Legendary Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer (3 February 1889-20
March 1968) was born in Copenhagen to a single mother, Josefine
Bernhardine Nilsson, a Swede. His Danish father, Jens Christian
Torp, a married farmer, employed Nilsson as a housekeeper. After
spending his first two years in orphanages, Dreyer was adopted by
Carl Theodor Dreyer, a typographer, and his wife, Inger Marie
Dreyer. He was given his adoptive father's name. At age 16, he
renounced his adoptive parents and worked his way into the film
industry as a journalist, title card writer, screenwriter, and
director. Throughout his career he concealed his birth name and the
details of his upbringing and his adult private life, which
included a period in which he explored his homosexual orientation
and endured a nervous breakdown. Despite his relatively small
output of fourteen feature films and seven documentary short films,
1919-64, he is considered one of the greatest filmmakers in history
because of the diversity of his subjects, themes, techniques, and
styles, and the originality of the bold visual grammar he mastered.
In Cinematography of Carl Theodor Dreyer: Performative Camerawork,
Transgressing the Frame, I argue: 1) that Dreyer, an anonymous
orphan, an unsourced subject, manufactured his individuality
through filmmaking, self-identifying by shrouding himself in the
skin of film, and 2) that, as a screenwriter-director who blocked
entire feature films in his imagination in advance-sets, lighting,
photography, shot breakdowns, editing-and imposed his vision on
camera operators, lighting directors, actors, and crews in
production, he saw filmmaking essentially as camerawork and he
directed in the style of a performative cinematographer.
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