Looking back at Du skal ære din hustru in 1939, Dreyer described it as “a microscopic recording of the triv­ial day-to-day existence lived by thou­sands of people in the big city”. He thus emphasises the film’s realism, lack of glamour, and urban setting, which were indeed unusual at the time. He calls it a Kammerspiel, a chamber play, and the film’s intimate, careful staging is re­markable. Set almost entirely in a small, two-room apartment, the film centres on just a few characters, all portrayed with gentle humour and generous sym­pathy. Dreyer adapted a popular stage comedy called Tyrannes fald; in doing so, he eliminated several major charac­ters and subplots, making the humour more subtle.

The set (designed by Dreyer himself) is supposedly an exact replica of a real apartment. The walls could be moved to allow the camera to be placed on any side of the actors. Dreyer builds a carefully constructed web of point-of-view shots, medium shots and close-ups, cutting at a fast pace unusual for a Danish film of this period. The central theme is the hus­band’s inability to see his wife’s devoted self-sacrifice, hence it is significant that the film is always showing us what the various characters see (or don’t see) and how they react.

The film was produced by Palladium and was distributed internationally. It was particularly popular in France (four original prints survive in French archives), and its success there led to a job offer for Dreyer, who after giving up on various other projects would eventu­ally make The Passion of Joan d’Arc (1928).

The print shown has English-lan­guage titles based on the original ex­port version, which gives the characters the almost-symbolic everyman names of “John” and “Mary” rather than the less weighted “Victor” and “Ida” of the Danish-language original. The intro­ductory titles are also quite different – less silly and moralising – in the Danish original.

Casper Tybjerg