'Day Of Wrath' (1943, Vredens dag)
Jan 26, 2018 23:28:09 GMT
spiderwort and manfromplanetx like this
Post by petrolino on Jan 26, 2018 23:28:09 GMT
The historical drama 'Day Of Wrath' is an adaptation of the play 'Anne Pedersdotter' (1909) by Hans Wiers-Jenssen which was based on an actual Norwegian witch trial from the 16th century. Anne Pedersdotter (Lisbeth Movin) became the second wife of Reverend Absalon Pedersson (Thorkild Roose) through an arranged marriage of convenience, but now she's regularly disavowed by his domineering mother Merete (Sigrid Niejendam). When Anne provides suspected witch Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier) with refuge, the two womens' lives threaten to turn to dust upon the crest of vengeance.
'Day Of Wrath' was 11 long years in the making for its director Carl Theodor Dreyer. His last fiction film had been the supernatural tale 'Vampyr' (1932) which he'd shot in France with the assistance of apprentice cameraman Louis Nee and distinguished Polish cinematographer Rudolph Mate. In the intervening years, Dreyer had hoped to make a documentary about mysteries on the African continent, one of several aborted projects that included an unrealised adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's debut novel 'Madame Bovary' (1856). 'Day Of Wrath' was made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and some contend its embrace by resistance fighters forced Dreyer's decision to flee to Sweden where he was fortunately able to see out the bloody war.
"An extraordinary mass escape happened from Nazi-occupied Denmark. Tipped off about German plans to deport them to concentration camps, almost the entire Jewish population - several thousand people - fled their homes and left the country. As he stepped onto the fishing boat that was meant to carry them across the Baltic sea to safety, 14-year-old Bent Melchior feared he might never see his home again. A week earlier, he had left the home in Copenhagen he shared with his parents and four siblings. It was 8 October 1943 and Denmark was under Nazi occupation. Along with thousands of other Danish Jews, Bent and his family were fleeing the Germans. "We were gathered in this boat that was supposed to carry herrings, but instead it was now carrying human beings," he says. They set off after dark. There were 19 people on the boat, hiding below deck in case German planes should spot them from overhead. The night air was chilly and the sea rough. "People started to be sick, and every minute felt like an hour". Melchior and his family were part of a mass escape. That autumn night, 2,500 Jews set sail for neighbouring Sweden from Danish beaches and ports, in rowing boats, canoes, as stowaways on ferries and cargo ships. Some even swam across. In September that year, the Nazi secret police - the Gestapo - had decided to deport all Danish Jews to concentration camps, just as they'd done to millions of other Jews across Europe. The raid was scheduled for Friday 1 October, when they had hoped to find families gathering for the Jewish Sabbath dinner. But when they raided their homes, they found fewer than 300 people still there. A few days earlier, Georg Duckwitz, a German naval attache working at the German embassy in Copenhagen, had tipped off Hans Hedtoft, a leading member of the Danish Labour party. Hedtoft, who later became Denmark's prime minister, warned the Jewish community to leave."
- Ellen Otzen, The British Broadcasting Corporation
"I mean that statement from Richard Spencer, for us, came at a point where everything in the world seemed so crazy and we felt as if there would be nothing that could come at us from leftfield. And then that happened! I mean where did it come from? We don’t agree on anything they stand for. You could probably pick any one of our albums and there’d be a track with lyrics totally contrary to what they believe."
