The Birth, Death, and Re-Birth of an Auteur: The Analog to Digital Conversion of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Films

Description

This dissertation explores how DVD and digital media can deviate from an original filmmaker’s intent by being used as a tool for re-mediation. It addresses an important issue about what happens to an author’s work of art from the pre-electronic age to the present when it is re-mediated or repurposed via a new platform. The Scandinavian filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889–1968) is an ideal prototype for studying the phenomenon of remediation. Dreyer began directing movies at the peak of the silent years and made his first talkie at the beginning of the sound era. Thirteen out of the fourteen feature films that Dreyer directed are available on LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray, and digital streaming platforms. Dreyer deserves a renewed appraisal and fresh investigation into his life and work. Why Dreyer and why in this postmodern era of digital cinema? Dreyer’s oeuvre has always been in a state of re-mediation through continuous, changing circumstances. Some rather infamous instances illustrate how the original aesthetic intentions of his films were either compromised or altered. For example, in 1951 the Italian-born film historian Joseph-Marie Lo Duca acquired an original negative of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928) and cropped the left side of the picture in order to accommodate a sound track of preexisting music. He also marred the image by superimposing some intertitles over the shots. This sonorized print was recently transferred to Blu-ray. Vampyr (1932) also suffered an ominous fate when Image Entertainment’s technical authors added large Gothic subtitles that covered nearly half the picture to Dreyer’s personal print on the distributor’s LD and DVD releases. While Dreyer is a prominent example of this trend, these kinds of re-mediations have become common and need to be studied. Dreyer’s films are representative of how re-mediation is crucial and unavoidable in cinema work. Film history is being re-mediated and this challenges any notion of the auteur in a digital domain. In fact, these practices call for a complete reconsideration of the notion of auteur. This dissertation employs a mixed-methods, integrated theoretical approach to chart the genesis of Dreyer the auteur, his death as an author (especially in the case of The Passion of Joan of Arc), and ultimately the re-birth of his work rather than the re-birth of him as author. This study of an auteur also interweaves media theories of re-mediation and critical methodologies of film and digital restoration. It also examines key transformations of Dreyer’s films through the practices of archiving, conservation, and restoration. As we navigate the historical watershed of digitization, my work examines the cultural and historical implications of converting older, analog media formats to digital ones. This “case history” of an auteur’s work—mainly Dreyer’s silent movies—acts as an illustrative example for the assessment of how film as a medium gets pushed out of existence after it undergoes a digital makeover. I cover nine of Dreyer’s works starting with their inception and stretching from their original theatrical runs to their release(s) on home video. I account for competing versions that feature different distributors, different extra features, and different subtitle translations. Through archival research, critical questions I seek to answer include: who is the “producer” of the DVD/digital copy? Who is heading up those projects? Who emerges as the alternative auteurs for the films and do they supplant the role of the director? Do they assume control of new material in some way and exhibit authorship? What ethical imperatives do modifying Dreyer’s images pose for a viewer? This detailed study strives to set standards for future work on authorship and re-mediation.