Carl Theodor Dreyer
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The Witch (2016)
Directed by Robert Eggers
influenced by Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (1955), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Themes
Indeed, his inspiration seems to have been Danish director Carl Dreyer’s wartime drama Day of Wrath, with which The Witch (the title appears as “The VVitch” on the credits) shares many themes.
It might be argued that revered director Carl Dreyer was doing something similar in his 1943 classic, Day of Wrath, a tale of alleged witchcraft in a Danish village which Eggers had acknowledged as an influence.
Cinema has always had a grand tradition of dealing with religious hysteria tied to the patriarchal fear of pussy, lest we forget Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, plus virtually anything foisted upon us by Ingmar Bergman.
Conjuring the spirit of such convincing occult dramas as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day Of Wrath, Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General and Piers Haggard’s The Blood On Satan’s Claw, The Witch favours verisimilitude, formal exactitude and insidious dread over cheap shocks.
What follows is a thematic mash-up of the European folk tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault (the figures of Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty loom large), the paranoid finger-pointing of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible , the religious devotion of Dreyer’s Ordet and the historical detail of Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun .
El terror puritano adopta una antidecimonónica estructura de relato nuevo (según Robbe-Grillet): discontinua, subjetiva, ambigua y móvil, donde las crispadas voces obsedidas por la culpa y los malos pensamientos se espetan a cámara buscando su autonomía y demostrar la terrible vicariancia de la palabra sagrada (la que en Ordet de Dreyer 55 resucitaba a una difunta); donde la trágica desaparición del bebito se efectúa a base de lúdicos planos objetivos/subjetivos escamoteadores; donde la atmosférica música postserial de Mark Korven, nunca de acompañamiento o mero fondo, vehicula al terror en sí, consustancial; donde cobra enorme importancia el dominio de las tinieblas, como algo más que una ausencia o un motivo contrastante, sino como sustancia significativa y crucial que determina decisiones e impregna los miedos en la elaboradísimas imágenes del fotógrafo Jarin Blaschke, de continuo iluminadas a base exclusiva de famélicas velas omnipresentes o confinando a rincones fractales, cual ejercic…
12 Years a Slave (2013)
Directed by Steve McQueen
influenced by The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Characters
She’s like Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, going to a place of private craziness and communion beyond pain, to the point that Patsey begs Solomon to take her down to the river and drown her.
Like him or not, Lee knows his predecessors, Hulk’s indebtedness to the surreal drama of the 1930’s horror lexicon knowingly indicated by two shots – one of the Hulk, one of Bruce Banner – lifted from Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein and Dreyer’s Vampyr (not to mention Jennifer Connelly, channeling countless damsels from decades past with a new sense of modern feminine empowerment).
The Green Knight (2021)
Directed by David Lowery
influenced by The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Visuals
With inspiration from films such as Willow , The Dark Crystal , and The Passion of Joan of Arc , The Green Knight is a slow-burning, character study.
Lowery has cited multiple films that influenced him over the years as he worked to bring The Green Knight to life onscreen: Willow , Bram Stoker's Dracula , The Dark Crystal , Marie Antoinette , and The Passion of Joan of Arc , a 1928 French silent film by Carl Dreyer.
Oliver even takes his hip girlfriend to a screening of “The Passion of Joan of Arc” while trying to impress her with copies of “King Lear,” the works of Nietzsche, and a dog-eared copy of “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Not only does it also have elements that recall Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) and a certain amount of Italian horror, but it’s every inch a Tim Burton picture.
While Crash is a starting point, Ducournau’s fresh take on body horror leads into Under the Skin (2013) territory, and frames the growing divinity of Rousselle as a face reminiscent of Falconetti’s anguish in Dreyer’s 1928 landmark The Passion of Joan of Arc (significantly in her final sequences with Lindon).
Dogville (2003)
Directed by Lars von Trier
influenced by The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (1955)
Themes Visuals Plot
Von Trier/Jekyll is a serious artist who, much of the time, at least, aspires to be Carl Dreyer, his great Dane antecedent whose most celebrated film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, is arguably the most galvanic testament to female martyrdom ever seen on the screen.
