The President

A woman accused of killing her child comes before the judge Karl Victor von Sendlingen. She is his daughter, from a relationship he abandoned years ago. He has to sit in judgment on the law and on his own past at once. The film is not interested in the murder trial. It is interested in the same mistake repeating across generations: three of them are linked here, and each time the woman who is seduced and left stands in the same place. The form works to avoid the usual theatrical decor of silent cinema. Plain walls, empty space and shots that hold on faces are an early version of the bareness we recognise in Dreyer's later films. This is Carl Theodor Dreyer's first film as a director. He wrote the script, took great care over the casting and designed all the interior sets himself. Before directing he had spent seven years at Nordisk as a screenwriter and editor, and the company gave him complete artistic freedom on his first film. The source is Karl Emil Franzos's 1884 novel Der Präsident. It was released on 1 February 1919. Who it is for: viewers interested in silent cinema and in where Dreyer began. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the intensity of his mature work. Melodrama dominates here and the coincidences look far too convenient now.