Thursday, February 28, 2008

Ordet

Last night, when I came back from my class, I was watching the film Ordet, a 1955 Danish film directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and based on a play by Kaj Munk. The film is about a very religious farming family in rural Denmark. However, the farmer is having problems with his three adult sons: The eldest, Mikkel, is an atheist, the youngest, Anders, wants to marry the daughter of his father's arch enemy (the two fathers disagree on religion) and the middle son, Johannes, thinks he's Jesus. The family spend most of their time sitting around, discussing religion and drinking endless cups of coffee. Eventually Mikkel's wife gets sick and dies. Johannes tries to bring her back to life and fails, so he leaves. However he comes back on the day of the funeral to try again. The title of the film is Danish for "Word". It's a very powerful, very slow and very serious film. Dreyer was very religious himself and that really comes across in the film. Everything is filmed beautifully.

Today at work was really quiet. Today I was being trained on a new type of work, so at least it meant a fairly easy day. We had to mark down on a chart any weeks we might want off from now until November, because they are trying some other training thing. The thing is that I pretty much just had to guess the weeks that I would want off, because I had absolutely no idea.

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