I'll agree on Day of Wrath, but The Passion of Joan of Arc seems both politically and spiritually protestant- politically, the institution it is critiquing is the Catholic Church, and the spiritual struggle is Joan submitting to her own conscience regarding her own personal religious belief vs. submitting to the corporate belief of the church.Drucker wrote:Solaris, I'm not a religion expert by any means (lapsed/atheist/Jew), and Ordet happens to be the Dreyer film I have seen least recently, but Day Of Wrath and Passion of Joan of Arc are incredibly critical of religion and religious authority figures, and should at the very least think of those if you are taking into account what might be Dreyer's beliefs.
Personally, I'd argue Dreyer's sense of spirituality certainly transcends and goes beyond the ideas of any one faith.
As to your last point regarding his sense of spirituality- I agree that his sense of spirituality has a universal appeal. I feel this way also about Tarkovsky's sense of spirituality, and Malick's, and honestly any worthwhile spiritual filmmaker or artist in general. Which brings us back to the earlier subject of the movie "God's Not Dead," and how it was a movie made to preach to the choir, only made to appeal to and reassure American evangelicals. It brings to mind for me GK Chesterton's praise of William Blake. (Forgive the wall of text.)
However, I do still think it is worthwhile to understand the roots of the spirituality presented in a film. There are aspects that are universal to different streams of spirituality, and there are aspects that are not. There are philosophical differences between the concept of Christians worshiping a triune godhead through a named deity who physically incarnated, vs. Jews worshiping an unnameable invisible and indivisible deity, vs. Buddhists who are nontheistic, vs. Jainists who are specifically atheistic.GK Chesterton wrote:It is worth while to describe this quarrel between Blake and Stothard, because it is really a symbolic quarrel, interesting to the whole world of artists and important to the whole destiny of art. It is the quarrel between the artist who is a poet and the artist who is only a painter. In many of his merely technical designs Blake was a better and bolder artist than Stothard; still, I should admit, and most people who saw the two pictures would be ready to admit, that Stothard's Canterbury Pilgrims as a mere piece of drawing and painting is better than Blake's. But this if anything only makes the whole argument more certain. It is the duel between the artist who wishes only to be an artist and the artist who has the higher and harder ambition to be a man—that is, an archangel. Or, again, it might be put thus: whether an artist ought to be a universalist or whether he is better as a specialist. Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never offered. People say that specialists are inhuman; but that is unjust. People say an expert is not a man; but that is unkind and untrue. The real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much of an ordinary man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is quite casually ignorant.