FILM CHRONICLE
DAY OF WRATH: THE ENCLOSED IMAGE
Carl Dreyer's basic problem as an artist is one that seems
almost inevitably to confront the self-conscious creator of "art" films:
the conflict between a love for the purely visual and the tendencies of a
medium that is not only visual but also dramatic. The principle that
the film is a medium based on movement has often been used to justify
a complete preoccupation with visual patterns, as if the ideal film would
be one that succeeded in divorcing movement from content, but it is this
principle itself that raises the problem, for the presentation of human
beings in movement necessarily leads to the creation of drama; thus
the maker of "art" films, unless he limits himself to complete abstraction
or to generalized poetic symbolism, tends to raise aesthetic demands that
he cannot satisfy within the framework he has set. Only in the earlier
parts of
Day of Wrath
can Dreyer be said to have solved this problem.
And the solution, though brilliant, is essentially unstable; the weaknesses
of the film's later parts grow out of the virtues of its beginning.
The film opens with the playing of
Dies ]rae,
a dreadful, insistent
hymn prolonged to the point where it comes to seem a kind of outrage;
it is music that does not aim at the listener's pleasure or require his con–
sent. In effect, this music establishes the existence of a world whose graces
pretend to no connection with the needs of human beings, a world that
may find it proper in the realization of its designs to burn a woman alive
for being a witch.
There is only the most unemphatic indication that such a world is
supposed to have existed in Denmark early in the seventeenth century.
It is not a historical world-though it exemplifies certain historical
ideas-and the primary tendency of Dreyer's direction is to keep it from
becoming historical, to preserve it self-enclosed and static. Everything
leading up to the execution of the witch Marthe is presented like a
pageant: each movement is graceful and dignified, each figure in some
particular fashion beautiful, each shot "composed"; and the camera
focuses always on the leading figures of the pageant itself, following their
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