Visions and Victims
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A01=Amanda Doxtater
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archive
art cinema
art melodrama
Author_Amanda Doxtater
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Blade af Satans Bog
Carl Th. Dreyer
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=APFA
Category=APFB
Category=ATFA
Category=ATFB
Category=HBJD
Category=NHD
COP=United States
Danish film
Day of Wrath
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Du skal AEre din Hustru
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European art cinema
Gertrud
La Passion de Jeanee d'Arc
Language_English
Leaves from Satan's Book
Master of the House
melodrama
melodramatic
Nordic film
Nordisk
Ordet
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Price_€50 to €100
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Scandinavian art cinema
Scandinavian cinema
Scandinavian film
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spectacle
Vampyr
Vredens dag
Product details
- ISBN 9780299347505
- Weight: 513g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 28 May 2024
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer, one of the twentieth century’s most famous filmmakers, is best known for his masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and his midcentury classics, Day of Wrath and Ordet. Both viewers and scholars largely leave his early work, for Nordisk Film, on the shelf, dismissing it as immature melodramatic fare produced for a company known for superficial, popular entertainment. In the received historiography, Dreyer broke with Nordisk in the pursuit of developing his film as a high art, eventually succeeding on the world stage as an auteur and eschewing melodrama in favor of austere art film.
Amanda Doxtater offers a necessary corrective to the narrative of Dreyer’s essentially bifurcated career. Close readings of Dreyer’s Nordisk films alongside his mature work reveal a stylistic throughline Doxtater terms “art melodrama,” a form combining the ambiguity, stylization, and consciousness of art cinema with the heightened emotional expressivity and dramatic embodiments characteristic of melodrama. She argues that Dreyer’s major artistic concerns known from his later work--pathos, authenticity, the embodiment of psychological duress, and so on--find their first expression in his Nordisk melodramas, complicating not only our understanding of his later films but also of his early works, and even our understanding of the melodramatic mode in general. Indeed, extending well beyond the career of a singular director, this book challenges assumptions about the relationship between “low-brow” melodrama and “high-brow” art cinema.
Amanda Doxtater offers a necessary corrective to the narrative of Dreyer’s essentially bifurcated career. Close readings of Dreyer’s Nordisk films alongside his mature work reveal a stylistic throughline Doxtater terms “art melodrama,” a form combining the ambiguity, stylization, and consciousness of art cinema with the heightened emotional expressivity and dramatic embodiments characteristic of melodrama. She argues that Dreyer’s major artistic concerns known from his later work--pathos, authenticity, the embodiment of psychological duress, and so on--find their first expression in his Nordisk melodramas, complicating not only our understanding of his later films but also of his early works, and even our understanding of the melodramatic mode in general. Indeed, extending well beyond the career of a singular director, this book challenges assumptions about the relationship between “low-brow” melodrama and “high-brow” art cinema.
Amanda Doxtater is an assistant professor and the Barbro Osher Endowed Chair of Swedish Studies at the University of Washington.
