Ordet (1955)

This is a stream of consciousness review I wrote about 30 minutes after completing Ordet during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. My overall rating for the film was 4 stars out of a possible 4. It was the 213th film to receive my highest rating distinction.

This writing will not be as long as the others, mainly because this is a religious drama, and dissecting religion, as opposed to film, is not my strong suit. This film was very intriguing to me and never dropped me down to boredom or even disinterest; it held me the whole way through, not with any cinematic aspect, but rather in the name of film itself. That’s not to say that I wasn’t impressed with the acting or the story or the direction or the cinematography. I was, in fact, impressed with all four of those aspects. This film intrigued me because, as I had read in several articles about the film, it was very much an archetype for what film is intended to be. It is not intended to be something to profit off of, to take a date to, to watch because you have nothing better to do. It is something to enjoy, to read, to accept, to allow changes in your life to occur due to what you have witnessed, and to deepen your understanding, answer your questions, propose new ones, and give insight into your own life. That is what film is, and that is what Ordet is. Dave Calhoun of Time Out London said it best when he wrote, “Ordet reminds us how in the end we know little about the mysteries of life. [Carl Theodor] Dreyer manages to say all this within the framework of a strange, wondrous, and shocking work. Once seen, it’s unlikely to leave you.” Going off of these words, and in particular the final seven words, I would like to briefly jot down the three parts of this film that will stay with me best. The first is a shot in Peter the Tailor’s house, where a religious ceremony is in full swing. Peter (Ejner Federspiel) and his congregation have begun a hymn and they are all singing it with him. But this is not the shot that struck me: it is the shot of Morten (Henrik Malberg) and Anders Borgen (Cay Kristiansen). The father and son had very recently appeared to face off with Peter over his ruling that because of their religious differences, Anders and Peter’s daughter Anne (Gerda Nielsen) cannot marry. The two men are welcomed by Peter and take a seat behind Peter, waiting for the service to conclude. This is when the hymn begins and when the shot occurs. Peter is facing the viewer’s left, standing and singing. Morten and Anders are facing the viewer’s right, sitting and quiet. In between the two sides, it is pitch black. The second is the scene that almost immediately follows Morten and Anders entering the Tailor’s house. Inger (Birgitte Federspiel) is struggling through her childbirth. This scene is one of the more worrying and terrifying scenes that I have ever seen because of the uncertainty you have between whether she will survive or not. This is intensified, as Dreyer does not allow you to see anything more than Inger’s legs up, the doctor (Henry Skjær), and Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen) helping the doctor. Additionally, Dreyer's refusal to let you hear anything apart from panting and screaming immortalizes the scene. The third is the performance by Preben Lerdorff Rye as Johannes, the son who believes that he is Jesus of Nazareth. During my Catholic school education, Jesus was presented as a profound figure and individual, one that, although people may not have listened to him, he spoke so that everyone and anyone could listen to him if they wished. In the film, Rye plays Johannes as a meek and simple individual, a quiet man who speaks to the world, knows that only two people, his nieces (Ann Elisabeth Rud & Susanne Rud), truly listen, and continues to speak to the world anyway, even though it is most often in a hushed voice, almost whispering, as if an attempt to make others pay close attention to hear what he has to say.