by Sam Juliano
One of the great masterpieces of world cinema has been showcased for several weeks at the IFC in Manhattan in a sparkling restored print. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 sound film Day of Wrath, which appeared more than ten years after his Vampyr, is a restrained chamber drama that examines guilt, sin and retribution in Denmark in the seventeenth century, when witch hunts were all the rage.
The ominous opening scenes unfold with startling power when an old woman named Herlofs Marthe (Anne Svierkier) is first seen handing some herbs to another person in a darkened kitchen room, and then is observed fleeing after the tolling of bells, signifying that the Puritan hierarchy have now identified their latest “conquest” and are hot in pursuit. The nefarious nature of summary judgement in regards to the vivacious Herlofs Marthe is evident by establishing that nothing she has done (or not done) is in any way harmful or contrary to religious doctrine. Her “dabbling” in remedies, which is enough to incur condemnation and eventual execution on a burning pyre illustrate a cloistered society ruled by fear, suspicion and an inflexible and fanatical religious doctrine. Before the austere and mesmerizing drama plays out, it is clear that in this society the closest of relationships would be betrayed if there is even a slight hint of aberrant behavior. At the time of its release many believed Dreyer was being implicitly clear in his own condemnation of Nazi Germany, which overran his home country of Denmark, and forged a society that rounded up those who resisted, enacting swift justice based on unfounded evidence, and encouraged family members to spy on each other. Dreyer, in an interview conducted in 1964 after the debut of his final film Gertrud, and three years before his death at age 79, stated that any parallel between the narrative content of his film and the Nazis was strictly coincidental. Still, it’s somewhat of a miracle the film was even made at all in that oppressive time.
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