The President

Carl Theodor Dreyer's first feature, 1919, Nordisk: a judge (Halvard Hoff) must try his own illegitimate daughter for infanticide. From a play by Karl Emil Franzos. Denmark, just after the war. Dreyer is already cutting faces as if they were verdicts. The old man, the girl, the past that is a legal document. It is not The Passion of Joan of Arc. It is the film in which he learned that a courtroom is a close-up.