RetroClips

Master of the House is Dreyer at his most disciplined: nearly the entire film unfolds inside one cramped Copenhagen apartment, and he insisted on building it as a real, fully wired flat rather than a set, so his actors could move through it the way people actually move through a home they have lived in for years. The film's real subject is housework itself, filmed with the same patient attention Dreyer would later bring to Falconetti's face in The Passion of Joan of Arc, and it was a massive hit in Denmark precisely because audiences recognized the unglamorous domestic labor nobody else was bothering to point a camera at.