- Martin Gore speaking with Peter Robinson, The Guardian
"Depeche Mode have hit out at Richard Spencer, the white supremacist known for getting punched on camera who recently described the group as “the official band of the alt-right”. Spencer, who is President of the white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute, made the comments at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) during February. Initially dismissing the claim, Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan has now described Spencer as a “c**t” in a new interview. He told Billboard: “This guy gets way too much publicity already. What’s dangerous about someone like Richard Spencer is, first of all, he’s a c**t – and he’s a very educated c**t, and that’s the scariest kind of all.” Gahan added: “I think it was one of those things he threw out there for whatever. But he’s not that type of guy – not like the other guy, the Milo [Yiannopoulos], an attention seeker, a bit crazy obviously. I saw [Milo] on Bill Maher and I was just like, ‘Wow, he really is a nut job.’ Those people to me aren’t so dangerous, but this guy’s [Spencer] got some weight behind him. I don’t like that… I haven’t had as many phone calls or texts from people over something like that – friends here and in the city, and other artists who were kind of shocked and like, ‘What’s this?'” “My son Jimmy, who is 24, he was kind of shocked by it. He was one of the first to say, ‘You got to make a response immediately.’ Because people read sh*t – unfortunately, as we know – and they interpret it as being real. It’s hard these days, because you really do have to search what you’re reading and where that information came from.” Gahan also explained how his band’s music has been mistaking for containing right-wing references or allusions: “I think over the years there’s been a number of times when things of ours have been misinterpreted – either our imagery, or something where people are not quite reading between the lines. If anything, there’s a way more sort of socialist – working class, if you like – industrial-sounding aesthetic to what we do. That’s where we come from. We come from the council estates of Essex, which is a really sh*tty place, just 30 minutes east of London, where they stuck everybody when London was getting too overpopulated in the late ’60s. So I don’t quite get what he was [saying].” Speaking in another interview with the New York Post, Gahan said of Spencer: “I saw the video of him getting punched [during the Trump protests]; he deserved it.” Depeche Mode’s upcoming album ‘Spirit’ will be released on Friday (March 17). It was produced by Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford."
- Luke Morgan Britton, New Musical Express
'Walking In My Shoes' - Depeche Mode
"In its visual texture Day of Wrath presents, even more than Joan of Arc, the supreme example of Dreyer's use of light and darkness to express moral and emotional concerns, with severe, black-garbed figures set against stark white walls, and opposing lines of force creating tensions within the frame. "It is difficult, visually, to get from horror to poetry in a single step", observed the novelist Charles Baxter, "and very few filmmakers have managed it without hokum - F.W. Murnau, Ingmar Bergman, Carl Dreyer come to mind. A cold Protestantism seems to suit transitions, a sense of fresh-frozen sexual repression and some sort of errant spiritual life shuddering in the tracks." Day of Wrath is imbued with exactly this "cold Protestantism"; victims and victimisers alike move slowly, as if trapped in harsh, punitive morality that rules their society. Dreyer's camera, too, moves without haste, often describing long, slow, horizontal tracking shots - often right to left, the counter-intuitive direction - to explore off-screen space."
- Philip Kemp, 'Day Of Wrath'
- Philip Kemp, 'Day Of Wrath'
'Never Let Me Down Again' - Depeche Mode
'Day Of Wrath' was 11 long years in the making for its director Carl Theodor Dreyer. His last fiction film had been the supernatural tale 'Vampyr' (1932) which he'd shot in France with the assistance of apprentice cameraman Louis Nee and distinguished Polish cinematographer Rudolph Mate. In the intervening years, Dreyer had hoped to make a documentary about mysteries on the African continent, one of several aborted projects that included an unrealised adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's debut novel 'Madame Bovary' (1856). 'Day Of Wrath' was made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and some contend its embrace by resistance fighters forced Dreyer's decision to flee to Sweden where he was fortunately able to see out the bloody war.
"It is quite common to hear film people, even critics, acknowledge Carl Dreyer’s greatness with the merest hint of a yawn, as if this Danish director of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964) was a film-maker relevant to film history but not to us today. Yet Godard paid tribute to him in Vivre Sa Vie (1962); and Antonioni, Resnais and other directors who came to prominence in the 60s freely acknowledge their stylistic and moral debt to him. Nothing could be further from the truth than to characterise him as a close relative to Shakespeare’s gloomy Dane and his films as too slow and lingering, too concerned with martyrdom and suffering, and too intent on marketing a gaunt spirituality to reach out to modern audiences. Vampyr, for instance, was one of the most poetic horror films ever made, and Day of Wrath (1943) one of the most terrifying. The fact is that almost all Dreyer’s films, stretching through the silent era into sound, etch themselves in the memory. And if they deal with the kind of subject matter today’s film-makers, and some audiences, find largely beyond them, that is surely not to his discredit. He stands among the greatest, most profound, artists of the 20th century."
