“1918 was the year of the directorial debut of the man, who was to become the greatest international name in Danish film. The journalist and balloon navigator Carl Th. Dreyer had then worked For Nordisk Films Kompagni for six years first as a script consultant and writer of intertitles, then as a scriptwriter. He had worked on some twenty project and also tried his hand at editing. So when he suggested that he would also like to try directing, it didn’t cause a lot of fuss. The debut was The President based on a novel from the 1850’s by the Austrian writer Karl Emil Franzos. Dreyer had worked on the script and had cut away all the political and social material from the novel, which dealt quite a lot with class structure and the political situation in Austria. What interested Dreyer was the story of men, three men of different generations, failing to fulfill their responsibility toward women of another class bearing their child. At the center of the story is a judge in a dilemma about whether to save his honourable name and social position or his illigitimate daughter who is to be prosecuted for having murdered her own illigitimate infant child.
The film has always been a part of the Dreyer collection of the Danish Film Institute/ Archive & Cinematheque the formerly Danish Film Museum. But the archive’s prints made in the fifties from the original negative is in black and white. We know, that Nordisk Film since 1907 released its films in tinted versions and that the company had a method for marking the different colours. Many of those indications were lost during the restoration in the fifties. In 1998 the archive and the Danish film historian Marguerite Engberg decided to try to reconstruct a tinted version. The negative, edited in the fifties, was used together with the intertitles, the manuscript and a partly survived script for the editing. The 224 takes were registered and spaces for the 116 intertitles marked. For reconstructing the tinting the editing script was used. It contained information about the different takes from which it was possible to conclude as to which takes were to have the same tinting. The indications were compared to previous experiences with tinting from Nordisk Films Kompagni.
The restoration was finished February 1999 and presented for the first time at a festival in Copenhagen same month. The intertitles are in Danish and English made for this print”. (Dan Nissen)