[There] is no film-maker more rudimentary than Dreyer. Unqualified to lay down the law or to pressurise in any way, Dreyer makes talking pictures considered and reconsidered strictly subject to the means he employs or, if you prefer, the elements on which they are founded.

Each new film is not approached as an isolated venture having only distant resemblances to past experiences, but as a voyage of discovery constantly penetrating deeper, an investigation that constantly becomes more exacting. Dreyer exhausts the resources of his own vocabulary, working his material until all resistance is overcome and he contrives to mould the scant and stubborn forces with which he set out and to which he limits himself. For what Dreyer accepts, or to be more precise acquires, is a refusal to resort to the appurtenances, details, incidental hurdles, external flourishes and irrelevant variations, the whole gamut of effects offered by...