Much to the admiration and gratitude of New York cinephiles such as yours truly (that is, young and urban and eager), BAMcinématek in Brooklyn has been running a retrospective of Carl Theodor Dreyer films during the second half of March. Beginning with a sold-out screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc and continuing through what I’m told will be a sold-out run of Vampyr screenings tonight, the series has shown a good deal of the master filmmaker’s silent cinema as well as his later, sound masterpieces. The silent pictures before Joan are mostly unavailable on Region 1 DVD (and those that are do not come well recommended), but thanks to those helpful guides at The Criterion Collection we have fine, restored, digital versions of Joan and each successive masterpiece (one per decade) that followed.

This much is predictable: part of the fun of a retrospective for me is the pleasure of seeing cinema exhibited as it should be—large, loud, altogether impressive—since I have no plasma television, no surround sound, and more often than not I appreciate seeing such films as these in friendly company. However, this should not stop you from exploring these elegant sphinx films at home if you could not make it to the series. For starters, Dreyer’s cycle is as fertile an education in the cinema as one may find since each film deploys a singular approach to the medium’s capacities for storytelling. Add to that: together they build an image of film history that stands outside time stamps: none of the five appear dated in the way, say, Marnie may (made the same year as Gertrud), or, to pick a descendant, something like Time of the Wolf howls of its era. Part of this is due to Dreyer’s lack of interest, so to speak, in documenting anything “of the moment” since each film is, to some degree, a period piece. Therefore, it’s best to look at these films as lessons in looking. It’s just easier, sometimes, to pay attention when forced to by the dark of the auditorium.

So why, you may ask, if it took a self-proclaimed cinephile such as me until this tardy moment to find Dreyer, should you bother? What kept me from him? Or, him from me? Well, I stayed away for a few simple factors that can be reduced to one baseline reason: with all else available (and demanding), so-reported dour Scandinavian cinema about faith never sounded like that much fun. And, to be fair, Dreyer’s films do not need you. But you may need them. You’ll have to trust me on this one. You may even have to believe me.

To start this dialogue, I should like to point you to the series of posts I have contributed to The Auteurs’ Notebook tracking my progression through the films. You can click here to jump straight over to that categorical feed, or you can click here to see a link dump post at my home-base blog, VINYL IS HEAVY, with specific guides to those pieces (as well as other helpful stops across the internet).

The series began, as did my relationship with Dreyer beforehand, with The Passion of Joan of Arc, which remains Dreyer’s most famous film. You can learn a lot about the face looking at this film. You will see that it projects as much as it protects; and that the face, in close-up, is all expression. The close-up is not about mirroring, or inviting, you. If, by its final fade out, you have truly seen Joan, you will recognize your separateness: that you cannot identify with her, nor should you, unless you are a ghost. No, to watch this one is to see what Dreyer himself calls a realized mysticism: finding the soul’s expression in “real” details, like the faces, like that arm pumping blood.

Day of Wrath followed Joan on the program and boy if it didn’t daze me. I am still processing all its complications, and desire to see it again, but I do not know when that will be. Ostensibly about witch hunts and young lovers in the 17th century, Wrath is the kind of film that helps sell the Dreyer mythology of an artist outside of time making austere films with no interest in simply satisfying his audience—if he even thought of his audience as such. Upon first viewing, I should like to say that Wrath can teach one about narrative ambiguity more than any of the other later films for the simple fact that Dreyer presents as many perspectives on the film (from characters within the film) story as there are characters acting in this world. This leads us to see how Wrath forms a world where there very well may be witches, where a curse under one’s breath may in fact kill a man. You either accept it or not. Another part of the myth: all these films concern faith.

Faith is front and center in Ordet as one of its characters, the middle son Johannes, thinks he is Jesus. This, naturally, poses a problem for his family. Like any good story, Ordet is spurred by crisis, but even its picture of crisis is quiet and patient. It’s a film out to wipe the frame clean, to negotiate a space of belief with its audience in some kind of God, be it Christian or cinematic, though the film rejects any closed system as a church might provide. Of all Dreyer’s films, I could probably watch this one most frequently.

Though it may be one of the most singular masterpieces of dream cinema ever, I do not know when I will sit down with Gertrud for a second time. It’s a film of stasis, it bleeds time. It’s a series of “scenes” structured around people sitting and talking and sitting and talking. If Ordet takes patience, Gertrud takes an act of will. Of course, Gertrud is not simply “a bore” or anything reductive like that (though plenty will tell you that is how the film was received upon its premiere); no, the film is as good a ghost story as you will see. What I learned watching this film is that all of Dreyer’s work is about the figure of the ghost in the world: how we can become shadows of ourselves, how we are in fact shadows, how we cast our shadows on others, how our shadows fade quicker than we hope or imagine or expect.

Vampyr will try to convince you that some of these shadows will suck you dry.

