PARTISAN REVIEW
is
accomplished by the manipulation of lighting. And
~henever
the
aesthetic image does not come into direct conflict with the dramatic
structure, it can still take on some of the purity and completeness of the
earlier scenes-for example, in the procession of choir boys at the pas–
tor's funeral-except that now the image is felt as an interruption of the
action.
At bottom, the film is an aesthetic paradox: out of the pure and
enclosed image Dreyer creates a sort of "pure drama," in which the
point of conflict is precisely the exclusion of drama; but
this
in turn
creates a tension that the image alone cannot resolve; the dramatic
nature of the medium must reassert itself in the later portions of the
film, and Dreyer is involved again in the initial contradiction.
Robert Warshow
1340
