Introduction: Michael Wedel

Entire plot situations, image and character arrangements in Briel's Like Two Cheerful Airshipmen seem to have sprung as direct doubles and doppelgangers from Dreyer's paradigmatic horror film, in which dream and reality constantly interpenetrate in expressive imagery. In both films, we enter "a liminal space where reality and imagination, living and dead, intertwine, the imaginary becomes real and reality becomes imaginary, the living is dead and the dead is alive" (Michael Wedel).