lens, while droning on and on about which brand of Christianity - the guilt-ridden or the enlightened variety - is the one true faith. The outcome, in which the God of the Old Testament supposedly reveals himself through Inger's resurrection, is preposterous precisely for being staged and shot so matter-of-factly. The event has not even the effect of a magic trick, which involves some illusion or other, that one has just witnessed something that cannot have happened, and which calls for a suspension of disbelief.

Dreyer, who evidently believed in miracles, chose to refrain from trickery of any kind - no dramatic emphasis through lighting, camera angle, or action. His use of such "devices" are what gave Vampyr and Day of Wrath a certain level of realism - realism of the fantastic, that made them, if only momentarily, convincing. Inger's resurrection, however, is not intended to frighten us (although, in reality, it would have sent some of the characters who witnessed it screaming from the room).

I was always puzzled by the popularity of magicians. Do people like to be fooled, or do  they believe in magic? I am equally amazed whenever I read some of the most serious - or seriously intended - writing about Ordet because so often the writer, in the most reverential tones they can manage, refers to the so-called resurrection at the end of the film as if it were a literal resurrection. Even Chris Fujiwara, also writing for Criterion, falls into the trap: "The triumph of Ordet is to bring us a moving, detailed image of a life that is rich, ordinary, practical, and physical—an image that makes us ache for such close comprehensiveness—and at the same time to purify this image so that it comes to us as new and absolute, so that we feel the necessity, justice, and marvelousness of the moment (stretched to eternity) when the dead Inger comes back to life."(3)

I find this kind of talk fascinating because the critics who resort to it are evidently not trying to fool us - at least not as much as they were fooled by Dreyer. When Le Fanu asks "Do you believe it?" he's trying to determine the extent to which we've been taken in by Dreyer's trickery.  Because it is trickery, even though Dreyer uses no special effects. He presents to the viewer an impossible event. Dreyer was initially unsure about the scene of Inger coming back from the dead, so he shot two versions - the way Munk wrote it, in which Inger only appears to be dead, and the other that wound up in the film. Dreyer opted for Inger's resurrection, and it's the reason so many seemingly rational people are still swooning over Ordet.

As a non-Christian, I am surprised that so many critics who like the film and approve of its methods and its message miss the powerful rebuke by Munk and Dreyer of every so-called Christian in the film by making the character with the most ecstatic faith seem like a pathetic lunatic. Unlike the others, every one of whom has his own "interpretation" of the scriptures, Johannes takes them literally. But being a literal Christian makes him an outcast, unsuited to the everyday tasks and spiritual compromises of life. The nature of Johannes's madness is never mentioned in any study of Ordet that I've read. Munk suggested in his play that its cause was a disappointment in love. But Dreyer eliminates this motivation, and introduces the argument that Johannes was driven mad by reading too much Kierkegaard. In the documentary, Carl Th. Dreyer: My Métier, the actor who played Johannes, Preben Lerdorff Rye, speaks about how Dreyer took him to a hospital to meet a patient there:

'We are going to Vordingborg,' Dreyer told him, 'there is a hospital there!' 'I see,' I said. I didn't really see at all. Well, we got there - and I was admitted into a patient's room. It was no ordinary hospital. The room was a kind of cell. It had no door handle on the inside. There sat a very nice man, - almost beautiful, if one may say that of a man. He resembled the most beautiful pictures one has seen in print of Jesus. I learned later that Dreyer wanted to use him, but no, for when he was to be got back to normal afterwards it might be difficult. Or so I surmise.

So Dreyer considered using an actual mental patient to play Johannes. Instead, he advised his actor to adopt the mental patient's odd high-pitched speaking voice. We know that Dreyer had been planning a film on the life of Christ for decades. The script he wrote was published, but he never made the film. Nine of the fourteen feature films he made in his forty-year career were silent films, culminating in what is by far his greatest accomplishment, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Vampyr (1931) was an experimental, and effective, horror film. Dreyer decided, in the extended intervals between making his feature films (he also made several short films), that he needed to adopt a different technique with long takes to accustom the viewer to a slower-paced period or setting. Day of Wrath (1943), about a 17th-century woman accused of witchcraft, profited from this technique by helping to establish the film's uncanny atmosphere. But Ordet suffers from the same technique because the everydayness of the scenes prior to the very last is so deadening that you find yourself thinking about every interminable scene's duration. Dreyer even punctuates the stillness with the sound of a ticking clock. I know that he did this in order to heighten the effect of Inger's awakening, just as he deliberately forced us to conclude, like everyone else in the film (except a little girl), that Johannes is mad. But the ending is cleverly-staged, brilliantly photographed hogwash. I can only reiterate what I wrote eight years ago:

Dreyer's approach is bald rather than bold. Instead of suspending our disbelief, Inger's awakening is intended to inspire belief. But the very realism he uses raises more questions than it tries to answer, or dismiss: would not the body of Inger, even in her insulated farm community, have been prepared in some way for burial - I mean in some way that might make her sudden return to life even more impossible? In the midst of so much humanity, even in so stifling a drama as Ordet, the appearance of the inhuman only produces a shock and, ultimately, distaste for everything that comes before it. et, the appearance of the inhuman only produces a shock and, ultimately, distaste for everything that comes before it.

(1) See Films I Love To Hate: Ordet
(2) Mystery of Faith: What 'the Breath of Religion' Means to Mark Le Fanu, September 9, 2019.
(3) Fujiwara is defiant (from the safety of his admiration for the film) enough to declare "That Ordet is a great film, one of the greatest ever made, only a rash or foolish person will deny." As rash or foolish as Johannes, perhaps?