FR 73m Dir: Carl Theodor Dreyer
I hope Jeff Bezos isn't aware of how this film was funded. When looking to finance the film director Carl Theodor Dreyer met aristocrat Nicolas de Gunzburg who agreed to fund the film as long as he could star in it. Gunzburg, credited as Julian West, ended up playing the main character David Gray in the film.
This is a film which is all about the visuals. It was shot through a gauze held three feet away from the camera to create a washed-out look and drew on the likes of Goya for it's look. There's striking dream-sequences and lots of stunning shots of Gray wandering round a country chateau.
The big problem with the film for me is that it is so focused on the look and style that it forgets to have much plot. In the whole seventy-three minute film there's probably only around five minutes when anything actually happens. I'm all for creating a fantastic atmosphere but you need a story that matches the atmosphere which this film utterly fails to achieve.
Dreyer took a similar approach to other silent film directors moving onto talkies as he treats this like a silent film complete with title cards and with minimal dialogue. This was also partly because the film was to be made in French, German and English (although it appears the latter was never completed) so keeping the dialogue minimal made the film much easier to make. It's understandable that film-makers recorded in multiple languages in order to try to capture the same market they did when they made silent films but in my limited experience it seemed to have a negative effect on the quality of the films.
A visually stunning film which certainly achieved the director's goal of wanting "to make a film different from all other films" but it lacks the plot to make it a well-rounded masterpiece.
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