During the pre-war period there were only a handful of significant Danish directors, of those were Carl Theodor Dreyer, Urban Gad (1879-1947) who helped catapult the career of Asta Nielsen with his inspired silent short, The Abyss in 1910. The enigmatic Benjamin Christensen (1879-1959) a medical school dropout who asserted himself as a master of horror film before it even became a genre itself, with Det hemmelighedsfulde X (1913) and Night of Revenge in 1915.
Christensen produced an extraordinary quasi-documentary in Sweden - Haxan (Witchcraft through the Ages,1922) and after a stint in Germany he sailed off and away to the distant shores of Hollywood, where a clutch of horror films, the most impressive being 1929's Seven Footprints to Satan. proclaimed him worthy of comparison to formidable directors like Tod Browning and Louise Feuillade.
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| Dreyer said knock you out! - from the domestic delighter - Master of the House (1925) |
Dreyer's Master of the House (1925) was a delectably ironic account of a demanding husband's comeuppance at the hands of the old family nurse and then after making the minor Glomdalsbruden, in Noway, moved to France for his best known picture - The Passion of Joan of Arc which whittles Joan's trial down to a twenty-four hour day, consisting chiefly of interrogations, this late silent film entry seems to cry out emphatically for sound and yet, miraculously to transcend in the end isn't that much a necessity. The exceptional editing, Rudolph Mate's arresting photography, the performance in her only film role - the great French stage thespian - Renee Falconetti, the magnificently expressive faces, the sublime yet terrible ending - out of these Dreyer would create a magnificent and inimitable study of the interior life of a human being.