DOCSLIB.ORG

UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Pathos, Performance, Volition: Melodrama's Legacy in the Work of Carl Th. Dreyer Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97m380jb Author Doxtater, Amanda Elaine Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Pathos, Performance, Volition: Melodrama's Legacy in the Work of Carl Th. Dreyer by Amanda Elaine Doxtater A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Mark Sandberg, Chair Professor Linda Rugg Professor Linda Williams Fall 2012 Pathos, Performance, Volition: Melodrama's Legacy in the Work of Carl Th. Dreyer © 2012 by Amanda Elaine Doxtater Abstract Pathos, Performance, Volition: Melodrama's Legacy in the Work of Carl Th. Dreyer by Amanda Elaine Doxtater Doctor of Philosophy in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Mark Sandberg, Chair This dissertation reads melodrama as an important influence in Carl Th. Dreyer’s work and oeuvre and shows that his work demonstrates melodrama’s relevance to the tradition of Scandinavian art-house, modernist cinema. Dreyer’s work has come to embody a stern and severe aesthetic seen largely as the epitome of artistic restraint rather than indicative of melodramatic expressivity. Dreyer began his career in cinema, however, at the Danish studio Nordisk Films Kompagni in the 1910s when the company became synonymous with early Danish film melodrama and other spectacular, mass-produced, popular fare. Scholars have subsequently labeled this decade “The Golden Age of Danish Melodrama.” Although the standard reception of Dreyer’s work predicates his status as a masterful auteur director upon his decisive break with the company’s production model, its themes, and popular-culture ambitions, this dissertation argues that asserting such a break occludes intriguing continuities in Dreyer’s oeuvre. The rich proliferation of melodrama scholarship in decades following Dreyer’s death in 1968 has radically expanded what can be understood as “melodrama,” allowing important affective concerns in Dreyer’s work to come to light. Melodrama scholarship allows us to characterize Dreyer’s innovation of cinema not only on formal terms, but now also through his developing representations of human suffering, volition, interiority, and emotion. No longer exclusively a genre, style, or theatrical tradition, melodrama is now better understood as a powerful and adaptable mode that informs a variety of media, ranging from soap operas to novels by Henry James. The connotations of melodrama available to earlier scholarship and to Dreyer himself could not avoid its strongly pejorative sense; more recent work has made clear the pervasive presence of the mode as 1 a productive category in both “high” and “low” forms of culture. Consequently, Dreyer’s unique inflection of melodrama reflects his simultaneous relation of repulsion and of attraction to the mode, driven by his perceived need to distance himself from melodrama’s low-art stigma. To negotiate this paradox Dreyer continually reimagines and pressures the mode while remaining sympathetic to its core interests: its depictions of suffering, its humanist faith in art’s capacity to convey something about existence, and its existential desires to recuperate meaning in a world shaken by modernity’s upheaval of traditional cosmologies. Neither fully modernist nor fully submissive to realism’s illusions, melodrama provides a productive framework for understanding both the aesthetic ingenuity and more conservative elements of Dreyer’s modernism. The first chapters of this dissertation outline advances in melodrama scholarship relevant to the project and then trace the category of “melodrama” through the standard reception both of silent-era Danish film melodrama at Nordisk and in Dreyer reception more generally. The final chapters parse out Dreyer’s innovation of melodrama in three of his major works, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc, 1928), Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath, 1943), and Ordet (The Word, 1955) by comparing his “mature” films and by drawing upon key moments in the melodramatic scenarios he wrote at Nordisk. In Jeanne d’Arc Dreyer innovates corporeal spectacle, the