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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Visions and Victims: Art Melodrama in the Films of Carl Th. Dreyer

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

Doxtater, Amanda

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralFilm StudiesScandinavian History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0299347508
ISBN13: 9780299347505
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: May 28 2024
Pages: 254
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
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.

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