This dissertation sets out to reflect on the relation between subject and lan-guage based on the work of the Danish film-maker Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968). It critically reviews the strategies of interpretation that characterize previ-ous approaches to his work and subsequently analyzes the discursive violence and performatic force of the language employed in his films (fourteen full-length fic-tion films consisting of 9 silent movies and 5 talkies). While remaining within the bounds of a limpid form of narration, Dreyer s cinema continually explored the problem of man as a talking animal that risks its own life and destiny through lan-guage. Underneath the heterodoxy of styles and the variety of themes and epochs portrayed in his films, Dreyer insistently focuses on the missed encounter between body and word. The dissertation situates his filmography at the point where cine-ma transitioned from silent to the talking mode, a moment often seen as a tech-nical and aesthetic advance, which ended up further concealing the subject/word and body/voice disjunction. It focuses on film situations in which the characters perform deeds in words – such as taking oaths and making curses and promises. These analyses are studied borrowing notions of the sacrament of language (Giorgio Agamben) and acts of truth (Michel Foucault). In his very first film, The President, oath-taking is already a crucial event. Reappearing in the form of a broken promise in The Bride of Glomdal, this grows more complex in The Passion of Jeanne D Arc, his last silent movie. Such speech acts show that language transparency, which is empirically impossible, is persistently sought by means of power techniques designed to ensure that act and word correspond faithfully, thus setting roots for language in these uncontrollable bodies, which are an endless sources of confusion, perjury and lie. The autonomous, though complementary chapters of the dissertation allow for multiple directions and sequences of reading.