Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

ScoobyMint Disappointment for a huge fan!

Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

chaos-rampant So I finally arrive to the famous Ordet. Three women are central in Dreyer's last three films, one every decade. In Days of Wrath she was trapped in a loveless marriage and looking for love she had been denied by a cruel turn of events. Here comes the second woman, in a loving marriage to one of three sons of a powerful father figure, radiant, kind, and eager for that love to flourish and spread in the household. The younger son has found love, she petitions the father to give his consent.God stands between the two households which are locked in dispute about marriage, god implying a whole view of how the world is put together. The pater famiglia in the farmhouse believes in god as embracing the fullness of life, the tailor down the village espouses a mortifying god that rejects this life for the next. None of them is ready to give ground.This disputation about god takes an even eerier shape; there's another son who has gone mad by an inner search for god and believes himself to be Jesus; the father's wish for someone to wake up mankind, a desire for a living voice for god, but that has given him a broken son, from his own pov, who is looked on with pity as an invalid. The father hopes against hope that he might come to his senses.So, unable to set aside their ego in favor of loving- kindness, the woman who had embodied love falls to die. The father hastens back, a long, hard night of the soul follows as childbirth goes awry and her life hangs in the balance.Okay now we have most of the parts; the whole is filmed in austere flows, almost entirely setbound in the two houses, as sparse as the god of these people. Dreyer is clearly on the side of the farmer, for a living god; you'll see this in how eager he is to sketch complex human beings, this is a man who takes pleasure in the brushing and slow reveal of human character, therein lies the richness. 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. I simply don't perceive them to be the matter of real spirituality, or in any way a road that leads out of a stifled soul. God will never make himself known in the way that tormented piety expects so it's moot to agonize, no? 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. I don't know how much stock I would put in this view. For one, accepting it at face value, suspending disbelief, does it abet an eye that sees in fresh light something fundamental about how the world is put together?Another IMDb reviewer makes a great observation, the woman looks eerie when she comes to, almost vampire-like. It's no accident that Dreyer has her almost bite her husband, cling with mouth agape, eyes unfocused, muttering "life" as if unable to remember kind of thing it is, joyous occasion or horrible ordeal.No, I think let's blow the lid on this, let's deserve a Dreyer who isn't just a pastor preaching god. (He's not)Dreyer is not a transcendental filmmaker (Tarkovsky is), he's a purist like Ozu. He's not shuffling walls of despair until they give way to light from above, he's distilling everything down to a pure view of the house. With the miracle, he's being existential, not spiritual.Having said this, now we can go through the whole. If god, meant broadly as what we call that, is the fullness of life, it has to include the inevitable end of life and the suffering, this too no less a part of the fullness that needs to be embraced. Dreyer seems to ask, why have you brought her back, now that you have? Is it just to cling on her as your only way to happiness?Above all for me, it's the the way we wander around the house where now and then an afflicted son prophesies or repudiates, how we wait and come to, that makes this indispensable viewing. Bergman and Tarkovsky both begin here, each one pursuing a different strand of Dreyer.

Ben Parker OK, forgive my little joke. 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. People talk slow, the camera moves slow, if at all, the shots are long. Its also a more distant work than Day of Wrath, which I adored. The camera is kept always at a medium shot for most of the film. There are very few closeups.The production design is barren; interiors have the minimal amount of dressing to feel authentic, and not many details are added for personality or charm. This is the least showy film I've seen by Dreyer. If you're feeling unkind, it feels like a play. If you're willing to search a bit, its probably a well made and profound film. The point I'd like to make is that its not an easy film to enjoy, as I found Day of Wrath and Vampyr.Because its too slow, too distant, and I feel myself constantly straining to like it, I give it a 5/10, though obviously its well-made and probably better than that.

jacksflicks ***I see a couple of idiots don't like the review. Maybe it's because I misspelled Kierkergaard (corrected). Or maybe they just don't like what they can't comprehend.***I love Pauline Kael. As a film critic, she was the greatest. About Ordet, she said:"Some of us may find it difficult to accept the holy-madman protagonist (driven insane by too close study of Kierkegaard!), and even more difficult to accept Dreyer's use of the protagonist's home as a stage for numerous entrances and exits, and altogether impossible to get involved in the factionalist strife between bright, happy Christianity and dark, gloomy Christianity -- represented as they are by people sitting around drinking vast quantities of coffee."Yes, you could read it that way, if you were a cynic. But that begs the question of the film. (Anyway, they weren't drinking that much coffee.)The question for the current audience was the same for the audience of Kaj Munk's time: Are you going to "face reality" -- the reality of the New Order of the Nazis, or in Dreyer's 1955, the reality of materialism -- or are you going to reach beyond yourself, despite all the evidence, embracing even folly? (Erasmus was asking this centuries ago.)The lesson of Dreyer was the lesson of Kierkegaard. Whether your world view is bright or gloomy, stuff happens anyway. What matters is how you confront it, with faith or despair. I think Munk's and Dreyer's challenge still confronts us in the 21st century.As for Dreyer's success in getting the message across, at first I braced myself for a dour lecture. But I was surprised to find uplifting characters and even humor. Like all Dreyer's films, Ordet is mannered and stylized. But think of Eisenstein. Think of Bergman.Speaking of Bergman, I rather compare Ordet to The Virgin Spring. Both confront grief and end with a miracle.

Michael_Elliott Ordet (1955)*** (out of 4) Extremely powerful film from Dreyer about religion and death. The film focuses on a family where the female is pregnant with what they men hope will be her first son. The grandfather is proud of his family but over the next few days he will have many reasons to question the faith of God. I'd be lying if I sat here and said I knew exactly what this film was about or what it was trying to say. In fact, I don't think anyone could give a definite answer on what this film is about but that's because anyone could come up with their own ideas of what the film was trying to say. I've never been a major fan of Dreyer even though I can understand him being considered one of the masters of cinema. Like many of his previous films, this movie took me a while to warm up to and for the first hour I had problems fully getting involved in the film. This is something I've experiences before for Dreyer so I somewhat expected this and at the same time I wondered if a second viewing would help. The film, during its second half, is when it really picked up for me and starting with the birth sequence is when my attention was finally grabbed and the film took me for the wonderful ride that was to follow. I'm sure everyone is going to take away their ideas of what the ending meant and I have mine, which I won't spoil here. What I can say about the film is that it's certainly beautiful to look at as Dreyer certainly had one of the greatest eyes in cinema. There isn't a single second of this film that doesn't jump off the screen and you really could pause it at any spot any that image in front of you would be something beautiful to behold. The darkness of the scenes was incredibly rich but the lightness at the end was incredibly touching. The performances by the entire cast were terrific but it is the visuals that are the main focus here.