SPECIAL SCREENINGS : Dreyer Survey to Show All 14 of Great Tragedian’s Works

Is it too much to call any one film series “essential”? Perhaps. But the UCLA Film Archive’s comprehensive Carl Dreyer retrospective--at Melnitz Theater, Saturday through Aug. 28--deserves that accolade.

Carl-Theodor Dreyer was the cinema’s greatest tragedian. Born in tragedy himself, illegitimate son of a cruel Danish landowner and his Swedish servant, he fled a loveless adoptive home at 17 and, over the last 50 years of his life, earned one of the most formidable reputations of any 20th-Century cineaste . His fame is largely based on only five films, made in successive decades: “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1927), “Vampyr” (1932), “Day of Wrath” (1943), “Ordet” (1955) and “Gertrud” (1964).

For many critics and film makers he is, like poetry’s Eliot or music’s Mahler, the compleat, integral creator, unflinching witness to the century’s spiritual crises. His main subjects were religious, social and sexual intolerance. His style was as rapt, complex and full of powerfully repressed emotion as a Bach toccata that conceals a scream.

The beauty of the UCLA retrospective is that, for the first time, it gives us everything: all 14 films--from the 1918 “The President” to 1964’s “Gertrud”; the seven short documentaries he directed between 1942 and 1954, plus a rare interview shot by Jurgen Roos in 1966, only two years before Dreyer’s death. These rarer works, shown mainly over the retrospective’s first three days, are perhaps its most important and unusual section. In fact, the 1918-28 period, the first decade of his creative life, when he worked in five countries, was undoubtedly Dreyer’s most innovative and fertile. These films are full of surprises.

Here, we get the Dreyer even assiduous scholars have missed. Dreyer’s visual genius--those monumentally austere and moving shots of Maria Falconetti as Joan of Arc, the Rembrandt-esque lighting of his greatest film, “Day of Wrath,” the beautifully Angst -ridden interiors (often suggesting Vermeer but actually influenced by the Danish chamber painter Vilhelm Hammershoi)--is widely granted. These films reveal an even more universal talent--a master of slapstick, satire and eroticism, suspense, romance, fantasy, lush spectacle, even of hell-for-leather action scenes--who, in every circumstance, remains uniquely himself.

The myth of the dry Dreyer--the lonely, gloomy, uncompromising, ultra-religious Dane--is blasted away by the bulk of his unseen silent and documentary work. Can you imagine a Dreyer movie with a car chase? There’s a hair-raising highway battle between motorcycle and cars in the 1948 “They Caught the Ferry” (Saturday), a jolting traffic safety documentary with “Twilight Zone” overtones. In the 1919 “Leaves From Satan’s Book” (Sunday), there’s a gunfight on horseback and a rousing last-minute rescue modeled on Dreyer’s youthful idol, D. W. Griffith--whose “Intolerance” inspired the whole film.

“Leaves From Satan’s Book,” with Lucifer appearing as both a French Jacobin and a Russian “red,” is often derided as over-conservative. But, in the 1921 “Love One Another” (Sunday), Dreyer made a film on the Russian revolution surpassed only by the silent masterpieces of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko: a seething, teeming period piece (shot in Germany) and a brave attack on bigotry. The hero is Christian, the heroine Jewish, the major set-piece a horrifically re-created pogrom.

Dreyer’s famous visuals predominate in these films. Right from the first shots of “The President” (Sunday)--about a “Scarlet Letter”-style web of sexual hypocrisy and remorse--he shows an inspired sense of camera placement. Later, he also shows experimental brio. The fresh, exuberant 1925 “Bride of Glomdale” (Saturday), shot in the open air of Norway, was largely improvised by the cast and Dreyer as they went along. It contains a zesty “Quiet Man”-style slant on village marriage mores and a thrilling sequence where man and horse are swept downstream toward the churning rapids.

The 1920 “The Parson’s Widow” (Sunday)--in which an opportunistic young preacher marries the previous parson’s elderly widow, sneaking his girlfriend into the household as his sister--opens with hilarious slapstick and bawdy jokes. Later it darkens toward pathos and a poetic structure built on complex visual rhymes and inversions.

There’s a delicately impish Ronald Firbank tone and sexual urbanity in the 1922 fairy-tale fragment “Once Upon a Time” (Monday). The 1925 “Master of the House” (Monday), which made Dreyer’s reputation in France, is a feminist family comedy-drama that scathingly attacked masculine pretensions and household tyranny 50 years before it was fashionable.

Of these early films, “The Parson’s Widow,” “Master of the House” and the 1924 “Michael” (Aug. 14) seem to me masterpieces worthy to be ranked alongside his five late classics. “Leaves From Satan’s Book” is a flawed but majestic work in which all his obsessions are encapsulated. And one of the later classics, the mesmerizing horror movie “Vampyr” (1932), which helps open the series on Saturday, haunts us once again with its specters and seekers, its miasmal grays, its macabre humor and poetry, its bizarre skewed camera angles and aura of dislocated dread.

We all lose because of the rigid incomprehension the film industry often displays toward its great originals: Eisenstein, Vigo, Griffith, Welles, Tarkovsky--and the Dreyer who managed barely a feature a decade for the last 40 years of his life. But, coming in his centennial, the UCLA retrospective is a fitting and glorious tribute for one of this century’s most brilliant, and tragically underseen, artists.

Information: (213) 206-FILM or (213) 206-8013.