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 this narrative of his 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 our understanding not only 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 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc: Art Melodrama, “Authenticity,” and Performance
3 Vampyr: Victims, Volition, and Melodrama of Consciousness
4 Day of Wrath and “Kniplinger”: Melodramatic Inheritance and the Domestic Sphere
5 Ordet: Art Melodrama and the Miracle
6 Gertrud: Melodramatic Refusal and the Art Melodrama Archive
Conclusion
 
Appendix: Carl Th. Dreyer’s Filmography
Notes
Bibliography
Index