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Documentary with didactic purposes that warns of water pollution in rural environments and how germs can affect the people who work in the field.

In Danish:
Skarpt kritisk film om drikkevandsforurening på landet. Brugen af vand i hverdagssituationer suppleres med illustrative grafiske fremstillinger af en brønd og jordlagene omkring den. En ny og korrekt opført brønd etableres på gårdspladsen. Filmen blev aldrig vist offentligt, da landboorganisationerne protesterede heftigt imod den.

https://nitro.download/view/798D2FA0DEDF35F/Vandet_paa_landet.1946.1080p.Web-DL.KG.mkv

Language(s):Danish
Subtitles:None

The post Carl Theodor Dreyer – Vandet på landet AKA Water from the land (1946) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Based on Herman Bang’s 1902 novel of the same name, Dreyer’s film is a fascinating fin-de-siècle study of a “decadent” elderly artist (Benjamin Christensen) driven to despair by his relationship with his young protégé and former model, Michael (Walter Slezak). With suffocatingly sumptuous production design by renowned architect Hugo Häring (his only film work), this Kammerspiel, or “intimate theatre”, foreshadows Dreyer’s magnificent final film Gertrud, by forty years with its “Now I may die content, for I have seen great love” epigraph.

Michael was scripted by Dreyer with Fritz Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou (Metropolis, M, etc). It stars the director Benjamin Christensen (Häxan); Walter Slezak (Hitchcock’s Lifeboat); Nora Gregor (Renoir’s The Rules of the Game); Mady Christians (Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman); and Karl Freund (who also shot Metropolis) in his only ever appearance as an actor. Freund lensed most of Michael too, but left to work on Murnau’s The Last Laugh, and Rudolph Maté (The Passion of Joan of Arc) took over.

Extras (in English):
Audio commentary as a secondary audio track
Audio interview with Carl Dreyer
David Cairns’ Video Essay

1.93GB | 1h 34m | 766×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/535B6A8F2C6EB12/Michael.(Carl.Theodor.Dreyer.1924).BDRip.576p.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/323A7F06D115278/Audio_Interview_with_Carl_Dreyer.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/9ACB7539088F04C/David_Cairns_Video_Essay.mkv
or
https://fikper.com/qIs9U1IXmr/Michael.(Carl.Theodor.Dreyer.1924).BDRip.576p.mkv
https://fikper.com/6aQCh8zaV3/Audio_Interview_with_Carl_Dreyer.mkv
https://fikper.com/mbFB4zZBLR/David_Cairns_Video_Essay.mkv

Language(s):German intertitles
Subtitles:English

The post Carl Theodor Dreyer – Mikaël (1924) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Traveler Allan Gray arrives in the village of Courtempierre and takes lodgings in a small inn. Gray has a great interest in the supernatural, particularly vampires. He’s barely settled in when he feels a sinister force descending upon him. In the night an old man enters his room to tell him ‘she must not die’. One of the old man’s daughters, Leone, has been bitten by a vampire. In order to break the curse, Gray and Leone’s sister Gisele must find the original vampire and drive a stake through her heart.

+Commentary by critic and programmer Tony Rayns
+Commentary by filmmaker and Vampyr fan Guillermo del Toro

5.30GB | 1h 13mn | 858×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/37DD6BA19DA0450/Vampyr.1932.720p.MoC.Bluray.AAC.1.0.x264-SaL.mkv

Language:German
Subtitles: English

The post Carl Theodor Dreyer – Vampyr [Masters of Cinema 2K] (1932) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In a 17th-century Danish village, an old woman is accused of witchcraft. In the shadow of her flight, capture, confession, and burning at the stake, the young wife of the town’s aging pastor falls in love with the pastor’s son…

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Often seen as an allegory on the Nazi occupation of Denmark, this austere and very sombre account of the persecution of witches in 17th century Denmark is arguably Dreyer’s most pessimistic film. When a pious elderly parson sends an old woman to the stake, she curses him. His young wife (the daughter of a woman suspected of witchcraft) falls in love with her stepson; the affair induces the parson’s death. Is the wife, then, herself a witch? Dreyer remains wisely ambivalent, preferring instead to focus on the powerful, earthly emotions of fear and love: the grim, grey confession chambers – location of perhaps the most discreet yet horrific torture scenes in cinema – embody the former, rippling streams and sun-dappled meadows the latter. Almost paradoxically, Dreyer evokes the soul through the physical world; the result is a masterpiece, its slow, measured pace and stark visuals achieving an almost unbearable emotional intensity.

3.07GB | 1h 37m | 766×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6ADC353206798E6/Vredens_Dag_-_Carl_Theodor_Dreyer_(1943).mkv

Language:Danish+commentary
Subtitles:English

The post Carl Theodor Dreyer – Vredens dag aka Day of Wrath (1943) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Although only Dreyer’s third film, The Parson’s Widow is an astonishingly mature achievement. Many of the director’s chief characteristics can be recognised, appearing not as blueprints but in their already fully-realised form. To people who only know his more celebrated later works, the most surprising feature of The Parson’s Widow is its humour. Its comedy is in the tradition – as becomes a Swedish production of the time – not only of Mauritz Stiller’s well-known frequentation of the genre, but also of some of Victor Sjöström’s less widely seen or underappreciated masterpieces, such as Hans nåds testamente (His Honor’s Testament, 1919) and Mästerman (1920). All of these films are quiet, poignant comedies of love and ageing, strangely foreshadowing some of Leo McCarey’s 1930s films.

