Dies irae

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.

Just borrowing a phrase with my summary, and not trying to trivialize "Day Of Wrath", an extraordinarily powerful film. I think we in the States are not used to films as masterfully done and as impactful as this one.

In the 17th century - Europe as well as in the States - witchcraft and witch hunts were all the rage, an age of ignorance during the Age Of Enlightment. How quaint and simplistic a notion that someone could be a witch just by anothers accusation! Director Carl Dreyer brings this idea home to us in this methodical masterpiece in harrowing detail. His story centers on a young Danish woman who goes from mouse-wife to temptress to doomed heroine. She is surrounded throughout the picture by hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness and in the end she succumbs to Christian ideals, the same ones she had been struggling to suppress for most of the picture.

You can watch until your eyes drop out and you won't find a scene not executed to perfection in all departments. I am not familiar with the actors but they were outstanding down to the smallest part. The pacing, like a Bergman film, is slow and deliberate, much the same way it would have been lived out in the 1600's. The Inquisition-type scene involving the old accused woman is even slower still, making the scene all the more horrifying, even though the torture is in the viewers mind and not on screen. Note how slowly the camera pans around the chamber of judges.

There are so many scenes worth mentioning, but it's best to see the picture for yourself if you haven't. It is an unforgettable treatment of nasty, unsavory material.

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.

Dreyer's pictures are absolutely mind-boggling .We seem to be in a Rembrandt's or Georges de la Tour's painting.He works with his camera the way a painter does with light to create different textures ,highlights and shadows.The scenes inside the minister's house where the world is still the prey of the good/evil concept are in direct contrast to those ,luminous and pastoral,where the lovers try to reinvent life:some kind of Garden of Eden,which the apple tree on the picture has promised.

Anne's passion was doomed from the start:her situation recalls that of Phaedra:both are pure even in sin,both are victims of an implacable heredity.Even before Martin's appearance ,the over-possessive mother leaves her no chance at all.

Remarkable sequences: the old woman's "trial",her tortures,her screams (I'm not afraid of Heaven or Hell ,I'm afraid to die!" Her death at the stake ,with Ann looking through the window pane ,and realizing it's an omen.The children singing terrifying canticles about God's wrath.

The minister beginning to wonder if his faith is strong enough and the wife's infamous revelation.

The nature which was a refuge, the only sunlight the lovers could get,becomes misty ,almost dark,as the young man has lost all his hopes and illusions."No,Ann says ,it all begins" It's the seventeenth century and Ann is too ahead of her time.She and the old woman are the real human beings in the movie:the minister and his sinister mother are already dead when the film begins as much as the dying man he comforts in his last hour .Martin has got himself tangled up in remorse,superstitions (You've got a magic power) and if life means rebellion and fight ,his surrender leaves him a living dead.

The old woman ,the "witch" ,is afraid to die,which is human:Jeanne D'Arc herself,another "witch" which inspired CT Dreyer had her moments of doubt and fear,and she abjured to save her life .

"Vredens Dag" can still grab today's audience.This is a must.

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.