Danish cinematographer Henning Bendtsen—whose career stretched from the 1940s to 1991, with his final film, Lars von Trier’s Europa_—has died at the age of eighty-five. Bendtsen is best known, perhaps, for the transcendent images he created with director Carl Theodor Dreyer on the films Ordet_ (1955) and Gertrud (1964). For the former, he devised what we believe to be one of the greatest shots in cinema history: a late-film, almost three-minute pan around the possibly mad character Johannes and his niece, Marren, fearful of her mother’s death. Though the camera doesn’t for a moment stop its slow rotation around the two of them, we never see their backs; they are evidently subtly rotating along with the camera. Jonathan Rosenbaum has called this scene “a miracle of its own, expressed through an ‘impossible’ mise-en-scène.”
Z. Bart
From Criterion site:
Danish cinematographer Henning Bendtsen—whose career stretched from the 1940s to 1991, with his final film, Lars von Trier’s Europa_—has died at the age of eighty-five. Bendtsen is best known, perhaps, for the transcendent images he created with director Carl Theodor Dreyer on the films Ordet_ (1955) and Gertrud (1964). For the former, he devised what we believe to be one of the greatest shots in cinema history: a late-film, almost three-minute pan around the possibly mad character Johannes and his niece, Marren, fearful of her mother’s death. Though the camera doesn’t for a moment stop its slow rotation around the two of them, we never see their backs; they are evidently subtly rotating along with the camera. Jonathan Rosenbaum has called this scene “a miracle of its own, expressed through an ‘impossible’ mise-en-scène.”