Post by petrolino on Jan 28, 2018 2:29:54 GMT
'Master Of The House' is a housebound silent picture based on a play by Svend Rindom who co-scripted the film with its director Carl Theodor Dreyer. Cruel patriarch Viktor Frandsen (Johannes Meyer) harasses his wife Ida (Astrid Holm), overworks his daughter Karen (Karin Nellemose) and bullies his son Dreng (Aage Hoffman). His old family nanny Mads (Mathilde Nielsen) determines to teach the spoilt, ill-mannered fool a valuable lesson in appreciation.
Sometimes you see a silent movie so impressive you just have to take your hat off and 'Master Of The House' is one of them. There's no reason this simple film about a family should be so compelling, in fact it might easily have become static and stagebound, but it's teeming with life and rife with observation. It details the degradation of a family by a needlessly cruel man who feels emasculated by the intelligent women around him. Eventually he learns what it takes to be a real man, accepting responsibility for his actions and learning what it takes to balance the core human qualities of being dependable, steady and self-sufficient. It's brilliantly acted, cleverly designed and the work of a preternaturally gifted cinematic artist.
The master of the house is depicted as the monster in the house, a scowling man-baby who refuses to grow up and measures personal happiness by how smug he's feeling. This damaged domestic drama, admired by filmmakers Abel Gance and Victor Sjostrom, elevates an elegiac notion and predicts rebirth for a man who otherwise threatens to teach his children only the worst aspects of humanity.
"Consciously, I don't do anything to please the public."
- Carl Theodor Dreyer
'Music For Chameleons' - Tubeway Army
- Carl Theodor Dreyer
'Music For Chameleons' - Tubeway Army
Sometimes you see a silent movie so impressive you just have to take your hat off and 'Master Of The House' is one of them. There's no reason this simple film about a family should be so compelling, in fact it might easily have become static and stagebound, but it's teeming with life and rife with observation. It details the degradation of a family by a needlessly cruel man who feels emasculated by the intelligent women around him. Eventually he learns what it takes to be a real man, accepting responsibility for his actions and learning what it takes to balance the core human qualities of being dependable, steady and self-sufficient. It's brilliantly acted, cleverly designed and the work of a preternaturally gifted cinematic artist.
"From this rather unpromising material, drawn from a play by Svend Rindom, Dreyer fashioned a richly detailed film which is charming, funny, and intensely moving in roughly equally proportions. True to his new principles, Dreyer refused to use studio decor. As Ebbe Neergaard puts it, 'Dreyer would have preferred to make the whole film inside a real two-roomed flat. But as this was impossible technically, a complete copy of such an apartment was built in the studio - not just a separate set for each room dotted around the studio with open sides like a doll's house, but a composite unit of four-walled rooms with doors between and gas and water and electricity laid on - everything was there.' The results are immediately visible in the density of the film, where Dreyer begins, like Renoir, to shoot through an empty to the action glimpsed beyond."
- Tom Milne on the making of 'Master Of The House', 'Darkness And Light : Carl Theodor Dreyer'
"Every so often a filmmaker decides to accept severe spatial constraints, creating what David Koepp calls “bottle” plots. Make a movie in a lifeboat (Lifeboat) or around a phone booth (Phone Booth) or in a motel room (Tape) or in a Manhattan house (Panic Room) or in a remote cabin plagued by horrors (name your favorite). In the 1940s several filmmakers were trying out a “theatrical” approach that welcomed confinement like this; Cocteau’s Les Parents terribles, H. C. Potter’s The Time of Your Life, and of course Rope are examples. Today’s filmmakers are still exploring “chamber cinema.” The Hateful Eight is the most recent instance, with most of its chapters set in Minnie’s Haberdashery. Typically, the chamber films in any period aren’t “canned theatre” like the PBS or English National Theatre broadcasts. Chamber films push the camera into the space, often showing all four walls and letting us get familiar with the rooms the characters inhabit. But this requires not only a carefully planned setting but also a good deal of cinematic skill in smoothly taking us to the primary zones of action. Carl Dreyer was one of the earliest exponents of chamber cinema. He had seen initial examples in German Kammerspiel (chamber-play) films like Sylvester (1924) and had made a mild version himself in Michael (1924). Dreyer took the aesthetic to new heights in The Master of the House (1925). Long before Akerman’s Jeanne Dielmann, Dreyer gave us a film about housework. Ida’s husband Victor is unemployed, so while he loafs and drifts around town, she struggles to keep things going. He pays her back with scorn and abuse. The plot is structured around two days, which yield a before-and-after pattern. At the end of the first, Ida leaves Victor, and a month later, his realization of his mistakes is revealed by his behavior in the household. The drama comes not only from the characters’ conflicts but from the way they handle everyday things like butter knives and laundry lines. Rendering the household in all its specificity obliges Dreyer to rethink continuity filmmaking. He lays out the geography of the home by shooting “in the round” and cutting on the basis of eyelines and frame entrances. (He displays the same confidence in the “immersive camera” that Lubitsch displays in Lady Windermere’s Fan.) He trains us to notice landmarks, to associate bits of action with particular areas of the apartment, and to sense the characters’ changing emotions in relation to small adjustments in composition. The film is an exceptionally fluid, assured one, and it prepares for more daring Dreyer experiments to come: the fragmented interior spaces of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the creeping camera of Vampyr, and the intensely theatricalized late films Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud. Little-known at the time, The Master of the House has come to be regarded as one of the most quietly perfect of silent films."
