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

Using Ignacio Matte Blanco's theoretical model, the author analyzes the paradoxical dramatic dynamics in Carl Theodor Dreyer's film as a tormented path of self-awareness involving progressive immersion in the unconscious. The protagonist Anne, a young wife of an old Lutheran pastor, falls in love with her son-in-law and comes to believe she possesses the magical powers of witches: evoking the living and dead, killing with thought, and communicating through dreams. All emotions reach an infinite level of intensity. After being abandoned by her lover and her husband's death, Anne confesses to witchcraft before his coffin, attaining a mystic epiphany—possibly contact with the mind's deepest layer where symmetrization is total.

Study at a glance

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.