Ordet at 70: the humanity behind one of cinema’s supreme spiritual achievements

In the years since his death in 1968, an aura of austere Christianity has surrounded the reputation of the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, and his late masterpiece Ordet is central to this mystique. Premiered 70 years ago in January 1955, the film focuses on the rivalry between two Christian factions – the lively followers of Grundtvig (or “Glad Christians”, as Dreyer called them) and those of the dour Inner Mission (“the sour-faced ones”). Slow in pace and sepulchral in tone, it was adapted from the work of a Lutheran pastor, and was made as a stylistic trial for Dreyer’s unrealised film about the life of Jesus.

But approaching Dreyer’s work in this way has led to misconceptions. Dreyer may have been Christian, but he was rather tight-lipped, if not evasive, when asked about his own relationship with religion. Furthermore, many of his films – Ordet included – are fiercely critical of organised religion: see, for example, the way the Church subjugates women in both The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Day of Wrath (1943). Finally, and more pertinently, Dreyer’s humanist concerns always take precedence: even when portraying a saint in Joan of Arc, he foregrounds the personal rather than the religious aspects. It was Joan’s human suffering that interested him.

Dreyer often spoke of the need to focus on the ‘inner’ lives of his characters, to reproduce their thoughts and emotions as sincerely as possible. To achieve this, he made use of ‘abstraction’, a stylistic simplification which pared elements back to their essential signifiers: for instance, he would fill a set with objects and then remove anything he deemed superfluous, leaving only items that he thought would “bear witness psychologically to the personality of the resident”. 

For Dreyer, this technique allowed him to step away from naturalism towards a purer, more spiritual essence – a way of showing the divine nature in the ordinary world. In other words, by grounding the spiritual struggles of his characters within a ‘realistic’ framework led by human emotions, Dreyer posited a conception of spirituality that goes beyond the religious: a synthesis of the physical and the metaphysical that he called “realised mysticism”.

Seen in this light, then, Dreyer’s films are best understood as humanist tales of individual spirituality, rather than as works of collective religiosity – and nowhere is this truer than in Ordet.

A multi-character study, the film centres on the inhabitants of Borgensgaard, a homestead in West Jutland belonging to old Morten Borgen, leader of the Glad Christians, and his three sons: Mikkel, happily married and devoid of religious belief; Johannes, lost to madness and believing himself to be Jesus; and young Anders, desperately in love with the daughter of Peter the Tailor, leader of the Inner Mission. 

In following these entwined characters, much space is given to the rivalry between the two Christian sects, but the film is ultimately critical of both – one and all, the local pastor included, are shown as lacking in true faith. If, in previous films, Dreyer showed evil at work through powerful antagonists, by the time of Ordet the antagonism has become a general malaise, a society rotten by a deficiency of faithfulness. Only the madman Johannes and Mikkel’s young daughter seem to have any strength behind their convictions. As Dreyer said: “the best believers are the child and the deranged person, since their minds are not rational and limited by proof-positive facts like ours.”

As ever, Dreyer approaches all of his characters with compassion, but in the story of Anders it’s clear that his sympathy lies with the young lovers: surely a difference of religious views is no reason to separate people who connect on a level beyond the spiritual, in the realm of the physical? For, as Dreyer has shown repeatedly throughout his work, to be human is also to be flesh – whether that’s the burning flesh of Joan on the pyre, or the flesh behind the sensuous sexuality of the illicit affair in Day of Wrath. 

In Ordet, Mikkel is quick to remind us that he loves his wife’s body as well as her soul and, while the film may end on a note of grace, it only does so after one of the fleshiest, lustiest kisses ever captured on screen. For what is God, if not love – be it carnal or otherwise?

Ordet, then, like much of Dreyer’s work, shows us both the flesh around our bones and the spirit that lies within. A supreme achievement in spiritual cinema, it nevertheless remains thoroughly grounded, eschewing religiosity in favour of affirming a pure, individualised faith – both in God and in the human body. It thereby leads us towards a miraculous transcendence quite unlike anything else in the history of cinema.