- David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, 'Observations On Film Art'
Karin Nellemose & Lau Lauritzen
- Tom Milne on the making of 'Master Of The House', 'Darkness And Light : Carl Theodor Dreyer'
"Every so often a filmmaker decides to accept severe spatial constraints, creating what David Koepp calls “bottle” plots. Make a movie in a lifeboat (Lifeboat) or around a phone booth (Phone Booth) or in a motel room (Tape) or in a Manhattan house (Panic Room) or in a remote cabin plagued by horrors (name your favorite). In the 1940s several filmmakers were trying out a “theatrical” approach that welcomed confinement like this; Cocteau’s Les Parents terribles, H. C. Potter’s The Time of Your Life, and of course Rope are examples. Today’s filmmakers are still exploring “chamber cinema.” The Hateful Eight is the most recent instance, with most of its chapters set in Minnie’s Haberdashery. Typically, the chamber films in any period aren’t “canned theatre” like the PBS or English National Theatre broadcasts. Chamber films push the camera into the space, often showing all four walls and letting us get familiar with the rooms the characters inhabit. But this requires not only a carefully planned setting but also a good deal of cinematic skill in smoothly taking us to the primary zones of action. Carl Dreyer was one of the earliest exponents of chamber cinema. He had seen initial examples in German Kammerspiel (chamber-play) films like Sylvester (1924) and had made a mild version himself in Michael (1924). Dreyer took the aesthetic to new heights in The Master of the House (1925). Long before Akerman’s Jeanne Dielmann, Dreyer gave us a film about housework. Ida’s husband Victor is unemployed, so while he loafs and drifts around town, she struggles to keep things going. He pays her back with scorn and abuse. The plot is structured around two days, which yield a before-and-after pattern. At the end of the first, Ida leaves Victor, and a month later, his realization of his mistakes is revealed by his behavior in the household. The drama comes not only from the characters’ conflicts but from the way they handle everyday things like butter knives and laundry lines. Rendering the household in all its specificity obliges Dreyer to rethink continuity filmmaking. He lays out the geography of the home by shooting “in the round” and cutting on the basis of eyelines and frame entrances. (He displays the same confidence in the “immersive camera” that Lubitsch displays in Lady Windermere’s Fan.) He trains us to notice landmarks, to associate bits of action with particular areas of the apartment, and to sense the characters’ changing emotions in relation to small adjustments in composition. The film is an exceptionally fluid, assured one, and it prepares for more daring Dreyer experiments to come: the fragmented interior spaces of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the creeping camera of Vampyr, and the intensely theatricalized late films Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud. Little-known at the time, The Master of the House has come to be regarded as one of the most quietly perfect of silent films."
- David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, 'Observations On Film Art'
Karin Nellemose & Lau Lauritzen
The master of the house is depicted as the monster in the house, a scowling man-baby who refuses to grow up and measures personal happiness by how smug he's feeling. This damaged domestic drama, admired by filmmakers Abel Gance and Victor Sjostrom, elevates an elegiac notion and predicts rebirth for a man who otherwise threatens to teach his children only the worst aspects of humanity.
