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Lyrics to "Dies Irae" scroll down the screen in lieu of opening credits, just the hymn for a landscape of quotidian tortures and burnings. The unseen mob chanting outside the home of the elderly accused (Anna Svierkier) is concurrent with Clouzot's Le Corbeau, her trembling figure in the darkened attic is a vivid memory of Lang's M. (Her pale, bare body is next seen broken on a rack as the judges congratulate themselves for the "fine confession" they've extracted.) "A young housewife in an old household" is the central scandal, the aged minister (Thorkild Roose) once took a child bride whose mother he spared from persecution for witchcraft, the maiden (Lisbeth Movin) is an evil spirit in the eyes of her severe mother-in-law (Sigrid Neiiendam). When her desperate embrace is rejected by her devout spouse, she tries an incantation and summons her stepson (Preben Lerdorff Rye) for an illicit kiss. "What are my eyes like? Childlike? Pure and clear?" "No. Deep and mysterious." Carl Theodor Dreyer on the Occupation, 1943 as 1623, a vast masterpiece on oppressive sanctity and subversive sin and the insinuating ambiguity in between. Georges de La Tour is key to the shadowy portraiture, the camera's sustained lateral panning prepares the shock of a fierce vertical, i.e., the widow tied to a long ladder that topples into the bonfire. (An idyllic stroll in the forest comes to a halt at the sight of a cart carrying wood for the execution.) Frost's "old-believers," medieval superstition, the empty promise of soulful redemption in the face of corporeal suffering. "Does one hear of anything else these days?" Alive with forbidden desire, the heroine glides while others plod, flashes her loose tresses like a naked body, and, to her own horror, succeeds in willing her husband's demise. Sorcery, or simply the danger of a woman's assertiveness? "It's not the dead we should fear." The last image contrasts with Bresson's Journal d'un Curé de Campagne. Cinematography by Karl Andersson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |