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This page collects together Carl Dreyer DVDs, VHS, and Books that are currently "in print" around the world and available to buy. There is also an Out Of Print Books section at the bottom. VHS titles have not been included where a DVD equivalent exists. Carldreyer.com is a non-commercial venture and therefore unwilling to recommend retailers (email if you're stuck.)
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DVD
 MICHAEL[Mikaël] - Dreyer, 1924 - Eureka, Masters of Cinema Series (2 x DVD, R0 (region zero, not region encoded), PAL, UK) - Released October 2004
#3 in the Masters of Cinema Series from Eureka (UK), this set features two transfers of the film (one by David Shepard, with Neal Kurz score, and English intertitles; the other by Transit Film in Germany, with Pierre Oser score, and German intertitles). The set comes with a 20-page booklet containing full reprints of Tom Milne's The World Inside (about Michael), and Jean Renoir's 1968 tribute to Dreyer — Dreyer's Sin. Disc one features a full length commentary by renowned Dreyer scholar Casper Tybjerg and Disc Two features an illustrated 26 minute audio interview with Dreyer from 1965. This set was produced by the curator of carldreyer.com. MICHAEL page at Eureka.
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 DER VAR ENGANG (Once Upon A Time) - Dreyer, 1922 - Danish Film Institute (Danish DVD Region 2 PAL) - Released February 2003
This DVD is the first of a planned series of important releases by the Danish Film Institute. In circumstances similar to the miraculous find of Dreyer's The Passion Of Joan Of Arc in an Oslo mental hospital in 1981, Der Var Engang was thought long lost until 1964 and it is rarely seen. The DFI have created a new film restoration (a complete 2K digital intermediate restoration on 35mm film) and thus the DVD is of the best possible quality. Click here for an indepth review with many DVD screengrabs.
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 DREYER BOXSET (DAY OF WRATH, ORDET, GERTRUD and Torben Skjødt Jensen's MY METIER)THE CRITERION COLLECTION #124 (USA DVD Region 1 NTSC) - Released: Aug 2001
Following their release of The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Criterion Collection renewed its commitment to Carl Th. Dreyer with this Special Edition box set of his sound films, Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud; featuring new digital transfers supervised by Gertrud cinematographer Henning Bendtsen; interview footage with cast members from Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud; archival footage of Dreyer during the production of Gertrud; interviews with Henning Bendtsen and Jørgen Roos; a 22-page booklet, including a reprint of Dreyer's essay "Thoughts on My Metier"; and an extensive essay by Dreyer scholar Edvin Kau.
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 THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC Dreyer, 1928 - THE CRITERION COLLECTION #62 (USA DVD Region 1 NTSC) Released: Nov 1999
The Criterion Collection released this truly landmark DVD at the end of 1999. The film has had a torrid history - original negatives were lost in a laboratory fire and a dubious reconstituted version with added music was made without Dreyer's input in the 1950s (he summarily dismissed it). So it was a miracle when an original pristine print was found in 1981 in a Norwegian mental institution. What is now known as the "Oslo" print appears on this Criterion DVD probably looking as good as the day it was shot. Features: Voices of Light, a choral and orchestral work; audio commentary by Casper Tybjerg, a Dreyer scholar from the University of Copenhagen; an extensive production design archive; a history of Passion's many versions, with clips; audio interview with Helene Falconetti; an essay on Joan of Arc and Voices of Light; libretto booklet, and more.
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 VAMPYR Dreyer, 1932 - IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT (USA DVD Region 1 NTSC) Released: 1998
Vampyr was shot three times in three languages. None of the original negatives remain and a definitive DVD of this film has yet to be released. This IMAGE DVD is a straight port of the Laserdisc that film restorer David Shepard produced in 1991. The subtitles are unfortunately quite large and ingrained because the source print (a German version) had Danish subtitles which have been blacked out and covered. Image quality is average compared to the much newer Criterion DVDs above but the master was made from Dreyer's personal print which he had given as a gift to Jan Wahl, his assistant on Ordet. This is all we have until Martin Koerber's 1999 restoration sees the light of DVD - and until then, if you haven't seen Vampyr, this DVD is worth getting.
