Carl Th. Dreyer—My Métier (1995, Torben Skjødt Jensen) (Patreon)

36/100

Not the worst film in Criterion's collection, perhaps—looks like my lowest rating currently goes to Pasolini's Salò, which I could barely stomach; consensus pick if we include laserdiscs would likely be Armageddon—but there's no justification for their giving this terminally bland doc portrait equal weight with the actual Dreyer films that it accompanies in their box set. Skjødt Jensen metronomically alternates among (a) standard talking-head interviews with surviving collaborators; (b) lengthy clips from Dreyer's work; and (c) Ken Burns-y montages of text "artfully" superimposed onto still photos, accompanied by an actor reading Dreyer's letters and journal entries and such. Nothing wrong with (b) per se, except that the clips appear to have been selected at random—we get only stills of Falconetti, for example, even though her performance is discussed at length and her daughter is that section's key interview subject. (It's not a rights issue, either, as the film does feature clips from Joan of Arc. Not very many, but it's acknowledged in the end credits and everything. Movie fairly zips past Vampyr, too.) My general impatience with (a) is by no means universally shared, but even if you enjoy watching people talk just past the camera lens in medium shot more than I do, these anecdotes are less than illuminating. (Ostensibly fun fact: Dreyer gifted unwanted items of clothing to his cinematographer. Like three solid minutes on that.) And then (c) pretty much exemplifies what I think of as pseudo-filmmaking, i.e. struggling to create moving images from elements that properly belong to other media, in the mistaken belief that dumping your research onto the kitchen table and panning across it while an audiobook plays will somehow magically constitute compelling cinema. (I don't care for Ken Burns.) Most memorable moment here is Dreyer talking (via the voiceover dude) about his time in Paris, accompanied by then-contemporary footage of the city's marquees, including—at the precise moment that we hear "No other city has such a great film culture"—Stargate. Had this been a special feature on Day of Wrath or Ordet, as it ought to have been, I'd have switched it off after five minutes. Completism is a curse.