- Derek Malcolm, The Guardian
"I first encountered Carl Dreyer’s work in my teens, but it wasn’t until my forties that I began to be ready for it. I mainly had to rely on lousy 16-millimeter prints, so ruinous to the sounds and images of Day of Wrath that I could look at that film only as a form of painterly academicism, a repressed view of repression. The film defeated me with its unalleviated gloom and dull pacing, which I associated with Dreyer’s strict Lutheran upbringing. All this was sheer nonsense, as I discovered once I had access to better prints, information, and reflexes. For one thing, contrary to many reference works, Dreyer’s upbringing was neither strict nor Lutheran. Born out of wedlock in 1889 to a Swedish servant (who died horribly a year and a half later trying to abort a second child), he was adopted by the Dreyers in Copenhagen, who gave him a nonreligious upbringing and whom he grew up despising. (According to biographer Maurice Drouzy, he worshiped his real mother and hated his adopted one, and good as well as bad mother figures abound in his work.) What I had taken to be religious beliefs were actually calculated challenges, and according to what Dreyer’s friend Ib Monty once told me, he wasn’t especially religious at all. What’s great about Day of Wrath is a passionate ambiguity that leaves all major questions frustratingly unresolved yet vibrantly open, quivering and radiant with life and meaning. The slow pacing is necessary for the intensity and the sexiness under the gloom to register. Freely adapted from a Norwegian play—Hans Wiers-Jenssen’s Anne Pedersdotter—that Dreyer had first seen in 1909, Day of Wrath looks today more cinematically advanced than any other movie released in 1943. The film’s handling of period is unparalleled ..."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Figuring Out Day Of Wrath'
Lisbeth Movin
- Derek Malcolm, The Guardian
"I first encountered Carl Dreyer’s work in my teens, but it wasn’t until my forties that I began to be ready for it. I mainly had to rely on lousy 16-millimeter prints, so ruinous to the sounds and images of Day of Wrath that I could look at that film only as a form of painterly academicism, a repressed view of repression. The film defeated me with its unalleviated gloom and dull pacing, which I associated with Dreyer’s strict Lutheran upbringing. All this was sheer nonsense, as I discovered once I had access to better prints, information, and reflexes. For one thing, contrary to many reference works, Dreyer’s upbringing was neither strict nor Lutheran. Born out of wedlock in 1889 to a Swedish servant (who died horribly a year and a half later trying to abort a second child), he was adopted by the Dreyers in Copenhagen, who gave him a nonreligious upbringing and whom he grew up despising. (According to biographer Maurice Drouzy, he worshiped his real mother and hated his adopted one, and good as well as bad mother figures abound in his work.) What I had taken to be religious beliefs were actually calculated challenges, and according to what Dreyer’s friend Ib Monty once told me, he wasn’t especially religious at all. What’s great about Day of Wrath is a passionate ambiguity that leaves all major questions frustratingly unresolved yet vibrantly open, quivering and radiant with life and meaning. The slow pacing is necessary for the intensity and the sexiness under the gloom to register. Freely adapted from a Norwegian play—Hans Wiers-Jenssen’s Anne Pedersdotter—that Dreyer had first seen in 1909, Day of Wrath looks today more cinematically advanced than any other movie released in 1943. The film’s handling of period is unparalleled ..."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Figuring Out Day Of Wrath'
Lisbeth Movin
'Day Of Wrath' builds upon the legacy of Danish film director Benjamin Christensen's silent movie 'Haxan' (1922), Christensen having appeared in Dreyer's silent picture 'Michael' (1924). 'Day Of Wrath' has influenced many films, notably Ingmar Bergman's medieval revenge picture 'The Virgin Spring' (1960) which makes direct parallels and carries visual references, its plot derived from the 13th century Swedish ballad 'Tore's Daughters In Vange'. It's an immensely powerful piece of filmmaking.