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VHS
 MASTER OF THE HOUSE (Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife) - Dreyer, 1925
BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE (UK VHS PAL format) - Released: 1998
In 1998 the BFI released four Dreyer titles on VHS (PAL) in the UK. The only one of these which is currently not available on DVD anywhere in the world is Master Of The House. The picture is very good on this VHS tape and it is crying out for a proper DVD release. The box fails to mention that there is a piano accompaniment on this 'silent' film. From the sleevenotes: "Dreyer's comedy touches on issues of inequality and subordination in the domestic sphere that are still relevant today. Contemporary viewers will appreciate the irony of the 'new man' persona which this domestic struggle produces. The group of women at the centre of the film, Ida, Nanny, Ida's mother and Ida's daughter Karen, can be seen collectively to present Dreyer's continuing fascination with women characters who can achieve autonomy only through an almost Nietzschean struggle, overcoming their dependence on men and masculine values.
Adapting a play for pre-sound cinema was commonplace as theatre was generally seen as a reservoir of plots for the cinema. Dreyer developed his own method: "We compressed it, cleaned it, purified it and the story became very clear, very clean. That was the first time I employed this method. Later I employed it for Day Of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud which are also plays". Dreyer prunes back the dialogue of the original play to the essential, using intertitles as sparingly as possible, so as not to disrupt the flow of the scene. By accompanying all his dialogue points with close-ups he comes close to finding the cinematic equivalent to speech that so preoccupied silent film directors.
Master Of The House was particularly successful in France - recalling the early realist comedies of Jean Renoir set in peasant and working class milieux - and resulted in Dreyer being invited to France and in the eventual commission of his first large budget film, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc."
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BOOKS
 MY ONLY GREAT PASSION: The Life and Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer by Jean Drum, Dale D. Drum
Publisher: Scarecrow Press; (July 26, 2000); ISBN: 0810836793
The title refers to a quote from a 1950 Dreyer interview. On October 23, 1950, Carl Dreyer was interviewed for the radio program New Perspectives on the Arts and the Sciences. He discussed The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath and talked about his proposed film on the life of Jesus. At the conclusion the interviewer asked, 'What is film for you?' Dreyer replied, 'It is my only great passion.'
The Drums present a fascinating and complex portrait of a polite, intelligent, mild mannered, introverted, singularly focused, and uncompromising human being who was driven as much by his heart as by the perfection of his craft.
Extract: "Einar Sissener, who made his film debut in Dreyer's film, The Bride of Glomdal, recounts how Dreyer convinced him to perform in a physically dangerous scene: "I was the story's young hero and at the end of the film I was in a stream. For this a Norwegian swimming champion was hired. But when the scene was to be shot, he didn't care to do it. I was at that time at the National Theatre in Oslo. Suddenly the telephone rang. It was Carl Th. Dreyer. 'Sissener, hello. Do you have life insurance?' 'No,' I answered. 'Go and get insurance right away. Say goodbye to your family, bring two flasks of cognac with you and say nothing to the theatre manager. You must act in the waterfall.' I went. The shooting took five days in September. It was forty-four degrees in the water. Dreyer gave the cognac to the horse. I only got cough medicine. Yes, Dreyer could get people to do anything he wanted. Long may he live."
Acquarello writes: "Jean and Dale Drum present an impartial, accessible, and comprehensive biography on the intensely private and relentlessly perfectionist visionary filmmaker. The authors trace Dreyer's life from his nebulous parentage, to his early career as a journalist and pursuit of adventure, to his dedicated life in the motion pictures, and ultimately, to his death from pneumonia in 1968. It is a reverent portrait that echoes the unbiased chronicle and social realism of Dreyer's own cinema - a search to find emotional truth and profound humanity behind the enigmatic image."
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 SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF DESIRE by Ray Carney (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 50 illustrations, paperback, 365 pages. This book is available directly from the author for $20 - click here.
