One feature of Bergman films is an unconscious acknowledgment of personal influences of his world on him. Bergman was working for Svensk Filmindustri while Alf Sjöberg made The Road to Heaven (1942), a stark medieval allegory, hints of which we can see in The Seventh Seal. The fact that he went on to put Miss Julie, the film that established the reputation of Sjöberg on the boards after his death, cannot be coincidental. If Bergman has found relentless use of close-up of the face a technique to reinforce the existential and moral problems of his characters we may find in Carl Dreyer’s use of such close-ups as forerunner. In citing these in no way detracts the artistic excellence of this Swedish filmmaker. Another feature of Bergman’s subject matter is his introspective quality derived of course from his childhood memories, adolescence and personality. The Seventh Seal for example is his search for faith in the absence of a personal God. In a way he repudiates the faith of his fathers and in its place coalesce certain existential sureties from his own a clue of which in his film Persona (1966).
"Today I feel that in Persona — and later in Cries and Whispers — I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover." If we consider this film in particular we see it as self-revelatory as to his interior life. Take for example the images of Elizabet Vogler and Alma merging as one. This shot is a follow up of the birth of Elizabet’s son and it is narrated by her nurse. It is a painful memory for the actress and she hates herself and her baby. In merging the two faces of the nurse and the patient, Bergman is merely reliving his own condition. It is the reverse of the son towards his father. What spiritual baggage that he is left holding is anathema considering circumstances of its birth. The child- parent relationship must have been traumatic that it is explored in his movies again and again like a melody that one cannot get rid of. His Autumn Sonata (1978) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) are cases in point.
This rather obsessive aspect of Bergman where he would rather get rid of the world and its uses on which politics, commerce and culture gather strength (and by which nations may trade their tawdry goods across,) he would confront his viewer and also himself by deep concerns that his own countrymen found as excesses. Consider ‘Bergman's tight use of a 1.33:1 frame which often excludes any clear glimpses of the world beyond a face which finds no up, down, left or right in which to direct its gaze’. (The radical intimacy of Bergman-Hamish Ford) I for myself cannot think Bergman could pull off a film like say Ophul’s ‘The earrings of Madame de…’ or Fassbinder’s Lola. His metaphysical make-up is too ingrained in him to let him get into a serious business of commenting on political or social concerns of his day.
His first success came with Port of Call (1948).
In telling the love story of Gösta a seaman who saves a girl from drowning and keeping her by his side Bergman resorts to rather straightforward narrative. Berit has a terrible past and she would rather risk telling it before she commits herself to Gösta. In resolving their differences and mutual acceptance he touches upon social themes like failed parents sending their daughters to reformatories, the reliance of working class women on back-street abortions. We see him more as a disengaged filmmaker from polemics. I mentioned this film to show Bergman, as he has himself admitted at the time, was heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism. ‘The is most apparent in the stunning location sequences of Port of Call, where the influence of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica can be seen in virtually every shot. Some of these sequences have a raw documentary-feel… that is lacking in virtually all of Bergman’s other films’. (James travers-2007)
Take a film like Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) where love, marriage and infidelity angle of the film is of a different league than the lighthearted touch of Renoir (The Rules of the Game) for instance. The aging Egermann takes his young wife to the theater to see his former mistress. His directorial touch doesn’t bring out anything new in their three-way confrontation except some heavy observations. The three actresses on stage mock men, love and marriage. One of them says that a woman can do anything she wants to a man as long as she doesn’t hurt his dignity. Bergman won a jury prize at Cannes for the film (1955). His handling of the comedy of romantic entanglements was as different from his Magic Flute or the Silence. With films as disparate as the Magician or So Close to Life he showed that he was not confined to any particular style as his genius to put on what he had thematically chalked out. The subject matter determined the style. It could have come only from his intuitive understanding of various modes and viewpoints of filmmakers of his age.
Critical acclaim of his films have waxed and waned. Bergman’s status in late 50’s and in the 90s are light years away. Ingmar Bergman is not to be judged by films per se but in the way he opened us to appreciate the shared condition of life and film art beyond the fads and polemics. It is purely an internal experience. Elizabet, his character in Persona stopped speaking unable to respond effectively with ‘large catastrophes’ such as Holocaust or Vietnam War. Bergman was also confronted by catastrophes that in his case were private. Luckily for us he responded with films.(Ack: James Travers, Hamish ford, Pedro Blas Gonzalez.)