ethical interaction and thrill of performance, and exploits the limits between “live theater” and film by conflating phenomenological and semiotic performing bodies. Day of Wrath extends and heightens melodramatic tensions surrounding domestic melodrama’s conveyance of interiority through expressively charged bodily surfaces. Dreyer uses the body and psychological interiority of his protagonist, Anne (whose will and desire are stifled by relationships in the domestic sphere), to evoke a melodramatic worldview rife with epistemological uncertainty and ambiguous causality. In The Word, Dreyer juxtaposes elements of maternal melodrama with intense depictions of male suffering and tears to create art-house melodrama’s version of a male-weepie. This film also bears traces of Dreyer’s persistent interest in the materiality of the filmed body and in depicting gradations of consciousness, drawing on multiple precedents in early Danish film melodrama. In conclusion, Dreyer’s oeuvre vitally broadens our understanding of the potentials of the melodramatic mode and the specific tradition of “Scandinavian art-house melodrama.” 2 Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to my family for all of their enduring love and support. Without the kindness, humor, and understanding they show me everyday, this project would not have been possible. They have given me strength. A heartfelt thank you to: Dean Krouk and Anna Jörngården (founding members of IDEA—International Dissertation Encouragement Alliance), Elisabeth Ward, Nan Gerdes, Laura Horak, Althea Wasow, Dr. Carol Morrison, Claire Thomson, Isak Thorsen, Morten Egholm, Kenneth Thorsted de Lorenzi, Rachel Doxtater and Pragyan Mishra for their assistance with everything from editing to listening to accounts of my archival adventures over beer. I give special thanks also to Susan Oxtoby for her work coordinating a Dreyer retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive and for the unforgettable glimpse into Gertrud she granted me. I thank James Schamus for his blind faith in hiring me as a research assistant for The Moving Word. The experience brought about a fateful initial contact with the Danish Film Institute’s Dreyer Collection. This project would have been neither possible nor nearly as intellectually pleasurable without the generosity shown to me by the fantastic staff of the Danish Film Institute. Pernille Schütz, Lisbeth Richter Larsen, Thomas Christensen, Lars Ølgaard, Tobias Lynge Herler, and Henrik Fuglsang are inspiring facilitators of research and great colleagues. I can’t thank them enough. Casper Tybjerg at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at Copenhagen University graciously helped me with institutional support in Denmark and provided me the opportunity to share my research in its early stages. He has set the bar high with his meticulous scholarship on Dreyer and Danish Cinema. The American Scandinavian Foundation and the (lamentably!) now-defunct Georg Brandes Skolen in Copenhagen also provided me with crucial research funding and support without which this project would not have been possible. I gratefully acknowledge members of my dissertation committee, Linda Williams and Linda Rugg for their insightful feedback, openness, and encouragement. And words cannot really express what working with Mark Sandberg on this project has meant to me. With his unflinching pursuit of excellence, generous guidance, intellectual curiosity, endless patience, humor, integrity, and masterful grasp of the comma he has been the kind of educator and scholar that I aspire to be. i INTRODUCTION “In all art, it is the human being that is most crucial.” Carl Th. Dreyer1 As Denmark’s most distinguished auteur film director, Carl Th. Dreyer (1889- 1968), is best known as a paragon of serious European art-house cinema. His work has become synonymous with artistic restraint, control, and uncompromising cinematic virtuosity. Though Dreyer created relatively few feature films during his long career, each comprises a wealth of immaculately composed images and introspective psychological portraits. His unique vision of the human predicament—brought forth through slow, stylized dialogue and minimalist mise-en-scène—has become