From the back cover:
"Although Carl Dreyer is universally acknowledged to be one of the supreme masters of world cinema, it is one of the oddities of film history that beyond The Passion of Joan of Arc, his films have seldom had the general recognition that they undeniably deserve. This book is an attempt to bring his work to the awareness of contemporary filmgoers everywhere.
Ray Carney argues that the key to an understanding of Dreyer's work is to be found in an appreciation of his distinctive style. Professor Carney argues that Dreyer's style creates a "radically new way of knowing and feeling" that can change how we understand our experiences and identities outside of the movies. Following a general consideration of Dreyer's style, the book offers lucid and comprehensive interpretations of the three crowning masterworks of Dreyer's career: Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud."
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Out Of Print Books
 FOUR SCREEN PLAYS by Carl Theodor Dreyer - (first published as "Fire Film" by Gyldendal, Copenhagen, 1964; first published in English by Thames and Hudson, London in 1970). Out-of-print
From the back cover:
"Dreyer lived to create; and the films which bear his signature express a tragic vision and a sense of spiritual victory over evil which is entirely his own and yet, at the same time, for all the world. Dreyer was a writer before he became a film-maker, and in approaching a new subject he used to work out a detailed treatment in semi-novelistic, semi-dramatic form. The result, a halfway stage between synopsis and technical shooting-script, was a work of imaginative literature in its own right. This volume contains four of these 'screenplays': The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1927), Vampyr (1932), Day Of Wrath (1943), and Ordet (1954-55)"
With a foreword by Dreyer where he states that the four scripts in the book are "precisely those four of my films which I myself like best and rate highest - partly because they were difficult to make, partly because they gave me unusual opportunities for stylistic experiment."
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 CARL THEODOR DREYER'S JESUS by Carl Dreyer - (The Dial Press, New York, 1971) First published in Danish as "Jesus Fra Nazaret" (Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag A/S 1968). Out-of-print
Contains "Jesus: A Film Manuscript" by Carl Th. Dreyer; an introduction by Ib Monty; Three Essays by Carl Dreyer ("Who Crucified Jesus?", "The Roots Of Anti-Semitism", "My Only Great Passion"); "Working With Dreyer" by Preben Thomsen; and tributes to Dreyer by Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini and Francois Truffaut.
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 THE CINEMA OF CARL DREYER by Tom Milne - (The International Film Guide Series: A.S. Barnes, NY; A Zwemmer, London) First published 1971. Out-of-print
A marvellous little pocket-sized book with Milne's perceptive observations sprinkled across a chronological overview of Dreyer's films. Lots of stills and very readable.
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 THE FILMS OF CARL THEODOR DREYER by David Bordwell - (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California). First published 1981. Out-of-printA fine, large format book. Certainly one of the most indepth books about Dreyer's films - and sadly out-of-print like the other books in this section.
From the back cover:
"In the most extenisive and intensive bookyet devoted to Dreyer, David Bordwell sows how Dreyer's films offer unique challenges to the dominant filmmaking style. He analyses how Dreyer confronts the viewer with problems of attention, orientation, and narrative coprehension.
All of Dreyer's works are discussed, with the major films receiving detailed attention. Using over 300 frame enlargements to clarify points of technique, Bordwell also examines the Hollywood filmmaking style, the concept of authorship in the cinema, and principles of narrative construction."
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 DREYER IN DOUBLE REFLECTION edited with commentary by Donald Skoller - Translation of Carl Th. Dreyer's writings about film (Om filmen). (New York, Dutton, 1973). Out-of-print
From the back cover:
"Dreyer's essays constitute one of the most condensed, carefully considered, and eloquent expressions of the possibility of cinema as a high art by any filmmaker." - P. Adams Sitney
A very important collection. I've compared this to a 1959 edition of OM FILMEN and the contents are identical (except in English), and the Skoller has two more articles (ie. post-1959).