Benny
Showing posts with label Scandinavian films. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scandinavian films. Show all posts
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
Monday, 4 January 2010
Miss Julie-1951
According to film scholar Peter Cowie, Alf Sjöberg’s boldly experimental 1951 adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie inaugurated “a new cinematic language”. Alf Sjöberg one of the brightest stars in Scandinavian film scene in the ‘40s and ‘50s, is now rather overlooked for the simple reason Ingmar Bergman is far greater draw than he. (see Sjöberg, Bergman and Swedish films). Of his oeuvres Miss Julie is a classic. Alf Sjöberg won the Grand Prix du Festival at the Cannes Film Festival twice: in 1946 for Torment (Swedish: Hets) (part of an eleven-way tie), and in 1951 for Miss Julie (Swedish: Fröken Julie)
August Strindberg owed much to Émile Zola’s “Le naturalism au théâtre” and in the works of the Goncourt brothers. This 1888 play belongs to the period of naturalism in theater begun around 1880. Their dictum was to depict life through a temperament and to maintain a strict dramatic form resting on the three unities of time, place, and action. In Miss Julie, for instance, Strindberg confines the entire action to the estate kitchen, the conflict takes place in a short time span during Midsummer’s Eve, and dramatic potential of power play is delineated by three characters: Julie, the twenty-five-year-old countess; Jean, her father’s valet; and Jean’s fiancé, the robust cook Kristin. Naturalism also decreed that a drama demonstrate a law of nature—in this case it was the survival of the fittest: the likes of Jean will live on while Julie, the product of an effete aristocratic family, will succumb.
Two different mediums
Before I get on with the details of the film proper let me point out a few points that distinguish film treatment of a play as ground breaking as that of Strindberg. In the manner film exploits the basic theme more trenchantly Sjöberg shows his superlative talent. He came originally from the stage and showed his genius could transcend the limits of theater by letting the camera to explore the nuances of self destructive love as essayed by willful countess and her valet.
The film opens as in the play on midsummer night of 1874 on the estate of a Count in Sweden. The film roams freely over the grounds of the count’s estate, unlike the claustrophobic mood of the theater. The evocative mood awakened by the festive atmosphere of solstice, the torpor and heat in which inhibitions are lowered, only film can bring about effectively. One may compare it with Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).
In theater the directness of actors and speech must work despite of a confined architecture and painted scenery; the all- enveloping intimacy in which the actors create reality is all that they have in order to succeed. Their stylized gestures and rhythmic speech are their props. Whether it is an Ibsen or Pinter play, speech and truth of action in stylized acting or natural, reality is in carrying the audience along till the very end. In the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes cleverness of the makers of Emperor’s new clothes succeeded. In such immediacy of a make- believe world, reality was broken by the child who shouted, ‘the emperor is naked’. In short reality of the theater doesn’t suffer audience to drift into fantasy or introspection. Not so with cinema. To quote
‘Cinema is peopled with ghosts and chimeras who weightlessly defy the boundaries of space and time. This abrogation of external laws pulls the medium into the realm of introspection, imagination, and dreams.’(Peter Matthews-criterion 21 Jan’08)
Basic themes
The film as with the play essays power play of power, class and gender. The frolic of the lower classes typified by the solstice is a counterpoint to the hidebound social mores under which Miss Julie exists. This underlying tension runs throughout in visual terms as well as in the development of two protagonists. Julie takes added delight in playing her games with Jean, seeing fit to consistently demean this servant through such acts as forcing him to shine her boots. He submits to her will since his station requires it.
Taught by her mother to hold all men in contempt, Miss Julie nonetheless gives herself to him and it is a point where balance of power shifts. The affair with valet Jean (Ulf Palme) shows what is her future. He wants her to elope with him to Switzerland where he expects her to entice customers to the inn that he intends to set up. His victory over her can never be that of one of an equal to her either in class or in aristocratic unflappability. Only he needs hear the ring of two bells and in Pavlovian reflex he reverts to his servile upbringing.
The tension of their doomed romance is revealing in in their dreams: Jean speaks of a recurring dream where he is ever trying to climb a tree and the countess is free falling. Such contrasts, in Sjoberg’s handling render disparity of their childhood, taking us into the past, illustrating the events and people who came to shape both Julie and Jean’s disparate outlooks on life. Raised a servant’s son and scorned by those above him, Jean is subjected to cruel humiliations early on in life which has the dual effects of both fostering contempt for the ruling class he lives under but also shapes him into a poltroon. And with Julie, her life is genuinely shaped by the sins of the father and mother; in her case, an emotionally weak father and psychologically unbalanced mother’s own war of attrition shaped and trained the young girl to distrust all men. (Strindberg points out with painful clarity the ways in which children become the weapons through which their parents can strike hardest and deepest at each other.)
‘The chief innovation that Sjöberg brings to his Miss Julie is the seamless way in which he presents both main characters’ past and present in a unified whole; as Julie begins to reminisce over her own childhood, the camera pans away and we are taken into the past only to be brought back into the uncomfortable present in one continuous motion, which speaks to the ever-present nature of memory in our lives as we live out in real time. This seamlessness injects a dreamy surrealism into an otherwise, caustic realism as well as foreshadows Bergman’s own use of this approach in films like Wild Strawberries.
However, the film’s dramatic core is sustained by Bjork and Palme’s performances as the main characters. Powerfully open emotionally, Bjork is expert at imposing the character’s will believably in the first half as well as transitioning into the shattered psyche that exposes her vulnerability and leads her to the tale’s tragic denouement'.
