Ordet
Tags: insanity

Plot synopsis:
The film centers around the Borgen family in rural Denmark. The devout widower Morten, patriarch of the family, prominent member of the community, and patron of the local parish church, has three sons. Mikkel, the eldest, has no faith, but is happily married to the pious Inger, who is pregnant with their third child. Johannes, who went insane studying Søren Kierkegaard, believes himself to be Jesus Christ and wanders the farm condemning the age's lack of faith, including that of his family and the modern-minded new pastor of the village. The youngest son, Anders, is lovesick for the daughter of the leader of a local Christian religious sect.
Anders confesses to Mikkel and Inger that he loves Anne Petersen, the daughter of Peter the Tailor. They agree to convince Morten to assent to the match. Later, Inger attempts to convince Morten to allow Anders to marry Anne. Morten angrily refuses, but changes his mind when he finds out Peter has refused Anders' proposal. Morten and Anders go to meet Peter, in order to negotiate the betrothal.
Morten tries to convince Peter to permit the marriage, but he continues to refuse unless Morten and Anders join his sect. As the discussion collapses into sectarian bickering, Morten receives a call announcing that Inger has gone into a difficult labor. Peter says that Inger's difficulties are punishment from God for Morten not joining his sect. Furious at Peter's comments, Morten attacks Peter and storms out with Anders, the two of them rushing home. While the doctor is forced to abort the baby, he is able to save Inger's life. After the doctor and pastor leave, Johannes angers his father by telling him that death is nearby and will take Inger, unless Morten has faith in him. Morten refuses to listen and, as prophesied, Inger dies suddenly.
While preparing to go to Inger's funeral, Peter realizes that he has wronged Morten terribly, and reconciles with him over Inger's open coffin, agreeing to permit Anne and Anders to marry. Johannes suddenly interrupts the wake, approaches Inger's coffin, and proclaims that she can be raised from the dead if the family will only have faith and ask God to do so. Inger's daughter takes Johannes' hand and impatiently asks him to raise her mother from the dead. Johannes praises her childlike faith and asks God to raise Inger, who begins to breathe and twitch in her coffin. Seeing what seems to be the miracle of resurrection, both Morten and Peter rejoice, forgetting their religious differences. As Inger sits up, Mikkel embraces her and proclaims that he has finally found faith.

Review: She has the most elemental kind of Christian faith, and trusts that her husband's essential goodness of heart will lead him back to the fold.All these characters and forces come together in a terrible crisis when Inger goes into premature labor.
I'll not divulge the climax, for you should have the same experience of wonder and gratitude I--and probably most moviegoers who've ever seen it--had as it ended.Two important notes: All this Christianity stuff may turn you off, may make you think Ordet is some gloomy Scandinavian meditation.
His unmistakable film grammar--the hauntingly lit intereriors, the long pans from place to place in the same room, the slightly detached yet intense performances, the most purely photographed exteriors in cinema, echoing the Danish pictorial tradition of Hammershoi, Pedersen, and others who worked a modest magic with the windswept elements of Denmark's hard land--this fiercely personal vision is put to the service of something rare in the movie business (or any other business): love..
Based on a 1944 play by a Danish priest who was killed by the Nazis, the great Danish Director Carl Dreyer dramatizes this faith in the form of a Christian miracle which provides healing for an entire family in crisis.
Dreyer creates a moody, atmospheric, almost dreamlike rural setting, using light and shadow to contrast a life-affirming attitude with one that denies joy.Mikkel Borgen, one of three brothers, whose wife Inger is giving birth to their third child, has denied faith completely.
The movie has a long and very slow, almost agonizing buildup until the final scene which, when it comes, is one of the most moving and powerful climaxes in cinema.
There is too much of an inexorable quality about the final transition.I think that the film is best viewed as an allegory contrasting people who live in their mind and not their experience and feel powerless to change their lives, with people who know that they have the ability to transform the quality of their life and the lives of those around them.