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 PORTRAIT OF CARL TH. DREYER Text by Ib Monty - Danish Government Film Foundation, Copenhagen - 1965 - 20 pages. Out-of-print
Large format booklet written just after Gertrud was released, when Dreyer was 76 years old. Ib Monty's text is defensive, obviously written after the relatively disappointing international reception of Gertrud, and by defining Dreyer's character as one that is "isolated in the local art world in Denmark" he reveals much about the climate in which Dreyer made his films. Contains many stills.
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 CARL TH. DREYER The Museum of Modern Art, New York Edited by Jytte Jensen - 1988 - 96 pages - 70 illustrations - ISBN 0-87070-305-6. Out-of-print
From the back cover:
"Denmark's Carl Theodor Dreyer is one of the undisputed master filmmakers of cinematic history. An uncompromising perfectionist, Dreyer completed only fourteen feature films during his lifetime, but these works span the development of film, from silents to sound, from 1918 to 1964. The essays in this book present four fresh perspectives from which a general audience can appreciate Dreyer's films. Ib Monty traces the filmmaker's chronological development; Jytte Jensen examines the evolution of his attitude toward his heroines; James Schamus evaluates Dreyer within the realist tradition and describes his concern for authentic texts; and Carren O. Kaston offers an insightful metaphysical interpretation of Dreyer's work. The authors demonstrate not only the power and intensity of Dreyer's best-known works, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet, and Day of Wrath, but also the compassion and humor that illuminat his total oeuvre. The book also includes an illustrated filmography, and the authorized English-language translation of the script for Dreyer's final, uncompleted project, Medea."
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 THE FILMS OF CARL DREYER by Eileen Bowser - The Film Library Of The Museum Of Modern Art - 1964 - 8 pages - sold for 25 cents. Out-of-print
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LETTERS ABOUT THE JESUS FILM "16 years of correspondence between Carl Th. Dreyer and Blevins Davis" University of Copenhagen, Dept. of Cinema, Television, and Communications; Sekvens special edition, 235 pages - 1989 - Edited by Martin Drouzy and Lisbeth Nannestad Jorgensen. Out-of-print
This is perhaps one of the hardest to find Dreyer books - and by its very nature, is one of the most intimate and fascinating. It consists of almost all the correspondence written between Dreyer and Davis (including telegrams) in a 16 year period where Dreyer was working constantly on the Jesus film project. The sheer interminable frustration that Dreyer must have felt, and which one feels after reading it, is unbearable. In 1967, away from Davis, the Italians at RAI kindly offered him carte blanche to film it in Israel. A doctor was being prepared to travel with him, but Dreyer didn't make it long enough. (Eternal thanks to Thure for sorting me out with a copy.)
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 DREYER by Mark Nash London: British Film Institute, 1977. Out-of-print
A slim volume akin to similar studies the BFI produced at the time on
directors such as Ophuls and Fassbinder. Written in 1977 by Mark Nash who
would go on to edit the influential British film journal Screen, the 80-page
work centers upon his essay 'Notes on the Dreyer-text'. This emphasises the
"ideological processes of text construction played out in the space between
the 'author' of the filmic discourse and the reader/viewer", a perspective
which draws upon the grand theories (semiotics/structuralism,
psychoanalysis) and theorists (Barthes, Kristeva, Lacan) so prevalent during
the Seventies. Nonetheless, there is some attentive analysis of particular
films (especially Getrud) and an annotated filmography with much invaluable
additional material. The book appends two useful articles - 'The Nordic
Archaism of Dreyer' by Cahiers du Cinema critic and filmmaker Andre Techine,
and 'Spiritual Men and Natural Women' by Freida Grafe. - Stephen Masters
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 CARL DREYER by Ebbe Neergaard "New Index Series No. 1", BFI London, 1950. Out-of-print
An index of Dreyer's work originally issued as a supplement to the magazine
Sight & Sound, and published separately in 1950. A slender monograph (42
pages) with helpful biographical information, this benefits from Dreyer's
own input and refers to the intentions behind the planned film about Christ
("Dreyer believes he has found the right style for the film. It will not be
naturalistic or documentary, but simplified like a modern wood-cut".)
- Stephen Masters
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