Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
“I feel as though I’m staring into a fire about to be extinguished,” reflects the now aged Gertrud (Nina Pens Rode), a woman whose search for a very specific type of love ultimately left her with nothing but memories. This sequence, set twenty or thirty years after the action of the film, has a palpable sense of deathliness—if Getrud spent the entirety of the film being of the moment, in this scene all she has left is remnants of the past, which she calls to mind like faded photographs. The simple closing of a door becomes an action that represents spiritual transcendence, either a moment of hopeful grace or tragic loss depending on the viewer. Director Carl Theodor Dreyer is not keen to make such decisions, rather revels in the complexities of his characters and situations. The key to this understanding is Gertrud herself, who is both a worthy martyr and a deeply flawed romantic. She becomes so obsessed with an unattainable ideal that she makes everyone, including herself, miserable by the end. Gertrud is equal parts intoxicating and frustrating on a first viewing—while Dreyer’s minimalism is not to be mistaken for a lack of complexity (the shifting balances of the characters within the frame is itself a remarkable game of power), the film has the feel of a mausoleum. And yet this doomed tone services an unforgettable evocation of the most haunted of memories, where Gertrud’s conquest and the way she illustrates her free will being the cause of her eventual isolation.
Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 1925, carl theodor dreyer, master of the house
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s best-known works are characterized by the audacity of their mise en scène (The Passion of Joan of Arc’s close-ups) or their expressionistic focus on creating uncanny atmospheres (Vampyr). Master of the House, then, seems like a radical step behind his later works at a first glance, but it is nonetheless as precise and true to its world as Dreyer’s later films. If the spaces in The Passion of Joan of Arc were distorted and almost purgatorial, Master of the House deliberately creates what a common viewer would associate as a “typical” household. Playing out largely in medium or long shots, the entirety of the house that the bulk of the film takes place in is laid out with incredible precision–one gets a sense of what it would be like to occupy the space, and more significantly the objects that appear in it. Dreyer’s play with objects enhances the realism. The movement of slippers is the physical manifestation of a power play, reflecting the small battles that occur in a typical household. Where the film is of particular interest is in its progressive stance regarding gender, and specifically the destruction of the very makeup of a working class household. The comedy is a bit hard to stomach–regardless of what a wretch Viktor (Johannes Meyer) proves to be, the prolonged humbling he endures begins to feel too obsessively vengeful. Regardless, the film nicely deals with grand drama on a micro scale, and Dreyer’s investment in accuracy creates an uncommonly convincing depiction of a household.
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