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Carl Th. Dreyer's ORDET - Criterion Collection

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The ordet (The word)t still remains among the most sublime films ever made. It's an adaptation 8probably very faithful) of a work of Kaj Munk, a clergyman wiodely known in the Scandinavian , who died under the Nazi oppression in 1944.

An old farmer has three sons; the eldest gifted iof a positivist temperament, is married with Inger, a devote wife who has given him two daughters and is waiting for her third son. She wishes ardently, her next son was a son.

On the other hand we have the second son - Johannes -, who has suffered an irreversible trip into the universe of the shadows of the most troubled mind religious fanaticism, believing himself Jesus, nothing more, nothing less.

And finally, the youngest of his sons, who is deeply in love with the daughter of a religious protestant, because of that circumstance, they won' t be able to marry

Here you have, this complex dramatis personae in which the religious convictions, seem to prevail upon the most sincere feelings. But as the clergyman says; the miracles may happen and though a chain of events, these three destinies will be profoundly intermingled to demonstrate us the brotherhood of man will be always capable to surmount these remarkable conceptual differences.

The wonderful and exquisite camerawork of this genius is admirable and mesmerizing. Austerity and the employment of the white color as synonymous of absolute reference represents at the same time, the color of life and death.

As Andre Bazin, smartly states in his famous essay: "The cruelty's cinema" this movie is the last exponent of the genre of black and white pictures, that closes all the previous gates.

It's absolutely impossible for any movie' lover, to do without to watch this sidereal masterpiece.