Silent Era : Home Video Reviews

Silent Era Home Page > Home Video > Præsidenten

Reviews of silent film releases on home video.
Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett
and the Silent Era Company.
All Rights Reserved.

Præsidenten
[The President]
(1919)

This premiere directorial effort by Carl Theodor Dreyer stars Halvard Hof and Edith Pio, with support from Carl Meyer, Jacoba Jensen, Olga Raphael-Linden Betty Kirkeby and Jon Iversen. Adapted from a novel by Karl Emil Franzos.

Danish Film Institute
2004 DVD edition

Præsidenten [The President] (1919), color-tinted black & white, 89 minutes, not rated, with Penge (1915) [fragment], black & white, 1 minute, not rated.

Danish Film Institute, distributed by Edition Filmmuseum,
DFICTHD, no UPC number.
One single-sided, single-layered, Region 0 PAL DVD disc; 1.33:1 aspect ratio picture in full-frame 4:3 (720 x 576 pixels) interlaced scan image encoded in SDR MPEG-2 format at 6.0 Mbps average video bit rate (capable of progressive scan upscaling to ? fps); Dolby Digital (AC3) 2.0 stereo sound encoded at 192 Kbps audio bit rate; Danish and English language intertitles, optional English language subtitles; chapter stops; standard DVD keepcase; DKK 159,00 (€19,95).
Release date: 2004
Country of origin: Denmark •

Ratings (1-10): video: 7 / audio: 8 / additional content: 7 / overall: 7.

This early film by Carl Theodor Dreyer has been released on PAL DVD by the Danish Film Institute. The disc has been mastered at 17fps running speed from the 1999 restoration fine-grain duplicate negative copied from the original nitrate negative and supervised by historian Marguerite Engberg.

The film is accompanied by a music score performed on piano by Ronen Thalmay.

Recommended. North American collectors will need a region-free PAL DVD player capable of outputting an NTSC-compatible signal to view this edition.

This Region 0 PAL DVD edition is available directly from . . .