Apart from a single exterior scene, the entire story is set in a two-room apartment (including a couple of scenes in the building’s attic and laundry cellar). Dreyer personally took charge of the sets and constructed the apartment in a Palladium studio, perfectly recreating an apartment from Copenhagen’s Christianshavn district, replete with running water, electric lights and real fire in the stove.
According to the director (Drouzy, 1982), at no point in the interior scenes did the distance between the camera and what it filmed exceed four meters. As Dreyer said, the important thing was to depict "a microscopic shot of the trivial everyday lives lived by thousands of people in the city."
The film was shot from 21 March to 15 July 1925, two weeks less than scheduled. In an interview made while he was shooting Joan of Arc in Paris, Dreyer says that Master of the House cost 78,000 kroner (B.T., 13 Apr. 1928).
By Lisbeth Richter Larsen | 03. June