Benjamin Christensen

[HerrSchreck]

Benjamin Christensen (1879 - 1959)

"..like any other artist (the director) should reveal his own individuality in his own work."

Benjamin Christensen

"(Christensen) was a man who knew exactly what he wanted and who pursued his goal with uncompromising stubbornness."
- Carl Th. Dreyer

Filmography

Films as director:

Damen med de lyse Handsker (1942)
... aka Lady with the Light Gloves (English title)

GÃ¥ med mig hjem (1941)
... aka Come Home with Me (English title)

Barnet (1940)
... aka The Child (English title)

Skilsmissens børn (1939)
... aka Children of Divorce (English title)

The Mysterious Island (1929) (uncredited)

Seven Footprints to Satan (1929)

The Haunted House (1928)

The Hawk's Nest (1928)

Mockery (1927)

The Devil's Circus (1926)

Frau mit dem schlechten Ruf, Die (1925)
... aka The Woman Who Did (UK)

Seine Frau, die Unbekannte (1923)

Häxan (1922) R1 Criterion
... aka The Witches (USA)

Hævnens nat (1916) Danish Film Institute double feature with Mysterious X
... aka Blind Justice (USA)

Hemmelighedsfulde X, Det (1914) Danish Film Institute double feature with Blind Justice
... aka Sealed Orders
... aka The Mysterious X (USA)

Films as actor:

Michael (1924) .... Claude Zoret

Häxan (1922) .... Djævlen / The Devil

Hævnens nat (1916) (as Benjmain Christie) .... Strong Henry/Strong John Sikes (US version)

Hemmelighedsfulde X, Det (1914) .... Løjtnant van Hauen

Skæbnebæltet (1911) .... Ravaud, blind organist

More to come..

[zedz]

Cue unpaid plug for that absolutely essential DFI disc of the first two films. Sealed Orders is amazing for its time; Blind Justice is just plain amazing.

His post-Haxan work is a complete blank for me. Has anybody encountered those later films? How many even survive?

[lubitsch]

Cue unpaid plug for that absolutely essential DFI disc of the first two films. Sealed Orders is amazing for its time; Blind Justice is just plain amazing.

His post-Haxan work is a complete blank for me. Has anybody encountered those later films? How many even survive?

SEVEN FOOTPRINTS is an old dark house thriller of the nuttiest kind driven towards parody. And that goes for the whole of Christensen's work: He's an utterly amazingly inventive director who has no peers in 1914 if we're talking about film language, but in all films you have the feeling that he enjoys making trash and doesn't take himself seriously. It's a similar experience to watching Gance film, two brilliant formalists, but one thinks he's the teller of the greatest stories ever told while the other doesn't care what he's telling. A fascinating, but also frustrating experience.

[Danny Burk]

Cue unpaid plug for that absolutely essential DFI disc of the first two films. Sealed Orders is amazing for its time; Blind Justice is just plain amazing.

His post-Haxan work is a complete blank for me. Has anybody encountered those later films? How many even survive?

I agree with lubitsch's comments on SEVEN FOOTPRINTS. I've always considered MOCKERY the weakest of the MGM Chaney films (even more so than WHERE EAST IS EAST); expecting something creative or at least interesting, it was a total letdown. It has a very short running time (under an hour) but didn't strike me as incomplete.

I haven't seen DEVIL'S CIRCUS in ages, but I remember it as being somewhat better than MOCKERY. Of the others, HAUNTED HOUSE and HAWK'S NEST are both lost. MYSTERIOUS ISLAND plays regularly on TCM; it's rather a mess, but unfortunate that the lengthy two-color Tech scenes only exist in b&w.

[HerrSchreck]

Cue unpaid plug for that absolutely essential DFI disc of the first two films. Sealed Orders is amazing for its time; Blind Justice is just plain amazing.

His post-Haxan work is a complete blank for me. Has anybody encountered those later films? How many even survive?

SEVEN FOOTPRINTS is an old dark house thriller of the nuttiest kind driven towards parody. And that goes for the whole of Christensen's work: He's an utterly amazingly inventive director who has no peers in 1914 if we're talking about film language.

SEVEN FOOTPRINTS is indeed a blast, and yes zedz is absolutely correct, if you're even remotely interested in the erly development of silent film language the first Christensens-- and their presentation on the wonderful DFI double feature-- is essential. The second half of the man's career is incredibly anticlimactic, considering his first three blazing masterpieces.

I'd qualify Lubitsch's statement that Christensen had no peers in 1914-- I find Yevgeni Bauer far more impressive in terms of story development, camera movement, and geenral mise en scene. Whereas the performance in early Christensen is a bit stagebound and stodgy, Bauer is naturalistic, with stories of a fully avant garde decadence that anticipates von Sternbers Deitrich films by two decades.

Although Christensen's obsession with and use of single source lighting and chiaroscuro is singular, it has nothing on Bauer.

[HerrSchreck]

I just recently caught a restored print of Chaney-Christensens MOCKERY. . . and came away impressed, not by the direction,but by Chaneys infinitely colorful performance.

In many ways this is familiar emotional territory for Chaney. . broken hearted man sufferrs in silence in the shadow of the beloved. Yet at the same time the part is a moderately unusual one for Chaney. He plays an emotionally and psychologically stunted peasant in revolutionary era Russia. Despite the disappointingly flat and uninspired direction, Chaney embellishes his character with such charismatic color and pathos that one can't help but being roped in by the peculiar vividness of the performance.

For Chaney fans the film is an absolute must see . . less so for those seeking to investigate the usually astounding talents of Benjamin Christensen.

[whaleallright]

n/a

[JPJ]

Interesting trivia jonah.77.Maybe they were both busy operating their movie theaters?