UC Berkeley

This dissertation reads melodrama as an important influence in Carl Th. Dreyer's work and oeuvre and shows that his work demonstrates melodrama's relevance to the tradition of Scandinavian art–house, modernist cinema. Dreyer's work has come to embody a stern and severe aesthetic seen largely as the epitome of artistic restraint rather than indicative of melodramatic expressivity. Dreyer began his career in cinema, however, at the Danish studio Nordisk Films Kompagni in the 1910s when the company became synonymous with early Danish film melodrama and other spectacular, mass–produced, popular fare. Scholars have subsequently labeled this decade “The Golden Age of Danish Melodrama.” Although the standard reception of Dreyer's work predicates his status as a masterful auteur director upon his decisive break with the company's production model, its themes, and popular–culture ambitions, this dissertation argues that asserting such a break occludes intriguing continuities in Dreyer's oeuvre.

The rich proliferation of melodrama scholarship in decades following Dreyer's death in 1968 has radically expanded what can be understood as “melodrama,” allowing important affective concerns in Dreyer's work to come to light. Melodrama scholarship allows us to characterize Dreyer's innovation of cinema not only on formal terms, but now also through his developing representations of human suffering, volition, interiority, and emotion. No longer exclusively a genre, style, or theatrical tradition, melodrama is now better understood as a powerful and adaptable mode that informs a variety of media, ranging from soap operas to novels by Henry James. The connotations of melodrama available to earlier scholarship and to Dreyer himself could not avoid its strongly pejorative sense; more recent work has made clear the pervasive presence of the mode as a productive category in both “high" and “low” forms of culture. Consequently, Dreyer's unique inflection of melodrama reflects his simultaneous relation of repulsion and of attraction to the mode, driven by his perceived need to distance himself from melodrama's low–art stigma. To negotiate this paradox Dreyer continually reimagines and pressures the mode while remaining sympathetic to its core interests: its depictions of suffering, its humanist faith in art's capacity to convey something about existence, and its existential desires to recuperate meaning in a world shaken by modernity's upheaval of traditional cosmologies. Neither fully modernist nor fully submissive to realism's illusions, melodrama provides a productive framework for understanding both the aesthetic ingenuity and more conservative elements of Dreyer's modernism.

The first chapters of this dissertation outline advances in melodrama scholarship relevant to the project and then trace the category of “melodrama” through the standard reception both of silent–era Danish film melodrama at Nordisk and in Dreyer reception more generally. The final chapters parse out Dreyer's innovation of melodrama in three of his major works, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Jeanne d'Arc, 1928), Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath, 1943), and Ordet (The Word, 1955) by comparing his “mature” films and by drawing upon key moments in the melodramatic scenarios he wrote at Nordisk. In Jeanne d'Arc Dreyer innovates corporeal spectacle, the ethical interaction and thrill of performance, and exploits the limits between “live theater” and film by conflating phenomenological and semiotic performing bodies. Day of Wrath extends and heightens melodramatic tensions surrounding domestic melodrama's conveyance of interiority through expressively charged bodily surfaces. Dreyer uses the body and psychological interiority of his protagonist, Anne (whose will and desire are stifled by relationships in the domestic sphere), to evoke a melodramatic worldview rife with epistemological uncertainty and ambiguous causality. In The Word, Dreyer juxtaposes elements of maternal melodrama with intense depictions of male suffering and tears to create art–house melodrama's version of a male–weepie. This film also bears traces of Dreyer's persistent interest in the materiality of the filmed body and in depicting gradations of consciousness, drawing on multiple precedents in early Danish film melodrama. In conclusion, Dreyer's oeuvre vitally broadens our understanding of the potentials of the melodramatic mode and the specific tradition of “Scandinavian art–house melodrama.”