So this piece is not out to recommend a purchase, nor even to nudge your Netflix queue all that stridently, but to say that your life might get richer if you allow it to absorb some Dreyer. I told my friend Danny that these are films I feel I need to age with, but I don’t know when I’ll be seeing them next. I know I’ll need a break, and I know I won’t be buying the Box Set any time soon, but I am happy to know they will be around and an available part of my cinematic life.

A wife wins her unwitting freedom in the form of a camera before she finds herself behind the limits of her marriage. A husband refuses to look beyond himself, to see that the siren song no longer calls him. A marriage continues to spawn new lives, to add its frailty and its weight, its babies and its abuse into this world. Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments is this brand of simple story, though a curious film. This is not to say the story is simply redundant or (heavens, no) boring, but, as you might guess, its curiosity refreshes the “period piece slash woman’s picture” frame that marketing (in a backwards-thinking move) will do its best to make appealing—thus subverting that the film’s evident wonder with light (and its negative) balloons its niggling tendencies into something advanced and graceful. Troell moulds what some may see as clichés away from strictures by—it’s simple, yes—observing the familiar and attending to how it forms, or how it can form, the new.

Maria Heiskanen plays Maria Larsson with all the awe one can (and justifiably should) expect in a burdened-by-seven wife given life through an accordion-style large-format Contessa camera. Her eyes routinely widen and light out from under a shawl (or her sweaty brow, or the brim of a flat hat) as she stands her ground in her decades-long sparring match of a marriage. Mikael Persbrandt embodies her husband, Sigfrid (known as “Sigge”), as a blunt beast, all too often under the pall of drunkenness; as a relative giant forever hunched in his home, guarding some enigmatic source of hurt under his brawn and his smile. Maria bears his weight along with her own—she washes his back, withstands his infidelities, challenges his cowardice—for the privilege of her picture-making. Or so she grows.

The film begins in the trials of routine, the stubborn fight of a life hemmed by duty. Troell takes his time to show the family balance, to show how Maria might have loved (and does continue to love) Sigge despite his idiocy; how his charm earns its devotion in song and dance alongside how his brazen disregard for responsibility spurs Maria’s constant at-bay impulse to flee; how Maria’s choice to stay in the marriage, to labor with it, is an act of faith. Although the credits detail its mechanism in pieces before a (still small) whole, only after Sigge’s first eruption—after he knocks Maria’s temple bloody against a doorway—does the Contessa camera enters the picture. First Maria tries to sell the apparatus upon its appearance, unused for some time, in the belly of a drawer. But the man behind the counter, one Mr. Pedersen, brokers a different deal he needn’t think of, nor could Maria dream of, to open and salve a women who appears shuttered and broken by her life. He will “buy” the camera as long as she “tries it out” before relinquishing it and its opportunity (for agency, for beauty, for life) for good.

The camera figures the rest of the film, and how these three interact over time. It’s a powerful tool. For Maria and Pedersen, it’s a mode of belonging to the world. For Sigge, it’s a threat to his power-position as husband and father while also a means to lighten his load. For Jan Troell, the camera in the film is a mirror made to refract significance, not reflect it. At some junctures, Troell’s camera (of the film) labors frantically, nervy and unexpected, reframing without edits as if the image itself cowers in the face of the world, unsure of its footing or its hold on this space. It’s trying (and, as is natural, failing) to see everything. While these visual paroxysms often coincide with on-screen violence, their bustling is not restricted to such events; we see it in gleeful discovery, too. Each is an immediate labor to fix an image and each immediately fails—for the image, we know, has a life and a movement all its own. For Troell, like Maria and Pedersen, cannot sit with the world as it is: each sees past our forms and our roles, each looks to remake this world from our daily material. Each sees the liberty of the image to stand outside of time, indeed outside of simple representation. However, for all my will to concepts, Everlasting Moments is a concrete film (one might call it pragmatic storytelling) that resists abstraction.

All Troell’s “ideas” are indeed delicate details that cohere through dogged commitment. There’s a predictability to this kind of “art-house cinema” (and the film may be long), but in an age of brutality where caped and painted crusaders substitute for life, where tourist forgery wins awards, this tender picture reminds what uplift a worked-over film about people and our shadows may provide. And passionate, egalitarian concepts do surface. We see how the feminine can be celebrated, we see how a man can cower from himself while enraged. We see that the mother creates what the father cannot but dream of from his perch outside her womb. First she captures it, tenderly, then she puts it inside her dark spaces, lit from a softened hue of warmth, to cultivate its banks of life. Figures emerge from water, lines form inside a frame and, on the palimpsest pushed around its bath, a image emerges. It takes patience, and it’s a simple reminder, but this is it: life is born in light.