The action moves right along without help of special effects or a distracting musical score.This picture at least alludes to the seldom-asked question, "Why do people believe?" Is it merely for the rewards of faithfulness, or something more?The final scene, utterly devoid of effects or music, has a dramatic power unexcelled in the ensuing 47 years of cinema to date.
'Ordet', even by Dreyer standards, is a gruelling experience, but in a different way from 'the Passion of Joan of Arc', which, with almost sadistic intensity, thrust the viewer into a visceral pummelling, dragging the spiritual out of us.
The situation and plots are straight out of classic 19th century realist literature - a stubbornly proud landowner refuses to let his youngest son marry a wealthy neighbour because of religious differences; his eldest son goes mad from studying too much theology, hoping to fulfil his father's messianic dreams, under the delusion that he is Jesus, with beard too match, although a joyless, Old-Testament kind of prophet-Jesus; another son has renounced his faith, disgusted with the daily evidence of God's indifference; his pious wife loses her baby in childbirth.
The film opens with a brilliantly orchestrated sequence, which introduces the characters, their dilemmas and their milieu, with a simple, yet intricate pattern, as each family member searches for the missing mad brother, a man linked to nature, the light and the dunes.
I prefer the way Dreyer turns the rare modern intrusions in the film, the doctor's car for instance, into a scary, almost medieval vision of death in motion; or the chillingly glum view of village life, in a film that keeps implicating the social only to drive it out.
To the average person it can tend to look boring lest one know how to read between the lines, and yet its so simple and beautiful, I've witnessed the ultimate skeptics(regarding God and religion) get engulfed in this film and enjoy it.
Another winner from Dreyer but i expected as much since i think every film i've seen by him is pretty much a masterpiece that's taking into consideration The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), his final film Gertrud (1964) and now Ordet completes the string of 5 brilliant films he made from 1928- 1964 before dying at the age of 79 in 1968 he was one of the the few geniuses who wasn't given much time to make films, only 13 features in his career from as early as 1919 he was there right from the start and left with such a deep note on what can be done in cinema, that he has inspired generations to come with his meticulous detail for showing reality but in a very unusual manner What is to be said about a story where one character believes he's the reincarnation of Jesus, yet the family think he's crazy in the early 1900s where religion ruled & love was broken cause the fathers of the 2 families have different religious practices where an atheist and his pregnant wife hopes for a boy but problems arise & all the families faith will be tested, and ultimately set the path for this very unusual and unsettling adaptation of a popular Danish play If you haven't seen any Dreyer, you haven't experienced one of the masters of cinema who created a world & atmosphere like no otherhttp://samuellbronko.tumblr.com/post/119845549042/ordet-aka-the- word-1955-carl-theodor-dreyer.
The two, Peter and Morten, have been having sharp differences on religious issues for years and they really came into focus later on in the movie with Inger who was pregnant at the time.
Peter starts to feel that now his friend Morten will be tested by God like the Biblical Job. By having Inger die and having him accept what happens to her without any show of anger on his part to show his complete faith in God's work which is to test Morten.This unfeeling statement by Peter causes an angry and outraged Morten to almost clobber, and end up on nonspeaking terms with, him and end their friendship.
John, who was gone all this time, appears and with only young Meren believing him in his assertion that faith in God is the only force that can bring Inger back to life.
The classic status of Carl Dreyer's Passion Play has weathered years of change in attitude and taste better than the film itself: a stiff, theatrical meditation on the fundamental conflict between religion and faith.
But in what many believe to be his finest film Dreyer approaches the story like an undertaker to a corpse, carefully arranging each scene in a static tableau and embalming the script in the formal delivery of each line of dialogue..
This is certainly no action film, and another film of completely po-faced sincerity from Dreyer.You should know going in that this is a much slower work than Day of Wrath, and its charms are much subtler than something like Vampyr.
However, I was impressed how in an increasingly cynical world when it comes to religion that director Dreyer makes a film that is unashamedly religious and creates A LOT to talk about once the film has completed.Overall, a very slow film but one that's worth watching.
If you're not laughing at Johannes yourself every time he appears, I'm not sure I want to know you.And never have I been so let down by the ending of a film.