Cast:
Anita Björk ... Miss Julie
Ulf Palme ... Jean
Märta Dorff ... Kristin, cook
Lissi Alandh ... Countess Berta, Julie's mother
Anders Henrikson ... Count Carl, Julie's father
Inga Gill ... Viola
Åke Fridell ... Robert
Kurt-Olof Sundström ... Julie's Fiancé
Max von Sydow ... Hand
Margaretha Krook ... Governess (as Margareta Krook)
Åke Claesson ... Doctor
Inger Norberg ... Julie as a child
Jan Hagerman ... Jean as a child
Technical
Produced by
Rune Waldekranz .... producer (uncredited)
Original Music and arranged by
Dag Wirén
Cinematography by
Göran Strindberg
Film Editing by
Lennart Wallén
Art Direction by
Bibi Lindström
Bergman and Sjöberg, Swedish films
Alf Sjöberg (21 June 1903 – 16 April 1980) was a Swedish theatre and film director.
Born in 1903, Sjöberg was in the thick of artistic developments of new medium of cinema. Victor Sjöström( The Outlaw and His Wife-1918) and Mauritz Stiller( Sir Arne’s Treasure-1919) were engaged in making Swedish cinema a force to reckon with. Hollywood sensing threat bought over Sjöström and Stiller along with his protégé Greta Garbo to MGM. Into this breach stepped in Alf Sjöberg, trained at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and he caused a sensation with his very first work, The Strongest (1929), an intense fable of seal hunters in Greenland. But the mortal blow to the industry had been struck, and he retreated to the boards, mounting acclaimed, innovative productions of Strindberg and Shakespeare through the 1930s. Meanwhile, Swedish cinema entered a struggling, populist phase. The smash of the decade was Gustaf Molander’s glossy soap Intermezzo (1936), soon to be remade for David Selznick -( once again,this time plundering its ingenue star, Ingrid Bergman).
Ironically, Sweden’s neutrality during the Second World War turned the grim situation around. A ban on foreign imports deemed propaganda (that is, nearly everything from the Axis or the Allies) gave domestic filmmaking a sudden shot in the arm. Determined on a renaissance, the visionary head of Svensk Filmindustri, Carl Anders Dymling, symbolically enthroned a repatriated Sjöström as the company’s artistic supervisor, then wooed another indispensable auteur. Sjöberg had been tempted back to cinema for an urgent, antifascist melodrama, They Staked Their Lives (1940), and consolidated his prestige with The Road to Heaven (1942), a stark medieval allegory that holds more than an embryonic hint of a later folktale about a certain chess-playing knight. At the time, the author of that classic was a hustling junior in the script department of SF, and Dymling had an inspiration: why not arrange a creative marriage between this whiz kid Bergman and the veteran Sjöberg? The result was Torment (1944) The young Bergman came to represent the youth and Sjöberg, the Establishment. In Sweden as elsewhere, the war’s trauma had propelled youth culture—and though Bergman could be profitably sold as a rebel than Sjöberg.
Whatever might be said of Bergman’s burgeoning talent it was unlike that of Sjöberg who had cut his teeth on 1920s German expressionism. His camera mobility and deep-focus framing is evident in Torment.
Bergman would absorb some aspect of his technique for Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and The Silence (1963), eventually conceding that “Alf Sjöberg . . . taught me a great deal.” If it was a case of oedipal rivalry, then momentarily the father outpaced the son. Screwed over on Torment, Sjöberg recouped with Iris and the Lieutenant (1946) and Only a Mother (1949). Despite his success with films Torment (1944) and Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg was above all, and foremost, a stage director; perhaps the greatest at Dramaten (alongside, first, Olof Molander and, later, Ingmar Bergman). He was a First Director of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre in the years 1930-1980, where he staged a large number of remarkable and historic productions. Sjöberg was also a pioneer director for early Swedish TV theatre (his 1955 TV theatre production of Hamlet is a national milestone).
A clue to the weight of two directors one only needs to watch Torment where Bergamn’s part only called for script and some four days shooting towards the end. Yet Bergman has become saleable and his name appears more striking than that of Sjöberg.
Sjöberg died in a car accident on his way to rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.
Versions of Miss Julie
* The first, Fröken Julie by the Swedish director, Alf Sjöberg in 1951.
* Another version was produced in 1971 by Tigon British Film Productions. It starred Helen Mirren as Miss Julie.
* A version was directed by Mike Figgis with Saffron Burrows in the role of Miss Julie and Peter Mullan in the role of Jean in 1999.
