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), Carl 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 eviller 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 whom 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 is 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 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.
Out of
guilt for her lies, 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 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 be 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 the hand of God
himself.
With
that 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, he 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
grandmother. The head pastor 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 desire 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 innocence, 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 another body burning on the
pyre.
When
Dreyer’s film was first shown 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
these men’s own spiritual doubts and fears—than 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
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (April
2014).
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