known as the acknowledged fare of tried cineastes and connoisseurs, but the bane of popular audiences. Absent from this picture, however—out of frame as it were—is the story of Dreyer’s emergence from one vibrantly boisterous tradition of Danish melodrama and his inspiration for another: Nordisk Films Kompagni (Nordisk) and Denmark’s enfant terrible, Lars von Trier, respectively. Dreyer learned all facets of filmmaking at Nordisk during the Golden Age of Danish film melodrama in 1910-1920. Dreyer cut his teeth, in other words, working on Nordisk’s spectacle-packed, multi-reel “social melodrama” full of “intrigues and espionage and thefts and swindling and betrayals, […] the ‘social’ element of sinking and rising in society, leading the wild life and going
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Cutting Patterns in DW Griffith's Biographs
    Cutting patterns in D.W. Griffith’s Biographs: An experimental statistical study Mike Baxter, 16 Lady Bay Road, West Bridgford, Nottingham, NG2 5BJ, U.K. (e-mail: [email protected]) 1 Introduction A number of recent studies have examined statistical methods for investigating cutting patterns within films, for the purposes of comparing patterns across films and/or for summarising ‘average’ patterns in a body of films. The present paper investigates how different ideas that have been proposed might be combined to identify subsets of similarly constructed films (i.e. exhibiting comparable cutting structures) within a larger body. The ideas explored are illustrated using a sample of 62 D.W Griffith Biograph one-reelers from the years 1909–1913. Yuri Tsivian has suggested that ‘all films are different as far as their SL struc- tures; yet some are less different than others’. Barry Salt, with specific reference to the question of whether or not Griffith’s Biographs ‘have the same large scale variations in their shot lengths along the length of the film’ says the ‘answer to this is quite clearly, no’. This judgment is based on smooths of the data using seventh degree trendlines and the observation that these ‘are nearly all quite different one from another, and too varied to allow any grouping that could be matched against, say, genre’1. While the basis for Salt’s view is clear Tsivian’s apparently oppos- ing position that some films are ‘less different than others’ seems to me to be a reasonably incontestable sentiment. It depends on how much you are prepared to simplify structure by smoothing in order to effect comparisons.
    [Show full text]
  • UX and Agile: a Bollywood Blockbuster Masala
    UX and Agile: A Bollywood blockbuster masala Pradeep Joseph UXD Manager Juniper Networks Bangalore What is Bollywood? Wikipedia says: The name "Bollywood" is derived from Bombay (the former name for Mumbai) and Hollywood, the center of the American film industry. However, unlike Hollywood, Bollywood does not exist as a physical place. Bollywood films are mostly musicals, and are expected to contain catchy music in the form of song-and-dance numbers woven into the script. Indian audiences expect full value for their money. Songs and dances, love triangles, comedy and dare-devil thrills are all mixed up in a three-hour- long extravaganza with an intermission. Such movies are called masala films, after the Hindi word for a spice mixture. Like masalas, these movies are a mixture of many things such as action, comedy, romance and so on. Melodrama and romance are common ingredients to Bollywood films. They frequently employ formulaic ingredients such as star-crossed lovers and angry parents, love triangles, family ties, sacrifice, corrupt politicians, kidnappers, conniving villains, courtesans with hearts of gold, long-lost relatives and siblings separated by fate, dramatic reversals of fortune, and convenient coincidences. What has UX and Agile got to do with Bollywood? As a Designer I faced tremendous challenges while moving into an Agile environment. While drowning the sorrows with designers from other organizations I came to realize that they too face similar challenges. This inspired me to explore further into what makes designers sad, what makes them suck and what are the ways in which they can contribute more in an Agile environment.
