Film Review
By the time Carl Dreyer had completed his first three films, the Danish
film industry was in serious decline and this led him to make his first
film outside Scandinavia for a small German film company,
Primus-Film. Adapting the 1912 novel
Elsker hverandre by the popular
Danish writer Aage Madelung,
Die
Gezeichneten - a.k.a.
Love
One Another - gave Dreyer the opportunity to tackle a subject
near to his heart, anti-Semitism, and in doing so delivered a film that
is chillingly prophetic, not just of the anti-Jewish sentiment that
would consume Germany (indeed much of Europe) in the following decade,
but also of the Holocaust. Survival in the face of injustice and
oppression is a theme that runs through much of Dreyer's work, and in
Die Gezeichneten we encounter
another of his strong-willed heroines, in the guise of a victimised
Jewish girl who gets caught up in one of the most shameful episodes in
Russian history, the anti-Jewish pogrom of 1903-6.
After being lost for many years,
Die
Gezeichneten was rediscovered in 1961 in Moscow's film
archives. With only four prints of the film now in existence, it
is among Dreyer's rarest films - one that is too easily overlooked,
even though it has considerable merit. This is arguably the film in
which Dreyer is most visibly influenced by his personal hero D.W.
Griffith, and with its confident use of close-up, pacey editing and
penchant for spectacle, it could also be mistaken for one of
Griffith's more ambitious films. Before Dreyer, no European
filmmaker used the close-up to its full dramatic impact and here the
device brings a frightening reality to the protagonists, revealing not
only their feelings but also their dark trains of thought.
Dreyer's use of the close-up does the work of scores of inter-titles,
compelling us to sympathise with his 'heroic' characters, whilst making
the villains of the piece (flagrant anti-Semites) more odious and
frightening.
A stickler for realism, Dreyer travelled with his set designer to
Lublin in Poland to see some real ghettos on which the film's sets
would be closely modelled. The same striving for Russian
authenticity led Dreyer to cast predominantly Russian actors (including
prominent members of the Moscow Art Theatre, Richard Boleslawski and
Vladimir Gadjarov), although the part of the villainous Rylowitsch was
reserved for Johannes Meyer, the great Danish actor who had already
appeared in the director's
Leaves
Out of the Book of Satan (1920) and would take the lead role in
his subsequent
Master of the House (1925).
The subdued, almost naturalistic acting style (unusual for a film of
this era but quite commonplace in Scandinavian cinema) adds considerably
to the film's realism and Dreyer achieves a genuine Russian feel which
is highly anticipatory of the important films that Sergei Eisenstein
would soon make.
Die
Gezeichneten's shockingly violent ending, graphic of the chaos
that inevitably results from intolerance, prefigures the grand
set-pieces of Eisenstein's
Battleship Potemkin (1925) and
October
(1928), whilst showing a horrible prescience for the racial
purge that Nazi Germany would embark upon just over a decade after the
film was made.
© James Travers 2015
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Next Carl Theodor Dreyer film:
Once upon a Time (1922)
Film Synopsis
In western Russia circa 1900, Hannah-Liebe is a Jewish girl growing up
in a small town inhabited by Jews and serfs. Driven from the town
by malicious gossip, she travels to St Petersburg to live with her
older brother Jakov, who has converted to Christianity and now makes a
comfortable living as a lawyer. It is here that Hannah-Liebe
meets up with Sascha, a student from her town who has fallen in with a
group of revolutionaries. After being tricked by Rylowitsch, a
police spy, into preparing a terrorist act, Sascha is arrested.
With their mother on her death bed, Hanne-Liebe and Jakov must return
to their home village, just as the government authorises a pogrom
against the Jews...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.