An incandescent self-exploration: Ambiguities and unconscious logic in Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer (Denmark 1943)

ABSTRACT

The author examines the paradoxical dramatic dynamics of the Dreyer's masterpiece, according the Matte Blanco's theoretical model, as a tormented path of self awareness that consists in a progressive immersion in the unconscious. Anne, the young wife of an old Lutheran pastor, marginally involved in the witchcraft trial of a friend of her mother (now dead, but suspected to be a sorceress as well), falls in love for his son-in-law, leaving the child-wife position held so far. It's a new very strong vital drive for Anne, to which she adds the belief to own the magic powers of the witches: the ability to evoke the living and the dead, kill with thought and communicate through dreams. All the emotions are at an infinite level of intensity. Nevertheless, after she's left by her lover and after her husband's wished-upon death, the protagonist confesses her presumed witchcraft before the husband's coffin and, in the derangement of ambiguities, affective contradictions and shift of position, she attains a sort of mystic epiphany (significantly represented by the flow of filmic images): maybe a contact with the deepest layer of the mind where, according to MatteBlanco, the symmetrization is total.

L'autore prende in esame la paradossale dinamica drammatica del capolavoro di Dreyer, ipotizzata come un sofferto percorso di conoscenza che consiste in una progressiva immersione nell'inconscio, secondo il modello di Matte Blanco. Anne, la protagonista, è la giovane moglie di un anziano pastore luterano, la quale, tangenzialmente coinvolta in un processo per stregoneria (la madre della stessa Anne, ora defunta, era stata sospettata di un analogo delitto), si innamora del figliastro, rifiutando il ruolo di moglie bambina tenuto finora. Si accende in lei una potente vitalità pulsionale, alla quale si viene ad aggiungere la convinzione di possedere i magici poteri delle streghe: evocare i vivi e i morti, uccidere col pensiero e comunicare attraverso i sogni. Le emozioni della protagonista raggiungono un livello infinito d'intensità. Peraltro, dopo la strana morte del marito da lei desiderata, nonché abbandonata dall'amante, Anne confessa la sua presunta stregoneria e, nella vertigine delle ambiguità, dei contrasti affettivi e dei ribaltamenti di fronte, approda a una sorta di epifania mistica (espressivamente rappresentata nel flusso delle immagini cinematografiche). Forse un contatto con lo strato più profondo della mente, dove, secondo Matte Blanco, la simmetrizzazione sarebbe totale.

KEYWORDS:

• Unconscious
• symmetry principle
• Matte Blanco
• paranoid anxiety
• mysticism
• Dreyer

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Nils Holger Petersen, teacher of theology at the University of Copenhagen, for his invaluable observations and for the Danish translation of Dies irae.

Notes

1 Calling to mind the use of pictorial themes in Day of Wrath, seventeenth-century Dutch painting (and in particular, the work of Rembrandt) is frequently referenced in the literature on Dies irae.

2 Dreyer adapted the script for Day of Wrath from the play Anne Pedersdotter (1908), by the Norwegian playwright Hans Wiers-Jenssen. It is an elaboration of an event that actually happened in 1590. The playwright’s interpretation is wholly secular and positivistic (in the dialogue, there are continual references to hypnotic/parapsychological communications, and even, in the end, to the protagonist’s madness). Additionally, in the theatrical work, the time intervals and ages of the characters are precisely indicated: Anne is 25 and was married at the age of 20; Martin is 24 and has been away studying theology for nine years; Absalon is about 60. Furthermore, while between the first and second acts, there is the span of a day, the third act takes place six months after the second. In the film, nothing is said about these measured rhythms, and it seems that everything happens in a contracted space of time – in contrast to the rather slow rhythm of the story.

3 Translations of quotations from Italian sources are by Gina Atkinson.

4 The English translations of the film’s dialogue are taken from subtitles at the following URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ_Ys4er_MY (accessed 15 August 2017).

5 In the stratified bi-logic of the mind, the first stratum (almost all asymmetrical and conscious) is “that of a conception or perception of a concrete and well-delimited thing—a person, a material object, a well-defined thought” (Matte Blanco 1988, 52). In the second stratum, largely conscious, “emotion makes its first visible appearance” (53), and with it an original symmetrization (for instance, “this person is like a tiger”). The third stratum, normally unconscious, involves things belonging to the same class that become identical and are equal in possessing all the properties of that class (in our film, the witches or the clergy). The intensity of emotions tends toward infinite values. A certain degree of asymmetry persists, at any rate, in that, as is many times evidenced in Day of Wrath, there is a splitting that involves both clear and dichotomous differences (see also Rayner 1995, passim). In the fourth stratum, even more unconscious, “owing to the union of different classes or sets, these become wider, more comprehensive. Example: the class of men comprises that of women and children, so that, when symmetrized, to be a man is identical to being a woman or a child . … At this stratum of greater symmetry and correspondingly less asymmetry, the great aggressions of the preceding stratum are no longer found” (Matte Blanco, 1988, 54). The fifth stratum, the deepest of all, would show a level of symmetrization so elevated that thinking itself is rendered extremely problematic; it is a mode of pure indivisibility, where any one thing mysteriously becomes any other.