Day of Wrath

Dir. Carl Dreyer
1943
n/a


There is something quite radical about Carl Dreyer's filmography. His most well known pictures are remembered for their grossly upsetting scenarios and visuals, as well as their severe undertones. Unlike fellow Scandinavian filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, who builds steadily towards cathartic philosophical climaxes, Dreyer works within a tension/release system, one that gives poignancy to quieter moments in which subtext takes up a prominent but subtly inferred position and lends significant terror and volume to the rawness of human suffering and the bitter contemptibility between persons and institutions, mainly the church. Religion is a reoccurring topic in Bergman's films but while he tends to deal with the motif by smashing it into his beautifully designed, forlorn and misguided characters, Dreyer takes a more theatrical angle. Dreyer sets his stage dramatically and invites skepticism but ultimately draws the viewer in so deeply to his remarkably flawed characters who breathe humanity that any element of disbelief is paralyzed. He deals with difficult Judeo Christian subject matter through a lens of radicalism, bordering sometimes on the absurd, but uses that same radical gaze to reveal the deeply convoluted discrepancies between piety and morality. His films are particularly unnerving not because they show doubt in religious figures (such as in Bergman's Winter Light or its pseudo-contemporary Doubt) but rather the lack thereof. The church is portrayed as a coldly decisive body of misanthropes whose highest priority is to decimate all forms that do not congeal with their own narrow reading of the Bible. The film Day of Wrath is a punctual critique of narrow mindedness. While commenting on the rigor mortis state of Christian dogma, the film also picks up where The Passion of Joan of Arc left off in developing themes of women's liberation from an oppressive, male dominated world and their subsequent role as independents.

Explaining Day of Wrath's plot without making it sound like a second rate horror/thriller but rather a subliminal, religious familial drama is a challenge. Taking place in a Danish village in the throes of witch-hunt paranoia in the 17th century, the film's narrative is divided into two segments. In the first an old woman, Herlof Marte, is accused of being a witch and is hunted down by village officials, a rather direct allusion to the Nazi occupation of Denmark during the 1940s. She seeks refuge in the home of Anne, a newly married young woman whose husband, Absalon, is a local pastor involved in the persecution of witchcraft. Herlof Marte knew Anne's mother while she was alive and reveals that she was a witch. Soon after this revelation Herlof Marte is captured and tortured until she confesses to practicing witchcraft. She is burned at the stake, but not before she swears death upon the responsible clergy members.

The second portion of the film is a twisted, diabolical romance. Absalon's son, Martin, returns home and quickly falls in love with Anne. Anne, whose transformation from sweet subordinate to manipulative seductress is both physical and psychological, falls passionately in love with Martin and confesses her terrible anger at having her youth stolen away by Absalon whom she does not love and even later admits to hating. While he performs the last rites for a fellow priest, Anne wishes death upon Absalon. In a scene of furious malevolence Absalon pleads forgiveness from Anne, who refuses and curses him to expiration. Terrified by her supernatural powers Martin is caught between wishing to abandon her and his irrational fear of the cabalistic occult. She dogs after him in a perverse attempt to convince him of her innocence but as the final portion of the film reveals Martin's faith in God is stronger than his trust of anything temporal or secular.

It is not altogether clear what final conclusion Dreyer was coming to in Day of Wrath. Perhaps it was that although women were gaining a foothold in modern societies around the world at the time the film was being made, they were still ultimately damned to apologize and atone for their own instinctual and righteous desires for independence. There is a rather open deriding of the “old ways” in Dreyer's films (matriarchs, abstinence, arranged marriages), but there is also a sense of shallowness in the callow confidence of his younger characters. It is as if both sides are arrogant and ignorant simultaneously. Perhaps Dreyer's ultimate objective was to reconcile the young and old, men and women, tyrant and laborer. It is possible that in his constant probing of institutional branches of society and their dated doctrines that Dreyer was not simply trying to agitate people into action but rather express some fundamental concern about the way humans treat each other. Using history and religion as his road map Dreyer successfully modeled a paradigmatic world. Of course this can only be viewed through the lens of antithesis, as Dreyer's films are quite dystopian in their own right. They advertise humanitarian goals in and through their use of negative imagery and self relexivity. Day of Wrath concludes not in favor of the protagonist or the antagonist, the subjective good or bad side, but rather in favor of humankind. It is a bold cause and one that cannot be achieved simply or by very direct means. It takes a skillful communicator of which Dreyer stands as a sterling exemplar.

