Ordet (1955)

Another winner from Dreyer but i expected as much since i think every film i've seen by him is pretty much a masterpieceÂ… that's taking into consideration The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), his final film Gertrud (1964) and now Ordet completes the string of 5 brilliant films he made from 1928- 1964 before dying at the age of 79 in 1968Â… he was one of the the few geniuses who wasn't given much time to make films, only 13 features in his career from as early as 1919Â… he was there right from the start and left with such a deep note on what can be done in cinema, that he has inspired generations to come with his meticulous detail for showing reality but in a very unusual mannerÂ…

What is to be said about a story where one character believes he's the reincarnation of Jesus, yet the family think he's crazyÂ… in the early 1900s where religion ruled & love was broken cause the fathers of the 2 families have different religious practicesÂ… where an atheist and his pregnant wife hopes for a boy but problems arise & all the families faith will be tested, and ultimately set the path for this very unusual and unsettling adaptation of a popular Danish playÂ…

If you haven't seen any Dreyer, you haven't experienced one of the masters of cinema who created a world & atmosphere like no otherÂ…

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Fmovies: So I finally arrive to the famous Ordet.

Three women are central in Dreyer's last three films, one every decade. In Days of Wrath she was trapped in a loveless marriage and looking for love she had been denied by a cruel turn of events. Here comes the second woman, in a loving marriage to one of three sons of a powerful father figure, radiant, kind, and eager for that love to flourish and spread in the household. The younger son has found love, she petitions the father to give his consent.

God stands between the two households which are locked in dispute about marriage, god implying a whole view of how the world is put together. The pater famiglia in the farmhouse believes in god as embracing the fullness of life, the tailor down the village espouses a mortifying god that rejects this life for the next. None of them is ready to give ground.

This disputation about god takes an even eerier shape; there's another son who has gone mad by an inner search for god and believes himself to be Jesus; the father's wish for someone to wake up mankind, a desire for a living voice for god, but that has given him a broken son, from his own pov, who is looked on with pity as an invalid. The father hopes against hope that he might come to his senses.

So, unable to set aside their ego in favor of loving- kindness, the woman who had embodied love falls to die. The father hastens back, a long, hard night of the soul follows as childbirth goes awry and her life hangs in the balance.

Okay now we have most of the parts; the whole is filmed in austere flows, almost entirely setbound in the two houses, as sparse as the god of these people. Dreyer is clearly on the side of the farmer, for a living god; you'll see this in how eager he is to sketch complex human beings, this is a man who takes pleasure in the brushing and slow reveal of human character, therein lies the richness. The scenes with the little girl and her mad uncle are some of the most heart- aching.

The parts in which Dreyer ruminates explictly on god and faith in a faithless world I pass by without much interest, I simply don't know what use I have for them, for example when the father is asked by a doctor if science saved his daughter-in-law or his own faith. I simply don't perceive them to be the matter of real spirituality, or in any way a road that leads out of a stifled soul. God will never make himself known in the way that tormented piety expects so it's moot to agonize, no? The world is always aglow with spirituality so long as the eye, the heart, remain effortless, able to let each thing mean itself.

Now we come to the famous ending with the miracle; one of the most famous in cinema probably.

It's possible, for Dreyer, that our ability to accept it or not is a test of our faith in the possibility of transcendence, it might be a case that to reject it out of hand is to already have a heart that is hardened. I don't know how much stock I would put in this view. For one, accepting it at face value, suspending disbelief, does it abet an eye that sees in fresh light something fundamental about how the world is put together?

Another IMDb reviewer makes a great observation, the woman looks eerie when she comes to, almost vampire-like. It's no accident that Dreyer has her almost bite her husband, cling with mouth agape, eyes unfocused, muttering "life" as if unable to remember kind of thing it is, joyous occasion or horrible ordeal.

No, I think let's bl

very strong early pictures, followed by a slow build up of the plot. introducing character after character. each one played very carefully without the slightest overacting. strong faces, intense voices. the visuals show a black and white with some soft sand tone in between, at least it seemed like that. wonderful cinematography, very careful and precise lights.

there is almost no editing. there are minute long scenes without a cut. the set is most of the time studio and the acting happens like in a play, wit the audience at the position of the camera. yet miraculously it never feels ... staged. very careful small pieces are set in between to illustrate characters, like the end, when the doctor slightly touches the arm of the priest, following their earlier conversation and contrasting their social position.

an amazing piece. very late i realized that most of it was without any music, building up the auditive experience by rhythm of words ... or of breath. as in the givingBirth sequence when the breathing of the woman is somehow intense, yet not loud at all, very different from more modern versions of givingBirth in movies. not necessarily realistic in sound, but totally in the intensity.

what a film. and i had never heard of it until a friend put the DVD in my hand ...

