The European Principle: Art and Border-Crossings in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Career

Carl Th. Dreyer is usually framed as a national auteur, but several of his canonical and less well-known films were produced in France, Germany, Sweden and elsewhere. This chapter takes as its starting point a 1931 interview with Dreyer, in which he distinguishes sharply between an American principle of filmmaking focused on the efficient manufacture of entertainment, and a European one focused on individual artistic expression. Dreyer's career is then discussed in terms of how this idealised principle found expression in practice across the various European film industries where he worked. A guiding concept in the chapter is ‘entangled history’ or histoire croisée, which stresses the interconnectedness of historical actors, events, documents, and other phenomena beyond the national, problematising the concept of national cinema.