the
power of life and death
by Douglas Messerli
Carl Theodor Dreyer, Poul
Knudsen, and Mogens Skot-Hansen (screenplay, based on the fiction Anne
Pedersdotterm by Hans Wiers-Jenssen), Carol Theodor Dreyer (director) Vredens
Dag (Day of Wrath) / 1943, USA 1948
The
time is the early 17th century in Denmark, where the church is busy,
as it has been throughout the world, accusing elderly busybody housewives and
young women of the whom the community women are jealous of witchcraft.
Witchcraft can be claimed, evidently, for almost any inexplicable occurrence in
this time of superstition and community small-mindedness. An older woman such
as Herlof’s Marte (Anna Svierkier) can be seen in league with the Devil merely
by speaking evilly of a friend or neighbor, particularly if she might wish that
woman’s death. Once one has been accused, moreover, there is little one can do
to defend oneself, particularly in an uneducated community where the women
themselves may believe they are guilty just for perceiving their unsocial
tendencies. Certainly Marte might be described as that, a woman who in the very
first scene is represented as cooking up herbs gathered from below the gallows
that might do harm to others or protect oneself. For once one is proclaimed a
witch the major proof is through torture, in which the accused, in terror for
pain the eminent death, often admits to crimes she has not committed.
Women like Marte, however, are not
stupid, and she perceives her best way out of being accused of witchcraft is
not denial but gaining the protection the church elder, Absalon Pedersson
(Thorkild Roose), who protected another woman—the mother of his second wife,
the young Anne (Lisbeth Movin)—from charges of having the power over others of
life and death. His motives, as he takes the young girl to marriage without
even consulting her, are certainly questionable, and perhaps more evil than
anything either woman was connected with, particularly since the elderly pastor
did not even seek that Anne love him and that he truly loved her, determining
merely to marry her because of her lovely, pure and innocent, eyes, which Marte
describes as being full of fire, like her mother’s.
The gamble on Marte’s part does not work;
although Pedersson has saved Anne’s mother, who is now dead, he is not willing
to intercede in Marte’s trial; despite her pleas, to which he turns a dead ear,
he agrees to meet with her, only to make certain that she does not reveal his
connection to Anne’s mother. Terrorized of both torture and death, Marte,
however, keeps her silence, while Pedersson’s guilt leaves his mind open to
Godly accusations. Perhaps he knows that on the Day of Wrath, it is he and
Marte or Anne’s mother who must face Christ’s judgment for his evil acts.
His wife, Anne, trapped in a household
where she finds little love from her husband and discovers absolute hate from
his elderly, domineering mother, Meret, overhears the statements about her
mother with great interest. In a world in which women have utterly no power,
might she, like her mother, be secretly able to wield power even over life and
death in men?
Certainly, Marte, as she is thrown upon
the burning pyre believes she has that power, damning a younger pastor,
Laurentius (Olaf Ussing) to an early death, and cursing the young Anne to a
scandalous relationship with Pederrson’s son, Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), a
boy who has just returned home from his schooling, which will destroy his
father.
Upon seeing one another, the two, in
fact, do fall immediately in love with one another and quickly begin a sensual
relationship that, in this film of dark and irrational pessimism, stands out
through Dreyer’s depiction of the lovers sleeping among the grasses, lounging
under apple trees, and luxuriously floating down the farm’s hidden waterways on
low rowing boats. If being in league with the Devil can help one to control the
lives of others, so Anne discovers, just being a beautiful young girl with a
man falls in love can permit her a power beyond anything which she has
previously imagined. Indeed, it is not hate that allows her to control other
lives, but natural love, a love unfouled by the bedsheets of dirty old men like
her husband who give nothing in return. Is it any wonder, as Anne soon
confesses to her lover, that she sometimes imagines the death of her husband, a
death allowed through the hand of God to allow her and Martin to establish a
truer and purer relationship.
But in this closed society, even an
educated man like Martin is subject to irrational fears, to the belief that in
his loving the beautiful Anne he is simultaneously sinning again his father. In
terms of that society, of course, he truly creating a scandal, as his
grandmother describes nearly everything outside of her narrow focus. No matter
that the society itself has created a perverse and unnatural world in which they
live!
