Ordet [The Word] **** (1955, Henrik Malberg, Emil Hass Christensen, Preben Lerdorff Rye) – Classic Movie Review 10,814

Writer-director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1955 black and white classic Danish drama Ordet [The Word] is based on a play by Kaj Munk, a Danish Lutheran priest, first performed in 1932. It follows the lives of the Borgen family in rural Denmark during the autumn of 1925.

This celebrated, resonant spiritual fable about resurrection focuses on a strict, religious father, devout widowed family patriarch Morten Borgen (Henrik Malberg), who angrily forbids his young, slight Anders (Cay Kristiansen), who is in love with Anne Petersen (Gerda Nielsen), the daughter of Peter the Tailor (Ejner Federspiel), from marrying her, a woman from a family of a different religion. Borgen’s traditional Lutheranism is at odds with her father’s fundamentalist sect. However, Morten changes his mind when he finds out Peter has refused Anders’s marriage proposal.

Now Morten tries to convince Peter to permit the marriage, but Peter continues to refuse unless Morten and Anders join his local Inner Mission sect.

Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) believes that he is Jesus Christ after a mental breakdown.

Borgen has two other sons: Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye), who went insane studying Søren Kierkegaard and believes himself to be Jesus Christ, and the eldest, the good-hearted agnostic son Mikkel Borgen (Emil Hass Christensen), happily married to the pious Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), who is pregnant with their third child.

Dreyer’s famed world cinema classic is a truly sensitive and genuinely uplifting experience rare in the movies. Henning Bendtsen’s cinematography with its brilliant lighting design is rightly much admired. Dreyer uses mostly long takes and a slow-moving camera, and many shots last for up to seven minutes. Bendtsen recalled: ‘Each image is composed like a painting in which the background and the lighting are carefully prepared.’

Ordet [The Word] is the winner of the Golden Lion, the best film award, at the 16th Venice International Film Festival in 1955. In 1956 it was among films honoured with the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It is Dreyer’s only film that was both a critical and financial success. Nevertheless, it was nine years till Dreyer’s next, and last, film, Gertrud (1964).

Although he was careful to stay true to Munk’s intentions and the play’s message, Dreyer cut two thirds of Munk’s original dialogue, resulting in a minimalist film. Filming lasted for four months, two months on a studio set and two months in Vedersø, a village in West Jutland where Kaj Munk had been a Lutheran priest. Munk was killed in 1944 during the Nazi occupation of Denmark for preaching against collaboration with the Nazi regime.

Also in the cast are Preben Lerdorff Rye, Caj Kristiansen, Ann Elisabeth Groth, Gerda Nielsen, Ove Rud, Susanne Rud, Henry Skjær, Birgitte Federspiel, Edith Trane and Ejner Federspiel.

It runs 126 minutes.

Dreyer stated: I believe that long takes represent the film of the future. You must be able to make a film in six, seven, eight shots. Short scenes, quick cuts in my view mark the silent film, but the smooth medium shot – with continual camera movement –belongs to the sound film.’

The Danish government had awarded Dreyer a lifelong lease to the Dagmar Bio, an art-house cinema in Copenhagen, in 1952.

Carl Theodor Dreyer died on 20 March 1968, aged 79.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,814

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