Carl theodor dreyer jesus of nazareth

Final paintings, final books, and final films are often read into because of their terminating chronology. Did the artist know they were close to death?

How is that shown in the art?

Carl theodor dreyer jesus of nazareth

When he died in 1968, Carl Dreyer had many projects lined up, including Medea and Jesus of Nazareth, which he had been preparing and researching for years, to the point of learning Hebrew. His last films, Ordet in 1955 and Gertrud in 1964,embody the exacting visual style he forged during his fifty-five-year career—a style he explicated in short essays written ten and twenty years before Gertrud.

Being a director who worked with and without sound, we should trust Dreyer when he says film “first and foremost directs itself to the eye, and that the picture far, far more easily than the spoken word penetrates deeply into a spectator’s consciousness.”Gerturd is as much about the eponymous character's face and all the freein