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?
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