The President (1919)
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Film Review

The President (a.k.a. Praesidenten) was the first film directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, the Danish filmmaker whose subsequent masterpieces La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928) and Ordet (1955) are held in such high esteem that they are often cited as two of the most sublime works to have been committed to celluloid.  Before making his directing debut, Dreyer had worked solidly for seven years as a screenwriter and film editor at Nordisk, Denmark's leading film company, and by way of gratitude his bosses at Nordisk gave him complete artistic control over his first film - a privilege he would never again enjoy in his career.  Dreyer not only directed the film, showing immense flair and originality in doing so; he also wrote the script, took great care over the casting, and designed all of the interior sets.  Right from the outset, Dreyer was fashioning himself as a perfect example of what would later come to be known as the film auteur.

Although the film was based on a novel - Der President, written by the Austrian author Karl Emil Franzos - its story had a profound resonance with Dreyer's own personal history.  In common with two of the female characters in the film, Dreyer's mother was a commoner who was made pregnant and then abandoned by a man belonging to a 'superior' class.  Such was the stigma associated with illegitimate births at the time that Dreyer's mother had to give birth away from her hometown and was forced to give her newborn infant up for adoption.  As a young man, Dreyer was appalled to learn that this unfortunate woman had died within a year of bringing him into the world, as a result of a botched abortion.  The fate of his biological mother was to have a deep and lasting effect on Dreyer and throughout his films intensely compassionate portraits of women suffering on account of the injustices and cruelty of men abound.  It is the one abiding theme in his oeuvre, and the thing that was probably his dearest preoccupation in life.

When Carl Dreyer began his career, Denmark's golden age of filmmaking (1909-1914) was pretty well over.  The country that had been one of the most commercially successful and artistically pre-eminent in the new industry of filmmaking was rapidly losing ground to the United States and would never recover its former prestige.  Nordisk would survive this decline and is still in business today, the oldest continuously running film studio in the world.  In his capacity as a screenwriter and editor at Nordisk Dreyer would have rubbed shoulders with some of Denmark's most creative artists, and this would explain why, when he began making his own films, he did so with such technical and artistic brilliance.

On the writing front, Dreyer makes good use of a narrative device that had rarely been used before, the narrative flashback.  This is not some arbitrary gimmick that Dreyer has plugged into the film to make it appear smarter than it is but an effective way of driving home his central point, that women have always been ill-treated by society, the injustices of one generation inevitably replayed by the next, over and over again.  Dreyer wants us to understand that it is the strict moral code which society imposes on itself which prevents individuals from changing for the better.  Until this alters things will never improve - women will go on being the victims of a system that punishes them for the unmentionable crimes and follies of the male sex.  Another strength of Dreyer's screenplay is the psychological depth the film's author brings to his characters, in particular the central protagonist.  The crises of conscience that afflict the eponymous president and ultimately destroy him are something that we can easily relate to and reveal in Dreyer not only a keen understanding of human nature but also an extraordinary capacity for empathising with others.  There is never a character in a Carl Dreyer film who is not totally convincing and who fails to arouse our interest, if not our whole-hearted sympathy.

Dreyer's use of symbolism is interesting and quite striking.  At her trial, the fallen heroine, Victorine, is depicted as a Christ-like martyr, almost exactly as Joan of Arc would later be portrayed by the director in his best-known film, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928).  In her saintly innocence, we can hardly fail to see her as Dreyer intended, as the unfortunate scapegoat of a system that is inherently rotten.  The crumbling castle ruins which we see at the start and end of the film provide a potent visual metaphor for a society that is blighted by an antiquated, life-crushing notion of morality, one that prevents individuals from acting according to their own moral precepts and therefore taking an honest stand against the injustices that are inherent in the system.  To save his daughter from a death sentence, the central protagonist must surrender his place in society to accomplish a moral act, but all he achieves is to exchange the guilt for one crime (his abandonment of his wife and daughter) with another, one that is far more heinous in society's eyes.

There is a jarring conflict between Dreyer's use of natural locations (most of these being on the picturesque island of Gotland) and his claustrophobic, ornately furnished interiors (which were influenced by the 19th century Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi).  If the latter suggest a rigidly organised society, bound by inviolable rules of etiquette (the horror of which is occasionally underscored by some bold expressionistic touches reminiscent of Dreyer's subsequent Vampyr), the former express the more desirable alternative, where an individual is free to act according to his own beliefs.  Repeated shots of cute little animals and toddlers show us the innocence and insouciance that modern man has lost through his slavish adherence to a strict social code.  There is a nice humorous touch near the end of the film, where a group of dogs make up for the lack of a human congregation at a wedding which is deemed socially unacceptable.  This canine gathering does not regard the married couple as social renegades, to be judged and pitied; they are just content to lend their presence to a happy event.  If only human beings could be so wise...

Film Synopsis

Karl Victor von Sendlingen is an important magistrate in an unspecified European town, respected by all for his unstinting devotion to justice. One day, he is called upon to preside over the case of a young woman, Victorine, who has murdered her own child not long after giving birth to it in secret.  Karl Victor is horrified to recognise Victorine as his estranged daughter, the fruit of an injudicious love affair he had in his youth with a woman of inferior class.  Instead of marrying the girl he had made pregnant, he discarded her, to honour a pledge he had made to his father never to wed a commoner as he had done.  The girl died after giving birth, leaving Victorine to fend for herself.  Employed as a governess, Victorine was herself put in the family way by her employer's son, leading to a tragic chain of events that now places her in a prison cell await trial for infanticide.  When Victorine's appeal against her death sentence is turned down, Karl Victor has only one option left open to him.  He must sacrifice everything he has - his career, his reputation, his self-esteem - to save the life of the young woman whose miseries are the result of his own misguided sense of duty.