Regarded by many filmmakers and critics as one of the greatest directors in cinema history, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968) achieved worldwide acclaim after the debut of 'The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). This book explores how, in 1955, student Jan Wahl spent an unforgettable summer with Dreyer during the filming of 'Ordet'.

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.

In an industry that celebrates extravagance and showmanship, Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer was a rarity, a man who guarded his privacy fiercely and believed that film provided a way to understand human nature by focusing on the individual person. Best known for his 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, dominated by its emotionally harrowing close-ups of Joan during her trial, it was Dreyer who pioneered some of the seminal techniques of modern film, techniques that would later be made famous by better known contemporaries such as Sergei Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith. Now, in My Only Great Passion, the first full-length English language biography of Dreyer, Jean and Dale D. Drum restore his reputation to its rightful place. Based on extensive and exclusive interviews with both Dreyer and the people who worked with him--including personal correspondence dating back to 1952--this biography provides the most comprehensive critical examination to date of both Dreyer's life and his approach to filmmaking. A valuable resource for film critics and historians, those in the film industry, and university cinema departments, as well as anyone with an interest in Danish art and culture, My Only Great Passion provides long neglected insights into the man who first raised European film above the level of entertainment and placed it in the realm of art.

The Cinema of Eisenstein is David Bordwell's comprehensive analysis of the films of Sergei Eisenstein, arguably the key figure in the entire history of film. The director of such classics as Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible, October, Strike, and Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein theorized montage, presented Soviet realism to the world, and mastered the concept of film epic. Comprehensive, authoritative, and illustrated throughout, this classic work deserves to be on the shelf of every serious student of cinema.