"Carl Dreyer went back to Berlin, where he made 'Michael' (1924), an adaptation of a novel by the celebrated Danish writer Herman Bang, which tells the story of an ageing artist who is cruelly betrayed by his young protege, a young man to whom he has a deep emotional attachment. Returning to Denmark, Dreyer made 'Master of the House' (1925), a witty and heart-warming film about a domestic tyrant, an unkind and grumpy husband who constantly bullies his family. The wife finally breaks down, and her place is taken by the husband's wife's old nanny, who takes charge of the household and puts the husband in his place. Her harsh but well-intentioned discipline brings out his kinder self and teaches him to appreciate the love and care of his wife and children. 'Master of the House' is briskly shot and full of life; never sentimental, it subtly portrays the everyday joys and sorrows of the family. Dreyer brilliantly meets the challenge of telling a story where the action is largely confined to one tiny, two-room apartment and consists mainly in seemingly insignificant domestic activity. Both 'Michael' and 'Master of the House' showed Dreyer's talent for close and sympathetic character study and established him as one of the leading film artists of the time. Dreyer himself frequently stated that it was precisely the cinema's ability to create sympathetic understanding of character, particularly through intimate views of the human face, that was the essence of all true film art. 'Master of the House' was a great success in France and widely admired, paving the way for Dreyer's most expensive and ambitious film, 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928)."
- Casper Tybjerg, 'Film Art As Passion'
"Although it might be tempting to save the best till last, Dreyer’s most respected film, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), offers the most accessible introduction to his work. The apotheosis of Dreyer’s silent film craft, the film is rightly considered to be one of the true masterpieces of the pre-sound era. Made in France, the film was produced under the auspices of the Société Gėnėrale des Films, who were then completing work on Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927). As they had done for Gance, the Société Gėnėrale gave Dreyer a seemingly unlimited budget and, more importantly, total creative control. But whereas Gance created a decade-spanning spectacle of epic proportions, Dreyer favoured a more grounded approach, opting to focus solely upon Joan’s trial and execution, thereby eschewing the story of how Joan led an army into battle in an attempt to drive the English out of 15th-century France. Basing his film upon the transcripts of Joan’s real trial, Dreyer condensed the events into a single day, rendering the film with a unity of time, place and action which speaks volumes about Dreyer’s interest in interior dramas – not only of locations, but also of the soul. Throughout the film, Dreyer sticks closely to Joan and her assailants, filming much of the action in dramatic close-ups. These close-ups foreground the actors’ faces, allowing us a more immediate access to their inner thoughts, but they also render the wider space around them unimportant. Combined with the film’s sparse décor, Dreyer’s camera choices reinforce Joan’s sense of disorientation, and move the action away from the exterior physical world towards Joan’s spiritual interior. Dreyer once stated that the artist should describe inner, not outer, life, and nowhere does he achieve this more perfectly than in The Passion of Joan of Arc."
- Alex Barrett, The British Film Institute
'In My Room' - Yazoo
'In Your Room' - Depeche Mode
- Casper Tybjerg, 'Film Art As Passion'
"Although it might be tempting to save the best till last, Dreyer’s most respected film, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), offers the most accessible introduction to his work. The apotheosis of Dreyer’s silent film craft, the film is rightly considered to be one of the true masterpieces of the pre-sound era. Made in France, the film was produced under the auspices of the Société Gėnėrale des Films, who were then completing work on Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927). As they had done for Gance, the Société Gėnėrale gave Dreyer a seemingly unlimited budget and, more importantly, total creative control. But whereas Gance created a decade-spanning spectacle of epic proportions, Dreyer favoured a more grounded approach, opting to focus solely upon Joan’s trial and execution, thereby eschewing the story of how Joan led an army into battle in an attempt to drive the English out of 15th-century France. Basing his film upon the transcripts of Joan’s real trial, Dreyer condensed the events into a single day, rendering the film with a unity of time, place and action which speaks volumes about Dreyer’s interest in interior dramas – not only of locations, but also of the soul. Throughout the film, Dreyer sticks closely to Joan and her assailants, filming much of the action in dramatic close-ups. These close-ups foreground the actors’ faces, allowing us a more immediate access to their inner thoughts, but they also render the wider space around them unimportant. Combined with the film’s sparse décor, Dreyer’s camera choices reinforce Joan’s sense of disorientation, and move the action away from the exterior physical world towards Joan’s spiritual interior. Dreyer once stated that the artist should describe inner, not outer, life, and nowhere does he achieve this more perfectly than in The Passion of Joan of Arc."
- Alex Barrett, The British Film Institute
'In My Room' - Yazoo
'In Your Room' - Depeche Mode
