DAY OF WRATH: THE ENCLOSED IMAGE
historical-dramatic elements which have been so rigidly suppressed. But
the basic style of the film is already fixed, and this need to introduce
new elements results in incongruities, passages of boredom, and dramatic
incoherence.
The dramatic plot which begins to work itself out after the witch's
death concerns the adultery of the pastor's young wife Anne and his
son Martin; Anne becomes a witch, ensnaring her lover and later killing
her husband by the power of evil. The ambiguity of the pastor's posi–
tion, too, is involved with witchcraft: his sin was to conceal the fact that
Anne's mother was a witch. Thus witchcraft is no longer pure image,
it is a way of behaving, and the question of its reality is no longer to be
avoided. A psychological answer is impossible: Dreyer is already com–
mitted to keeping the past
in
the past. But the supernatural answer,
which is the one he chooses (and with a hesitation that only makes
matters worse), is just as bad: once the question of witchcraft is raised,
no one can be expected to believe in its reality.
The attempt to impose belief by purely aesthetic means is inevitably
a failure, both dramatically and visually. There is a scene in which the
pastor walks home at night through an "evil" storm that is the height
of visual banality; then his wife, at home with her lover, is shown saying,
"If
he were dead-"; then back to the pastor, who suddenly straightens
up in the howling wind and says to his companion, "I felt as if Death
had brushed me by." And there is a continual effort to use the camera
for symbolic comment that eventually becomes clear enough but is
never convincing: when Anne first tries her "power" in order to call
Martin to her side, Dreyer repeats on her face the shifting pattern of
leaves that appeared on the face of the old witch before she was burnt;
when the lovers walk in the fields, the camera keeps turning upward
to the trees above their heads. In general, there is an attempt to equate
the outdoors, the world of nature, with evil (the pastor's mother, who is
the one firm moral pillar, is never seen outside the rigidly ordered house–
hold she controls) ; but the camera cannot create a religious system.
The purely dramatic failure is most obvious in the film's conclusion,
when Martin turns against Anne and thus leads her to confess her
witchcraft. Martin's defection is not made to seem an adequate reason
for Anne's confession, and Martin's action itself is entirely without
motivation: the very skill with which the director now tries to transmute
visual patterns into drama (as earlier he had tried to make dramatic
patterns purely visual) becomes a kind of irrelevancy. But even in this
later section of the film there is still much that is successful. When
Anne resolves to kill her husband, a virtual transformation of character
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