Death in the Works of Carl Th. Dreyer
Everything encounters death. There’s no way around that: every life, be it human or flora or fauna, will perish. Every culture crumbles; every sensation fades; every memory is at some point forgotten. In the same vein every teleology, every philosophy, ends in death—or at least must pass through death. It is the inescapable, that which must be confronted. Thus our rituals enact death, our myths imagine the lands of the dead, and our ghost stories warn us of those who fail to embrace death.
To claim that we are beings-toward-death is to note a simple fact of causality and inevitability, but it is also to describe a posture: Heidegger used the term to emphasize that we, in some part, gain our meaning through the eventual reality (and present knowledge) of our death. We are inclined toward the being we’re becoming, leaning toward the future; but that future has a terminus.
The question is how to confront it—how to understand it, this thing that is by nature closed off from our experiential understanding. Even if we can bear soberly with being inclined toward our death, there’s an uncertainty about what precisely we’re aiming toward. In our parlance death has a thousand faces: some kind; others vindictive; or reluctant and mournful; or insatiable, devouring. Death is friend and foe and companion and terror and peace.
And we are humans caught up in the midst (and the mist) of it all, so we do what humans have done since at least the time of Jacob: we wrestle. We fight and cling and tear and shove and flail, refusing to surrender even in defeat. In our God-breathed essence, we are an artistic bunch, so our existential wrestling expresses itself in our poetry, symphonies, paintings, legends, plays, and films. These works of art are double acts of combat—first as an overflowing struggle of the artists’ own immeasurable being, and second as an opportunity to invite the further wrestling of the audience. They are means of survival; they are gifts to one another. In engaging with death through art, we see ourselves and others in our existential nakedness. Keeping both of these modes close to heart—the fight, the gift—we should be attentive to that nakedness with all the care, all the compassion, and all the frankness which this wrestling calls for.
The films of Carl Theodor Dreyer have borne this struggle and inserted themselves deep within the artistic and religious imagination since 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. To some, his filmmaking epitomizes the spiritual capacities of film, capturing a transcendence rooted in faith—the faith which inspires Joan to silently suffer the oppression of her judges, the faith that leads to new life in 1955’s Ordet. But beyond the explorations of faith (which are not always so amiable), Dreyer’s work carries a persistent motif of death that holds its flaming sword over much of his work. Taking such a lens on Dreyer’s oeuvre, a tremendous ambivalence in regards to death becomes evident. It is always at hand, though rarely does it manifest with the same signification. To Dreyer, death is a changeling—much like death writ large across human history. To journey through his films is to confront our greatest enemy and our nearest companion, and to confront our own being-toward-death.
The Cruelty of the World
The Passion of Joan of Arc is largely structured around the actual records of Joan’s trial. Her exploits now behind her, Joan has been captured and is placed on trial for heresy. Even for the uninitiated, the absence of hope is clear from the beginning. Dreyer cast Renée Falconetti as Joan, and her expressive performance engendered cinema’s most beatific image of suffering. For much of the film, the focus is on the injustice of the trial itself: the manipulation of virtue, the insidious framing of pure desires, and the drive of ruling men to domineer. But Falconetti’s serenity and sorrow throughout the proceedings imbue an already-not yet of her execution. She floats beyond the vicissitudes of these men even as she succumbs to their plans. Her tears speak to something greater—both more beautiful and terrible—than they have the power to create. They are a prophecy of both death and the afterlife.
Dreyer’s film can only depict the former, however, and the film ends in conflagration and a wrenching pain, even though Joan’s demise is not shown in full on screen. Instead, the film makes brutal use of editing, cutting between the raging pile of wood and close ups of Joan’s frightened tears. But just as much time is spent on the faces of the onlookers, their pity, dismay and—eventually—anger.
Here, death manifests as the poisonous fruit of tragedy and injustice. David prayed that “you will not let your holy one see decay;” but decay and destruction are viciously enacted upon Falconetti’s Joan. She is engulfed by hatred, as though the cruelty of the world could not let purity—especially of a spiritual nature—go uncorrupted. The world’s rot becomes even more rancorous when it manifests in an authority that wields the Bible as it wields a torch.
It’s tempting to use Christian doctrine to whitewash death, to make it a minor pain, a mere transient stop before we move along to our destination. But to do so is to trivialize the life that preceded it and the revolutionary hope that stretches beyond it. Such reduction is inauthentic in its posture and an illusory defense against the reality of death. The spiritual power of The Passion of Joan of Arc persists even today for its shrewd confrontation of Joan’s execution. The film allows her purity to shine through the smoke, but it frankly perceives the horror of destruction.