This film touches religious matters, such as faith and the real meaning of it and on a broader sense it can be a good source for reflection even today as we experience so much disharmony thru out the world because of religious differences.
Based with great fidelity on a play by Kaj Munk, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1944, it's formulated as a kind of rural chamber drama, and like most of Dreyer's films it centers on the tensions within a family.Ordet concerns two Danish families in the mid-1920s.
What makes Ordet so deeply moving is the way in which all the various pieces ultimately fit together and lead smoothly to the stirring climax, which involves a miraculous raising from the dead that might seem hokey in any other movie.
The intensity of the viewer's relationship with the film makes the closing scene (a miracle) one of the most extraordinary in all cinema.Of Dreyer's masterworks, Ordet is possibly his best.
My Rating : 9/10Ordet (The Word) is a beautiful film about a family living on a remote farm in Denmark and the test of their faith.
'Ordet' feels more like a play than a film as it moves through different scenes in different rooms.
The scenes with the little girl and her mad uncle are some of the most heart- aching.The parts in which Dreyer ruminates explictly on god and faith in a faithless world I pass by without much interest, I simply don't know what use I have for them, for example when the father is asked by a doctor if science saved his daughter-in-law or his own faith.
The world is always aglow with spirituality so long as the eye, the heart, remain effortless, able to let each thing mean itself.Now we come to the famous ending with the miracle; one of the most famous in cinema probably.It's possible, for Dreyer, that our ability to accept it or not is a test of our faith in the possibility of transcendence, it might be a case that to reject it out of hand is to already have a heart that is hardened.
Anders wants to marry the daughter of his father's rival, while Johannes believes that he is Jesus.The film is a very serious and powerful work, but it is not intended as entertainment and moves at a very slow pace.
In viewing "Ordet", a Danish film directed by Carl Th. Dreyer, one can scarcely avoid perceiving a religious theme.
The latter elements lend an altogether human aspect to the film, allowing even the religious facets to convey the doubts and skepticism associated with human nature.In the final scene of "Ordet", the setting is a funeral in the home of Mr. Borgen, the grandfather of the farm on which the deceased (Inger) lived and worked as the daughter-in-law.
Like all Dreyer's films, Ordet is mannered and stylized.
And most of us like to mention only as existed once a man who did miracles, to consider the power of faith as being in the past and kept within the time of biblical story, not as a truly, really fact that still exists.
Patriarch Borgen has three sons: Mikkel, a good-hearted agnostic whose wife Inger is pregnant, Johannes, who believes he is Jesus, and Anders, young, slight, in love with the tailor's daughter.All I wanted to say about this one was a general comment on the cinematography in the Scandinavian countries.
It'a obviously all based on a stage-play, which you can tell by the way the scene's are being set up and the story is getting told.Again, it's all rather slow and the movie does definitely take its time to get its story across.
Family patriarch Morten (Henrik Malberg) lives in rural Denmark with his three sons - faithless father Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen), the deranged Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) who after going crazy studying theology, now believes himself to be Jesus Christ, and youngest son Anders (Cay Kristiansen).
Morten eventually agrees with the help of Mikken, but comes to loggerheads with Peter over their religious beliefs.I don't know much about the work of the great Scandinavian director Carl Theodor Dreyer, as the only other film of his I've seen is the fantastic Gothic 'horror' Vampyr (1932).
The result is a beautiful and humanistic study of religion and the miraculous.The main crux of the film focuses on the two fathers' views on religion, with Morten's beliefs allowing him to embrace life, while Peter lives a stricter, more sacrificial life.
Ordet (1955)*** (out of 4) Extremely powerful film from Dreyer about religion and death.
Ordet is the second Dreyers film I've seen - the first being The Passion of Joan of Arc which at the time both amazed and scared me with its dark, brooding and sinister camera work and acting.
I can only wonder what happened in between this and Ordet (I will soon find out though), but the latter surely makes a few steps backward in terms of almost everything I've seen in the Passion.I'm not a religious person and I can understand that this film may have a great appeal on a Christian (or, as someone else has put it, a quaker).
