Carl Theodor Dreyer

About Carl Theodor Dreyer

Who is it?: Writer, Director, Editor
Birth Day: February 03, 1889
Birth Place:  Copenhagen, Denmark, Denmark
Died On: 20 March 1968(1968-03-20) (aged 79)\nCopenhagen, Denmark
Birth Sign: Pisces
Occupation: Film director
Years active: 1919–68
Spouse(s): Ebba Larsen (m. 1911) (d.1977)
Children: Gunni Erik
Awards: Golden Lion 1955 Ordet

Carl Theodor Dreyer Net Worth

Carl Theodor Dreyer was born on February 03, 1889 in  Copenhagen, Denmark, Denmark, is Writer, Director, Editor. The illegitimate son of a Danish farmer and his Swedish housekeeper, Carl Theodor Dreyer was born in Copenhagen on the 3th of February, 1889. He spent his early years in various foster homes before being adopted by the Dreyers at the age of two. Contrary to popular belief (perhaps nourished by the fact that his films often deal with religious themes) Dreyer did not receive a strict Lutheran upbringing, but was raised in a household that embraced modern ideas: in his spare time the adoptive father was an avid photographer, and the Dreyers voted for The Danish Social Democrates. When he was baptized the reasoning was culturally, not religiously motivated. Dreyer's childhood was an unhappy one. He did not feel his adoptive parents' love (especially the mother), and longed for his biological mother, whom he never knew.After working as a journalist, he entered the film industry, and advanced from reading scripts to directing films himself. In the silent era his output was large, but it quickly diminished with the arrival of the talkie. In his lifetime he was recognized as being a fanatical perfectionist amongst producers, and thus difficult to work with. His career was dogged by problems with the financing of his films, which led to large gaps in his output - and after the critics, too, denounced Vampyr (1932), he returned to journalism in 1932, and became a cinema manager in 1952 - though he still made features up to the mid- 1960s, a few years before his death. His films are typically slow, intense studies of human psychology, usually of people undergoing extreme personal or religious crises. He is now regarded as the greatest director ever to emerge from Denmark.
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Biography/Timeline

1913

As a young man, Dreyer worked as a Journalist, but he eventually joined the film industry as a Writer of title cards for silent films and subsequently of screenplays. He was initially hired by Nordisk Film in 1913.

1928

His first attempts at film direction had limited success, and he left Denmark to work in the French film industry. While living in France he met Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo and other members of the French artistic scene and in 1928 he made his first classic film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Working from the transcripts of Joan's trial, he created a masterpiece of emotion that drew equally on realism and expressionism. Dreyer used private Finance from Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg to make his next film as the Danish film industry was in financial ruin. Vampyr (1932) is a surreal meditation on fear. Logic gave way to mood and atmosphere in this story of a man protecting two sisters from a vampire. The movie contains many indelible images, such as the hero, played by de Gunzburg (under the screen name Julian West), dreaming of his own burial and the animal blood lust on the face of one of the sisters as she suffers under the vampire's spell. The film was shot mostly silent but with sparse, cryptic dialogue in three separate versions – English, French and German.

1943

Both films were box office failures, and Dreyer did not make another movie until 1943. Denmark was by now under Nazi occupation, and his Day of Wrath had as its theme the paranoia surrounding witch hunts in the seventeenth century in a strongly theocratic culture. With this work, Dreyer established the style that would mark his sound films: careful compositions, stark monochrome cinematography, and very long takes. In the more than a decade before his next full-length feature film, Dreyer made two documentaries. In 1955, he made Ordet (The Word) based on the play of the same name by Kaj Munk. The film combines a love story with a conflict of faith. Dreyer's last film was 1964's Gertrud. Although seen by some as a lesser film than its predecessors, it is a fitting close to Dreyer's career, as it deals with a woman who, through the tribulations of her life, never expresses regret for her choices.

1968

The great, never finished project of Dreyer's career was a film about Jesus. Though a manuscript was written (published 1968) the unstable economic conditions and Dreyer's own demands of realism together with his switching engagement let it remain a dream.