    [Show full text]
  • January 13, 2009 (XVIII:1) Carl Theodor Dreyer VAMPYR—DER TRAUM DES ALLAN GREY (1932, 75 Min)
    January 13, 2009 (XVIII:1) Carl Theodor Dreyer VAMPYR—DER TRAUM DES ALLAN GREY (1932, 75 min) Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer Produced by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Julian West Cinematography by Rudolph Maté and Louis Née Original music by Wolfgang Zeller Film editing by Tonka Taldy Art direction by Hermann Warm Special effects by Henri Armand Allan Grey…Julian West Der Schlossherr (Lord of the Manor)…Maurice Schutz Gisèle…Rena Mandel Léone…Sybille Schmitz Village Doctor…Jan Heironimko The Woman from the Cemetery…Henriette Gérard Old Servant…Albert Bras Foreign Correspondent (1940). Some of the other films he shot His Wife….N. Barbanini were The Lady from Shanghai (1947), It Had to Be You (1947), Down to Earth (1947), Gilda (1946), They Got Me Covered CARL THEODOR DREYER (February 3, 1889, Copenhagen, (1943), To Be or Not to Be (1942), It Started with Eve (1941), Denmark—March 20, 1968, Copenhagen, Denmark) has 23 Love Affair (1939), The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938), Stella Directing credits, among them Gertrud (1964), Ordet/The Word Dallas (1937), Come and Get It (1936), Dodsworth (1936), A (1955), Et Slot i et slot/The Castle Within the Castle (1955), Message to Garcia (1936), Charlie Chan's Secret (1936), Storstrømsbroen/The Storstrom Bridge (1950), Thorvaldsen Metropolitan (1935), Dressed to Thrill (1935), Dante's Inferno (1949), De nåede færgen/They Caught the Ferry (1948), (1935), Le Dernier milliardaire/The Last Billionaire/The Last Landsbykirken/The Danish Church (1947), Kampen mod Millionaire (1934), Liliom (1934), Paprika (1933),
    [Show full text]
  • The Ghostmodern: Revisionist Haunting in Turn-Of-The-Century American Literature (1887-1910)
    THE GHOSTMODERN: REVISIONIST HAUNTING IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE (1887-1910) by MATH TRAFTON B.A., University of Colorado, 2003 B.S., University of Colorado, 2003 M.A., University of Colorado, 2005 M.A., University of Colorado, 2008 A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Comparative Literature 2013 This dissertation titled: The Ghostmodern: Revisionist Haunting in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature (1887-1910) written by Math Trafton has been approved for the Department of Comparative Literature Dr. Karen Jacobs, committee chair Dr. Mark Leiderman Dr. Eric White Dr. Sue Zemka Date The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards Of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. iii Trafton, Math (Ph.D., Comparative Literature) The Ghostmodern: Revisionist Haunting in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature (1887- 1910) Dissertation directed by Associate Professor Karen Jacobs This project attempts to identify and explain numerous significant transformations in the genre of the literary ghost story in the period roughly contemporary with the earliest emergence of literary Modernism. Through a detailed examination of the literary encounters with invisibility in pivotal American ghost stories from the end of the twentieth century, the project considers the rich literary trope of ghostly haunting according to its capacity to provoke an engagement with marginalized, liminal spaces. In traditional ghost stories, however, as ghosts are ultimately overcome and order is restored, normative structures resume, and such engagements are trivialized.
    [Show full text]
  • The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage
    The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage Phoebe S. Spinrad Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright© 1987 by the Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. A shorter version of chapter 4 appeared, along with part of chapter 2, as "The Last Temptation of Everyman, in Philological Quarterly 64 (1985): 185-94. Chapter 8 originally appeared as "Measure for Measure and the Art of Not Dying," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 26 (1984): 74-93. Parts of Chapter 9 are adapted from m y "Coping with Uncertainty in The Duchess of Malfi," in Explorations in Renaissance Culture 6 (1980): 47-63. A shorter version of chapter 10 appeared as "Memento Mockery: Some Skulls on the Renaissance Stage," in Explorations in Renaissance Culture 10 (1984): 1-11. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spinrad, Phoebe S. The summons of death on the medieval and Renaissance English stage. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1700—History and criticism. 2. English drama— To 1500—History and criticism. 3. Death in literature. 4. Death- History. I. Title. PR658.D4S64 1987 822'.009'354 87-5487 ISBN 0-8142-0443-0 To Karl Snyder and Marjorie Lewis without who m none of this would have been Contents Preface ix I Death Takes a Grisly Shape Medieval and Renaissance Iconography 1 II Answering the Summon s The Art of Dying 27 III Death Takes to the Stage The Mystery Cycles and Early Moralities 50 IV Death
