The Word
Carl Theodor Dreyer (1955)
It begins and ends with a character waking, in very different circumstances. At the start of the film, early one morning, young Anders Borgen (Cay Kristiansen) comes to and hurries out of bed. In the finale, his sister-in-law, Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), rises from the dead.
Anders, once he’s up in the opening scene, joins his widowed father, Morten (Henrik Malberg), and eldest brother, Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen), in a search of the Borgens’ farmland for Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye), the second of Morten’s three sons. Johannes, who regularly goes walkabout, believes himself to be Jesus Christ. In the climax to Ordet, he returns from his latest excursion free of this delusion but fortified in his Christian faith. He’s sure that Inger, Mikkel’s wife, can be restored to life if the family, who are just about to attend her funeral, prays to God to resurrect her and believes their prayer will be answered. As Johannes prays beside the open coffin, he holds the hand of Mikkel and Inger’s little daughter, Lilleinger (Susanne Rud). Unlike her bereft, unbelieving father, Lilleinger is less grief-stricken than impatient for her mother to come back. The child’s faith that she will come back, in combination with Johannes’s, is sufficient: Inger’s corpse starts to stir. Her return to the land of the living causes Morten Borgen and Peter Petersen (Ejner Federspiel) – senior representatives of opposing Lutheran sects in the rural Danish community, Vedersø, West Jutland, where Carl Theodor Dreyer’s drama is set – to bury their doctrinal differences instantly. Thanks to the miracle, Mikkel can declare, as he embraces his wife, that he has recovered too his long-lost faith.
Ordet’s amazing conclusion brings to mind the words of the Archbishop of Rheims in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan:
‘A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. They may seem very wonderful to the people who witness them, and very simple to those who perform them.’
And mention of Joan inevitably brings to mind Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). In that film, he and Maria Falconetti made remarkably real Joan’s religious conviction and unassuming, unquestionable spiritual authority. In the early outdoor scenes in Ordet, as the search for Johannes goes on, Dreyer and his cinematographer, Henning Bendtsen, conjure up a semblance of transcendence in quite prosaic details: clothes hanging on a washing line beside the Borgens’ house are so luminously white in the sunshine that they’re almost otherworldly. Although deluded for most of the film, Johannes, like Joan, conveys – both before and after the scales fall from his eyes – a sense of the absolute demands of religious commitment. He does this whether quoting copiously from the Bible and inveighing against the godlessness of the age in which he lives, or stipulating the required conditions for a miracle to occur. But The Passion of Joan of Arc and Ordet prove to have rather little in common beyond fine black-and-white photography and an extraordinary believer at the narrative’s centre.
This becomes clear almost as soon as Dreyer moves his camera indoors, where it stays for most of the film – mainly chez Borgen though there’s also a scene at the home of ‘Peter the tailor’ (as Morten calls Peter Petersen). Dreyer’s screenplay for Ordet is adapted from a 1925 stage work of the same name by Kaj Munk, a playwright and Lutheran pastor ‘known for his cultural engagement and his martyrdom during the Occupation of Denmark of World War II’ (Wikipedia). BFI used an extract from Philip Horne’s essay for their The Carl Theodor Dreyer Collection booklet as the handout for this screening. According to Horne, Dreyer wrote, regarding his screen version of Ordet, that ‘plays work very differently from films’; Horne also notes that Dreyer ‘cuts great swathes out of Munk’s text’. The film is very talky, even so. What’s more – and puzzling for a film artist as visually imaginative as Dreyer – it often looks like a stage play, as the actors make their frequent exits and entrances. Worse, they tend to move unnaturally slowly, as if heeding warnings not to walk out of shot.
In Munk’s play, the mental breakdown that triggers Johannes’s religious mania is caused by the death of his fiancée; Dreyer’s screenplay attributes his state of mind instead to reading too much Kierkegaard. That succinct explanation makes a witty change from the chunks of dogmatic dialogue assigned to Morten and Peter. The two sects at loggerheads – the life-affirming followers of ‘Grundtvigianism’ vs the puritanical ‘Inner Mission’ – are real religious groupings (and Vedersø was Kaj Munk’s actual parish). The tensions between them are in the foreground of the film because Anders is in love with Anne (Gerda Nielsen), daughter of Peter the tailor, who won’t let them marry unless Anders converts to the Inner Mission. But Morten’s ‘Glad Christianity’ is hardly more appealing than Peter’s harsh strictures. In fact, the latter’s killjoy extremism, because it seems ridiculous, is marginally the more entertaining of the two.
For the most part, the acting in Ordet is impressive chiefly when the main characters are in extremis. In two cases – Johannes and Inger – this means most of the time they’re on screen. Inger dies after giving birth to her and Mikkel’s third child and first son, who is stillborn. (The couple’s elder daughter is Maren (Ann Elisabeth Rud).) The gruelling labour is powerfully staged by Dreyer and played by Birgitte Federspiel. The same goes, of course, for Inger’s eventual return to life – a breathtaking technical achievement on the part of actress and director alike. In contrast, Mikkel’s breakdown beside his wife’s coffin (before she revives) registers strongly in part because it’s so different from Emil Hass Christensen’s stilted playing in what’s gone before. I preferred the acting in three of the smaller parts. Ove Rud is the Borgens’ smooth new pastor, who doesn’t believe in miracles, while allowing for the ‘special circumstances’ in which Christ performed them. Henry Skjær is the family’s ebullient rationalist doctor, taken by surprise when Inger dies but determinedly unfazed by her post-mortem recovery: ‘These amateur death certificates must be done away with!’ is all he has to say. Sylvia Eckhausen is Peter’s pleasantly hospitable wife, who does as her husband tells her without seeming subservient.
Telephone calls and the doctor’s motor car supply needed reminders that Ordet is set in 1925: the rural settings, in combination with the décor and clothes, give the impression of a more distant past. A conflict between temporal and sub specie aeternitatis points of view – sustained throughout The Passion of Joan of Arc – comes through here in odd, striking details, as when Johannes apprehends the arrival of the doctor’s car outside the Borgens’ house as the approach of the Reaper. But the script’s many words often get in the way of Ordet’s confounding aspect – until near the end, that is. The supernatural climax sounds like an impossible challenge for the director of a serious-minded screen drama. It’s quite a mystery in itself that Dreyer seems more comfortable realising a miracle than in depicting supposedly real life.
25 February 2023
