Praesidenten (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1919)

Although "The President" (Praesidenten, 1919), written and directed by Carl Th. Dreyer, photographed by Hans Vaage, and having starred Elith Pio and Olga Raphael-Linden, is not always distinguished as remarkable, it is one of the only two films that Carl Th. Dreyer made in Denmark, his later establishing a small body of work that would be indelible upon filmmaking, hi films, disparate stylistically, each differeing in their use of technique. Dreyer has been quoted as having remarked upon his having tried to find a style that would have value for only a single film. Casper Tybjerg, University of Copenhagen, highlights the use of "intricate flashback narrative structure" in Dreyer's directorial debut.

In his article "Forms of the Intangible: Carl Dreyer and the concept of Transcendental Style", Scholar Casper Tybjerg looks at Paul Schraeder's concept of there being an "aesthetic dimension of religious films" and accordingly a transcendental style to express spiritual experience by "stylizing" reality.

Peter Cowie, in his volume Scandinavian Cinema, views the film as having been adapted from a "sentimental novel", its author having had been being Karl-Emil Franzos, who wrote about relations within and between religious communities in Europe. "Within the framework of this tear-jerking melodrama may be located the distinctive mise-en-scene and the thematic links with Nordic cinema as a whole. Victorine, the accused woman, ears a strong resemblence to Helga in Sjostrom's 'A Girl from the Marshcroft'."


In his volume The Cinema of Carl Dreyer, author Tom Milne writes about the " comparatively sophisticated montage technique" used in the film, "Dreyer was obviously bent on manufacturing his emotions and built up an elaborate flshback technique borrowed from Griffith...All these time switches and parallels are obviously designed to strike resonant sparks off each other, but instead through their own comtrivance, serve merely to point up the grotesque contrivance of the whole story."
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