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Beginning from a consideration of some ideas on aesthetics deriving from R. G. Collingwood, this essay sets Dreyer‘s Vampyr beside Fulcis The Beyond. The article then goes on to suggest something of the nature of the horror film, at least as exemplified by these two works, by placing them against the background of certain poetic procedures associated with the post-symbolist poetry of T. S. Eliot.
the American Gnostic/cabbalistic theorist Harold Bloom would call agon – with one of the silent cinema’s greatest classics, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc of 1928. Bresson has written of the earlier film in somewhat deprecatory terms (‘Faute de vrai, le public s’attache au faux. La façon expressionniste dont Mlle Falconetti lançait les yeux au ciel, dans le film de Dreyer, arrachait les larmes’ (Bresson
instance, Lindqvist, who is often compared to Stephen King, highlights his admiration for the works of British horror writer and filmmaker Clive Barker. In the case of Riget , the main Gothic influences besides the works of Danish Carl Theodor Dreyer are Claude Barma's Belphegor (ORTF, 1965), a French TV series about a phantom at the Louvre that von Trier watched as a child, and David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–1991), a supernatural crime series. This particular American TV series has also influenced later developments of what is called ‘Nordic
more 128 British rural landscapes on film overt connection to European modernism. Indeed, the visual intensity, austerity and introspection of The Winter Guest invokes the distinctive aesthetic and thematic sensibility of Scandinavian masters such as Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman. Rickman and MacDonald explore a range of themes through the interactions of the eight main characters, deployed as four distinct dyads. The central pairing is that of Elspeth and Frances (played by real-life mother and daughter Phyllida Law and Emma Thompson) –the latter is
films being a part of, and this is a tradition that I will call medieval art cinema. Indeed, European art cinema has a long history of engaging with the Middle Ages, and many of its most notable auteurs have made significant films about the period and its cultural heritage. For example, in the silent era Fritz Lang made his two-part epic Die Niebelung (1924) and in 1929 Carl Theodor Dreyer produced The Passion of Joan of Arc . These works, and Lang’s in particular, influenced Sergei Eisenstein’s subsequent medieval films, Alexander Nevsky (1938) and the two parts
dead past), rather than presenting an analogy between present and past. Any film-maker doing her homework on a period film by watching other films about the Middle Ages will have come across canonical art house films that reflect on time and chronology, if not Kluge’s work, then at least Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) or Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d
can no longer access or reconstruct the limitless space as it was in the Middle Ages, but space in the Middle Ages had never been limitless, and was never perceived to be so. This becomes clear when he explains his theory, using the example of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film Day of Anger (1943): This remarkable film obviously rests
qualities of Lagerlöf's 1912 novel Körkarlen ( Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness ) on which the film was based. The first Nordic vampire movie, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Danish expressionistic film Vampyr (1931–1932), is structured as a journey to an isolated island, a settlement beyond time and space at the border of life and death, day and night. 17 During the interwar years, Gothic also surfaced in Modernist writing, for example, in the Swedish Nobel laurate Pär Lagerkvist
uniforms and wigs cannot help but invoke the passion of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Joan’.34 Whitehead_01_Chps.indd 192 29/3/07 15:53:33 vera drake 193 In The Independent, Anthony Quinn was impressed by the film’s ‘wonderfully tender portrait of proletarian togetherness’ and thought that the performances of Staunton and Davis caught ‘something quite elegiac about the virtues of charity and mercy’.35 Recognising the centrality of these virtues, Quinn makes a point that others, including Sandhu, miss in their eagerness to find ‘class caricatures’ in the film: that wealthy
Hairs on Head Grow (1976–81). After he let them grow, he had his wife completely strip him of all of his facial and head hair, cutting, shaving and removing it in a very precise way, according to his design, in a public performance that occurred at Flower Market Square [Cvjetni trg] in Zagreb: Haircutting and Shaving in a Public Space: Homage to Carl Theodor Dreyer and the Film Jeanne d’Arc and Maria Falconetti (1981; figure 2.9 ). 53 The hair was then saved and preserved in special envelopes, marked by the artist with the section from his head from which it