Index cards and indexicality: Carl Th. Dreyer and the historical (unmade) film
In the Carl Th. Dreyer Archive at the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen, a large cupboard is given over to a substantial library of books about sixteenth-century Scotland. This incongruous presence in the archive of Denmark’s greatest auteur constitutes one trace of a film project Dreyer never managed to bring to the screen: Maria Stuart, or Mary, Queen of Scots. Though it is his unrealised film on the life of Jesus that often appears on the ubiquitous lists of ‘the greatest films never made’, Dreyer spent twenty years researching the life and times of the Scottish queen, and penned a screenplay for what would have been a three-hour epic. Like the cabinet of tomes on Napoleon displayed at recent Stanley Kubrick exhibitions, Dreyer’s history books poignantly testify to the intellectual labour underpinning such projects. However, expanding my previous research on Maria Stuart, this paper treats Dreyer’s library as more than just archival paraphernalia or exhibition fodder. Dreyer was trained as an archivist and accomplished as an amateur historian. His working method when crafting a film involved distilling typed passages from historical sources onto index cards, which in turn were filed in thematically labelled envelopes. Reconstructing the transition from screenplay to card to book and thus offering a fine-grained analysis of Dreyer’s creative process, I will also assess his practice as historian and archivist against the claims of Kracauer and others about Dreyer’s distinctive approach to historical representation, and Dreyer’s own pronouncements on film and history.
Unmade, Unfinished, Unseen: Shadow Histories of Cinema and Television 