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Visions and Victims

Name: Visions and Victims
Brand: UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
SKU: 9780299347505
Price: 206.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESSISBN: 9780299347505

Art Melodrama in the Films of Carl Th. Dreyer

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By Amanda Doxtater
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
Release Date: August 29, 2024
Format: HARDBACK
Pages: 254

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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 is an assistant professor and the Barbro Osher Endowed Chair of Swedish Studies at the University of Washington.

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Reading Dreyer's Early Archive: Nordisk Scripts and Art Melodrama 2 Art Melodrama, "Authenticity," and Performance in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc 3 Vampyr: Victims, Volition, and Melodrama of Consciousness 4 Inheriting the Curse of Melodrama: Reading Lace in Day of Wrath and "Kniplinger" 5 Art Melodrama and the Miracle: Ordet Chapter 6 Gertrud's Melodrama Refused: Performing the Art Melodrama Archive Appendix 1: Carl Th. Dreyer's Filmography Including Scripts (Realized and Unrealized) Appendix 2: Nordisk Offer (Victim/Sacrifice) Films and Scripts Notes Bibliography Index

"Doxtater compellingly argues that Carl Th. Dreyer's metier was always art melodrama as a hybrid genre. In her case studies, Dreyer joins the ranks of Sirk, Ray, and Fassbinder as subversive genre filmmakers of melodrama with high-art intentions. Against the grain of the Danish director's reputation for formalist austerity, the author reveals a surprisingly cagey, dynamic, and erotic storyteller." - Arne Lunde, author of Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema "Rooted in painstaking archival research that unpacks Carl Th. Dreyer's praxis as screenwriter, archivist, and historian, Visions and Victims is a thought-provoking rumination on the temporalities, performativities, and affordances of the archive. Lucidly and elegantly written, the book resituates Dreyer's oeuvre in the ambivalent space between art cinema and melodrama." - C. Claire Thomson, author of Short Films from a Small Nation: Danish Informational Cinema 1935-1965.

Visions and Victims

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