The Magnificent Ambersons

Dir. Orson Welles
1942
n/a

Imagine making the follow up to Citizen Kane. Granted, Citizen Kane wasn't immediately and obviously accepted as the greatest film of all time, as it is now so often called by those who know, but it is undeniable that it was a film the likes of which Hollywood had never seen. Orson Welles had his fair share of trouble with the producers and Hollywood executives who, even in the 40s, were busy meddling in the work of cinematic artists. Those troubles didn't cease with Welles' second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, which, after production went over budget and time constraints, was seized by RKO, the distributer, and promptly dismantled. RKO cut over 40 minutes of the film and changed the ending, which is obvious as it is rather optimistic for Welles. Still, despite how comparatively Wellesian the film is or is not, it is still a stunning piece of progressive cinema. Suffice it to say that you'd have to do quite a lot to take the Orson Welles out of an Orson Welles film, and The Magnificent Ambersons still reeks of the perpetual dissatisfaction, autobiographical egomania, and forward looking auteur-ism that made Citizen Kane and so many of his subsequent films both memorable and grossly unnerving.

The Magnificent Ambersons relates the fall of a family like the fall of an empire, with all the inclinations towards incestuous behavior and outrageous disconnect with reality. At the focal point is young Mr. George Amberson-Minifer (Tim Holt, a Wellesian protege if there ever was one) and his backwards upbringing of never being denied anything and thus becoming an insatiable and delinquent young man. His mother, Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello), has always doted on him, and denied herself everything, even the man she has always loved, inventor Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotton). The Ambersons' family affairs begin to spiral out of control after the death of George's father and the ensuing love affair between Eugene and Isabel, of which George greatly disapproves. Conniving and pathetic Aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead) attempts at helping George disintegrate the love affair, but suffers from chronic nervous breakdowns that confuse the hell out of poor George who believes that he is not keeping his mother and Eugene from happiness out of malice, but out of his respect for his family's “good name”. Like in Citizen Kane George succeeds in self-destructing not only his own life but his family's as well, when his mother dies after returning home from Paris with him, his uncle leaves, his grand father dies leaving all his money to Fanny who invests poorly and loses all of it. All the while George is trying to court the lovely Lucy Morgan (Anne Baxter) and ultimately fails in that endeavor as well. The film somehow manages to end happily with a near-death experience causing George to beg forgiveness from Eugene who he has treated with such deep seated lack of consideration all throughout the film. No doubt RKO found this ending to be more suitable, despite the conspicuous lack of continuity.

While keeping his hand well into the film (he did direct, write the adaptation of, and narrate the film after all), Welles keeps his face out of it. I couldn't help thinking that had he performed the part of George it would have had a little more life to it; an air of mystery and a greater sense of repressed self-loathing. Still, it was probably in his best interest to stay off screen for this film lest he give critics anymore reason to point out his characteristic narcissism. Without Welles on screen his arrogance and contempt for humanity reveals itself in different ways. Welles spreads his knack for understanding the bastardized ways humans can act towards each other over a number of characters. Its not that the characters in Citzen Kane weren't all impressively well developed, but Charles Arthur Kane was the focal point of that film and the majority of Welles' insight at that time went into making the most oppressively realistic titan ever to be captured on the silver screen. Conversely in The Magnificent Ambersons he widens his scope but also dulls his impact noticeably. The film still boasts sophisticated psychology but in 90 minutes there is only so many moments of revolting insincerity and unconscious self-deprecation that can be shown. Still, who knows whether the original cut and that deleted extra hour of footage would have helped in developing the characters of The Magnificent Ambersons.

I feel sorry for Orson Welles, even though he's dead and far more famous than I will ever be. I feel sorry for him because Citizen Kane was the first film he ever made and despite the critical praise lavished on The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil among others, his memory will never outlive it's legacy. When one talks or writes about any Orson Welles movie they are desperately trying to avoid mentioning Citizen Kane with the dual concern that it will obscure the quality of whichever film they are writing about but that it will also make them seem as though they view Welles' entire career in the context of that single film. The Magnificent Ambersons is not Citizen Kane, but that's a good thing. Welles succeeded in making a number films after Citizen Kane that were insightful and incisive, and comparatively disheartening as well. He was a sad but irrefutably vital figure in the world of cinema that, in the 40s, was just coming into bloom. Through his own personal and artistic hardship he paved the way for so many great filmmakers from around the world, with both his inspirational film making and deeply controversial subject matter. The Magnificent Ambersons is a synecdoche: an essential part of a larger canon of film that forever shaped the way people watch and make movies.