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Dreyer, UFA, 1924, from Herman Bang. An aging painter, Claude Zoret (Benjamin Christensen), loves his model and adopted son Michael (Walter Slezak); a princess takes the boy away. Karl Freund photographed the studios and the sale of the pictures. Christensen, who had just made Häxan, plays the artist as a man who keeps working after the room empties. Weimar will file it with other queer melodramas; Dreyer shoots it as a household losing its center. Bang's novel is the source, not a hint.
In two programmes
Dreyer in Berlin with Freund on camera, and the household is the landscape. An old painter loses his model to a princess and keeps painting. Christensen, fresh from playing the Devil, plays the artist. The last title is not a twist. It is a man deciding what his life was.
Wanting between an aging painter and the young man he adopted, played without a lecture. Dreyer keeps it in the studio and the household. Christensen paints on while the room empties. Watch who pays: the master, in a last title that decides what his life was.
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