Dreyer’s powerful film of dichotomies
explodes on the night when Pederrson is called out into the night to administer
the last rites to the dying Laurentius. A fierce storm is brewing in the
landscape, symbolizing the inner storms suddenly facing Martin for the guilt he
feels in having made love to his own mother, and the rising flush of hatred and
scorn of Anne by Pederrson’s unforgiving mother. As Anne admits to Martin her
desires for him and her wishes that Pederrson might die, freeing them to their
own predilections, the pastor, returning home suddenly feels the hand of death
upon his neck, and returns home to discover his son and wife sitting up in
which her assumes is their wait for him.
In cowardice, Martin retires to bed,
while Pederrson, describing what he has just felt, queries her about her
feelings for him. He admits that he has never considered her own desires in the
whole matter, but still expects her reassurances of love. When, instead,
through her bitterness of the way he has destroyed her youth, she lashes out in
honesty, the old man screams out in horror, falls to the floor in what appears
to me a heart-attack or stroke; since throughout Pederrson has shown little
evidence of a heart, we have to presume it is the latter, perhaps a “day of
wrath”-like stroke from hand of God himself.
With the cry, both grandmother and
grandson come running to discover Pederrson dead. In his now absolute sorrow
for his own behavior, Martin rejects further communication with Anne; yet, as
he sits in watch over the body, agrees with Anne to protect her from being
proclaimed a witch by Marte.
At
the funeral, with all members of the family clad in black, accept Anne, draped
in white Pederrson asks for forgiveness for his unstated acts, yet proclaiming
that no one, in the end, has been responsible for his father’s death When he
has finished, however, Merte stands to accuse Anne as being a witch, and
Martin, weaker than even the audience might have expected, joins his grand-mother.
The head past now has no choice but to ask Anne to defend herself over the
casket itself.
Certainly, we have seen her capable of
that; she has previously defended her wish for her husband’s death as
conditional, never a direct intention, over the dead man’s body and bible, in
order to convince Martin. But just as she is about to argue her innocent, we
see that Martin’s cowardice has so completely unnerved her that she cannot go
forward: there is no longer anyone there to wipe away her tears, she argues.
Any power of life and death that she might have imagined for herself has
disappeared. Without love, death is the only alternative, and she invites
herself into Death’s arms by the logical admissions of desiring the end of her
abusive husband’s life. This is a society that permits no allowance for women,
for the weak, for the poor. Only the strong of faith and self-aggrandizement
easily survive. And Dreyer’s great psychological study ends with what we know
will be her body on the burning pyre.
When Dreyer’s film was first show in
theaters both in Denmark and England, critics found its bleak message nearly
unbearable, and criticized the work on just that account. Many viewers,
moreover, saw the film as a kind metaphor for the political events of the day,
particularly German Nazism and the Holocaust. Dreyer denied those parallels,
but did feel it was prudent, given these interpretations, to leave his country
for the neutral Sweden for much of the rest of World War II.
In fact, the solemn dictates of the old
men of this Danish community, as ugly and harsh as they are, might be seen far
more sensible and tamer—particularly given the these men’s own spiritual doubts
and fears—that anything the Nazi’s did, and particularly the attempted extermination
of an entire religion and ethnicity. Dreyer’s world may be a miserably
dictatorial and immoral world, but those destroyed are not masses of human
beings, and the comparison, is accordingly, a weak one, which diminishes the
tragedy of the 20th century.
I would rather see Dreyer’s work as a
brilliant proto-feminist work that argues for education and knowledge over
superstition and paternal dominance. If the elders of Dreyer’s Day of Wrath
control the lives of their closed society, that control is ultimately laughable
since they too must face the Dies Irae. Surely the Nazi’s never imagined facing
an eerily terrifying “day of wrath”
that day
Will
dissolve the
World in ashes
As
foretold by
David and
the Sibyl!
How much
tremor there will be,
When the
Judge will come,
Investigating everything strictly!
Los Angeles, April 27,
2014
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