(Ack: independentfilmquarterly, Brigitta Steene, Miss Julie: The Three Bergs-peter Matthews, criterion collection
answers.com, wikipedia,)
benny
August Strindberg owed much to Émile Zola’s “Le naturalism au théâtre” and in the works of the Goncourt brothers. This 1888 play belongs to the period of naturalism in theater begun around 1880. Their dictum was to depict life through a temperament and to maintain a strict dramatic form resting on the three unities of time, place, and action. In Miss Julie, for instance, Strindberg confines the entire action to the estate kitchen, the conflict takes place in a short time span during Midsummer’s Eve, and dramatic potential of power play is delineated by three characters: Julie, the twenty-five-year-old countess; Jean, her father’s valet; and Jean’s fiancé, the robust cook Kristin. Naturalism also decreed that a drama demonstrate a law of nature—in this case it was the survival of the fittest: the likes of Jean will live on while Julie, the product of an effete aristocratic family, will succumb.
Two different mediums
Before I get on with the details of the film proper let me point out a few points that distinguish film treatment of a play as ground breaking as that of Strindberg. In the manner film exploits the basic theme more trenchantly Sjöberg shows his superlative talent. He came originally from the stage and showed his genius could transcend the limits of theater by letting the camera to explore the nuances of self destructive love as essayed by willful countess and her valet.
The film opens as in the play on midsummer night of 1874 on the estate of a Count in Sweden. The film roams freely over the grounds of the count’s estate, unlike the claustrophobic mood of the theater. The evocative mood awakened by the festive atmosphere of solstice, the torpor and heat in which inhibitions are lowered, only film can bring about effectively. One may compare it with Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).
In theater the directness of actors and speech must work despite of a confined architecture and painted scenery; the all- enveloping intimacy in which the actors create reality is all that they have in order to succeed. Their stylized gestures and rhythmic speech are their props. Whether it is an Ibsen or Pinter play, speech and truth of action in stylized acting or natural, reality is in carrying the audience along till the very end. In the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes cleverness of the makers of Emperor’s new clothes succeeded. In such immediacy of a make- believe world, reality was broken by the child who shouted, ‘the emperor is naked’. In short reality of the theater doesn’t suffer audience to drift into fantasy or introspection. Not so with cinema. To quote
‘Cinema is peopled with ghosts and chimeras who weightlessly defy the boundaries of space and time. This abrogation of external laws pulls the medium into the realm of introspection, imagination, and dreams.’(Peter Matthews-criterion 21 Jan’08)
Basic themes
The film as with the play essays power play of power, class and gender. The frolic of the lower classes typified by the solstice is a counterpoint to the hidebound social mores under which Miss Julie exists. This underlying tension runs throughout in visual terms as well as in the development of two protagonists. Julie takes added delight in playing her games with Jean, seeing fit to consistently demean this servant through such acts as forcing him to shine her boots. He submits to her will since his station requires it.
Taught by her mother to hold all men in contempt, Miss Julie nonetheless gives herself to him and it is a point where balance of power shifts. The affair with valet Jean (Ulf Palme) shows what is her future. He wants her to elope with him to Switzerland where he expects her to entice customers to the inn that he intends to set up. His victory over her can never be that of one of an equal to her either in class or in aristocratic unflappability. Only he needs hear the ring of two bells and in Pavlovian reflex he reverts to his servile upbringing.
The tension of their doomed romance is revealing in in their dreams: Jean speaks of a recurring dream where he is ever trying to climb a tree and the countess is free falling. Such contrasts, in Sjoberg’s handling render disparity of their childhood, taking us into the past, illustrating the events and people who came to shape both Julie and Jean’s disparate outlooks on life. Raised a servant’s son and scorned by those above him, Jean is subjected to cruel humiliations early on in life which has the dual effects of both fostering contempt for the ruling class he lives under but also shapes him into a poltroon. And with Julie, her life is genuinely shaped by the sins of the father and mother; in her case, an emotionally weak father and psychologically unbalanced mother’s own war of attrition shaped and trained the young girl to distrust all men. (Strindberg points out with painful clarity the ways in which children become the weapons through which their parents can strike hardest and deepest at each other.)
‘The chief innovation that Sjöberg brings to his Miss Julie is the seamless way in which he presents both main characters’ past and present in a unified whole; as Julie begins to reminisce over her own childhood, the camera pans away and we are taken into the past only to be brought back into the uncomfortable present in one continuous motion, which speaks to the ever-present nature of memory in our lives as we live out in real time. This seamlessness injects a dreamy surrealism into an otherwise, caustic realism as well as foreshadows Bergman’s own use of this approach in films like Wild Strawberries.
However, the film’s dramatic core is sustained by Bjork and Palme’s performances as the main characters. Powerfully open emotionally, Bjork is expert at imposing the character’s will believably in the first half as well as transitioning into the shattered psyche that exposes her vulnerability and leads her to the tale’s tragic denouement'.
