This article appeared in the July 26, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

Jean-Marie Straub once wrote of the great Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer: “The fact that [he] was never able to produce a film in color (he had thought about it for more than 20 years) nor his film on Christ (a profound revolt against the state and the origins of anti-Semitism) reminds us that we live in a society that is not worth a frog’s fart.”

The same could be said of a society in which Michael Roemer—the German émigré director best known for Nothing but a Man (1964) (reportedly Malcolm X’s favorite movie), The Plot Against Harry (1969), and Vengeance Is Mine (1984)—has been unable to make a film in the last 40 years. Roemer’s small oeuvre of features, documentaries, and shorts—all intense and intimate human chronicles of American life—exhibits a radiant leanness of form and a moral seriousness unique in this country’s cinema. At one time lost or forgotten, three of Roemer’s fiction features are now available again thanks to the heroic efforts of Jake Perlin at The Film Desk.

An essay from a 1964 issue of Film Quarterly, titled “The Surfaces of Reality”—in which Roemer offers close studies of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), and Day of Wrath (1943) to support his ideas of film realism—is a testament to the resonance of Dreyer’s thoughts on Roemer’s own philosophies of cinema. In fact, Dreyer and Roemer once spent a few days together in 1954, both at critical moments in their lives, and later kept up a correspondence. The kindred feeling of the two artists is clear. Both share a preference for simplicity and directness, a belief in the primacy of love and its triumph over death, a twin concern for the immediate and for the beyond, and a sense of fury at the prevailing order of things: racism, intolerance, state violence, hypocrisy, puritanism. Their actors speak softly, projecting inward, with plain and unadorned faces; the hard surfaces of their films betray roiling depths within.

We spoke with Roemer, now 96 years old, about his time with Dreyer and the lasting impact of the filmmaker on his life and work.

Edward McCarry: Do you remember your first encounter with a Carl Dreyer film?

It was The Passion of Joan of Arc. Probably I saw it at the Museum of Modern Art. I was tremendously taken. “Impressed” is not the right word—I was overwhelmed by it. It taught me a great deal about filmmaking. And that prompted me to write to Dreyer. I was 25. I wondered whether he would let me visit him, and he responded positively, so my wife Barbara and I went to Copenhagen. It was a very meaningful experience.

EM: So you spent two days in Copenhagen with Dreyer?

Yes, two and a half days. We had no money. I mean, I had a salary but it wasn’t very large. This was 1954, so it might sound like the war was over, but the conditions in Europe were very different from what they are now. Paris was gray. Barbara and I took what was basically a milk train from Paris to Copenhagen. Third class. Hard, wooden benches. We were both very slender, so the two of us could lie down on the seat. (Laughs.)

Graham Carter: Do you remember what it was like when you arrived and first met Dreyer?

As you can tell from my accent, I’m German, and the first thing Dreyer said was, “How come you speak German?” And I said, “Well, I’m a Jew.” And he said, “Oh, then it’s okay.” I wonder if I hadn’t been Jewish whether he would have seen me at all. He hated the Germans, as many Danes did. But once I established this, he was friendly and welcoming. We spent half of each day there with Dreyer. He took us around, then he invited us to his apartment. I was so young that sitting in his presence was an august sort of privilege. When you’re young you really need these heroes. I had a couple of heroes, and Dreyer was one of them.

GC: Do you remember any conversations you had with him in those two and a half days? About film or life?

Yes, I do. Barbara and I were still on our honeymoon, you could say. I’d come from a very difficult family. I was scared of failing as a husband. And I think Dreyer could pick up on a certain distance that I kept from her. He said to me, “You can replace everything in your life but the wife of your youth.” I remember him saying that. (Laughs.) He picked up on something in me, and I half suspect he understood it from his own life. He was adopted as a child into a very unhappy situation. He also told me about a film he eventually made, Ordet. He was thinking about it, or perhaps planning it.

EM: Well, this was 1954, and Dreyer released Ordet in 1955, so it must have been on his mind.

It was. He told me it was going to be about the “black Christians”: Christians who were, you know, intolerant—not liberal. And I remember us walking beside Dreyer, Barbara and I, in Copenhagen. A beautiful city. He wore a hat, and he would tip it to everyone he knew on the street. And I remember he ran a movie theater. The Danish government supported the arts, so I always assumed this was their way of supporting Dreyer. He made very few films, and they didn’t make any money. So they offered him this job. (Laughs.)

GC: You told a story once about Dreyer’s eyes being very memorable.

He had very blue eyes, and they scared me. (Laughs.) I think he looked right into you, or through you. I saw him again in New York years later. His skin looked transparent. Of course, I don’t know if his eyes were really as penetrating as I remember them. They were certainly cold. But he wasn’t judgmental or superior. He gave me a copy of the Jesus film script that he was always planning to make. He showed me the research he was doing. He was going to make a film where the Jews speak Hebrew and the Romans would speak Latin. He was going to violate every rule of commercial filmmaking. But he never got to make that film.

GC: You mention the Jesus film in your essay, “The Surfaces of Reality.” You talk about how Dreyer, during the crucifixion scene, was planning to film the nails going through the back of the cross.

Yes, that was in the script. I remember it. He wasn’t going to challenge the audience into thinking, “How did they shoot that?” He didn’t challenge the credibility of the moment; instead, he showed you something that you could believe: the nail coming out the other side. That moment told me something: if you violate the credibility of your film, you’re really losing your audience. And it’s the audience that I’m trying to make films for. It’s like lying to someone: the next thing you say, they won’t believe.

