Dreyer was not an unwavering formalist; he did not define a single style throughout his career….

Each of Dreyer's individual film "styles" is, to be more accurate, a synthesis between three basic and opposing styles at work in his films. In his study of Dreyer, Claude Perrin notes two of these opposing forces. "In order to define Dreyer's aesthetic," he writes, "one must confront two opposing artistic schools: the Kammerspiel and expressionism." Perrin goes on to demonstrate how the tension between these "schools" underlies all of Dreyer's work. This tension, to be sure, is integral to Dreyer's films, but, it seems to me, it is unable to account for that peculiar, "spiritual" quality Perrin and others ascribe to his work. A "fundamental opposition" between Kammerspiel and expressionism was a consistent stylistic feature of the early German cinema, as Lotte Eisner points out; yet none of the German films evoke a world of transcendent values in the way Dreyer's films do. There is, I suggest, another force—transcendental style—which interacts with both Kammerspiel and expressionism in Dreyer's films, and brings them each a certain spiritual weight which they do not innately possess. Of the three "styles," Kammerspiel is the artistic raw material of Dreyer's films; expressionism and transcendental style act upon and distort that material, turning it to their own ends. (p. 113)

The interplay of these forces, styles, or schools in Dreyer's films may be schematized thus: (1) some films are straight-forward, relatively unhampered Kammerspiel, such as Mikael (1924), Master of the House (Du Skal Aere Din Hustru, 1925), Two People (Tva Manniskor, 1945), Gertrud (1965); (2) in one film, Vampire (Vampyr, 1932), expressionism predominates over Kammerspiel and transcendental style; (3) in another, The Word (Ordet, 1955), transcendental style predominates over Kammerspiel and expressionism; (4) in others, most importantly The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, 1928) and Day of Wrath (Vredans Dag, 1943), expressionism and transcendental style vie for control of the Kammerspiel. (p. 114)

In each of Dreyer's films one can detect elements of Kammerspiele: intimate family drama, fixed interior settings, unembellished sets, long takes emphasizing staging, the use to gesture and facial expression to convey psychological states, plain language, and a thoroughgoing sobriety. Master of the House, for example, contains almost all these elements; its enclosed interiors, its measured pacing, its emphasis on revelatory gesture, all place it within the Kammerspiele tradition. (p. 115)

Vampyr is Dreyer's only exclusively expressionistic film. The expressionism seems to have run away with the Kammerspiel; there is little tension between the two. Both the subject matter (vampires, afterlife) and the techniques (chiaroscuro, exaggerated gesture, nonrealistic sets, rampant fantasy sequences) of Vampyr exhibit a confident appreciation of the strengths of expressionism and a calculated use of its methods. (p. 117)

Like expressionism, transcendental style in Dreyer's films stems from the Kammerspiel and opposes it. But it also opposes expressionism and its right to control the Kammerspiel. (p. 118)

Dreyer's films often feature a character totally estranged from his environment: Joan of Arc, Marthe, the witch in Day of Wrath, John, God's fool in Ordet. As in Bresson's films these characters have no human metaphorical contact with reality, and their effect on the audience is similarly schizoid. To a large degree this disparity is caused by the tension between Kammerspiel (naturalistic settings) and expressionism (contrived camera composition and angle). Such a stylistic tension explains the protagonist's psychological dilemma, but it does not explain that other tension of which Dreyer speaks: "It is that latent tension, that smoldering discomfort behind the minister's family's everyday life that I have so urgently been trying to bring forward." This disparity (the Other within the physical) is the disparity of transcendental style. Dreyer not only creates disparity in the conventional psychological sense by contrasting Kammerspiel and expressionism, but he also creates disparity in the manner of transcendental style by designing a character like John in Ordet who has no psychological (interior or exterior) cause for his estranging passion, a character who is truly the "fool of God." (pp. 119-20)

Dreyer's lack of commitment to the transcendental style becomes most apparent in his failure to achieve stasis. Some of Dreyer's statements ("We hope that film will set ajar for us a door into other worlds") as well as his partial use of everyday and disparity indicate that he genuinely desired to create transcendental art, although the nonstasis endings of his films, as we shall see, suggest other intentions. Whatever Dreyer's true intentions were (and I tend to think they were mixed), he was never able to achieve stasis, the final test of transcendental art, to the extent that Ozu and Bresson did because, it seems to me, he never relied on the transcendental style to the extent that they did. When the final moment of would-be stasis occurred, Dreyer had hedged his bets, leaving elements of Kammerspiel untouched and intertwining expressionism with transcendental style, thereby offering the viewer alternative explanations, spiritual and psychological, for the decisive action.

Like many artists with spiritual intentions Dreyer uses the "frozen image," but it is crucial to ask what he is freezing. Is he freezing the commitment which comes after the decisive action, or is he freezing the disparity itself, creating an endless syndrome of earthly struggle?

Because Dreyer increasingly used elements of transcendental style in his films, one may suggest that he was progressing toward a thesis-antithesis-synthesis/Kammerspiel-expressionism-transcendental style evolution. Although a late Dreyer Kammerspiel film (Gertrud) has more of the ascetic elements of transcendental style than an early one (Master of the House), Dreyer, as far as one can ascertain, rejected complete stasis to the very end of his career. (pp. 120-21)