Cast:
Anita Björk ... Miss Julie
Ulf Palme ... Jean
Märta Dorff ... Kristin, cook
Lissi Alandh ... Countess Berta, Julie's mother
Anders Henrikson ... Count Carl, Julie's father
Inga Gill ... Viola
Åke Fridell ... Robert
Kurt-Olof Sundström ... Julie's Fiancé
Max von Sydow ... Hand
Margaretha Krook ... Governess (as Margareta Krook)
Åke Claesson ... Doctor
Inger Norberg ... Julie as a child
Jan Hagerman ... Jean as a child
Technical
Produced by
Rune Waldekranz .... producer (uncredited)
Original Music and arranged by
Dag Wirén
Cinematography by
Göran Strindberg
Film Editing by
Lennart Wallén
Art Direction by
Bibi Lindström
Bergman and Sjöberg, Swedish films
Alf Sjöberg (21 June 1903 – 16 April 1980) was a Swedish theatre and film director.
Born in 1903, Sjöberg was in the thick of artistic developments of new medium of cinema. Victor Sjöström( The Outlaw and His Wife-1918) and Mauritz Stiller( Sir Arne’s Treasure-1919) were engaged in making Swedish cinema a force to reckon with. Hollywood sensing threat bought over Sjöström and Stiller along with his protégé Greta Garbo to MGM. Into this breach stepped in Alf Sjöberg, trained at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and he caused a sensation with his very first work, The Strongest (1929), an intense fable of seal hunters in Greenland. But the mortal blow to the industry had been struck, and he retreated to the boards, mounting acclaimed, innovative productions of Strindberg and Shakespeare through the 1930s. Meanwhile, Swedish cinema entered a struggling, populist phase. The smash of the decade was Gustaf Molander’s glossy soap Intermezzo (1936), soon to be remade for David Selznick -( once again,this time plundering its ingenue star, Ingrid Bergman).
Ironically, Sweden’s neutrality during the Second World War turned the grim situation around. A ban on foreign imports deemed propaganda (that is, nearly everything from the Axis or the Allies) gave domestic filmmaking a sudden shot in the arm. Determined on a renaissance, the visionary head of Svensk Filmindustri, Carl Anders Dymling, symbolically enthroned a repatriated Sjöström as the company’s artistic supervisor, then wooed another indispensable auteur. Sjöberg had been tempted back to cinema for an urgent, antifascist melodrama, They Staked Their Lives (1940), and consolidated his prestige with The Road to Heaven (1942), a stark medieval allegory that holds more than an embryonic hint of a later folktale about a certain chess-playing knight. At the time, the author of that classic was a hustling junior in the script department of SF, and Dymling had an inspiration: why not arrange a creative marriage between this whiz kid Bergman and the veteran Sjöberg? The result was Torment (1944) The young Bergman came to represent the youth and Sjöberg, the Establishment. In Sweden as elsewhere, the war’s trauma had propelled youth culture—and though Bergman could be profitably sold as a rebel than Sjöberg.
Whatever might be said of Bergman’s burgeoning talent it was unlike that of Sjöberg who had cut his teeth on 1920s German expressionism. His camera mobility and deep-focus framing is evident in Torment.
Bergman would absorb some aspect of his technique for Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and The Silence (1963), eventually conceding that “Alf Sjöberg . . . taught me a great deal.” If it was a case of oedipal rivalry, then momentarily the father outpaced the son. Screwed over on Torment, Sjöberg recouped with Iris and the Lieutenant (1946) and Only a Mother (1949). Despite his success with films Torment (1944) and Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg was above all, and foremost, a stage director; perhaps the greatest at Dramaten (alongside, first, Olof Molander and, later, Ingmar Bergman). He was a First Director of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre in the years 1930-1980, where he staged a large number of remarkable and historic productions. Sjöberg was also a pioneer director for early Swedish TV theatre (his 1955 TV theatre production of Hamlet is a national milestone).
A clue to the weight of two directors one only needs to watch Torment where Bergamn’s part only called for script and some four days shooting towards the end. Yet Bergman has become saleable and his name appears more striking than that of Sjöberg.
Sjöberg died in a car accident on his way to rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.
Versions of Miss Julie
* The first, Fröken Julie by the Swedish director, Alf Sjöberg in 1951.
* Another version was produced in 1971 by Tigon British Film Productions. It starred Helen Mirren as Miss Julie.
* A version was directed by Mike Figgis with Saffron Burrows in the role of Miss Julie and Peter Mullan in the role of Jean in 1999.
(Ack: independentfilmquarterly, Brigitta Steene, Miss Julie: The Three Bergs-peter Matthews, criterion collection
answers.com, wikipedia,)
benny
Sunday, 3 January 2010
Day of Wrath-1943
Vredens Dag-1943
Based on a novel by Hans Wiers-Jenssens, Carl Th.Dreyer’s Day of Wrath remains an intense, unforgettable experience. The credits against the score of Dies Irae, chanted by a solemn choir on the background sets the tone. One might expect the film to be a moral play from a casual reading of the plot. Consider the plot: Anne, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson who has come home. The film could easily have slid into the other extreme judging by the bare storyline. The film is not for those who approach a film to satisfy their prurient interests. Carl Dreyer is in full command of his material never swerving to please either. He leaves the film open ended and it makes it all the more compelling drama somewhat like Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel. Was Anne similarly guilty or not is left to the viewer and there are no easy answers.
