Pordenone Dispatch. 3.

The retrospective celebrating the 100th anniversary of Denmark's Nordisk Film is a sampling of genres and styles that is heavy on the variety and light on the exclusivity. The program is designed to show the popular fare along with the art, the simple entertainments in their rudimentary form as well as the sophistication of the studio at its best.

Frustratingly, there is more of the former than the latter in this determinedly broad survey. The films in the "White Slavery" and "Lure of the Orient" programs (with films dating from 1907 to about 1917) are essentially the same abduction-and-rescue tale told in varying degrees of elaboration and stylistic development, but little else, with none of the creative invention (not to mention surreal charge) that Louis Feuillade brought to his thrilling and always unexpected cliffhangers in France at the time (such as Les Vampires and Judex). Atlantis is a stuttering drama with a few mesmerizing images and an exciting disaster at sea, but all the action is otherwise related in intertitles. Curiously, in a number of the pre-1916 films, you can see the fog of the performers' breath; what conditions exactly were they shooting in?

Klovnen (The Golden Clown, 1926), a circus drama turned tragic romance that became the studio's biggest hit ever, justifies the effort expended on the rest. A model of the elegance and sophistication of Danish cinema at its height, AW Sandberg's production is exquisitely photographed and marvelously designed, wringing high tragedy from the kind of tortured romantic mistakes and emotional spirals into depression and suicide that marks the most base kinds of melodramas. Superb performances by Gösta Ekman as the singing clown whose song makes him a superstar (his performance alone conveys the beauty that his song is said to carry) and Karina Bell (a beauty with a modern look who also appears in the final episode of Dreyer's Leaves From Satan's Book) bring it alive even as Sandberg's meticulous direction makes a fine production of every moment. And just when you think the tragedy is about to swallow you alive in doom, a spark of hope rescues the audience from suicidal depression.

Sandberg also directs the earlier The Hill Park Mystery (1923), a light-fingered comic mystery about a crime reporter suffering from exhaustion deliriously on the trail of a murderess he's falling helplessly in love with. It's as brisk and deftly droll as Klovnen is dramatically deliberate, a charmer with a delightful performance from Gorm Schmidt as the dogged reporter who becomes increasingly incoherent as he pursues his case and his romantic interest right down to the inevitable revelation that clears the way for a happily ever after. Sandberg's eye for compositions and clear, clean images is evident even here, and his pitch-perfect pacing matches the tone of the silly but endearing lark. Sandberg's direction lifts the lightweight entertainment beyond expectations. Both films, restored to a handsome sheen (Klovnen especially is pristine, so gorgeous the light glows off the screen), have also been remastered for DVD by the Danish Film Institute (along with a few other offerings) on a disc featuring both Danish and English intertitles.

On the dour and austere side is Carl Theodor Dreyer's Leaves From Satan's Book (1920), the Danish answer to Intolerance with an otherwordly answer to man's inhumanity to man. To wit: The devil made them do it. This early Dreyer is exquisitely photographed and almost unbearably deliberate (okay, it's slow, so much so that it sparked whispers that it was projected at the incorrect speed), and the blocks of text it takes to set it up almost extinguish the narrative before it begins. For festival audiences, the dramatic lethargy and the painfully inadequate and confused English translation made the experience too much to endure, and they streamed out before the beat-the-devil pay-off. True to Dreyer, even that is a tragic sacrifice.

In a more popular vein, a pair of genre spectacles offer their own minor pleasures. A Trip to Mars (1918) sends a crew of humans to a utopian society that looks like ancient Greece as interpreted by an episode of the original Star Trek, where the message of nonviolence and vegetarian love infects them with a passion they are determined to bring back to Earth. With the horrors of the First World War hovering over the film, such pacifism feels more like a desperate cry than the preachy idealism that sometimes comes through.

The End of the World (1916) is for the first two-thirds an indifferently directed social drama that weighs heavier on the manipulations of a corrupt newspaper publisher who uses a comet scare to make a killing on the stock market. But the comet that hangs in the sky, growing ever bigger in each succeeding scene, has its effect, notably in an uprising by the working class during an ill-conceived "end of the world" party where the guests thoughtfully remembered to pack heat under their tuxedos for a class struggle shoot-out. And then it becomes a nuclear holocaust film without the atomic bomb, where images of a scorched Earth, a devastating flood and the charred remains of a village are all the explanation we are given to the surreal depopulation, until only two are left to repopulate an Earth cleansed by an Old Testament God disgusted by the corruption of the human race.

Posted by dwhudson at October 14, 2006 3:03 AM