EM: Your writing in “The Surfaces of Reality” reminds us a lot of Dreyer’s films. They share this understanding of how the camera can’t lie, how it picks out falseness. Dreyer was very concerned with being truthful. For him, a film was an immediate and material object.

A publishing company published all my unmade screenplays, the ones I couldn’t get any money for. I’m 96, so I have to tell my children who I do and don’t want to be making films from my scripts. And it’s not a person: it’s a principle. The principle is that you have to respect this extraordinary sensibility—you just mentioned it—that everyone has: we pick up on falsehoods, or lies. We are enormously sensitive to the surfaces of reality. We read them. And it’s an extraordinary resource if you’re making a movie, because you can use it, or fail to use it. You can overstate things, you can falsify them, but then you’re not using the medium. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be big moments in a film, just as long as they are genuine. People get it! Other artists would love to have an audience as sensitive as the audience of films, because we can use the extraordinary sensibility of so-called ordinary people. I think you know what I mean, right?

EM: Absolutely.

It’s just this wonderful sensibility. But I won’t pretend that it’s easy to do. It wasn’t easy for Dreyer. It certainly wasn’t easy for me. But it can be done. And I saw it when I saw Joan [of Arc] having her hair cut. That’s just an extraordinary scene.

EM: Dreyer wanted things to be natural or credible, but not haphazard. It’s all distilled. Joan’s hair falling is condensing so much violence, in such a concrete way.

What is so marvelous is you see a man doing a job: the man was called in to cut her hair. He has no dog in the fight, you know. But the effect on her is so powerful because he doesn’t mean to hurt her. It takes somebody of some significance like Dreyer to think about Joan’s penitence gown, in which she comes out to the scaffold. It’s too long! They didn’t burn that many witches, so the gown’s too big. It’s that kind of concrete evidence that we all respond to. You don’t even think about it. It’s just part of what you pick up.

GC: When you saw him in New York later, were the two of you still familiar? 

It was at a reception at the New York Film Festival [in 1965], when Gertrud was shown. There were so many people. And he was sitting down. I think he was frail. I could tell that he knew me when I shook his hand, but we didn’t talk. That screening, incidentally, is worth talking about. I mean, it was a disgrace. When Dreyer was introduced, of course the audience stood up and applauded. They were in the know. They knew this was a great man and they were applauding—basically applauding themselves. But they all walked out on the film, to the point where there was almost no one left by the end. These people who were so respectful of this great man weren’t going to sit through his movie. And that tells you something.

EM: Dreyer was planning two more films at this point: his Medea and the Jesus film. He thought of Gertrud as a stepping stone to these next films. He said he wanted “to approach the force of bewitchment released for example by Racinian tragedies.” He was looking for something that “points beyond the film itself.”

In that piece, “The Surfaces of Reality,” I quoted Dreyer about his feeling that the realism of the medium was a “fence” that you had to get through, that you had to go past it.

EM: Yes. Dreyer would say, “It’s not the things in reality that the director should be interested in, but rather the spirit in and behind things.” 

I just feel that God is in the details, you know, not just the devil. (Laughs.) I think it’s all concrete: it’s in the way that somebody touches you, for instance. I don’t believe in the abstract. And I think that’s where Dreyer’s Christianity departs from my Jewish-Hasidic perspective.

EM: Something you share with Dreyer is the quietness of your actors. Dreyer believed that what the sound film could allow, above all, was a whisper. And you would instruct your actors to tone down their performances.

Well, I don’t want my actors to project. You know, I owe a great deal to a man who worked with us on Nothing but a Man, Bob Rubin. He did the sound, but he was not a sound man. He was a production manager who left NBC. He had some money and he thought, “I’ll buy lavalier mics. There’s no reason we can’t use lavaliers on a feature film.” The lavaliers allowed me to have people talk normally, and I never used anything else after that. Bob would say, “Mike, the actors aren’t moving the needle.” And I’d say, “Well, can you hear them?” And he said, “Well, yeah.” And I said, “Okay, that’s it.” I didn’t want the actors to push it. It’s just what Dreyer was saying: a whisper.

EM: Dreyer had a lot of difficulties making his films. He never stopped working and trying to make them. But there are holes in his career. And you’ve had gaps between films.

It’s mostly gaps. (Laughs.) If I hadn’t been able to write these screenplays, I would have been very unhappy. But the response to them was always the same: nobody understood them. They still don’t. Dreyer was a very inward person, you know. I’m not. Maybe he was more at peace with being misunderstood.

EM: Dreyer believed very strongly in love. In Gertrud, he leaves us with: “Amor omnia.” Love is all. And I’d say there’s a soft heart to all of your films too. At their core is something basic—as basic as love. Do you agree?

Yes, I do. I feel that very much. That’s how something I’m working on now ends. But it’s complicated. You can get very close to someone and there’s also a lot of destructive things that can come out. I don’t remember how old Dreyer was in 1954, but I was very young. He was a Danish Christian and I’m a German Jew. There were huge differences. But the wonderful thing is that I could meet him, as it were, on the screen. I could understand him.

Edward McCarry is a writer and film distributor. Graham L. Carter is a filmmaker and film distributor. Both are co-founders of the Theater of the Matters, a new film screening group, and live in Brooklyn, NY.