Set in Denmark in the 1600s Dreyer’s austere narrative does not let off the aged, devout minister, Absalon (Thorkild Roose) for marrying a far younger wife, Anne (Lisbeth Movin). His moral authority places him head of the religious council and in power over life and death of members of his parish. But is he what he seems to profess? All his professed piety is negated by his foolish May- December marriage. As the film progresses we know his gravity and condescending concern for her is more a manifestation of the aridity of his soul. He can well dispatch a helpless woman to her death who knows too well the circumstances by which he claimed the young bride. With her death the minister has merely bought time. None of his fellow clergymen shall know he conspired to release Anne's late mother, an accused witch, in return for Anne agreeing to marry him. This is the moral dilemma number one.
Abaslon's unmarried son (and Anne's stepson), Martin (Preben Lerdoff Rye) poses the second. In the final scene we feel with Anne in the manner her last remaining support is cut off. Martin is as much guilty of lust but having tasted stolen bread in secret, the gravel that he spits out is his lack of moral compass. He gives in too easily to ‘religion’ of his departed sire and superstition. The shot where Anne stands by her husband’s coffin abandoned and accused by her peers is all the more keenly felt since it is a commentary of Martin’s betrayal. It breaks her will so much as to let her tormenters do what will. But was she really guilty of Absalon’s death?
Whether Anne is really guilty or not is left unanswered as the scene in the first half where Absalon reveals about her mother. She was a witch who could with her powers work with the dead and the living to bring anything to pass. He shares this piece of news concerned that she as her child possessed the same powers, and in the perilous times when witches were hunted and burned she should be very careful. Next shot we see her enunciating the name of Martin clearly and trembling with desire. The viewer knows the name is spoken with all her being. Was it the desire of a woman awaiting for a physical union with one who is in his prime? Or is the cold power of a witch manifested here? In whichever case Martin responded because of his human fraility. Whether Martin answered her call on incantation or by his own physical desire makes him equally guilty. But he is not punished. Moral dilemma of man answering his natural urges or giving in to darker powers easily doesn’t let off the ‘witch’ or her victim easily. In other words,our moral lapses we cover with labels of demonic possession or witchcraft.
While largely Dreyer’s essay deals with a forbidden love triangle there are two characters whose formidable presence delineate the moral ambit of the three characters. Anne’s tragedy is what imposed by hereditary. Herlofs Marte (Anne Svierkier) at the beginning of the film comes to Anne in fright; her appeal for refuge is on the basis she is the daughter of a witch of her own coven. Anne in helping her has already placed herself on the wrong side of the powerful Council.
Marte who is accused of witchcraft knows society for what it is. She knows what beats behind the straitlaced minister and his ilk. She is unrepentant and is not taken in by the moralizing prig whose heart is all angles as sharp as the scythe of Death. She cries out "I fear neither heaven or hell; I am only afraid to die," and it is merely admission of her human fraility that is beyond pretensions or need for redemption. When she falls along with the burning stake it is as she falls on us. It is an unforgettable cinematic moment.
At the outset we witness an intimate domestic scene that is a commentary on the household. It is not Absalon or his wife but his mother who is in charge. She is a veritable Gorgon. Naturally Anne could not do anything right and when her mother-in-law accuses her of engineering her son’s death we are left with no doubt as to the motive. Mother of the minister and in her dress and conduct a matron of unassailable virtue she is unrepentant and unredeemed as much as Herlofs Marte occupying the other end of local community in Norway.
Filmed during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (Vredens dag) is a harrowing account of individual helplessness in the face of growing social repression and paranoia. Exquisitely photographed and passionately acted, Day of Wrath remains an intense, unforgettable experience.
Cast
Lisbeth Movin
Albert Høeberg
Preben Lerdorff Rye
Sigrid Neiiendam
Credits
Director Carl Th. Dreyer
Screenplay Carl Th. Dreyer
From a novel by Hans Wiers-Jenssens
Producer Carl Th. Dreyer and Tage Nielsen
Cinematography Karl Andersson
Editing Anne Marie Petersen and Edith Schlüssel
Music Poul Schierbeck
Memorable Quotes:
Rev. Absalon Pederssøn: There is nothing so quiet as a heart that has ceased to beat.
----
Martin: Shall we ever find each other again?
Anne Pedersdotter: Who shall prevent it?
Martin: The dead.
----
Anne Pedersdotter: I see through my tears, but no one comes to wipe them away.
Trivia
Though the film is outwardly a chronicle of a religious witch-hunt, it contained many subtler comparisons to the behavior of the Nazis (torture and questioning) and Carl Theodor Dreyer fled Denmark for Sweden where he remained until the war was over.
