A Film Canon

This haunting film presents the covert appreciation of young male beauty as the supreme aesthetic experience, if only because it necessitates deflecting consummation into contemplation, thereby imbuing the sensual and sexual exchanges that constellate around it with the breathless, unquenchable eroticism of an open secret. To this end, Dreyer and cinematographer Karl Freund elevate skin to such a shimmering pitch as to seem capable of registering the eye's passage across it; or, alternatively, of detaching itself from the body to hang in the vacuum between two loving pairs of eyes, continuous with the canvas, marble busts, and painted nude across which their cipher - an aging artist's spotlight - wavers. From this perspective, the film's central erotic exchange takes place as an elegant love triangle between three gazes - that of the artist (Benjamin Christensen), his young model, Michael (Walter Slezak) and the Princess (Nora Gregor) that Michael loves - culminating with a session in which the Princess poses, the artist paints, but only Michael can fill in the eyes; that is, the ocular answer to the Swan Lake choreography that follows.