Vredens dag

Day of Wrath has got to be one of the best movies ever made. It's beautiful to look at, great intriguing witch-hunting story, the filmmaking is impeccable, and it's just plain awesome. It's too bad that not many people know about this little diamond.

Although I'm certainly not religious myself, I do find the subject of religion to be fascinating, yet whenever I see a film about religion, especially old black and white subtitled ones, it tends to be a very torrid viewing for me. This was certainly the case with Ingmar Bergman's 'Winter Light', but not the case with this film; which is actually very good. I went into it with the wrong expectations because my television guide had touted it as a film about witch hunt; which although they feature in the film, that's not what it's about. The film is about loss of faith, and having to choose between what you believe and the people you love. We follow a pastor who has indicted a woman for witchcraft and later has her burnt at the stake. Around the same time, his son has returned and he has inadvertently fallen in love with his father's wife, a woman who is his junior. Much like his earlier 'Passion of the Joan of Ark', Danish genius Carl Theodor Dreyer has created a film rich with religious tones that includes themes of witchcraft and the power of belief. The lighting and way that the atmosphere is built in the film is superb, and it's obvious that a master technician made the film. However, much like Passion of Joan of Ark, and his 1932 film, Vampyr, this film also comes across as being cold - which can make it difficult to like if, like me, you value the story and characters over technical prowess and potent themes. Day of Wrath is certainly not a film for everyone, and people that dislike thought provoking, yet completely style-less pieces of art should steer clear. For everyone else, however, this is most definitely worth a watch.

One of Dreyer's most accessible works; it has a dramatic story (witch hunting!) and still investigates the characters' morality and their relation to the world they exist in. This film is about the difference between life and the soul (the life that you live now and the soul of post-life, and the soul that fills your life as you live it), those at the stake and those on trial in the home, and the spells we cast on each other. When an accused witch confesses to being one to hopefully save her life (which doesn't happen) she threatens with witchery the man who won't save her. Obviously witches don't exist, but why, when sentenced to death, would she suddenly say she has a witch's power? To frighten him? Because she believes that she must be a witch, if others think she is? Or just to scare him? It's not clear. This is Dreyer's most overtly sexual film, where sex is a weapon (that eventually leads to a death); we see the relationship between the young girl, Anne, who falls in love with her much older husband's son (the same actor who played Johannes in Dreyer's next great film, "Ordet"), and, by the end of the film, we see that she has cast her spell on him, and is herself to be accused of being a witch.

Dreyer's films, which got more difficult as he got older, don't seem to have a date; certainly period pieces like this exist in a certain time, but put "Day of Wrath" next to "Gertrud" and you'd hardly notice a twenty year difference -- or few hundred years difference, in terms of the setting. And yet Dreyer's sense of place is almost unmatched, largely because of his simplicity: the costumes seem almost amateur, the acting is theatrical -- not so much in style, but in presentation (the actors seem to have been told where to stand and when). His films exist purely within this world he created, not minding the styles of the day; he's the truest of auteurs. He is also one of the great directors of women, and here elicits excellent performances from his entire cast (keeping in mind the date of production) but especially those of the two mothers in the film, the one who is put to the stake, and the other who is the mother to Anne's much older husband.

Despite the heavy seriousness of the religious beliefs in the film, Dreyer isn't religiously driven. He is driven by the soul, but these films are not the works of a fundamentalist. Dreyer looks at the actions of the characters, which are, at their worst, adultery and murder, and uses them as a moral, spiritual, and personal crisis in which to look for nothing less than meaning in life. 9/10

Dreyer's feature from the 40's (he roughly made one in each of the last four decades of his life) is another example of his unique talent. Day of Wrath is less whitish than other of his films, but the director's trademark lighting is at it best here. The film has elements in common with The Passion f Joan D'Arc, dealing with a powerful leading female and matters of Grace, witchcraft and Puritanism.

Dreyer masters a somehow theatrical plot with pure mise-en-scéne, using constant intercutting between indoor and outdoor spaces. The oppression of the family house, determined by heavy shadows and a mummified environment, is superbly embodied by his actors, all of them complex and full of grey zones, people that hide the most of their performances, and whose deliveries are effective and economic thanks to Dreyer's direction. He seems to direct their eyes only, the barren faces around them becoming a sort of empty canvas. The family and the world surrounding it invoke questions of transcendence that their own fails and temporality contradicts. That temporality is portrayed by an ever-present tick tack of a wall clock. Anne's fall occurs not because of his sin, rather because of her submission to the transcendence of love that seems to be impossible in such a universe, where the possibility of a passion leads inevitably to a Passion, in strictly religious terms.

As in other Dreyer's films, simple actions become memorable moments through the director's portrait and comment of them, like when the young son drinks from Anne's hands like a docile dog or the lovers' kissing behind the grass. A fantastic personal film from one of the most remarkable and coherent filmmakers of all time.

Sure, now it might be difficult to appreciate this for how far it went. We've had Bergman since, Tarkovsky, Haneke most lately, they all begin here. At the time Ozu was still on his way. Bresson had yet to begin. And there's the notion of a Nazi allegory, more likely applied in retrospect, that runs the risk of reducing the work to one convenient reading that simplifies.

So Dreyer was one of the first to arrive, but where to? A world distilled to purity, long quiet utterances of the camera, waxen faces sunken by inward weight, sensuous nature outside contrasted with pious suffering inside the pastor's house.

Contemporary viewers might find all this a bit too musky and too archaic, something fabled from a medieval world, and watch with detached, at best aesthetic interest. But that would be to turn a blind eye to the real engines that power ignorance and delusion all around us, these haven't changed a bit since Dreyer's time or the 1600s.

The film begins and ends with horrible punishment at the hands of a cruel establishment; but it's the unswathing of the soul in that interim space where people are alone with the questions they have about each other that matters. Let the story of religious persecution subside and this is about ordinary people who struggle with what they feel moves them.

A man betrayed his austere god, from his own end, when he allowed a 'witch' to go unpunished so he could take her beautiful daughter for a wife. The film begins with the wrongdoing appearing again around him. Another woman rumored to be a witch is apprehended and begs for the same forgiveness. That's on the same day as his son is coming to visit and meets a stepmother his own age.

From her own end, she has been locked in a suffocating household and loveless marriage, the young man before her is everything a woman her age would pine for. We have that life take shape as a hushed love affair, it begins with a lacy image of a woman and a boy holding hands that she stitches, then a promenade out in nature that envelops and sways with the promise.

Bergman would lengthen the monologues into articulate introspection, overbearingly so, Tarkovsky would take these same long pans of the camera, set the cut further back and seep with them in and out of dreams and consciousness. Dreyer sweats out the angst with the same stoic forbearance throughout; words are measured, flows are austere. Self is not penetrated here then, by way of words or camera, we infer opaquely from the outside. It will depend on the viewer if he finds all this hypnotic or oppressive; me, I favor cessation when it leads to realization.

So the household is devastated by the discovery, someone has fallen to die, love is now tainted and sinking. That's the dramatic turn of events, presbyterian. Questions I find immensely more interesting, quite apart from anything about religious persecution, is what is taking place inside these people?

He reserves bitter irony for the end, now she resigns to being the character in a wretched story shaped by idiots, but points also to this fickleness to make ourselves known, to our own selves first; it seems like he was ready to love to the end, a potentially happy life ahead of them, but at the last moment he steps on the accusing side of the room. Truth sunk by belief in a story about evil powers. Does he truly believe it, does he conveniently extricate himself? It's the same delusion either way.