Joan is a paragon, but the full terror that Dreyer brings to the film’s finale leaves one less than eager to follow her footsteps. Live well, and be deluged by flame. The lesson, perhaps, is this: If death is the inevitable outcome of a pure life, then a pure life lived in this world of suffering is nothing less than a martyrdom in itself. Few of us will be subject to a death like hers, but our death is nevertheless at hand. A life lived with Joan’s posture—in full acknowledgment and refutation of death—may find transcendence beyond even the cataclysm.
Yet a Further Terror
In a career filled with small scale, earthy tales of human failings and loves, Vampyr seems an outlier. In Dreyer’s deft hands, it becomes a perfect film. Nicolas de Gunzburg’s Allan Grey is studying the occult when he stumbles upon mysterious events in a small village. He’s given a package by a stranger labeled “To be opened upon my death”—a foreboding intrusion, only made moreso when Grey witnesses the man murdered shortly thereafter. The murder, an ailing woman, and a book on occult lore eventually culminates in the realization that a vampire is haunting this village.
Vampyr is nurtured by a religious inclination, as is any tale indebted to Stoker’s vision. But Dreyer’s film leans away from the explicit horror of Murnau’s Nosferatu to instead craft something more wild and existential. Vampyr is cast in extreme haze that pervades the landscape and the character’s psychology, alike. The events ricochet off Grey without clarity or semblance of purpose, a parade of bewildering episodes. After growing weary, Grey falls asleep on a bench; Dreyer employs a double exposure to show Grey (or his spirit?) rise and wander off, while his body remains fast asleep. Perchance a dream, perhaps physical—the essence of Dreyer’s film is that reality is dubious. The oneiric quality of life casts a haze on the substance of it all, leaving us wondering where the line between dream and reality ends, and if it even matters.
Here we become a little less certain as we confront death. Life itself gives us so little solid purchase, how can we grasp what the loss of it entails? Death is a fog wherein we wander, stumbling from image to image without revelation, without progressing. In the end, what can we say of death? Mysterious, only possibly final, wrapped up in our spirits as it is in our bodies. Farther behind its existential haze, though, there’s something darker at play. The filmis laced with a skepticism of resurrection. Life may be tenuous, but we prefer to imagine death with certainty. It is final, hermetic, at least until that final day when all shall be raised. In this we can have hope.
Or at least we should be able to have hope. In Vampyr, Dreyer selects a subject that subverts even Sheol. A resurrection should be a blessed thing, but the vampire revives the dead to a new, lasting death. In the vampire, resurrection is twisted into yet a further terror, the unquenchable thirst for more violence, the unresting eternal.
There’s a sharp provocation to Dreyer’s film, refusing us our most protected of hopes. Where The Passion of Joan of Arc throws us into the injustice of history, Vampyr troubles us with the uncertainty of our spirituality. The vampire’s final evil is that it takes such a religious hope—this inversion of death—and inverts it yet again, turning what should be joyous into something diabolic.
In Vampyr, Dreyer wrestles with the unknowable, and he forces us to do the same. As we confront death, we must realize that what comes after is hazy. He pushes us to the limits of our knowledge, and gives us dreams that venture beyond. Here even death becomes tenuous, like a land lost in fog.
No shade in the shadow of the cross
Set in the days of a small village’s witch hunt, Day of Wrath bears many parallels to Joan of Arc: the religious cast false accusations, trials that seek not truth but self-justification, execution by fire. Dreyer’s focus is once again on the relationships between human beings (though they often prove no less dangerous than vampires).
Anne (Lisbeth Movin) is the young second wife of the village’s priest, Rev. Absalon (Thorklid Roose). Absalon is much older than Anne, a gulf which Anne harbors inside and Absalon’s mother wields in condemnation. That gulf is even harder to bear when Absalon’s son, much closer to Anne’s age, returns and begins to fall in love with Anne.
This family drama is cast within a larger societal plague of suspicion and accusation. Women are being persecuted for performing witchcraft, and the town’s (un)righteous anger is greedy to root out more would-be witches. The two tensions collide, threatening to send Anne to the pyre if she can’t tread carefully in her desires. Movin’s Anne is out of her depth, too young and eager to be suspicious of the world. But unlike Joan, she is no quiet sufferer. Her eyes are an image of fury and hunger, not piety.
Death is never far off in Day of Wrath. One character feels a chill and describes it “as if Death held me by the hand.” It becomes an unwanted, ever present companion, patiently waiting: “I cannot get away from the thought.” When it does strike, it is even harsher and more brutal than Joan’s. As an accused witch is readied for the stake, her pleas are desperate and mingled with threats. When the execution finally occurs, it’s captured in a single wide shot instead of the close ups and quick editing of Joan of Arc. The body falls with the stake, thrust onto the pyre. In Day of Wrath, death has no intermingled spiritual triumph; it is mere annihilation.
