The Cameraman's Revenge

I’m in the middle of watching Shoah at the moment (post forthcoming), and opted for a rewatch of this as a bit of a light interlude. Of course, it’s only in such a context that Ordet can be called “light” even ironically; for the last 21 years, since I first saw it on SBS back in 1991, it’s always been kind of my supreme example of Serious and Difficult European (and More Specifically Scandinavian) Art Cinema. Carl Dreyer is someone I haven’t been in any great rush to reappraise, and indeed it’s probably been the better part of two decades since I last watched Ordet. I was so much younger then, I’m older than that now, to paraphrase that Zimmerman fellow, and I’ve gained rather more experience with the amazing world of cinema in that time. As such, I’m sure I have a greater appreciation of the artistry involved here; Ordet is a feast for fans of the long take, of which Dreyer was a clearly highly skilled proponent. And yet I admire it only at some distance. Ordet is a perplexing work by two difficult men (Dreyer and Kaj Munk; what a complicated character he seems to have been), a religious drama by an apparently not especially religious man at the end of which a madman who thinks he’s Christ resurrects the dead after he’s regained his sanity. I really don’t know what to take away from it. These days I’m inclined to agree with Wittgenstein’s opening to the Tractatus, i.e. the world is everything that is, although I think the sum total of “everything that is” is far larger than some people would have you believe. Consequently I don’t really believe in miracles of the kind the film offers at the end, at least not as supernatural events violating natural law, so I feel rather hamstrung by the climactic resurrection; the religiosity underlying the characters (and their disputes) leaves me somewhat at arm’s length from them, and the ending leaves me similarly remote from the film itself (it actually bothers me now for some reason as a 37 y.o. agnostic more than I think it did as a 16 y.o. atheist). I appreciate the film’s artistry, like I said, but I don’t know that I actually like it, never mind love it.

Many things were said about (and often against) Lars von Trier’s Antichrist last year, and they’re still being said; there’s a particularly good debate going on right now on the Criterion Collection Facebook page about it. Having decided somewhere around the time Dogville came out that Lars had run out of anything interesting to say, I had no particular interest in seeing it when it finally made an appearance in cinemas here at the end of last year. Still, when I saw it for loan at the library I decided I might as well see what the fuss was about… cos the fuss made it sound like one of the all-time blood-drenched epics, you know, Charlotte Gainsbourg going at herself with scissors and all of that, stuff for the strongest stomachs only. I was prepared to dislike this film, to be honest, given that I kind of gave up on von Trier ages ago, and given that the stuff all the critics seemed to be screaming about made the film sound like he was just straining to be offensive; I didn’t expect much in the way of depth from what appeared to be contrived controversy. I also didn’t expect it to be quite so amazingly boring, either. I mean, yeah, the stuff people were complaining about is ugly, but god/dess what acres of dullness surround those bits… most of which are in the second half of the film so it’s a mighty slog to even get to them. It was clearly nothing if not brave of Willem Dafoe and (even more so) Charlotte Gainsbourg to take the film on, but that still doesn’t mean the end result was particularly worth it… and while it looks about as lovely as digital cinematography can, that’s not enough.

I saw this on TV years ago, but all I recall about it is that it bored me terribly. As such, I’d frankly forgotten almost everything about the film and for some reason I thought it actually contained a second modern story in parallel with the 17th century one. Which I suppose shows how much attention I must’ve been paying to it in the 90s… mind you, the clown who wrote the description of the film for Allmovie was clearly working from a memory as faulty as mine, so I don’t feel too bad if the professionals are fucking up too. Anyway, seeing the film again was good, not least because now I actually know what happens in it, and I suspect I was harsher on it than I should’ve been back then (is that two Dreyer films I’ve liked better on reappraisal? Christ, I’ll be liking Ordet next…). That said, though, this is nothing if not a dour motherfucker of a film, and while I did like it I doubt I’ll be rushing back to it any time soon. Though I’m sure there are people out there who would casually pull this off the shelf for a night’s entertainment, I don’t know if I want to know them.

Early effort from Carl Dreyer, one of a number of international arthouse giants I tend to have trouble appreciating for whatever reason. (I am, no doubt, in a very special minority thanks to my dislike of Passion of Joan of Arc.) While I did kind of like the film he made before this one (The Parson’s Widow), this didn’t do much to elevate him again in my esteem. Supposedly based on Marie Corelli’s Sorrows of Satan, but as far as I can tell it bears about as much relation to it as Vampyr would to its source a decade later. Similarly, the influence of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance seems to have extended only to the idea of using four linked stories in four different historical periods; there’s no intercutting of the tales like Griffith did, though. The theological underpinning is interesting—God condemns Satan to tempt mankind and every soul Satan wins only adds to the time he must do so; God’s a real charmer, isn’t he—but it doesn’t exactly add up to the most rivetting drama.