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DAY
OF WRATH
7/10
Vredens
Dag : Denmark 1943 : Carl Theodor
DREYER : 98 mins
As a film
about the persecution of (so-called) witches in 1620s Denmark,
made in that country during the Nazi occupation, Day of Wrath was
never likely to be a barrel of laughs. And, indeed, it’s as stark, austere,
grim, downbeat and intense as you’d probably expect. The pace is by no
means fast, and there’s a staginess to some of the performances and direction
- the script, by Dreyer and Poul Knudsen, is based on a play. But
this is probably an accurate reflection of how life did proceed
the best part of 400 years ago – as much as it’s a result of how film-making
styles have evolved over the past six decades.
Dreyer
has been notably influential on other directors over the course of
those decades, both in terms of the spiritual/psychological complexity
of his concerns, and also in more mundane ways: the way the ‘witches’
are lowered onto the flames suggests that Michael Reeves was aware of
this film before making Witchfinder
General, while the creepy chorus of children joyfully belting
out the hymn ‘Day of Wrath’ as the flames consume their victim foreshadows
Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Lars von Trier, meanwhile, has seldom
missed the chance to pay tribute to his countryman: the sternly disapproving
village elders from his Breaking the Waves are close kin to the
similarly forbidding figures in Day of Wrath. And the final twist
– in which love proves to be far from enough – prefigures the Tom/Grace
relationship in von Trier’s Dogville.
Like von Trier,
Dreyer subjects his heroines to daunting physical and mental trials –
most famously in his 1928 Passion of Joan of Arc. Here it’s Lisbeth
Movin’s Anne who goes through the wringer: trapped in a loveless marriage
to a much older man, Reverend Absalon Pedersson (Thorkild Roose), she
seizes her chance of happiness when the pastor’s son Martin (Preben Lerdorff
Rye) arrives home after several years’ travel. But things start to go
awry when elderly Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier) is tried as a witch and
burned alive – the repercussions of this event will have dire consequences
for all concerned, bringing to light certain uncomfortable facts about
Anne’s late mother...
Though the
second half of the film drags a little in its concentration on the sappy
Anne/Martin romance, the first hour is a compellingly intense experience
as the sexual tensions in the Pedersson household mount in parallel with
the harrowing trial and execution of the seemingly-benign Marte. Seventysomething
Sigrid Neiiendam is the dominant presence as Absalon’s indomitable mother,
a glowering battle-axe who scarcely bothers to conceal her contempt for
her ‘wanton’ daughter-in-law. Filming almost entirely indoors and (with
cinematographer Karl Andersson) often deploying slow tracking-shots through
the house, Dreyer crafts a powerfully convincing tale of claustrophobic
family life - lit by candle-light that illuminates but casts very dark
shadows.
It’s a heady
mix of jealousy, guilt, hypocrisy and suspicion, full of repressed private
emotions which we see surfacing in public in the form of the witch-hunt
hysteria. But while the Christians’ methods are horrifyingly barbaric,
Dreyer makes it clear that there are witches at work here – indeed,
in this world witchcraft is a much more powerful and effective than orthodox
religion. We see two instances of ‘witches’ casting spells (both, interestingly,
against ‘holy’ men) and in both instances, the result is death, although
their success brings no happiness to the witch. Then again, pretty much
everyone ends up burning, either physically or psychologically
– and in this society witchcraft seems to offer women their only real
opportunity of power. Anne, we’re told, wasn’t even consulted about her
ill-advised marriage to Absalon.
In terms of
the specific political situation under which the film was made, however,
the subtext of Day of Wrath isn’t quite so straightforward. While
Denmark under the Nazis was obviously
an environment marked by paranoia, suspicion and denunciation, Dreyer’s
film doesn’t really hold up as a specific allegory for wartime events.
Arthur Miller, of course, often denied that his play The Crucible was
principally intended as an allegory of McCarthyism. Both Dreyer and Miller,
although writing at a particular juncture in history and looking back
to another, are making universal points about human fallibility, ones
that transcend the grim particulars of their own dark decades – and ours.
28th
February, 2004
(seen 17th February : Brewery
Arts Centre, Kendal)
by Neil
Young
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