Before this simple, fable-like didactic comedy of (mis)understanding properly starts to unfold, we see a young couple trysting in a soft, sunny landscape that brings to mind the idyllic happiness of the outdoor love scenes in Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath, 1943) – albeit without their hovering sense of doom and thus their fugitive intensity. As we learn that the couple want to marry, a small bell-tower with three crosses – an image that could come straight out of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1927) or Vampyr (1931) – tolls for the dead parson and announces a contest between prospective candidates for his place in the community. A theology student, Sofren (Einar Rod), decides to apply for the position, since, as Mari (Greta Almroth) reminds him, her father will not consent to their marriage unless he becomes a parson (and gets a job).

The competition between the three candidates may be broad in its comedy, but its impact is founded not in comic effects or even acting, but arranged beforehand through Dreyer’s caricature-based casting choices. Not disdaining some mischievous tricks, Sofren defeats his two pedantic competitors, only to learn that the post includes marrying the former parson’s widow, old Dame Margarete (Hildur Carlberg). The intended bride is, naturally, aghast, but the practical Sofren seems determined to carry out his scheme, guessing that they will not have to wait too long before the old woman dies, allowing his marriage to Mari. Seduced by a herring and a bottle of schnapps, Sofren dozedly proposes to Dame Margarete and in no time they are married in a very traditional peasant wedding ceremony. Sofren presents Mari as his sister and brings her to live at the parsonage.

Not long afterwards, and while the already thrice-widowed lady energetically reasserts her control over the household and farm, Mari accidentally falls down into a cave, and only Sofren’s hasty warning saves Dame Margarete from the same fate, with probably still more serious, even fatal, consequences. This automatically decent warning, for which we see Sofren almost instantly repent, somehow moves Dame Margarete, leading us to infer that she suspects something about the true relationship of her new husband and the young girl. After tenderly nursing the bed stricken Mari for weeks, the old woman tells them about her first wedding: her long-standing bridegroom had to marry the previous parson’s widow to get the appointment, and they felt guilty for building their future happiness on the hope of her death. Ultimately, they had to wait for five years until they were able to live together contentedly for 30 years more. Amazed at being roughly told their own story, Sofren and Mari confess the truth. Dame Margarete meets this confession with melancholy understanding, having gone through the same predicament.

Dreyer’s films have often been accurately described as dealing with different manifestations of intolerance. In contrast, The Parson’s Widow shines in his early career as a quite unpretentious lesson in tolerance, quietly unfolding to its predictable, logical conclusion, with a masterful control of acting, lighting, framing and general composition. The film breathes with a kind of naturalness, not needing to resort to obvious visual metaphors or “significant” editing. It foreshadows the “realistic” freedom only fully allowed by the arrival of sound and the long takes (and shots) that dominate his later work (and which are so sharply in contrast with the films he made just before and after the introduction of sound, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Vampyr).

All of the actors in The Parson’s Widow give surprisingly understated performances, quite different from most players in contemporaneous silents produced in both Europe and the United States. These performances can startle us even today for the utter modernity of their acting style. Without any explicit explanation, and only the most spare of titles, we instantly understand whatever is going on in the mind of every character. This sort of immediate expressive visual communication seems lost to the vast majority of filmmakers presently working.

1.96GB | 1h 33m | 722×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/7A9E9DF7D2334BA/The.Parsons.Widow.1920.WEBRIP.576p.x264.mkv

Language(s):Swedish Intertitles
Subtitles:English,French,Portuguese,Polish,Russian

The post Carl Theodor Dreyer – Prästänkan AKA The Parson’s Widow (1920) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Within its walls, Kronborg Castle in Elsinore contains large sections of another, older castle, Krogen, built by Eric of Pomerania around 1420. Discoveries unearthed during the 1926-1935 restoration of Kronborg made it possible to form a picture of Krogen, illustrated in the film by reconstruction models.

426MB | 8mn 53s | 960×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/E8A852179C2DD01/Et_slot_i_et_slot_Krogen_og_Kronborg_(1954).mkv

Language(s):Danish
Subtitles:English

The post Carl Theodor Dreyer & Jørgen Roos – Et slot i et slot: Krogen og Kronborg AKA The Castle Within the Castle (1954) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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Carl Th. Dreyer’s beautiful documentary uses no words to show different aspects of this beautiful bridge in Denmark. It is one of over a dozen state-commissioned documentary shorts made by the famous director.

The Storstrom Bridge was built between 1933-37 to the designs of Anker Engelund with construction under the direction of civil engineer Guy Anson Maunsell.

Storstrom Bridge connects the island of Sjaelland (Zealand) at Vordingborg to the smaller island of Falster to the south. Some two miles long (3199 metres or 3520 yards), at the time it was built it was the longest bridge in Europe.

It is an arch bridge with a suspended deck with both a road and railroad. The reinforced concrete central section was built on shore and floated out to be sunk in position.

Carl Dreyer shows the bridge from afar and in close up, from the air and from a ship in the Storstrom, with trains, vehicles, cyclists and a fisherman using the bridge.

340MB | 7mn 6s | 960×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/FC05B65EC477A2D/Storstromsbroen_(1950).mkv

Language:Danish
Subtitles:English

The post Carl Theodor Dreyer – Storstrømsbroen AKA The Storstrom Bridge (1950) first appeared on Cinema of the World.