The Swedish 'Ordet'

Get rid of the miracles, and the whole world will fall at the feet of Jesus Christ. Rousseau 

Not until this past week have I had a chance to watch the film Ordet. Not Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, that he waited until 1955 to make, that has inspired some critics to write about in words so reverential that you’d think the film was the record of an actual miracle and not the bald and quite ridiculous representation of one. Chris Fujiwara stated categorically “that Ordet is a great film, one of the greatest ever made, only a rash or foolish person will deny.” Fujiwara, I learn, has written books – BOOKS – about Otto Preminger and Jacques Tourneur. An auteurist is someone who goes around kissing every frog he can find on the outside chance that just one of them is an enchanted prince. 

But I’d rather not dwell on Dreyer’s ponderous version, because there is another Ordet, made in 1943 in Sweden by Gustaf Molander, who is best known for having brought Ingrid Bergman to the attention of David O. Selznick in his 1936 film Intermezzo and for directing Woman Without a Face, from one of Ingmar Bergman’s earliest scripts. Molander’s Ordet opened in Stockholm the day after Christmas in 1943. Nine days later, Kaj Munk, who wrote the original play, was murdered by the Gestapo in Denmark. His body was found in a ditch the next day. As I wrote eleven years ago, “In itself, this [Molander’s making a film adaptation of Munk’s play] was a rather daring act in a nation (Sweden) that, to save itself from the fate of Denmark, was officially neutral throughout World War II.” Carl Dreyer reportedly wanted to make his own film of Ordet, but had to wait at least a decade after Molander’s film due to copyright restrictions. 

Molander’s film has a great deal going for it – not the least being originality. But, compared with Dreyer’s version, it has much less going for it in terms of style – the manner in which the story unfolds is less formal, but also less mannered. By the time Dreyer made his last two films, Ordet and Gertrud, his ideas about film had so ossified that it’s a stretch to call them motion pictures. Dreyer’s actors seem like opera singers, who have to plant themselves so that their diaphragms can function. The lighting of his interior scenes is as unnatural as that of a portrait gallery. 

The differences between the two films are striking. In Molander’s film when we first meet Johannes, he is a pastor in his father’s church. In Dreyer’s film he has already flipped his lid, has escaped his family’s confinement and wanders the oh-so picturesque grassy hills preaching to the wind. Molander opens his film, after a disembodied voice gives us a tour of a cloud-filled sky and verdant earth near a rocky coast, at a farm house where several voices call out for “Inger” – everyone from the old patriarch with the familiar face of Victor Sjöström, as Knut Borg, needing her help putting on his Sunday collar to her husband looking for his socks in the kitchen to her younger brother trying to comb his cowlicked hair. Inger has to quiet them all because Johannes (Rune Lindström), a student pastor – like Kaj Munk – is nervously preparing his sermon, so nervously that he gets hiccups. His wife, Kristina, gives him a spoonful of sugar. 

Two differing Sunday services, and their religious dogmas, are contrasted by Molander – the orthodox Lutheran and the “born again” sect. Predictably both sides are convinced of their own righteousness. Knut Borg’s (Sjöström) orthodox Lutheran family is brought into direct conflict with a “born again” family, headed by Petterson (Ludde Gentzel) when Knut’s youngest son and Petterson’s daughter fall in love. Knut’s eldest son (Holger Löwenadler) announces his doubts about God, gets drunk in a tavern and gets beaten up. Then, after giving his Sunday sermon, Johannes disappears. Apparently, it isn’t theology that troubles him (Dreyer blamed his mental breakdown on his reading too much Kierkegaard) but the nature of faith itself. While he sees and hears more than enough of religion in the world, faith is lacking. 

And in Molander’s telling, Kristina, Johannes’s wife, is run over by a car after she tries to bring him back home. In a bizarre scene that anticipates the film’s climax, at Kristina’s vigil, Johannes tells her corpse, “In Jesus’s name, stand up!” Johannes’s subsequent breakdown makes somewhat more sense. His wife is eliminated by Dreyer. The actor playing Johannes was the remarkable Rune Lindström, who also wrote the Molander film’s screenplay. (The most hair-raising moment in the film comes not at the end but when Johannes, who by then thinks he is Jesus, goes in to see Inger just after she has died. When he looks at her he – and we – hear her voice calling to him to help her!) 

The rest of the story is familiar to anyone who has seen the Dreyer film, but the way it is told in Molander’s film is much more naturalistic. For one thing, Molander’s Ordet is crowded with life, and his actors resemble real people rather than archetypes. And his film is alive with humorous touches. This was an important choice for Molander, since he avoids the horrible solemnity of Dreyer’s film, and he doesn’t set us up, as Dreyer does, for the supernatural scene in which Inger, who died in childbirth, is roused by Johannes, as if from sleep, from her coffin. The scene is staged in two rooms, a smaller room where the coffin sits and an outer room, filled with a few dozen people. Just as they are about to screw the coffin lid down, Johannes arrives. He closes the door so that he (and his little sister) are alone with the body. He repeats the same command that he used with Kristina’s corpse, “In the name of Jesus Christ, stand up!” First her nostrils flare, then her eyes open. (If I found her sitting up in the coffin a little too pat, it’s only because I’ve seen too many vampire movies.) 

If Munk’s play and Dreyer’s film demonstrate one thing definitively it is that surely the raising of Lazarus was the most vulgar of Jesus’s miracles. Dreyer’s film has had an odd effect on many critics who were otherwise level headed reporters for their periodicals. It makes them go all reverent and weak in the knees (and between the ears). When Roger Ebert, who is usually so sensible and down-to-earth, saw Ordet, he wrote things like “The camera movements have an almost godlike quality” and “The lighting, in black and white, is celestial”. He tells us that “I had started by viewing a film that initially bored me. It had found its way into my soul.” I won’t try to figure out what Ebert is talking about. I saw the same film he did and I didn’t think the stunt staged in the last scene made up for the protracted tedium of what led up to it. I wonder what Roger Ebert would’ve written about Gustaf Molander's film if he’d seen it before Dreyer stole all of his thunder. 

Every frame of Dreyer’s Ordet gives away his game, that is so solemnized and emphatic that we could be watching the life of a saint instead of the ordinary lives of farmers. Molander’s film is like a Breughel painting – like The Fall of Icarus. 

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood 

Its human position: how it takes place 

While someone else is eating or opening a 

window or just walking dully along; 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 

For the miraculous birth, there always must be 

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot 

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot 

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse 

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

(“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden) 

Molander was never a master, thank god. He was only an intelligent and conscientious filmmaker trying not to appeal to our faith but to move us.