Ordet

Religion is a rich and varied subject for many filmmakers to pursue. Many filmmakers make at least one movie that explores the religious side of society. Sometimes these movies can be hard-hitting satires that point out the hypocrisy of religion. Other times, they can be small lyrical dramas about a person’s internal faith. But most filmmakers do not make their career subject matter the big r word. But most filmmakers aren’t like Th. Carl Dreyer.

Ordet is about two families in a remote part of Denmark. The Borgen family is led by Morten Borgen, a stout farmer who clearly etched out a unique life of his own. He has three sons. Mikkel, the eldest, is married to Inger and they have two children with one ready to burst out. Johannes is the middle one. He has gone mad some years ago after studying too much Kierkegaard and now believes he is Jesus Christ. The third brother, Anders, is a young adult who is in love with Anne, the tailor’s daughter. The other family is the tailor’s family, called the Petersens. The patriarch and proprietor of the business, Peter, is also a very devout fundamentalist Christian. The wife, Kirsten, staunchly stands next to her husband. Anne is the silent, but dutiful daughter.

The main conflict between these two families is Peter Petersen’s refusal to let Anne marry Anders. But this conflict doesn’t really matter. What matters more is Petersen and Borgen’s difference of religion. They are both Christians. Although they are united by one sacred text, their interpretations of this text vary wildly. Petersen is an austere fundamentalist, believing in the need for the sinner (which is everyone) to frequently ask for forgiveness and prostrate oneself in front of the Lord. We see the physical manifestation of his religion at a prayer meeting that he holds. The meeting is somber and full of fire and brimstone rhetoric. He is staunch and resolute in his beliefs. Borgen, however, believes in a joyous and forgiving God. He wants everyone to go to heaven not just the people of his own religion. He talks about religion and faith to Inger early on in the film and we can sense that he has some reservations about it. Although in his youth, he fought for a less strict faith in his community, we can see that this fight has gone out of him. He doubts his faith in God. These conversations that happen between Petersen and Borgen and Borgen and Inger make up most of the film. What is right? What is the perfect path to peace and happiness? No one ever has the answers, but that seems to be okay.

As the film progresses, the lives of these people shift dramatically. Inger is becoming sick from the pregnancy. She is failing fast and the doctor must get the baby out of her in order to save her. Their questions about abstract religion now become very real. Will the power of prayer save this beloved family member? Or will she die? At one point the doctor who is working on Inger sits down next to the priest who has come to visit. He asks a very important question. Did his work and his reliance on science, a very concrete discipline, save Inger? Or did the family’s persistent prayers save her instead and guide God to give the family a miracle? No one knows quite how to answer the question, because they don’t quite know. This is in essence the problem not just with religion, but with life itself. The doctor could have applied every aspect of science that he was taught to try to save her and there was still a strong possibility that she wouldn’t have lived. The world is made up of wild chances and harsh realities.

Of all the characters, it is easiest to sympathize with Inger. Inger has an internal faith that isn’t bound by a Church’s sense of rules. She prays out loud and has faith that prayer will help her brother-in-law, Johannes, become sane again. But she doesn’t force her faith onto her unbelieving husband. She accepts him for who he is and believes that one day he will find true peace, even if it isn’t in the religion she believes in. Her internal light seems to brighten even Morten Borgen. Her illness brings him back to prayer and the belief in his own religion.

Religion is a complicated subject to portray accurately on film. Most of the time characters with religion seem to be a cardboard cut out of very few characteristics. However, Dreyer was able to convey the complexity of religion while also grounding his characters in the reality of his world. The religion of their choosing is just one aspect of their many faceted lives. It is what drives them and completes them but it isn’t all that they are. More filmmakers need to remember that.

