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 Dreyer
shows us that the world of objects, places, and events is not the real
world. The real world is inward. All there is is soul, soul, and more
soul.
* * *
Our inner storms of feeling
are the only important weather. The wars that matter are all within.
* * *
The problem that confronts
every artist is how to get the inside of life into the work, when all
that can be seen, all that can be shown, is the outside.
* * *
A poet or novelist can describe
a character's thoughts and feelings. But painting and photography are
limited to the realm of the visible. How do you photograph or paint the
soul? How do you transform surfaces into depths? How do you represent
the invisible in terms of the visible?
* * *
The eyes are a doorway. We
plunge head first into Anne's flickering flames and Joan's limpid pools–so
transparent, permeable, liquid, inviting.
* * *
Has anyone ever been more exposed
on film than Joan? Has anyone ever been more vulnerably displayed to the
rude gaze of strangers?
* * *
We have a superficial definition
of nakedness. You remove your clothes and bare your flesh. Joan, Anne,
Inger, or Gertrud show us more than skin. They peel back their bodies
and bare their souls.
* * *
No one could be more naked
than Joan. Her face is the most naked thing ever photographed.
* * *
We look at her, but more important,
she looks at us. We must prove ourselves worthy of returning her gaze.
We are the ones really on trial, not her.
* * *
Like a virgin lover, she tests
our worthiness to receive her. By throwing herself on our mercy, she makes
the greatest possible emotional demand. By asking nothing, she asks everything.
By making no appeal, she makes the supreme appeal.
* * *
She is not embarrassed by our
look; it is we who are embarrassed by hers. We feel ashamed because we
know we can never deserve this degree of trust. She is innocent; we are
the guilty ones.
* * *
As when a newborn baby looks
up at us, we wonder how can we ever live up to the infinity of this faith
in us? How can we ever reciprocate the absoluteness of the love she so
totally gives?
* * *
If we would see her as she
really is, we must look at her the same way she looks at us: Tenderly,
purely, chastely. In awe and wonder. In humility. With love.
* * *
The men around Joan don't know
how to look at her. The law of the universe is that you get what you are.
They see only what they are capable of seeing. They see only their own
polluted hearts.
* * *
In their gaze, her nakedness
is pornography. In their hearts, her exposure is obscenity. Her actions
are immorality.
* * *
But the answering law of the
universe is that true purity can't be polluted. Joan is immune to their
sneers, their leering depravity. Nothing about her will ever be made obscene
or dirty or guilty.
* * *
To the pure all things are
pure. To the eyes of the spirit, everything is spirit. Their looks only
puzzle her. She stands forever beyond them, free of them, unreachable
by them.
* * *
The voice is another way in:
Inger's terrible birth-gasps in Ordet, Arne and Marianne's agitated
pants in Two People, Anne's playful giggle and Herlofs Marte's
anguished cries in Day of Wrath, Gabriel's discouraged sighs in
Gertrud.
* * *
Truth is never spoken. Words
are always evasions. We don't say what is really on our minds. Real speech
is silent.
* * *
The sound of the breath speaks
truer than the words uttered. It's not what we say, but how. Words are
from the brain; the breath is the voice of the heart.
* * *
Gestures, glances, movements,
pauses speak better than words ever can. The body speaks more than the
mind can know.
* * *
At this level of purity and
intensity, there is no need for artistic heightening or rhetoric. Dreyer
pares away all of the extras because he knows that they only distract
us. Simple situations, simple costumes, simple gestures, the most ordinary
events say it all. The way old man Borgen walks and sits in Ordet
speak more eloquently than fancy lighting or dialogue ever could.
* * *
As Dreyer once said: The great
dramas are played quietly. We may be still as an ice mountain on the outside,
but raging like a blast furnace within.
* * *
It is not accidental that women,
mistresses of inner space, are at the center of these works, and men,
manipulators of outer realms, are on the outside, in the dark. It takes
a woman to teach them to look inward, so that they can see anything.
* * *
To reach the spiritual realm,
each art must push against its natural tendencies. Film, the art of motion,
must have its movements arrested. Painting, the art of stillness, must
find a way to capture the movements of the soul.
* * *
Our art is too propulsive,
too fast, too obsessed with getting somewhere. Most films, videos, and
paintings are devoted to quick knowledge. They encourage us to take the
world in with glances. You read meanings with a look. Dreyer goes in the
other direction. He slows down events and actions almost to the point
of cessation. He makes knowing gradual. Like Tarkovsky's, his time is
slow and deep.
* * *
He knows that the soul is shy.
It must be wooed. It shows itself only to the patient. It defies rapid
knowing. It asks us to live with it, if we would know it.
* * *
Shallow works of art, like
shallow people, yield up their meanings in a minute, but you must spend
time with the deep ones. The characters and events in these works must
be lived into. To know them, even a little, you must return to them over
and over, exploring their secrets, giving yourself to them in time.
* * *
No shortcuts are allowed. These
experiences accumulate meaning in time.
* * *
If you would plumb its spiritual
depths, you must suffer though every second of Joan's trial. You must
live through the ups and downs of Inger's hopes and dreams. You must live
with Gertrud for a long time before you can even begin to understand her.
These experiences do not open themselves to strangers. You must prove
yourself ready to receive them.
* * *
And even then, after we have
watched and prayed with them, after hours have gone by, how far away from
us these figures still remain. The distance never disappears.
* * *
Has any artist made us more
aware of the interstellar distances that separate even lovers? Or what
an effort it takes to bridge the gaps between us even for a second?
* * *
The spirit is shrouded in solitude.
Cosmic vacuums of inner space sheathe our souls. The nucleus of the atom
is not more isolated than Gertrud, Joan, or Anne.
* * *
The close-ups draw us in, but
also hold us outside. We can't quite penetrate the veil. We can't reach
through the mask.
* * *
We can't see in these depths.
We swim in darkness blacker than the bottom of the ocean. The deeper we
dive, the deeper the mystery.
* * *
Dreyer's close-ups bring us
close, closer, closest. He couldn't get too close. He would have taken
the camera inside if it were possible.
* * *
In The Passion of Joan of
Arc space is compressed by the closeness of the shots. The third dimension
disappears. But what is lost as physical background is gained as emotional
foreground. The more the space behind Joan is flattened, the more the
space in front of her leaps out–but not as space but spirit.
* * *
When we get this close, faces
no longer look like faces. Fragmented, broken, cut into pieces, seen from
odd angles, bodies become abstract lines, shapes, forms. But, as in cubism,
the less recognizable the form is, the more spiritual it becomes. The
bits of skin become translucent. The soul shines though the seams and
cracks.
* * *
The abstraction on screen moves
us to an answering state of abstraction in our viewing. Where shape cannot
be read as shape, it is felt as spirit.
* * *
The flesh is burned away. It
peels, breaks, and cracks as the soul leaps free of it. Baptism by fire
is the birth of the spirit. Pain, loss, and relinquishment are the paths
to knowledge.
* * *
Only when we give ourselves
away, can we discover what we really are. Only when we let go of all of
our proud accomplishments, do we make ourselves infinite. Only when we
die to the world are we born to the spirit.
* * *
We want comfort and rest, but
Dreyer shows us that the soul is forever in flux and transformation. Objects,
places, people stand still, but the spirit endlessly heaves and surges.
The breath moves in and out. The spirit coruscates and flickers. The heart
expands and contracts. Though we want calm, these pulsebeats are the essence
of life. To stop moving and changing would be to die.
* * *
The products of the mind freeze,
but the heart melts them. The soul eternally flows.
* * *
While spirit flowed from every
pore of the world in the beginning, in our time it is forced to cower
in dark corners. We shove it off into out of the way places: into the
church, into cults, into death and funerals, into frenzies of horror and
fear. Dreyer restores it to its place at the center of everyday life.
The soul is in the farmhouse, the drawing room, the bedroom.
* * *
His spirituality is not otherworldly,
not separate from ordinary life, but mixed into the everyday. Johannes
thinks spirituality is to be with God in heaven; Inger and Maren know
better. It is in milking the cows, scrubbing the floor, and doing the
washing.
* * *
The blendings of the natural
and supernatural in Dreyer's work are not to convince us of the existence
of a special realm of the supernatural, but to show us that there is no
difference between the two realms. What exorcism dealt with in the middle
ages, and witchcraft expressed in the seventeenth century, the soul is
to every time and place.
* * *
Soul threatens all established
values because it obeys no worldly master and yields to no material bribes.
All saints are heretics. All lovers are dangerous.
* * *
Society is the mortal enemy
of soul, which it can neither control nor understand. It hates and fears
spirit because spirit reveals the irrelevance of all of the things it
values and esteems.
* * *
It is a fiction of our fallen
time that the body and the soul are different. Dreyer shows us that it
is only in a non-spiritual world that the spirit is separated from the
flesh. As the final kiss in Ordet shows, true love is soul and
saliva mixed to the point that they cannot be told apart.
* * *
Only when we despair do we
feel there is a difference between spiritual and physical love. In our
exalted moments, we realize that sex and spirituality are the same.
* * *
Many of these truths are hidden
and unspoken and must remain so. They cannot be given; they must be found
out by each individual for himself. We must earn them. Otherwise they
are merely words. But as experiences, they are always within us, near
at hand, instantly available to anyone in need.
* * *
God made the soul invisible
for a reason. It is preserved from being handled by the unworthy. It is
veiled in mystery to protect it. And to protect the unready from it. The
truth would blind them.
* * *
In the end, Dreyer's work reminds
us that although the world denies spirit, art can revive our faith in
it. When we lose our spiritual way, art can map the path back. It wakes
our souls from slumber. It exists to speak a language beyond any worldly
one–the language of the soul.
This page only
contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's writing on Dreyer.
To obtain the
entire essay from which this discussion is excerpted as well as a book
devoted to Dreyer's films, click
here.
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