What counted was getting the spectator absorbed in the past; the means were multifarious and new"--for The Passion of Joan of Arc, von Trier, an Americana buff, intermixes motifs in Dogville, arriving at a sort of Cubist period piece.
Omitting from this conversation admittedly key Dreyer works such as Day of Wrath, it's as though von Trier has, ironically, announced his artistic maturation by reverting to an older leitmotiv--through what started out as self-flattering imitation, he's organically retraced the arc of Dreyer, "Denmark's greatest filmmaker."
Take away Emily Watson’s heart-wrenching turn in Breaking the Waves and you have a TV-movie remake of Dreyer’s Ordet.
The Magdalene Sisters (2002)
Directed by Peter Mullan
influenced by The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Visuals
Following the story of three composite girls (mother out of wedlock Rose (Dorothy Duffy); too-flirtatious Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone); and Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), raped by a cousin at a wedding), the picture is something of a boot camp drama--complete with dressings-down and sadistic drilling--grafted to a concentration camp melodrama culminating in an involuntary shearing that finds Mullan indulging in a distracting nod to Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.
Antichrist (2009)
Directed by Lars von Trier
influenced by Day of Wrath (1943), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Themes
(Dreyer’s Day of Wrath might well be Gainsbourg’s character’s favorite film of all time, as it concerns her thesis topic, the persecution of women as witches in 16th century Europe.)
After all, the big influence here, as always, is Carl Theodor Dreyer, that other tyrannical Dane whose tuxedo von Trier once wore to the Cannes Film Festival. 1 Nearly all of Dreyer’s films from The Passion of Joan of Arc onwards involve the disjunction between men and women played out – sometimes violently – as a struggle of reason against nature, mind against body, language and intellectual order against gesture and emotional chaos.
For instance, there's a memorable sequence in Carl-Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) in which the camera seems to be placed inside a coffin and then carried through the streets.
It's a moody and moving coming-of-age saga, a love story, a wish-fulfillment revenge fantasy and a convincing depiction of a depressed milieu (working-class suburban Stockholm in the 1980s) as well as a vampire movie worthy of being discussed alongside such other offbeat genre touchstones as George Romero's "Martin" (1977) and the still unsurpassed "Vampyr" (1932), also from a Scandinavian filmmaker, Denmark's Carl Dreyer.
I Spit on Your Grave (2010)
Directed by Steven R. Monroe
influenced by The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Visuals
No one is ever going to confuse Steven R. Monroe's remake of I Spit on Your Grave with The Passion of Joan of Arc, but this ostensibly silly horror quickie possesses a formal sophistication that would make Carl Theodor Dreyer sit up and take notice.
(I look forward to what she does next, but even if she does nothing, she'll have this one extraordinary moment, much like Maria Falconetti's great, single performance in The Passion of Joan of Arc .)
Despite this paradox, in the history of cinema, there have been many great films about Christian faith — though not nearly enough: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Ordet,” Robert Bresson’s “The Diary of a Country Priest,” Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Léon Morin, Priest.”
Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
influenced by The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Visuals
The last movie I saw with this many close-ups was The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and it was supposed to be suffocating.
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (2021)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by Gertrud (1964)
Visuals
Circling back to Dreyer: In his final film, Gertrud , from 1964, his minimalism had progressed so far that he eschewed even the most basic props of a realistic world, such as extraneous plates or spoons in a kitchen, opting to include only items that directly served his story.
Biller recently tweeted about preparing for an interview with the Criterion Collection, and listed a few films she might talk about: Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman”; Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger Than Life” and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Gertrud.”
It’s as pure and harrowing a last shot as those of John Ford’s “ 7 Women ” and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “ Gertrud ”—an image that, if by some terrible misfortune were to be Scorsese’s last, would rank among the most harshly awe-inspiring farewells of the cinema.
En cambio, El faro sí parece aludir al cine de Jean Grémillon –como me lo hizo notar mi amigo J.J. Negrete– o al del Carl Theodor Dreyer que dirigió Vampyr (1932).