Day of Wrath

Carl Th. Dreyer is a director I both love and hate. When I watched the Passion of Joan of Arc, I fell in love with the tight angles and the expressionist camera movements. Everything about that movie demonstrated the genius of the director. I followed up that viewing with his last movie, Gerturd. I had the exact opposite reaction to the movie. I couldn’t stand the slow-moving action, the lack of diversity in the setting and the insufferable protagonist who does nothing but complain. I couldn’t believe that the man who made Passion also made such a slog of a movie. It took me a couple of years to get over the reversion I felt for Gerturd and give Dreyer another chance. I am glad I did.

Day of Wrath on the surface is about 16th century Denmark and a witch hunt. What makes this movie interesting is what is going on below the surface. Having been made in during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Dreyer chose to make several allusions to this oppressive regime. Dreyer essentially made an anti-Nazi movie without actually making it anti-Nazi. However to see this movie purely from this light would boil the plot down too much. Instead what we get is a great glimpse at a time where witches were a real threat, torture was accepted along with burning at the stake and real people thought they colluded with the Devil. A Lutheran priest is married to a much younger woman. Anne, the second wife of this Lutheran priest, became betrothed to him after the priest absolved her mother’s accusations of witchcraft in exchange for her. She had no say in the manner. (Somehow a marriage between a woman who is easily half the age of a man who is going to marry her is seen as perfectly acceptable.) One day a woman on the run from a witch hunting mob shows up at their doorstep. After this woman (named Herlof’s Marte) gets caught, she tries to bargain with her life by talking about Anne’s mother accusations of witchcraft. As she is being tortured and ultimately killed despite asking the priest many times for help, she puts a curse on him. The same day Herlof’s Marte shows up at the doorstep, an expected visitor also comes by. The son of the priest from his first wife is now a handsome adult man. Anne and the son are immediately attracted to each other. As Herlof’s Marte is being executed, their affair with each other begins. Anne’s passion for life is ignited by the son and extinguished the moment she comes back in the house under the oppressive regime of the priest’s mother. The priest bears the weight of the curse and his guilt throughout the rest of the film, fighting to throw both off. But the curse and the consequences of his actions get him in the end.

Dreyer uses the camera as well here as he did in Passion. In one magnificent scene, he slides the apparatus past a group of priests in a dungeon. They are watching Herlof’s Marte get tortured, but we don’t see her. We only hear her and see the reactions that these priests who seemed to be hardened to her plight by experience. We hear the main interrogator tell her statements. There was never once an actual question come out of his mouth. This is interspersed with agonizing moans and declarations from Herlof’s Marte. This scene illustrates the institutionalized nature of this practice and the justification of the reasons by just showing these priests’ composed faces. They seem like they just couldn’t be bothered. This scene is also one of the major scenes that film scholars point to when making their case about the anti-Nazi themes. It is clear from the grouping of these gentlemen and the brutal torture that doesn’t produce anything but what they want to come out of it, that he was accusing the Nazis of the same practice.

Just like in Passion, Dreyer was able to take a time and a place so remote from our own and use it to comment on timeless aspects of human nature. Although I may have painted him this way, the Lutheran priest is not a bad guy. He is just trying his hardest to be a virtuous and moral human being. But because he is a human, he makes mistakes. But the restrictions of the time force him to live up to impossible goals. Just like the Nazi officers tasked to enforce the new law in Denmark during its occupation weren’t necessarily bad people. They were just forced through a series of decisions and circumstances to become monsters. Anne in a way can be seen as the embodiment of the Resistance movement during the occupation. She is forced to live under the oppressive mother who lords over a house that she doesn’t want to be a part of. This oppression is manifested in the type of head garment she wears. At the beginning, you see in a restrictive all black hat that flattens her vibrant blonde hair. As she begins to rebel against the system manifested by the priest, she becomes a live with the spirit of doing something she wants to do. The rejection of her oppression is made physical by seeing her hair slowly be less and less restricted by bonnets. At the end she is completely free of her shackles and her hair is wild and free. The people who make up the Resistance can only become alive once they are rebelling against the system. Her complete lack of sorrow for her misdeeds during the final scene echoes what a caught Resistance fighter might exhibit. So in other words this film has layers! Yay Layers! Go Layers!