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.

Ordet

Dir. Carl Dreyer
1955
n/a

In Carl Dreyer's Ordet a fleeting reference is made to Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish religious philosopher highly regarded as the father of existentialism. In perhaps his best known work, “Fear and Trembling”(1843), Kierkegaard grapples with the fundamental incongruity between rationality and faith. Similarly Dreyer's Ordet calls into question the relationship between the two, and whether or not a person can find satisfaction in either or in a amalgamation of the two. What he unearths is the desperate reluctance of the human soul towards the improbable (miracles) and a certain astonishing comfort in what is both rational yet extremely upsetting (death). It is a film about faith, family and love and how the the principles that bring one group of people together can drive others away. Dreyer expertly unveils how those who profess faith are often the first to lose it, and those who profess not to have it are in fact holding back an insatiable desire to believe.

I have a rather large soft spot in my heart for Scandinavian film making. The lushness of the content is harshly juxtaposed with the starkness of the physical landscape and the motif of silence. Ordet embodies these features and dives deep into the philosophy of life, death and piety towards God that made Ingmar Bergman, a contemporary of Dreyer, so greatly respected. Ordet, like Bergman's reknowned God-themed trilogy (those films, it should be noted, came out several years after Ordet) of the early sixties (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence), probes the uncomfortable landscape of faith in the modern world. Ordet features two sons: Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) who believes himself to be the second coming of Christ, and another, Anders (Cay Kristiansen) who is initially forbidden to marry his love, Anne, by her father, Peter, because of religious differences between the two families. Morten Borgen (Henrik Malberg) is the family's patriarch and embodies the conflict of interest between the faithful (Johannes) and the rational like Morten's third son, Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen), who, despite assurances from his wife, Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), that he is a good man, has no faith of his own. As it is in the world that exists outside the movie theater, in Ordet each person comes with their own philosophy on how life should be lived and feels crushed by the burden of trying to convince others that their way is best. Peter and Morten quarrel about whose version of Christianity is best. Morten accuses Peter of being obsessed with death while obstinately concluding that his Christianity, which focuses on the the greatness of life, is how God intended people to live. Peter's philosophy is that his humble piety here on Earth will be repaid to him in full when he rises to Heaven upon his death. It is not long before the countering faiths of the two families is put into praxis when Inger falls ill and dies after an agonizing miscarriage. In the film's final scene the two families come together, Anders is given permission to marry Anne, Peter and Morten agree that they both share an equally powerful faith, and Johannes, in one of the most memorable scenes in the history of film, commands, by the will of God, that Inger rise from the dead, which she does.

Truly believing, without any dubious skepticism, is not a terribly easy thing to do. Throughout Ordet references are made to how miracles “used to happen” but don't anymore; a reflection on the cynically logical nature of the modern age. Miracles used to occur because people could not dissociate divine intervention from scientific anomalies. In a rigorously intellectual moment in the film, the doctor that has just finished 'saving' Inger's life (she dies after he leaves) sits down to a conversation with the new local priest. The doctor poses a question to Morten about whether it was his prayers or the doctor's work that saved Inger's life. Morten responds that it was the will of God. The doctor and the priest converse about the nature of miracles versus the tangibility of hard work or as the priest calls it “ora et labora” (pray and labor). The priest, in an attempt to draw up a rational God (a natural contradiction according to the film's philosophy), finds himself in an uncomfortable contradiction stating how God can perform miracles but does not because he created the laws of nature which would be broken by the miracles most people ask for. When the doctor presses him about Jesus' miracles the priest mistakenly calls them “a special circumstance” for which the doctor mockingly lambastes him. The emphasis here is that both faith and the lack there of are painfully partial, and are a root of conflict sown amongst so many good natured people.

When Johannes resurrects the lifeless body of Inger he also resurrects the lost faith of those in the room. Before doing so he criticizes their faith calling it weak and susceptible to doubt. The joy that fills the room after the resurrection is not found often on Earth because faith as strong and true as the faith exhibited by Johannes is unfortunately deemed blasphemous by the Christian doctrine who, in order to appeal to the greatest common denominator while simultaneously repenting for its former sins (killings and injustices performed in the name of God. See: Dreyer's equally stunning The Passion of Joan of Arc), reserves the right to reject all forms of faith that are judged to be too disconnected from the scientific reasoning that the age of ready information has given birth to and which oppose the notion of a 'rational God'. A man who believes himself to be the son of God and who works miracles, or a woman convinced that she has been sent by God to cast oppressors out of her homeland, have been considered enemies of the church. The heart of Dreyer's message in Ordet is that the two: rationality and faith, are not incongruous but rely on a certain level of mutual understanding in order to exist in harmony. Ordet presents the brilliant, but simple idea that both faith and reason can both be tested but the unpredictability of life and that, in order to thrive, a person can not understand one in terms of the other (a rational God or a divine science) but hold a delicate, reciprocal respect for both.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

Dir. Carl Dreyer
1928
n/a

I was raised a Christian, a Catholic no less, but I turned out OK (I guess that's a matter of opinion). I went through all the motions straight up through my Catechism where I was supposed to enter into the church as an adult. I chose not to. My ability to string along with the false piety (or worse: enviable exuberance) of my fellow young Christians failed me. I have one rather strong, distressing memory of my Catechism. We met each week on Sunday nights in small groups. We mostly read the Bible, discussed our faith and wasted time. On this night though our stand-in teacher posed a discriminating and frightful question. Making reference to the school shootings at Columbine High School and the rumor that one of the shooters had put a gun to a student's head and asked him if he believed in God and when he answered “Yes”, shot and killed the student, the teacher asked us what we would have done in that same scenario knowing a 'Yes' would end our life and a 'No' might save it, at the potential cost of our soul. As the pious and lazy youth swung their affirmation around the room the question came to me. I replied that I wouldn't; that I would want to live. I've wrangled with this situation for many years, trying to figure out why I answered the way I did. Was it because I actually don't believe in God? Was it because I am selfish? Was it because I wanted to make a scene? To this day I don't know, but years in the church have familiarized me with the psychological atrocities inflicted by those with piety and power. History books will tell of the Crusades and millions of deaths in the name of God, but, as Joan (Renee Jeanne Falconetti) in The Passion of Joan of Arc illustrates so clearly, it can be just as painful to live in the midst of a lie, as it is to die because of one.

The Passion of Joan of Arc chronicles the trial and subsequent execution of Joan of Arc. It is one of the most excruciatingly painful film experiences ever witnessed, as Joan undergoes significant amounts of physical and psychological torture by a body of theologians and cruel guardsmen. The theologians are outraged at Joan's conviction that she has been sent by God to expel the English from France. They are contemptuous of her because they are threatened by her dignity and the fact that she is a woman who claims to be doing God's work. Director Carl Dreyer captures the intensity of the event through studious use of close ups which highlight the exquisite (and sometimes revolting) facial expressions employed by his actors, especially Falconetti. Her performance stands apart from the rest of the film and in many respects the rest of the film world. Her passion is unbound and her sentiments so perfectly articulated that she does simply capture Joan of Arc, she is Joan of Arc. There are few performances as convincing and even fewer as powerful as Falconetti's, which would be her second and final appearance on the silver screen.

With The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer designed a complex and uncomfortable scenario. Apocryphal and hypocritical ardor is not uncommon, but it is difficult subject to deal with. Dreyer makes his theologians look ugly (extreme closeups of their faces reveal wrinkles and warts) and immature (they question why Joan is dressed in men's clothing), but they are in a position of power, so these outwardly degrading features do nothing in the favor of Joan's cause. This scenario still exists today and is a prominent reason as to why The Passion of Joan of Arc is still, and will likely always be, a truly timeless piece of cinema. Far too often, in the church, priests and worshipers of God will use God as the vessel in which to transmit their own messages on morality and faith, rather than the other way around (see: Pope Benedict's recent statements equating the dangers of homosexuality to those of deforestation). They believe themselves to be pious, but outwardly betray that dogma by using subversive tactics to influence the church-going community. Threats of excommunication, torture and death abound from the shouting mouths of the priests and monks in The Passion of Joan of Arc. And why? So that she might renounce her claim of being the daughter of God. All that hate in order to defeat one woman's selfless faith in God.

While Dreyer's religious epic is slightly more recondite than my own traumatic experiences in the church, the principle is much the same. The Christian faith was based on a solid foundation but the structure that has been built on top of that foundation is far too often ugly and useless; cruel to the point of savagery. His film captures the church in one of its most insightfully brutal moments, branding it with a stamp of malice. The final moments of the film are dreadfully powerful. The screen is full of images of fire and violence, the terrifying end to those who have failed to live by their own rhetoric. The film supplies a post script with a brief tribute to Joan of Arc, telling how the fire shielded Joan's soul as it soared into Heaven that day. Whether or not this is true is not for us to know. That is just for Joan.