Ordet fmovies. What is a miracle? A fantastic event created by a supernatural entity? The hallucination of a person with a strong belief? or simply an inexplicable wonder? This absolutely wonderful movie speaks about that from the complicated side of contemplation. After watching it everything is possible, every answer, every reason, every justification. The facts, are related with an enviable sense of modesty. Even a stauncher atheist would find miraculous this Dreyer's masterpiece. Obviously, the development of the story line is slow, determined and thoughtful. This movie requires full attention, full involvement from the audience who will give the answers: don't wait for them in this perfect example of cinema beyond our daily human way of life. By the way, this is not a religious movie as many people think.

Look I don't know how much the average person can watch this. They are bound to sleep through it as the apostles did as they waited for Christ to finish praying in the olive garden. Personally I watched it twice so far and am bound to watch it again. Every crook and cranny of this film is well studied. For me this is up there with Kubrick's 2001, believe it or not. To the average person it can tend to look boring lest one know how to read between the lines, and yet its so simple and beautiful, I've witnessed the ultimate skeptics(regarding God and religion) get engulfed in this film and enjoy it. I don't need to start bragging on about this film and mention every detail you can find in other very good critiques when you search about this film online, its the ultimate to me and definitely files in my Top 10. I seriously recommend this film to those truly searching meaning in life. This beats any trip to India at the end of the day, if only you had the patience to watch it through. Not only that you are going to need a spiritual microscope. Yes believe the truth can be told, for it to be understood it must be believed.

'Ordet', even by Dreyer standards, is a gruelling experience, but in a different way from 'the Passion of Joan of Arc', which, with almost sadistic intensity, thrust the viewer into a visceral pummelling, dragging the spiritual out of us. 'Ordet' is more typically Scandanavian, based on a play by Kaj Munk, a cleric-playwright murdered by the Gestapo during the Nazi Occupation of Denmark.

Its austerity and rigour are reminiscent of Bergman, without that director's lapses (i.e. audience-friendly gestures) into sensation. Like Bergman, Dreyer makes no attempts to hide the theatrical origins of his material - most of the action takes place in austere interiors that even look like sets in their oppressive spaciousness, just as you can hear the boards being trod. There are no harrowing close ups a la 'Passion' here; the camera keeps an unblinking distance throughout, as if we were watching a play in the theatre. The performances make no concessions to film acting, keeping a stern solemnity as they utter their tersely simple dialogue.

So why would Dreyer, one of the five greatest film directors of all time, make such a seemingly uncinematic picture? Part of the answer probably derives from the film's theme, that of faith and miracles. Although the film is as restrained and grim as you would expect from a Scandanavian work, the content is actually full of barely suppressed passion.

The situation and plots are straight out of classic 19th century realist literature - a stubbornly proud landowner refuses to let his youngest son marry a wealthy neighbour because of religious differences; his eldest son goes mad from studying too much theology, hoping to fulfil his father's messianic dreams, under the delusion that he is Jesus, with beard too match, although a joyless, Old-Testament kind of prophet-Jesus; another son has renounced his faith, disgusted with the daily evidence of God's indifference; his pious wife loses her baby in childbirth.

Material ripe for hothouse treatment. And yet Dreyer's reticence never lets it descend into 'Elmer Gantry'isms. The film works as a study in loneliness, in the limited options open to people in isolated outposts made rigid by tradition, religion, culture etc. Dreyer makes a virtue of the theatrical material: his use of doorways, his patterning of entries and exits, his positioning of characters, his calm yet insistent panning all created this sense of something being held in, ready to burst.

The film opens with a brilliantly orchestrated sequence, which introduces the characters, their dilemmas and their milieu, with a simple, yet intricate pattern, as each family member searches for the missing mad brother, a man linked to nature, the light and the dunes. his strictures are hard to take, and yet he is the one with the special knowledge and the miraculous power.

I'm not averse to miracles in cinema. I just found this one a little hard to take (it would certainly never have been produced in a Catholic country - Mother surviving baby? An outrage!). I prefer the way Dreyer turns the rare modern intrusions in the film, the doctor's car for instance, into a scary, almost medieval vision of death in motion; or the chillingly glum view of village life, in a film that keeps implicating the social only to drive it out. I guess you've got to have some knowledge of the theological background.