Released in 1943, Dreyer’s film reads as a clear allegory for Jewish persecution under the Nazi regime. Beloved neighbors become tormentors, and communal unity becomes a lever in the machinery of death. So it’s apt that, while Day of Wrath is suffused with overt religious symbolism from the first image to the last, it bears far more bitterness than Joan of Arc. The cross is hardly a memento of Christ’s loving solidarity with the sufferers of the world; instead, it’s an ominous foreshadow of the sham trials and executions that wait in the wings.
Throughout the film, children sing of “that sulfurous day,” of the “universal dread” that awaits humankind in the final judgment. The essential, cruel irony of the film is that the judgment depicted is far from holy. In Day of Wrath, death’s scythe is all too human. As Absalon mourns, “I see only sin, and sin, and sin.”
Day of Wrath is bleak, acrid. Death is envisioned as judgment, but merely a judgment of wrath and not of truth, unleashed by human hands all too hateful. Dreyer is tearing at the seams that stitch together truth and finality. He refuses to believe the lie that death is equivalent to right judgment, for he’s seen the death that evil unleashes.
It’s easy to see death in this way in our world today, with all of its war and famine and prejudice. It’s still easy to ignore it, too. Day of Wrath is a film made to burn away our ignorance and enrage our conscience. If there is any hope to be found in this film, it’s in a faith that sees the bitter irony and moves toward a truer religion. If a true Judgment is approaching, it will fall as a cataclysm on the ministers of falsehood who dare to judge in God’s place.
An Undoing
At a glance, Ordet would seem a continuation of Dreyer’s oeuvre. It’s religiously minded, focused on the individual trials of ordinary people, and told with a deliberate honesty. Narrowing on the motif of death, however, Ordet transmutes the visions he created in previous films.
Dreyer’s late masterpiece is a family drama of simplicity and madness. The clan of the devout Morten Borgen lives a spare life on the family’s farm. His sons support the work of the farm, but rifts in their beliefs strain their unity. Mikkel (Emil Christensen), the oldest, disavows God, his faith fractured. The faith of the middle son, Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye), has catapulted him into the delusional belief that he is Jesus Christ, himself. When Mikkel’s wife, Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), dies in childbirth, he becomes furious in his grief—death is a fracturing. But his wound sharpens when Johannes begins predicting a resurrection. Mikkel lashes out at Johannes, and his family, at God.
Ordet is modern. It is real. These people are mere villagers, poor and petty, people whose cosmic hope serves to balance the scarcity of their earthly experience. Despite their Christian convictions, they can’t bring themselves to believe in resurrection, not the kind that would materially matter. Neither can we, watching the film. Of course a dead woman isn’t just going to return to life. It could only be legerdemain.
And yet she does return to life. After the pervasive quality of death throughout Dreyer’s previous work, the moment comes as a shock. In a way, the resurrection is its own apocalypse for the Borgen family, shattering their expectations, their belief that death is certain and immutable. Certain, yes; immutable—maybe not.
In the purity of its hope, Ordet is just as provocative as Vampyr or Day of Wrath. If we can hardly bring ourselves to believe that a resurrection might occur in a movie, how much harder must we wrestle with such a strange hope in this life? The miracle of Ordet is that, despite using the techniques of fiction and the manipulation of moviemaking, Inger’s resurrection hits with a sudden clarity that breaks the boundaries of fiction. It is definite and real in a way that simply shouldn’t work. It’s at once too easy and far too impossible, and in that paradoxical space it finds a way to be not only believable but believed.
Let us ponder death with this in view. Getting beyond death is impossible, but perhaps it’s far too easy, as well. A gift simply given. Say what you will, but resurrection shouldn’t work. Even so, let us hope with all that we have that such a resurrection is indeed definite and real. Ordet enacts our faith even while it shows us just how meager our faith often is. Dreyer’s film puts our faith into images and story in a way that surprises us. Death is undone.
A biding
The films of Carl Th. Dreyer reflect and further our humanity. In these four films (but a fraction of his oeuvre), Dreyer portrays injustice, human cruelty, false religion, occultism, saintly purity, endurance, and the undoing of death, itself. He wrestles as we have always wrestled, as we will surely continue to wrestle.
In every instance, Dreyer’s correct. Death is tragedy and injustice. It is contentious, uncertain ground. It is often a wrathful and far too worldly judgment. But it is also something that can be broken. All the worst that death can be for us can be pierced in the hope of a full resurrection in Christ.
Still, I will keep wrestling. And when I cross that river, that veil, that cataclysm, it may become clear that all of that wrestling was simply biding. A sojourner can’t help but imagine the destinations their journey will take them on, and perhaps that’s what our wrestling conceals. One day it will cease to be fiction or imagination, and it will become real, lived. And whether encountered in conflagration or through injustice, it will also be encountered with hope.