    [Show full text]
  • Music and History in Italian Film Melodrama, 1940-2010
    Between Soundtrack and Performance: Music and History in Italian Film Melodrama, 1940-2010 By Marina Romani A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Barbara Spackman, Chair Professor Mary Ann Smart Professor Linda Williams Professor Mia Fuller Summer 2015 Abstract Between Soundtrack and Performance: Music and History in Italian Film Melodrama, 1940-2010 by Marina Romani Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Barbara Spackman, Chair Melodrama manifests itself in a variety of forms – as a film and theatre practice, as a discursive category, as a mode of imagination. This dissertation discusses film melodrama in its visual, gestural, and aural manifestations. My focus is on the persistence of melodrama and the traces it leaves on post-World War II Italian cinema: from the Neorealist canon of the 1940s to works that engage with the psychological and physical, private, and collective traumas after the experience of a totalitarian regime (Cavani’s Il portiere di notte, 1974), to postmodern Viscontian experiments set in a 21st-century capitalist society (Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore, 2009). The aural dimension is fundamental as an opening to the epistemology of each film. I pay particular attention to the presence of operatic music – as evoked directly or through semiotic displacement involving the film’s aesthetic and expressive figures – and I acknowledge the existence of a long legacy of practical and imaginative influences, infiltrations and borrowings between the screen and the operatic stage in the Italian cinematographic tradition.
    [Show full text]
  • South Korean Cinema and the Conditions of Capitalist Individuation
    The Intimacy of Distance: South Korean Cinema and the Conditions of Capitalist Individuation By Jisung Catherine Kim A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Kristen Whissel, Chair Professor Mark Sandberg Professor Elaine Kim Fall 2013 The Intimacy of Distance: South Korean Cinema and the Conditions of Capitalist Individuation © 2013 by Jisung Catherine Kim Abstract The Intimacy of Distance: South Korean Cinema and the Conditions of Capitalist Individuation by Jisung Catherine Kim Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media University of California, Berkeley Professor Kristen Whissel, Chair In The Intimacy of Distance, I reconceive the historical experience of capitalism’s globalization through the vantage point of South Korean cinema. According to world leaders’ discursive construction of South Korea, South Korea is a site of “progress” that proves the superiority of the free market capitalist system for “developing” the so-called “Third World.” Challenging this contention, my dissertation demonstrates how recent South Korean cinema made between 1998 and the first decade of the twenty-first century rearticulates South Korea as a site of economic disaster, ongoing historical trauma and what I call impassible “transmodernity” (compulsory capitalist restructuring alongside, and in conflict with, deep-seated tradition). Made during the first years after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the films under consideration here visualize the various dystopian social and economic changes attendant upon epidemic capitalist restructuring: social alienation, familial fragmentation, and widening economic division.
    [Show full text]
  • Reading the Surface: the Danish Gothic of B.S. Ingemann, H.C
    Reading the Surface: The Danish Gothic of B.S. Ingemann, H.C. Andersen, Karen Blixen and Beyond Kirstine Marie Kastbjerg A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Marianne Stecher. Chair Jan Sjaavik Marshall Brown Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Scandinavian Studies ©Copyright 2013 Kirstine Marie Kastbjerg Parts of chapter 7 are reprinted by permission of the publishers from “The Aesthetics of Surface: the Danish Gothic 1820-2000,” in Gothic Topographies ed. P.M. Mehtonen and Matti Savolainen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 153–167. Copyright © 2013 University of Washington Abstract Reading the Surface: The Danish Gothic of B.S. Ingemann, H.C. Andersen, Karen Blixen and Beyond Kirstine Marie Kastbjerg Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor in Danish Studies Marianne Stecher Department of Scandinavian Studies Despite growing ubiquitous in both the popular and academic mind in recent years, the Gothic has, perhaps not surprisingly, yet to be examined within the notoriously