David Bordwell's website on cinema   click for CV

Home

Blog

Books

Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder

On the History of Film Style pdf online

Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

Film Art: An Introduction

Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages pdf online

Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies pdf online

Planet Hong Kong, second edition pdf online

The Way Hollywood Tells It pdf online

Poetics of Cinema pdf online

Figures Traced In Light

Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema pdf online

Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907–1934 pdf online

Video

Hou Hsiao-hsien: A new video lecture!

CinemaScope: The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses

How Motion Pictures Became the Movies

Constructive editing in Pickpocket: A video essay

Essays

Rex Stout: Logomachizing

Lessons with Bazin: Six Paths to a Poetics

A Celestial Cinémathèque? or, Film Archives and Me: A Semi-Personal History

Shklovsky and His “Monument to a Scientific Error”

Murder Culture: Adventures in 1940s Suspense

The Viewer’s Share: Models of Mind in Explaining Film

Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film Theory?

Mad Detective: Doubling Down

The Classical Hollywood Cinema Twenty-Five Years Along

Nordisk and the Tableau Aesthetic

William Cameron Menzies: One Forceful, Impressive Idea

Another Shaw Production: Anamorphic Adventures in Hong Kong

Paolo Gioli’s Vertical Cinema

(Re)Discovering Charles Dekeukeleire

Doing Film History

The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema

Anatomy of the Action Picture

Hearing Voices

Preface, Croatian edition, On the History of Film Style

Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything

Film and the Historical Return

Studying Cinema

Articles

Book Reports

Observations on film art

Dreyer goes digital

Thursday | June 3, 2010   open printable version open printable version

The President (1919).

DB here:

Back in 2008 I noted that the Danish Film Institute was at work on a vast website devoted to Carl Dreyer. Now for the good news: It’s up! The English version is here.

Has any other director received such a comprehensive, authoritative treatment on the Web? Carl Theodor Dreyer: The Man and His Work is a pathway to all things Dreyerian: biographical background, documents from his career (over 4000 letters alone!), gorgeous stills, film clips, and news of current Dreyer-related events. There’s a library of video and audio interviews (with English translation). There are also essays on his life and working methods, his themes and techniques. The site will grow as well. (I’ll be adding an essay, mostly on The President, later this month.)

We’re deeply grateful to the Danish Film Institute for all their years of effort in making this lode of material available to scholars and admirers.

PS 4 June: I told you the site was growing fast! A new entry supplies anecdotes–some charming, some disconcerting–about Dreyer’s days running a movie theatre.

PPS 8 June: Jon Asp writes that Ingmar Bergman has earned a vast site that rivals (and precedes) the Dreyer one. It’s here. Embarrassing for us Yanks! Where’s our comparably rich site on Griffith, Ford, et al.? Thanks to Jon for the link.

The Master of the House (1925).

Comments are closed.

David Bordwell
top of page

have comments about the state of this website? go here