But the acting and overall ridicule views expressed within (that drag for two hours), make this film a cheap try at finding the meaning of life, death, god, faith and doubt.
The main characters are: the father Henrik, a member of a liberal Christian sect; Mikkel, a son who has lost his faith; Inger, Mikkel's wife; Johannes, a son who believes himself to be Jesus Christ; and Anders, a third son.
If religion were removed from the equation here, then I think all of these people would have been much happier.The movie is clearly based on a stage play and it has not been opened up much to make it more than the filming of a play.Given the language barrier for me and the fact that I could not identify with most of the characters, I did not find the acting to rise above average.
Children who don't question our faith and don't contest the ramblings of the insane prophet Johannes.Dreyer makes this point at the end when the local Christian minister (man of God) starts to protest the miracle, only to have the local doctor (man of science) hold him back.
"Ordet" is unique.Almost all the lines deal with faith,religion and God.It may repel some viewers but ,even if you are not a believer (or if like me,you used to be a believer),it's a fascinating absorbing drama.This is the kind of film you could talk about all night and at dawn it would not be over.There is no central character and everything happens in the space of a few days.Except for the scenes in the tailor's house,all the story takes place on Borgensgaard's farm and by the seaside where a restless wind blows.Johannes Borgen is crazy .That's what they say.He thinks he is Jesus Christ.But wasn't Christ Himself a crank for most of the people of His time?Preben Lerdoff Rye 's performance is all the more extraordinary since,with any lesser talent,such a character could have become ridiculous.His disappearance in a place "where you could not follow me" is probably a hint at Christ's descent to hell after His Death.
Inger's resurrection has been widely talked about ,and in this context,it makes sense:"miracles keep happening" is one of the many subjects of the film ,small ones (the tailor's wish come true) and this last one which leaves no room to coincidence.For a Christian like CT Dreyer,Faith is essential and he is no Saint Thomas."Life ,yes,life" are Inger's last words;life for Mikkel and her,but both do believe that their stillborn child is alive as well..
Despite having an abstract strength in the way the characters play off each other, and the direction, Ordet does not materialize itself until the final third of the film.
A long night leads to conflict between the 2 families.The best scene in the film is when Morten tries to convince Peter to let Anders marry Anne.
However, I wasn't bored by it, because of director Carl Theodor Dreyer's great directing.As great and engaging as the film can be at times, it can sometimes be a difficult wait getting to the good scenes, because the movie has pacing issues.
If the film would have had a tragic ending instead, that scene would've likely effected me a lot more.In conclusion, this was a well-made film that had the power to engage me quite a lot with Dreyer's great direction and writing.
From director Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr), this Danish film featured in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book, and besides knowing the director that was good enough reason for me to see it.
It is August 1925 in Denmark, where on a farm Patriarch Morten Borgen (Henrik Malberg) has three sons in different situations, good-hearted agnostic Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen) whose wife Inger, Mikkel's Wife (Birgitte Federspiel) is pregnant, Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) who is crazy or having a breakdown where he believes he is Jesus Christ, and young Anders (Cay Kristiansen) who is in love with and wants to marry Kirstin (Sylvia Eckhausen), the daughter of tailor Peter Petersen (Ejner Federspiel).
Inger has problems during the pregnancy, and a Doctor (Henry Skjær) is brought in to help her and ease the pain, and the night sees all four different views of faith come in to play, including Johannes who claims, as Jesus, that he can heal her, or that when she dies she will resurrect, like the true Holy son did.
The acting by many of the players is very good, I personally and particularly liked Lerdorff Rye as the son believing he is Jesus, the story has some very interesting scenes questioning sanity, and it really establishes that religion plays a big part of lives in the world for all sorts of reasons, it is a terrific religious drama.
If that happened in a lesser film without the religious and moral issues being thrashed out then it would be meaningless and a waste of time.Whichever way you want to look at it, those scenes are very moving.
Just like the resurrection itself, you either believe it or not, and if you think its a joke, then this film could become a joke for you too.I used to wonder why Dreyer is bringing this example of resurrection in his contemporary time.