Ordet

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (The Word) won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1955 and was nominated for the BAFTA for Best Foreign Language Film. It sits in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll that covers Dreyer's work. Together with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Day of Wrath (1943) it forms the core of a widely spaced career that produced relatively few features, all of them held in the highest regard.

In a remote farmhouse on the windswept North Sea coast of Jutland live three adult brothers and their father (Henrik Malberg), who holds to the Danish Lutheran Inner Mission with fierce conviction. Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen), the eldest, is a stolid believer within that framework. Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye), the middle son, has perhaps lost his mind in religious study and now publicly believes himself to be Jesus Christ. Anders (Cay Kristiansen), the youngest, is in love with the daughter of a neighbouring farmer from a rival congregation. Over all of them hangs Inger's pregnancy, on which the family's hopes for the next generation rest.

Dreyer works in long static takes (the average shot runs to more than one minute), with absolute restraint over conventional dramatic emphasis, and he sets the film inside the real liturgical and social world of rural Lutheran Jutland. The result is as uncompromising a religious film as any tradition has produced. Henning Bendtsen's photography of the farmhouse interiors and the Vendsyssel landscape gives it a serene austerity, and it remains one of the most distinctive films of the twentieth century.