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Master of the House (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1925)
🕑 Added 2022-05-17 04:15:30 +0000 UTC
You know what? Women really do hold up half the sky!
There's nothing particularly complicated (or compelling) about this early Dreyer effort. It painstakingly details the plight of a family in economic straits, ruled by Viktor (Johannes Meyer) not so much with an iron fist as a relentless streak of assholism. Bitter about his failed business, Viktor treats his beleaguered wife Ida (Astrid Holm) like a slave, upbraiding her for not having his coffee on the table exactly when he expects it, or having the audacity to use a bit of the butter on her own toast instead of slathering it all on his. The fact that Ida is raising three kids without his help is lost on him. He expects eldest daughter Karen (Karin Nellemose) to minister to his needs in tandem with Ida. He makes middle-child Frederik (Aage Hoffman) stand in the corner for playing outside and scuffing his shoes. And as for their infant (Byril Harvig), Viktor mostly just yells for Ida to make him be quiet.
The wild card in this scenario is Mads (Mathilde Nielsen), the elderly nanny who raised Viktor and now works for the family to help Ida maintain. She and Ida's mother (Clara Schønfeld) get together to whisk Ida out of the home for some much needed rest. And this creates an opening for Mads to subject Viktor to precisely the abuse that he's inflicted on Ida. Viktor is cowed by Mads, mostly because of his childhood memories of her strict discipline, and she eventually breaks him down until he repents. Ida returns, and he goes down on his knees to beg her forgiveness. Approving smiles. End credits.
Master of the House was made a mere three years before The Passion of Joan of Arc, wherein Dreyer would reshape film language to his own unique ends. Although Master is painfully conventional, and spends about half an hour more than necessary to make its point, one can certainly see the spare Scandinavian visual style that would reach an apex in Ordet and Gertrud. In particular, Dreyer's use of lighting, and (I think) a slightly slower than usual film stock, creates the molded pewter surfaces of bodies and objects, lending Master a solidity that was lacking from most cinema of the era. (I tried to find specific technical data in Bordwell's early book on Dreyer, but he appears not to have been especially interested in Master -- which he calls Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife -- compared with Dreyer's other early efforts.)
It's always a dodgy proposition to think that we, as contemporary interpreters of art of the past, have some special insight that its makers did not. The ample success of Master of the House suggests that its nominally feminist theme struck a chord in Danish audiences of the Twenties, regardless of how facile (even retrograde) it may seen today. But every element of Master of the House suggests that it means to be taken at face value, which makes the dynamic between Viktor and Mads incredibly strange. Rather than educating the man, Mads simply out-bullies him, "putting him in the corner" as she says to Karin. In short, she's reducing him to the scared little boy she used to dominate. There's no thought given to whether Mads' harsh treatment of young Viktor produced the "tyrant" we now see before us, and that can only be because the film is operating within a pre-Freudian logic, in which masculinity is always more threatening than any behavior a woman could muster. As the kids say, seems "sus."