If you live in New York and you pay attention to the movies (or if you don’t live here but you read about film across the blogosphere, say), then it’s probably safe to assume you are aware of Film Forum’s Breadlines & Champagne series, running now through March 5th. All the films are shown in 35mm, plenty are not available on DVD and every day there’s a new 2-for-1 double bill of 1930s Depression-era cinema. This Saturday, the ever-dreaded (around here, at least) and always-plastic Valentine’s Day offers a delicious dream pairing sure to propel its audience back outside with all the right Hallmark-approved sentiment appropriate to gaudy reds and garish pinks and overpriced (and often terrible) chocolate: Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) followed by Mitchel Leisen’s Easy Living (1937). Indeed, Film Forum’s program has a David Thomson endorsement that says, “If you paired [Easy Living] with My Man Godfrey, you’d have a beautiful portrait of money in New York—and a happy audience.”

J. Hoberman wrote this in the Village Voice to mark the opening of the program: “‘Breadlines & Champagne’ doesn’t showcase the full range of early-’30s Hollywood, but it is particularly rich in ‘preachment yarns’—movies that trafficked in lurid topicality while expressing a measure of passionately confused social protest.” What Hoberman fails to say here is that this confusion he points to often results in screwball romance, or provides its impetus. What’s striking to my eyes watching this series unspool over the past week is the strong will to shuck the city, in many cases to leave New York behind, or at least uproot it—as William Powell does in his defining role as Godfrey Park—in order to find romance’s salvation. Or, more basically, to reset.

Early in My Man Godfrey, Eugene Pallette (playing put-upon patriarch Alexander Bullock) stands at a bar, downing some kind of alcohol, while a “scavenger hunt” bustles about the grand hall he’s trying to ignore. A stranger joins him, tells him the commotion resembles an asylum. Pallette, ever gravel-voiced and brusquely pathetic, grumbles, “All you need is a room and the right kind of people.” This seems a perfect description not just for folly (or madness) but for the romance (to say the folly and the madness) of movie-watching. Or an imperative about how to have some fun in this wicked life. And, sure enough, as Godfrey’s finale attests, all you need to get married—issues of desire aside, or smirked at—is a room, like a renovated shack turned into a nightclub, some groceries and firewood and the right kind of man, like a city official plucked from his dinner, to say the right kind of words. In a film so much about propriety, and a certain form of education therein, “the right words” might translate into “the just words” as, one might expect, this film and its bill-mate are indeed films about the just city and our commitment to it; or, perhaps, the justice and decency available in the city as we inhabit in times such as these.

Unfortunately, not all the films offered live up to this claim. In fact, a fair number of them are probably obscured by history for a reason. However, to continue a trend, there is a pleasure to be had in seeing older films of middling “quality” since their “value” is raised, to complete a circle, by that very remove of history. The “Breadlines” series opener, I’m No Angel, starring Mae West, is, to be blunt, a simple thing. It is entertaining, no doubt, offering plenty to think about that measure of society at that time (those black ladies doting on Mae can make one squirm a bit), but it aims low and it knows it—and that’s fine. Its ideas about love as a commodity are nothing compared to the film that followed, Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle, which makes such a comparison fruitless, and directs me to consider the Warren William double bill shown on Tuesday (1933’s Employees’ Entrance followed by 1932’s Skyscraper Souls) as it is of the same, well, class as the West picture. That is, they share a similar perspective on romance in that society. In all three, the capitalist drive embodied by the films’ stars (William and West) sees the game rigged. Since I’m No Angel features Cary Grant opposite West, things turn out alright, and there’s a happiness found (if in compromise). Since Warren William appears committed to playing a devil, love is a haven outside his world: hence, the flight from the city (or its representation, respectively, as a department store and as a tower).

While the Warren William films figure capitalism in strikingly lucid conceptual terms, what truly separates his twin pictures from the pair to be shown Saturday is best understood in the discrepancy between the sets of screenplays. Employees’ Entrance may be tighter than Skyscraper Souls, but even its brisk funneling of narratives cannot compete with the elegance of something like My Man Godfrey or the express clatter of Easy Living’s Preston Sturges dialogue. The William pictures are screwball in the sense that they’re preposterous not that their plots’ madcap-ness are all that, well, madcap. Most of the jokes are “did he really?” moments, or pratfalls.

Plus, there’s that matter of language. Each of the Valentine’s Day pair pays such a strict attention to language as more than just information, as a performance all its own, that it is no wonder they offer a brighter picture of the city. (By contrast, in the case of the Borzage, it’s the attention to light—the literal luminosity—that gives us a lift, even as its couple flees the city for an unknown future.) To return to Godfrey, we can perhaps agree that another of its virtues is just how well this man, Godfrey, as embodied by William Powell, performs his words; whereas Warren William, ever the cad, refuses affection in favor of base possession. Maybe it’s a simple matter of charisma. One set of films, while charming and diverting, do not invite the audience to dream beyond their stations (their seats), while the other offers an avenue for the possibilities of our citizens to build a better country within the city and without.

In case you cannot make it to the Film Forum tomorrow night, for whatever reason, both films are available on DVD and well worth any evening’s plans, be it greeting-card-sanctioned or not. Besides, at home you can drink your own champagne, easier build your own (private) union.