DVD Review: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Michael on Kino on Video

Dreyer turns a bisexual love triangle into the archetype of sexual piety and martyrdom. How Scandinavian of him.

MichaelCarl Theodor Dreyer’s two final works economically cover the two poles of the Danish auteur’s attitudes toward love: Ordet is a sober celebration on the ability of love to accomplish the impossible and Gertrud is a hysterical lament for a woman who insists on fixating on the impossibility of love. Dreyer’s silent film Michael, based on a turn-of-the-century novel by the controversial gay Danish author Herman Bang, concerns itself with the gloomy latter proposition, and it resonates strongly as not only one of Dreyer’s greatest triumphs—not long after the comedy The Parson’s Widow, which utilizes both elements of the love continuum—but also as one of the most daring early expressions of gay-themed melodrama.

Benjamin Christensen is the drama queen at the heart of the story, playing the middle-aged artist Zoret. Success—artistic if not popular, judging from his beyond-opulent digs courtesy of production designer Hugo Haring—appears to have eluded Zoret for the entirety of his career until the moment that Michael (Walter Slezak) entered and rocked the homosexual artist’s world with his dapper looks, vivacious temper, and tantalizing unavailability. (“Gay for pay” is about as much as Dreyer was undoubtedly allowed to suggest, and even then only indirectly.)

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With Michael serving as his model, Zoret unleashes a spate of masterful paintings that turn him into the toast of the town. Unfortunately, and in keeping with Dreyer’s unforgiving sense of fatalistic humor, his increased critical stock attracts the attention of Princess Zamikoff (Nora Gregor), who commissions Zoret to paint her. But he’s unable to correctly draw her eyes—that is, her soul—and so he hands over his brush to Michael to see if his protégée has actually learned technique from the master. A few swift brush strokes later and the painting is completed.

But, in a situation that mirrors Zoret and Michael’s creative relationship, the princess appears to have Michael eating out of her hand, as well as out of Zoret’s pocketbook. Later, a crushed Zoret responds by painting a devastating self-portrait of himself, totally wasted away and propping himself up against a violent twilight sky in the background of the painting as Michael and Zamikoff lock eyes in the foreground on either side of his near-corpse.

Many have downplayed the film’s gay subtext, but doing so denies the power of Dreyer’s attention to the polarity of love’s vicissitudes. If stripped of the notion that Zoret’s attraction toward Michael, whose ostensible bisexuality is of an opportunistic strain, is physical as well as social, the film essentially becomes an embittered—and fairly rote, despite the astonishingly suffocating mise-en-scène—tale of two cuckolds. Regarding the second, it actually feels like Dreyer and co-writer Thea von Harbou were attempting to throw more reactionary viewers off the gay overtones of the mainstage drama with an otherwise unrelated subplot depicting the married Alice Adelsskjold’s (Grete Mosheim) affair with the Duke of Monthieu (Didier Aslan).

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In both cases, though, suffering becomes the catalyst for surprisingly secular epiphanies. If adage is to be believed, God answers knee mail. But, if Dreyer’s deliciously masochistic eroticism is to be believed, the dominatrix deity might prefer it delivered with a blowjob.

Image/Sound

Kino’s video transfer looks pretty acceptable for a film that’s 80 years old this year, although the screencaps I’ve seen from the Eureka R2 discs using a totally restored print of the film (in its 90-minute European cut) put this disc to shame. Comparatively speaking, Kino’s image is mildly fuzzy where Eureka’s is crystal clear, littered with blemishes and vertical scratch lines whereas Eureka’s might as well be a brand-spanking-new Guy Maddin film, and muted in color range whereas Eureka’s is positively dynamic. Still, it’s not a disaster, and it surely beats out any extant DVD transfers for Dreyer’s Vampyr. The piano score sounds fine sonically, but negligible musically.

Extras

Anyone who hasn’t already experienced the Hans Moleman-like splendor of Danish film scholar Casper Tybjerg’s commentary track on Criterion’s Passion of Joan of Arc DVD is in for a unique treat here. Setting aside the obviously unimpeachable quality of his critical and historical insight, the tone of his commentary is the main show. Tybjerg could be 20 years old, or he could be 200 years old, but his lovably enfeebled, wormish voice suggests that both are well below the true figure. And his thick accent is second only to Yuri Tsivian’s in its ability to turn the English language into a labyrinth of alternative pronunciations. He also spends at least 10 minutes enthusiastically establishing the outline of his impending commentary. (I kid you not, a literal transcription: “Each of these three stages can be divided into two subsections, each more or less corresponding to a 15-minute reel of film, and my commentary will follow this six section structure.”) Odds are that if you’re not already squirming two minutes in, you’ll be hypnotized by the mellifluously alien quality of his vocal patterns.

Overall

Dreyer turns a bisexual love triangle into the archetype of sexual piety and martyrdom. How Scandinavian of him.

Score: 
 Cast: Walter Slezak, Max Auzinger, Nora Gregor, Robert Garrison, Benjamin Christensen, Dider Aslan, Alexander Murski, Grete Moshem, Karl Freund  Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer  Screenwriter: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Thea Von Harbou  Distributor: Kino on Video  Running Time: 86 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1924  Release Date: December 14, 2004  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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