Discover Ordet (1955) is to experience an unprecedented continuity of cinema, a film from a single block like some of Rodin’s marbles, where the idea and the material seem to be one. The penultimate feature film by Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968), a notorious masterpiece of a career that is not lacking (The Passion of Joan of Arc, in 1928, and Day of wrath, in 1943), completely worked by the mystery of the incarnation, emerges in a new restored copy.
Ordet marked, in its time, the belated consecration of its author (and relatively ephemeral before the deep rejection that was to arouse Gertrud, in 1964), which received the Golden Lion for him at the Venice Film Festival. From the film, the cinephile tradition generally retains that it tells the story of a miracle. Something that would not be enough to distinguish it, if this miracle did not work on two levels: both as an incident and as a pure cinematographic event. In fact, Dreyer does not just recount it, following in this the play by Kaj Munk (1898-1944), which he adapted: he accomplished it by the most elementary means of staging, making thus cinema a form of thaumaturgy.
Climate of crisis and doubt
We are in 1925 in the bare and windy plain of Jutland, in the farm estate of Borgensgaard, leaning against the rim of dunes planted with rushes. Morten Borgen (Henrik Malberg), the “master of the house”, as Dreyer likes to paint them, reigns over his household like a good Lutheran patriarch, attentive, but somewhat rigid regarding the customs of a Christianity whose decline he deplores. In his three sons, the precepts inculcated seem to have turned somewhat sour: his eldest, Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen), admits having lost all faith, while the second, Johannes, a former seminarian disoriented by reading Kierkegaard, is downright mad, wandering on the dunes illuminated, taking himself for the resurrected prophet.
“Ordet”, in Danish, means “the word”, and it is indeed her, surrounded by silence, which serves as the keystone of the staging
There remains the youngest, Anders (Cay Kristiansen), who has the misfortune of wanting to marry the daughter of the tailor Petersen, faithful of another rigorous chapel, and for this reason in bickering with Morgen, whom he does not exclude to convert. In this climate of crisis and doubt, the only ray of sunshine in the house is Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), Mikkel’s wife, who is expecting a third child. Full of amenity and compassion, she preaches harmony between all these tormented gentlemen, professes patience and claims that tiny miracles occur at every moment. And it is precisely through her, who holds the secret of life, that Providence will manifest itself in the home twice.
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