Day of Wrath.

"It's masterfully photographed and alive to the human complexity of its characters, but offers an unsparing view of their failures and their blindness. It's intensely erotic, although it depicts nothing more risqué than a young couple kissing. It brings a disturbing fragment of the distant past alive with vivid clarity, but also crackles with contemporary political relevance and ambiguous, symbolic depth. I'd be saving a spot for it near the top of my 10-best list if the movie hadn't been made 65 years ago." Andrew O'Hehir in Salon on the digitally restored edition of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Day of Wrath, opening for a week-long run at the IFC Center on Friday.

Updated through 8/29.

"A carefully composed movie of copious close-ups and silent-style performances, Day of Wrath unfolds not so much in a rural Danish village as in deepest Freudland," writes the Voice's J Hoberman before turning to a recent DVD release from Criterion: "The bridge between Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, Vampyr is Dreyer's most radical film - maybe one of my dozen favorite movies by any director.... Vampyr is uncanny not because of its subject matter, but because of its utter strangeness as film."

Nicolas Rapold on Day of Wrath in the L Magazine: "There are the seeds of Bergman, minus the strain, while Paul Schrader grouped Dreyer with Bresson in positing a 'transcendental' style. Though marking a tunnel-vision turn toward play adaptation, Day maintains cinematic bravura: a children's choir learning a hymn for the witch-burning, Anne peering through paned glass like the traveler of Vampyr, a slumped half-nude mass in a priestly torture chamber, Anne gliding across the room before her beloved. Like much of Dreyer, you keep returning to Day of Wrath in your mind and re-emerging."

The IMDb links to nearly 40 more reviews.

Earlier: "Criterion's Vampyr."

(An aside to readers in Germany: While Tage des Zorns, opening this weekend, may translate as Days of Wrath, and though this film, too, is Danish, it ain't Dreyer.)

Update: "Dreyer's non-traditional lighting schemes make the walls seem to glow, and the film's tonal juxtapositions - a forest-idyll scene includes wood for a witch's pyre; children sing as she burns at the stake - have an otherworldly quality," writes Darrell Hartman for Artforum. "'Abstraction allows the director to get outside the fence with which naturalism has surrounded his medium,' Dreyer once claimed. You could say that Day of Wrath is tailor-made for transcendence."

Update, 8/29: "In billowing fabrics and whispering winds, God or Satan or the dead menace the living, yet the way the light falls on suffering and ecstatic faces suggests a higher, more clement power," writes Steven Boone at the House Next Door. "But far more chilling than this spooky expressionism are the simple pans down scrolls invoking God's word and the state's judgments. It's as if Dreyer was at war with words, answering their punishing certainties and limitations with the humanism of light and shadow delicately applied. Dreyer invites you to find in his flesh and blood friezes something a lot closer to God than those murderous texts."

"Yes, Day of Wrath is available in a characteristically pristine DVD transfer from Criterion, but Dreyer's peculiar and timeless cinematic gifts need to be appreciated via projector, not monitor," argues Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "I can think of few other movies whose central creative voice is at once so modern and yet so archaic. Confining that voice in any way - including reducing it to living-room casualness via video - sells Dreyer's medieval modernist vision short."

"[T]he film comes off like an apocalyptic thriller, with faith, family, lust and ash swirling into a vortex," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "In 1943, most Danes saw their country's Nazi occupiers as the hypocritical witch-hunters, but Dreyer's work has proven detached from time, less about persecution than the preservation of dignity at great cost."

Posted by dwhudson at August 27, 2008 1:40 AM