The Danish Village Church (S)

Landsbykirken [The Village Church] is a documentary on the 800 year old Danish village churches. Landsbykirken was made as an educational movie. It was therefore constructed to be very pedagogical so it looks a little formalistic. The movie starts out with a short introduction to the Danish village churches. Then comes a series of scenes showing the evolution of the village churches and their use during the ages. The series comes to an end together with the movie when the present day [1947] is reached. Some scenes also contain shabby "historical" reenactments of the use of the churches. The costumes for some of these masquerades were also used in Dreyer's earlier feature film "Vredens Dag" [Day of Wrath]. There is one Swedish wooden church in the movie, but the rest of the shown churches are from locations in Denmark.