realism-prone literary canon of Denmark. This dissertation fills that void by demonstrating an ongoing negotiation of Gothic conventions in select works by canonical Danish writers such as B.S. Ingemann, Hans Christian Andersen, and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), as well as contemporary writers such as Peter Høeg and Leonora Christina Skov. This examination does not only broaden our understanding of these culturally significant writers and the discourses they write within and against, it also adds to our understanding of the Gothic – an infamously malleable and indefinable literary mode – by redirecting attention to a central feature of the Gothic that has not received much critical attention: the emphasis on excess, spectacle, clichéd conventions, histrionic performances, its hyperbolic rhetorical style, and hyper-visual theatricality.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Introduction WILLIAM ROTHMAN WRITING ABOUT MOVIES HAS BEEN strand over strand with Stanley Cavell’s philosophical life from his earliest to his latest writings. As he observes in the preface to Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Cavell’s thinking about film has for four decades been bound up with his thinking “about most of whatever else I have been thinking about in what may be called philosophy or literature.”1 Contesting Tears, which follows The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film and Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, is his third book devoted to the subject of film—or third and a half, if we include the four essays on film (and one on television and its relation to film) in his 1984 collection of essays, Themes Out of School: Events and Causes. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, whose chapters alternate between read- ings of movies and of classic texts of moral philosophy, makes it an even four. In addition to these books, he has also written a substantial number of other pieces on film, in a diversity of formats—some ambitious theoretical state- ments, others apparently slight “occasional pieces”—originally presented to a diversity of audiences, on a diversity of occasions, and published, if at all, in a diversity of journals and anthologies. In “The World as Things: Collecting Thoughts on Collecting,” one of the chapters in the present collection, Cavell remarks that “every col- lection requires an idea,” and that this “seems to presage the fact that collections carry narratives with them, ones presumably telling the point of the gathering, the source and adventure of it.” The idea of the present xi © 2005 State University of New York Press, Albany xii Introduction collection is, quite simply, to gather under one cover all of Cavell’s writings on film—including the material from Themes Out of School—other than The World Viewed, Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears, and Cities of Words.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction : Why Melodrama?
    INTRODUCTION : WHY MELODRAMA? Of all the non-professional actors who appeared in post-war Italian cinema, one not usually considered as belonging to a neorealist impulse is Lidia Cirillo. Filmed sitting on a train at the beginning of Una donna ha ucciso [A Woman Has Killed] (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1952), she tells an apparently suicidal fellow female passenger her cautionary tale. This woman has killed, and the story is her own – that is, the story the film is based on is that of a real murder, carried out by Cirillo on her husband, an English soldier. In her study of women in post-war Italy, Garofalo noted that the public was in many ways approving in its reaction to the crime. In her defence Cirillo told the court: ‘I wanted to avenge, along with my honour, that of all the women of Italy’ (Garofalo 1956: 20). What connection does this comment reveal between the particular and the general? Is it revenge against an apparent liberator – a member of the Allied armies who had just freed the country from the Nazis, a redeemer of distressed damsels turned into a stranger within the home? Is this symbolic of Italian reconstruction, of the disappointment in life after the Liberation? In her claim to speak for ‘all the women of Italy’, does she testify to an explosive violence underlying the institution of marriage, or of the return of the repressed of war to the domestic sphere? Is it an overturning of gender relations, a sign of feminine hysteria, that prison is indistinguishable from an unhappy family? Or does it offer a moral tale of deplorable transgression, of the futility of the desire for fulfilment for women, or the language of resistance in the renewed conservatism prior to feminism? The film takes inspiration from a news event, one which seems itself inspired by a film.
