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Carl Theodor Dreyer moves from an expiring hourglass to grass growing over a crumbling stone castle, and within five minutes there's flesh both fragile (the elderly patriarch bent over his cane, recalling a youthful indiscretion) and sensual (the servant in the kitchen, spilling out of her dress). His first film is a tale of sins repeated and injustices perpetuated, a frail dictum ("The majesty of justice is the holiest on earth") stretched across three generations until it snaps. The abusive folly of the withered aristocrat (Elith Pio) is passed on to his son (Halvard Hoff), the dutiful magistrate who comes home to find that the governess on trial for infanticide (Olga Raphael-Linden) is his illegitimate daughter. Bearded men in robes pass judgment, the spectators in the gallery are of course the audience in the theater, yawning and applauding and weeping at the melodrama that's unfolding before them. As innocent as Goethe's Gretchen yet ever so delicately longing for death, the accused girl drifts into the courtroom in white shawl and parks in the barrister's heavy conscience. (Celebrated at dinner, he looks out the window and suddenly his guilt is given visual form by torch-bearing revelers in the street.) Expiation takes place, fittingly, amid priapic ruins. A portrait of knuckle-gnawing cads and seduced virgins and tragedy announced via telegram, a painterly style informed by Bloch and Whistler. Panning shots of tiny figures before blocky judges (The Passion of Joan of Arc), silhouettes and shadows (Vampyr) and mortified fêtes (Gertrud) are among Dreyer's early bedrock images, Hitchcock in The Paradine Case reflects the theme. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |