Visions and Victims: Art Melodrama in the Films of Carl Th. Dreyer

by Amanda Doxtater

Overview

Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer, one of the twentieth century’s most famous filmmakers, is best known for his masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and his midcentury classics, Day of Wrath and Ordet. Both viewers and scholars largely leave his early work, for Nordisk Film, on the shelf, dismissing it as immature melodramatic fare produced for a company known for superficial, popular entertainment. In the received historiography, Dreyer broke with Nordisk in the pursuit of developing his film as a high art, eventually succeeding on the world stage as an auteur and eschewing melodrama in favor of austere art film.

Amanda Doxtater offers a necessary corrective to this narrative of his bifurcated career. Close readings of Dreyer’s Nordisk films alongside his mature work reveal a stylistic throughline Doxtater terms “art melodrama,” a form combining the ambiguity, stylization, and consciousness of art cinema with the heightened emotional expressivity and dramatic embodiments characteristic of melodrama. She argues that Dreyer’s major artistic concerns known from his later work—pathos, authenticity, the embodiment of psychological duress, and so on—find their first expression in his Nordisk melodramas, complicating our understanding not only of his later films but also of his early works, and even our understanding of the melodramatic mode in general. Indeed, extending well beyond the career of a singular director, this book challenges assumptions about the relationship between “low-brow” melodrama and “high-brow” art cinema.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299347505
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	05/28/2024
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Amanda Doxtater is an assistant professor and the Barbro Osher Endowed Chair of Swedish Studies at the University of Washington.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface           
Acknowledgments
 
Introduction
1 Reading Dreyer’s Early Archive: Nordisk Scripts and Art Melodrama
2 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc: Art Melodrama, “Authenticity,” and Performance
3 Vampyr: Victims, Volition, and Melodrama of Consciousness
4 Day of Wrath and “Kniplinger”: Melodramatic Inheritance and the Domestic Sphere
5 Ordet: Art Melodrama and the Miracle
6 Gertrud: Melodramatic Refusal and the Art Melodrama Archive
Conclusion
 
Appendix: Carl Th. Dreyer’s Filmography
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Doxtater compellingly argues that Carl Th. Dreyer’s metiér was always art melodrama as a hybrid genre. In her case studies, Dreyer joins the ranks of Sirk, Ray, and Fassbinder as subversive genre filmmakers of melodrama with high-art intentions. Against the grain of the Danish director’s reputation for formalist austerity, the author reveals a surprisingly cagey, dynamic, and erotic storyteller.”—Arne Lunde, author of Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema

“Rooted in painstaking archival research that unpacks Carl Th. Dreyer’s praxis as screenwriter, archivist, and historian, Visions and Victims is a thought-provoking rumination on the temporalities, performativities, and affordances of the archive. Lucidly and elegantly written, the book resituates Dreyer’s oeuvre in the ambivalent space between art cinema and melodrama.”—​C. Claire Thomson, author of Short Films from a Small Nation: Danish Informational Cinema 1935-1965.

From the Publisher