#1110: The President (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1919) (My Favorite 1111 Movies)

The cinematic language employed in the very infancy of film and so early in the career of Dreyer is stunning a hundred years later and anticipate palpably the incredible movies he would go on to direct. The President is the debut film of the great Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer. It has a shocking emotional weight and a breathtaking mastery and invention of the film form.

The story is impressively complex, if a bit too dour and gratuitously sad to go into. Let's just say it is a weighty, joyless family drama. Dreyer's own troubled upbringing oozes into his art in this instance. The film has gorgeous 1919 cinematography and one distinct method employed here is similar to his later masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. Shots of characters don't place them in a way that makes spatial sense, yet are placed in a way to heighten the emotions of the acting and is unnerving to the viewer through a resulting disorientation. This is obtained by carefully staging shots between cuts, meticulously setting up the characters placement in a way that is uniquely fashioned to the cinematic form, rather than traditional theatre staging.

Dreyer is one of the most emotionally serious filmmakers in history and The President is an early touchstone of the dreamscape silent era.