"An extraordinary mass escape happened from Nazi-occupied Denmark. Tipped off about German plans to deport them to concentration camps, almost the entire Jewish population - several thousand people - fled their homes and left the country. As he stepped onto the fishing boat that was meant to carry them across the Baltic sea to safety, 14-year-old Bent Melchior feared he might never see his home again. A week earlier, he had left the home in Copenhagen he shared with his parents and four siblings. It was 8 October 1943 and Denmark was under Nazi occupation. Along with thousands of other Danish Jews, Bent and his family were fleeing the Germans. "We were gathered in this boat that was supposed to carry herrings, but instead it was now carrying human beings," he says. They set off after dark. There were 19 people on the boat, hiding below deck in case German planes should spot them from overhead. The night air was chilly and the sea rough. "People started to be sick, and every minute felt like an hour". Melchior and his family were part of a mass escape. That autumn night, 2,500 Jews set sail for neighbouring Sweden from Danish beaches and ports, in rowing boats, canoes, as stowaways on ferries and cargo ships. Some even swam across. In September that year, the Nazi secret police - the Gestapo - had decided to deport all Danish Jews to concentration camps, just as they'd done to millions of other Jews across Europe. The raid was scheduled for Friday 1 October, when they had hoped to find families gathering for the Jewish Sabbath dinner. But when they raided their homes, they found fewer than 300 people still there. A few days earlier, Georg Duckwitz, a German naval attache working at the German embassy in Copenhagen, had tipped off Hans Hedtoft, a leading member of the Danish Labour party. Hedtoft, who later became Denmark's prime minister, warned the Jewish community to leave."
- Ellen Otzen, The British Broadcasting Corporation
"I mean that statement from Richard Spencer, for us, came at a point where everything in the world seemed so crazy and we felt as if there would be nothing that could come at us from leftfield. And then that happened! I mean where did it come from? We don’t agree on anything they stand for. You could probably pick any one of our albums and there’d be a track with lyrics totally contrary to what they believe."
- Martin Gore speaking with Peter Robinson, The Guardian
"Depeche Mode have hit out at Richard Spencer, the white supremacist known for getting punched on camera who recently described the group as “the official band of the alt-right”. Spencer, who is President of the white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute, made the comments at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) during February. Initially dismissing the claim, Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan has now described Spencer as a “c**t” in a new interview. He told Billboard: “This guy gets way too much publicity already. What’s dangerous about someone like Richard Spencer is, first of all, he’s a c**t – and he’s a very educated c**t, and that’s the scariest kind of all.” Gahan added: “I think it was one of those things he threw out there for whatever. But he’s not that type of guy – not like the other guy, the Milo [Yiannopoulos], an attention seeker, a bit crazy obviously. I saw [Milo] on Bill Maher and I was just like, ‘Wow, he really is a nut job.’ Those people to me aren’t so dangerous, but this guy’s [Spencer] got some weight behind him. I don’t like that… I haven’t had as many phone calls or texts from people over something like that – friends here and in the city, and other artists who were kind of shocked and like, ‘What’s this?'” “My son Jimmy, who is 24, he was kind of shocked by it. He was one of the first to say, ‘You got to make a response immediately.’ Because people read sh*t – unfortunately, as we know – and they interpret it as being real. It’s hard these days, because you really do have to search what you’re reading and where that information came from.” Gahan also explained how his band’s music has been mistaking for containing right-wing references or allusions: “I think over the years there’s been a number of times when things of ours have been misinterpreted – either our imagery, or something where people are not quite reading between the lines. If anything, there’s a way more sort of socialist – working class, if you like – industrial-sounding aesthetic to what we do. That’s where we come from. We come from the council estates of Essex, which is a really sh*tty place, just 30 minutes east of London, where they stuck everybody when London was getting too overpopulated in the late ’60s. So I don’t quite get what he was [saying].” Speaking in another interview with the New York Post, Gahan said of Spencer: “I saw the video of him getting punched [during the Trump protests]; he deserved it.” Depeche Mode’s upcoming album ‘Spirit’ will be released on Friday (March 17). It was produced by Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford."
- Luke Morgan Britton, New Musical Express
'Walking In My Shoes' - Depeche Mode