Day of Wrath

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.

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 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.

Carl Theodor Dreyer, as I can figure from seeing just a few of his films, is consistently the director to get me feeling extremely emotional. This one, Day of Wrath, and especially his quintessential The Passion of Joan of Arc, somehow got me to the point of tears. Not to the point of stopping the film(s) to sob, but in feeling such a strong, endearing connection to the characters (through the actor(s) playing them) through the doomed feeling over the films that got to me. Films dealing with questions of faith and religion have fascinated me for a while from the likes of Bergman, Bunuel and even Scorsese, but Dreyer taps particularly well into the plights of those to be sacrificed in the name of 'the Lord'. At times I tried to put aside my own feelings about God and religion and the like, yet it kept on sort of dragging in along with it. By getting right up into the stink-pit of hypocrisy and sheer, un-wielding judgment that religion casts upon people (in the two main cases I've seen from him women), it speaks past the realm of a religious fable and goes into the realm of the universal. Day of Wrath is as much a story of witch-hunting as it is of the doom of the outsider, of what a soul who is circumspect in centuries before would be put down as if on complete call from high. Conscience from within, who knows.

Dreyer centers his story circa 17th century Denmark around Bishop Absalom (Alber Hoeberg, in a mostly haunted performance), his mother, his son Martin, and his recent wife Anne (Lisbeth Movin, not quite the face of Falconetti, but still stands powerful on its own). The Bishop deals with questions of faith, but more-so his own feelings of possible death and dread, following the catching and sacrificing of Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier). There is an affair between son and wife, which leads to another incredible turning point, not the least without the suspicious, un-bending old mother. Dreyer deals with the story of this family very simply and delicately, yet with a certain razor's edge that you know may be coming around the bend. Like in the times he filmed this, circa Nazi-Germany dominated world war 2, it's hardly the safest, especially to those who don't conform to certain ways. And then it all leads back to God, and love, or lack thereof.

Dreyer strikes very early on with the emotional powerhouse moments. Svierkier was the perfect choice to play the part of Herlofs Marte. Such humanity comes through her performance, as an old woman who says outright that she's not a witch ("I don't fear Heaven or Hell, I fear only Death"), is given the brush-off by the Bishop despite her pleas. Like with 'Passion', Dreyer ends up getting far more of a moving scene involving the torture of another person just by the mere suggestion of it, a hint even. He does it with audio this time, as opposed to a montage of images, and it's just as effective (a camera pans across a room of the Church's watchers, so to speak). While it's arguable if the scenes involving her are the most arresting emotionally- the plight of the everyday folk- the latter scenes bringing to a head the tragedy of Absalom, Martin, and Anne, doesn't lose its strength either.

This is kept up by Dreyer almost in spite of itself. He and his cameraman Karl Andersson keep a deliberate pacing in the film, a kind of aesthetic in tune likely with his silent-film days. It's a story not rushed at all, and gives some of the most beautiful shots in any of his films; the scenes of Martin and Anne by the riverside, in complete silhouette; the constant usage of medium shots still capturing the full outreach of the performers; the precious close-ups bringing forth his precise, masterful use of light and dark. The more I thought about this style, the more I appreciated it afterward, even when considering it was different than 'Passion' or 'Vampyr'. It lets the scenes sink in for the viewer, to the point of going along on this dark, fateful journey. And it also got me thinking- as I thought with Bergan's films till I saw interviews- about Dreyer and his own relationship to religion in regards to his films. The questioning is never out there in your face; it's in-between the lines of what is spoken between sinner and judger, and what it ends up feeding into society. Absalom may not be a bad man, but as a soul with his life into judging others, ones that might love him stray away.

It leaves me with questions that leave bitter, difficult and long answers, which is really what the best filmmakers tend to do for me sometimes, though at the same time always keeping the dramatic &/or just theatrical aspects of the film in enough control to really hit home. Superb work.

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.