    [Show full text]
  • The Philosophic Game: Eighteenth-Century Masquerade in German and Danish Literature and Culture a DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
    The Philosophic Game: Eighteenth-Century Masquerade in German and Danish Literature and Culture A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Anne Beryl Wallen IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Rembert Hüser, Poul Houe May 2012 © Anne Beryl Wallen, 2012 Acknowledgements My studies, research and dissertation writing have been supported by several institutions, for which I must express my most sincere appreciation: the University of Minnesota, particularly for the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and the Graduate School Fellowship; the Department of German, Scandinavian & Dutch, particularly for the Hella Lindemeyer Mears Fellowship, the Gerhard and Janet Weiss award, and to Hella Mears and Gerhard Weiss themselves for their support; the U.S.-Denmark Fulbright Comission; the American Scandinavian Foundation; and the P.E.O. Scholars Award. I am also grateful to the University of Copenhagen Institute of Nordic Studies and Linguistics for hosting me during my Fulbright year in Copenhagen. Thanks to Lisbet Hein of Hørsholm Museum and to Ida Poulsen of the Theatre Museum in the Court Theater for generously sharing materials and knowledge with me. At the individual level, my thanks go first to my co-advisors, Rembert Hüser and Poul Houe, for sharing their experience and providing guidance over the past several years. The size of my dissertation committee has raised eyebrows, but I could not imagine having gone forward with my project without the invaluable input each of my committee members has provided. Ruth-Ellen Joeres and Richard Leppert both also served on my Master’s committee, and so deserve special thanks for their support throughout my graduate studies.
    [Show full text]
  • Carl Theodor DREYER (1889-1968)
    CARLDREYER Çeviren: İng. Ok. A. Fikret IŞIKYAKAR Carl Theodor DREYER (1889-1968) 50 yıldan fazla bir zaman dilimi içerisinde film sanatına bü• yük katkıları olan Danimarkah yönetmen C.T. Dreyer, tiyatro eleştdrmerıliğinden sonra 1912 de senaryo yazarı olarak sinemaya geçti. Zola ve Balzac'tan yaptığı uyarlarnalardan sonra yönetmen• Iiğe başladı. 1920'de ilk filmi Praesiderıten (Başkan)'ı çevirdi. Bu filmde D.W.GriHith'e ve onun ünlü filmi Intolerance'a (Hoşgörü­ süzlük) duyduğu aşırı hayranlığın izleri açıktır. 1921'de yaptığı Blade af Satans Bağ' (Satan'ın Kitabından Yapraklar) yine Grif­ rith'e bir öykünmedir. Berlin'e gitti. «Kammerspielfilmulerden sa­ yılan Die Gezeichneten'I (Birbiııinizi sevmiz. 1922) çevirdi. Dani­ marka'ya döndü. Du Skal aere din husturu (Evin Efendisi) dan sorıra yaptığı, ülmograüsırunve sinema dünyasının başyapıtların­ dan olan La Passion de Jeanne D'are (Jandark'ın Tutkusu) adlı mm bu dönemdendir (1928). Duygu ve düşünceleri görselleştlrme­ deki olağanüstü başarısı, yakın çekimleri (close-ups) , tonlamayı ve tartımı büyük bir ustalıkla kullanması özelliklerindendır. İlk sesli filmini 1932'de yaptı (Vampyr) . 1955'te çevirdiği Ordet (Söz• cük), ile aşkın doğasının incelenmesi ve görsel durağanlığıyla Or- 212 det'in biçimci ve tematık bir uzantısı olan son filmi Gertrude (1964) diğer önemli filmleridir. Sanatsal bütünlüğü, sorumluluğu ve tavrından hiç ödün vermeyaşı kırkbeş yıllık yönetmenlik yaşa­ mında yalnızca öndört film çevirdiğinden de bellidir. Aşağıda, bu büyük sinemacı ile «Chaiers du Cinema» derglsın­ den Michael Delahaye'in 1965 te yaptığı bir söyleşinin çevirisini sunuyoruz. CAHIERS : Filminiz her şeyden çok yaşam ile bir anlaşma, neşeye doğru bir gelişme biçiminde görünüyor. CARL DREYER : Bu belkide, kadınlar olsun erkekler olsun, beni kişisel olarak ilgalendirmeyen insanlarla hiç ilişkim olmama­ sındandır.
    [Show full text]