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.

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Scott Lord Silent Film: Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, Edison Manufactu...

Authors Dennis R Cuthcin and Dennis R. Perry in their work "The Frankenstein Complex, when the text is more than a text" view the silent film "Frankenstein" as having been inspired by several stage adaptations, specifically Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein, which, produced in 1823 by Richard Brinkley Peak, may have been remote to the Edison Studios in New Jersey, as may have been the other fifteen theatrical adaptations of "Frankenstein" produced before 1851. The University of Pennsylvania presently includes Henry M. Milner's The Demon of Switzerland (1823) and The Man and the Monster (1826) among them, but admits that several theatrical adaptations were burlesque or musical comedy.


That intertitles were at first often explanatory shows the beginning of a narrative cinema. During an early scene of the silent film "Frankenstein" (J. Searle Dawley, Edison, 1910, one-reel) there is, in between scenes, an expositiory intertitle that uses a close shot of a letter to develop plot and character within the narrative, a form of the epistolary form of the novel transferred on to the screen. A similar insert shot is used in the film "A Dash Through the Clouds" (1912).

J. Searle Dawley directed at Edison Film Manufacturing Company untill 1913, when he joined Edwin Porter at Famous Players Company, where he directed actress Marguerite Clark.

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