Dreyer
‘Much of Dreyer’s austerity in dissecting the frailities of human heart and psyche without sitting in judgment of moral compulsions he is more a coroner than a surgeon. Hysteria of witchcraft and heresy of 17th Century had given way to Eugenics and racial purity demanded by the Nazism. Looking at society conditioned by Luther or Calvin authority of the godly required scapegoats. The church leaders based their policy on the Holy Writ while the Nazis policy of lebensraum drew their own conclusions from Spencer and Darwin. Dreyer’s concern was for those who made up society, Everyman on whom was the burden of making the policy of powers- that- be work. In locating the areas of putrefaction he didn’t make them monstrous or innocent. Absalon, Jeanne d’Arc one mythical and the other historical, were victims of greater forces.
Dreyer’s upbringing was neither strict nor Lutheran. Born out of wedlock in 1889 to a Swedish servant (who died horribly a year and a half later trying to abort a second child), he was adopted by the Dreyers in Copenhagen, who gave him a nonreligious upbringing and whom he grew up despising religiosity. Absalon’s mother must have touched a familiar chord in him to make her as instrument of hatred masquerading as propriety. ‘The slow pacing is necessary for the intensity and the sexiness under the gloom to register. Freely adapted from a Norwegian play… Anne Pedersdotter that Dreyer had first seen in 1909, Day of Wrath looks today more cinematically advanced than any other movie released in 1943.
The film’s handling of period is unparalleled, achieving a narrative richness that may initially seem confusing. Set in 1623, when people still believed without question in witches, the film views that world from a contemporary perspective without for a moment dispelling our sense of what it felt like from the inside. Dreyer pulls off this difficult task through his singular style, involving a sensual form of camera movement he invented: the camera gliding on unseen tracks in one direction while uncannily panning in another direction. It’s difficult to imagine—a three-dimensional kind of transport that somehow combines coming and going in the same complex journey—but a hypnotic experience to follow. The film’s first real taste of it comes fairly early, when we follow Anne in her sinuous progress towards the torture chamber where Herlof’s Marte is being interrogated. The camera tracking with Anne around a pillar prompts our involvement while its simultaneous swiveling away from her establishes our detachment. And enhancing the strange sense of presence that results is Dreyer’s rare employment of direct sound rather than studio post-synching—giving scenes an almost carnal impact..’ (20Aug01
Figuring Out Day of Wrath- Jonathan Rosenbaum/Criterion collections, 20 Aug 01)
benny
Based on a novel by Hans Wiers-Jenssens, Carl Th.Dreyer’s Day of Wrath remains an intense, unforgettable experience. The credits against the score of Dies Irae, chanted by a solemn choir on the background sets the tone. One might expect the film to be a moral play from a casual reading of the plot. Consider the plot: Anne, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson who has come home. The film could easily have slid into the other extreme judging by the bare storyline. The film is not for those who approach a film to satisfy their prurient interests. Carl Dreyer is in full command of his material never swerving to please either. He leaves the film open ended and it makes it all the more compelling drama somewhat like Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel. Was Anne similarly guilty or not is left to the viewer and there are no easy answers.
Set in Denmark in the 1600s Dreyer’s austere narrative does not let off the aged, devout minister, Absalon (Thorkild Roose) for marrying a far younger wife, Anne (Lisbeth Movin). His moral authority places him head of the religious council and in power over life and death of members of his parish. But is he what he seems to profess? All his professed piety is negated by his foolish May- December marriage. As the film progresses we know his gravity and condescending concern for her is more a manifestation of the aridity of his soul. He can well dispatch a helpless woman to her death who knows too well the circumstances by which he claimed the young bride. With her death the minister has merely bought time. None of his fellow clergymen shall know he conspired to release Anne's late mother, an accused witch, in return for Anne agreeing to marry him. This is the moral dilemma number one.
Abaslon's unmarried son (and Anne's stepson), Martin (Preben Lerdoff Rye) poses the second. In the final scene we feel with Anne in the manner her last remaining support is cut off. Martin is as much guilty of lust but having tasted stolen bread in secret, the gravel that he spits out is his lack of moral compass. He gives in too easily to ‘religion’ of his departed sire and superstition. The shot where Anne stands by her husband’s coffin abandoned and accused by her peers is all the more keenly felt since it is a commentary of Martin’s betrayal. It breaks her will so much as to let her tormenters do what will. But was she really guilty of Absalon’s death?
Whether Anne is really guilty or not is left unanswered as the scene in the first half where Absalon reveals about her mother. She was a witch who could with her powers work with the dead and the living to bring anything to pass. He shares this piece of news concerned that she as her child possessed the same powers, and in the perilous times when witches were hunted and burned she should be very careful. Next shot we see her enunciating the name of Martin clearly and trembling with desire. The viewer knows the name is spoken with all her being. Was it the desire of a woman awaiting for a physical union with one who is in his prime? Or is the cold power of a witch manifested here? In whichever case Martin responded because of his human fraility. Whether Martin answered her call on incantation or by his own physical desire makes him equally guilty. But he is not punished. Moral dilemma of man answering his natural urges or giving in to darker powers easily doesn’t let off the ‘witch’ or her victim easily. In other words,our moral lapses we cover with labels of demonic possession or witchcraft.
