Carl Theodor Dreyer

The show is hosted by historian Dr. Sarah Ifdeka, and Sarah and I recorded this episode back in 2021.

The subject of our conversation is Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.

While this film is clearly a long way outside the usual remit of a Russian and Soviet movie podcast, the theme of a person being persecuted by the powers that be, then being posthumously rehabilitated, does have a certain resonance with the historical times and places we typically cover.

History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes, as the saying goes.

This metric takes its cue from the famous Bechdel test, named after Alison Bechdel, which to pass, a film must feature two named female characters who talk to each other for at least one minute about something other than men.

The if-decker test is an even lower bar, the criteria for a film to pass being that at least one named female character must survive to the end of the film.

Okay, with that little bit of explanatory context out of the way, please enjoy this conversation about Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Deus eternae, qui ad sconditurum et spagnitur, qui postio meate quantia,

He was not like some fringe guy.

He starred in Joan of Arc, Carl Dreyer's Joan of Arc.

He was in a bunch of these huge films and was a renowned theater actor and writer.

and director, but he thought the experience of seeing a live performance should be like being in the presence of a shaman, where both you and the shaman and the audience are affected.

Its titular female vampire has acted as the foundation for the many female and lesbian vampires that would follow later in both literature and film.

These include the 1932 gothic movie Vampyr, directed by Carl Dreyer, Roger Vadim's 1960 movie Blood and Roses, the Christopher Lee-starring The Crypt of the Vampire, released in 1963, Hammer's Kahnstein trilogy, which began with The Vampire Lovers in 1970, and of course our second film this week, The Blood-Spattered Bride.

The story has also been translated into stage productions, comic books, radio plays and TV shows, while the character of Carmilla has also appeared, sometimes in name only, in a series of video games, including the Castlevania game series developed by Konami.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu is considered by many to be one of the greatest ghost story writers of the Victorian era, and he was a key figure in the dark romanticism movement of the 19th century.

It's the best Danish film I've seen in about three decades since Lars von Trier's The Idiots.

It's Carl Dreyer in a skirt.

in reference to the director, who is a woman.

It's the only film made solely by a woman in the competition.

Pat.

What? This week, we have another Carl Theodore Dreyer film.

It's been a

long

This is a thing that was also true when we watched Persona a couple weeks ago for Bergman.

But I didn't think about it when we had Bergen.

When we watched our first Dreyer film, this film was not in the Criterion Collection yet.

And that feels crazy