Raffaele Chiarulli

In the Beginning Was the Word Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Jesus. The Italian Path of a Screenplay

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy

Movies that were planned but never made are a wide and ever-expanding field of academic
research, leading to the discovery of lost or hidden fascinating stories (Fenwick, Foster, Eldridge
2020). This branch most certainly entangles with Screenwriting studies, as to the recovery and the
value appreciation of the screenwriters’ creative work. These two sectors argue the History of Film
should fully include movies which never made it to the screen, too. In fact, just as we understand a
director’s poetics also thanks to the movies he wished he had directed, we can evaluate a
screenwriter’s work thanks to the pages he wrote, whether they turned into moving images or not.
Especially in case a script has been published, it is possible to analyse screenwriting as an autonomous practice and art form, even though it skipped the production stage. For instance, non-produced scripts have sometimes been published, so they can be read as if they were theatre plays (The Little Prince by Orson Welles, San Paolo by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Proust by Harold Pinter). Other times they found their way into being radio adaptations or audiobooks (Gatiss 2024).

This paper will look into Carl Theodor Dreyer’s and his script about Jesus of Nazareth case, along
with the resonance it had in Italy. As early as the 30s, the great Danish director conceived of a movie about Jesus. His purpose strengthened throughout the Nazi occupation of Denmark, with a suggestive equalization between the ancient Roman dominators and the evil present-day invaders. Dreyer wrote a meticulous and constantly redrafted script, until he signed a contract with American producer Blevins Davis after the war. Davis was an unreliable figure: the director was at the entrepreneur’s mercy, while the script remained on paper. After sixteen years of uninterrupted rescheduling, in 1967 Dreyer finally got free and accepted to direct the movie for Italian television.

He worked again on the script, but died the following year, without being able to realize his most ambitious project. Some important documents are left about his agreement with RAI: these are two versions of the script, both published in Italy at a distance of years from each other (in 1969 and 2023), along with a once forgotten radio adaptation (1976), later found in the Rai Teche archive. They testify to how a script can keep living and rise again many times, despite not having been turned into a movie.

Raffaele Chiarulli, PhD, is research fellow in Philosophy and Theory of Languages at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan), where he teaches Audiovisual Languages and Contemporary Italian Cinema. He wrote Di scena a Hollywood. L’adattamento dal teatro nel cinema americano classico (Staged in Hollywood. Adaptation from Stage to Film in Classical American Cinema; Milan 2013) and Social Movies. Dal cinema digitale al cinema del sociale (Social Movies. From Digital Cinema to Social Cinema; Milan 2015). Along with Armando Fumagalli, he edited a commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics for screenwriters (Rome 2018) as well as, both with Armando Fumagalli and Eva Novrup Redvall, The Children are Watching Us. Exploring Audiovisual Content for Children, monographic issue of the Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies (Milan 2023). In 2021, he won the SRN Award for Best Journal Article.