While largely Dreyer’s essay deals with a forbidden love triangle there are two characters whose formidable presence delineate the moral ambit of the three characters. Anne’s tragedy is what imposed by hereditary. Herlofs Marte (Anne Svierkier) at the beginning of the film comes to Anne in fright; her appeal for refuge is on the basis she is the daughter of a witch of her own coven. Anne in helping her has already placed herself on the wrong side of the powerful Council.
Marte who is accused of witchcraft knows society for what it is. She knows what beats behind the straitlaced minister and his ilk. She is unrepentant and is not taken in by the moralizing prig whose heart is all angles as sharp as the scythe of Death. She cries out "I fear neither heaven or hell; I am only afraid to die," and it is merely admission of her human fraility that is beyond pretensions or need for redemption. When she falls along with the burning stake it is as she falls on us. It is an unforgettable cinematic moment.
At the outset we witness an intimate domestic scene that is a commentary on the household. It is not Absalon or his wife but his mother who is in charge. She is a veritable Gorgon. Naturally Anne could not do anything right and when her mother-in-law accuses her of engineering her son’s death we are left with no doubt as to the motive. Mother of the minister and in her dress and conduct a matron of unassailable virtue she is unrepentant and unredeemed as much as Herlofs Marte occupying the other end of local community in Norway.
Filmed during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (Vredens dag) is a harrowing account of individual helplessness in the face of growing social repression and paranoia. Exquisitely photographed and passionately acted, Day of Wrath remains an intense, unforgettable experience.
Cast
Lisbeth Movin
Albert Høeberg
Preben Lerdorff Rye
Sigrid Neiiendam
Credits
Director Carl Th. Dreyer
Screenplay Carl Th. Dreyer
From a novel by Hans Wiers-Jenssens
Producer Carl Th. Dreyer and Tage Nielsen
Cinematography Karl Andersson
Editing Anne Marie Petersen and Edith Schlüssel
Music Poul Schierbeck
Memorable Quotes:
Rev. Absalon Pederssøn: There is nothing so quiet as a heart that has ceased to beat.
----
Martin: Shall we ever find each other again?
Anne Pedersdotter: Who shall prevent it?
Martin: The dead.
----
Anne Pedersdotter: I see through my tears, but no one comes to wipe them away.
Trivia
Though the film is outwardly a chronicle of a religious witch-hunt, it contained many subtler comparisons to the behavior of the Nazis (torture and questioning) and Carl Theodor Dreyer fled Denmark for Sweden where he remained until the war was over.
Dreyer
‘Much of Dreyer’s austerity in dissecting the frailities of human heart and psyche without sitting in judgment of moral compulsions he is more a coroner than a surgeon. Hysteria of witchcraft and heresy of 17th Century had given way to Eugenics and racial purity demanded by the Nazism. Looking at society conditioned by Luther or Calvin authority of the godly required scapegoats. The church leaders based their policy on the Holy Writ while the Nazis policy of lebensraum drew their own conclusions from Spencer and Darwin. Dreyer’s concern was for those who made up society, Everyman on whom was the burden of making the policy of powers- that- be work. In locating the areas of putrefaction he didn’t make them monstrous or innocent. Absalon, Jeanne d’Arc one mythical and the other historical, were victims of greater forces.
Dreyer’s upbringing was neither strict nor Lutheran. Born out of wedlock in 1889 to a Swedish servant (who died horribly a year and a half later trying to abort a second child), he was adopted by the Dreyers in Copenhagen, who gave him a nonreligious upbringing and whom he grew up despising religiosity. Absalon’s mother must have touched a familiar chord in him to make her as instrument of hatred masquerading as propriety. ‘The slow pacing is necessary for the intensity and the sexiness under the gloom to register. Freely adapted from a Norwegian play… Anne Pedersdotter that Dreyer had first seen in 1909, Day of Wrath looks today more cinematically advanced than any other movie released in 1943.
The film’s handling of period is unparalleled, achieving a narrative richness that may initially seem confusing. Set in 1623, when people still believed without question in witches, the film views that world from a contemporary perspective without for a moment dispelling our sense of what it felt like from the inside. Dreyer pulls off this difficult task through his singular style, involving a sensual form of camera movement he invented: the camera gliding on unseen tracks in one direction while uncannily panning in another direction. It’s difficult to imagine—a three-dimensional kind of transport that somehow combines coming and going in the same complex journey—but a hypnotic experience to follow. The film’s first real taste of it comes fairly early, when we follow Anne in her sinuous progress towards the torture chamber where Herlof’s Marte is being interrogated. The camera tracking with Anne around a pillar prompts our involvement while its simultaneous swiveling away from her establishes our detachment. And enhancing the strange sense of presence that results is Dreyer’s rare employment of direct sound rather than studio post-synching—giving scenes an almost carnal impact..’ (20Aug01
Figuring Out Day of Wrath- Jonathan Rosenbaum/Criterion collections, 20 Aug 01)
benny
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