The two great Danish filmmakers, Carl Th. Dreyer and Lars von Trier, share an artistic kinship. Women suffer, are tortured and burned at the stake, but even down to individual shots, some of von Trier’s earliest films show traces of Dreyer’s style. The twin geniuses of Danish cinema are juxtaposed here in a tour de force of their work. 

About Dreyer / Themes / From Dreyer to Trier

Film historian David Bordwell draws our attention to Dreyer’s debut, The President, which is usually regarded as a second-tier work. The President is an exploratory work that offers glimpses of a characteristic Dreyerian approach to cinematic space, one that reworks the emerging continuity system and makes its local contemporaries look old-fashioned.
About Dreyer/Visual style/The Dreyer Generation