With The Witch back in theaters and having a field day at the box office, let us look back at the single greatest film about witches ever to grace the screen. 

Carl Dreyer’s non-silent catalog remains one of the most fascinating mysteries in the modern cinematic landscape, precisely because its dominant stylistic mode is antithetical to the average cineaste’s mental blockade of Dreyer as an enshriner of the world in the canvas of the human face. While gestures and facial reactions do ensnare his sound era films from time to time, Dreyer’s late period style is defined in the work between characters, not the supremacy of the individuals in the frame. Although he would perfect the style with Ordet and sublimate it to a transcendental realm with his final film Gertrud, Day of Wrath evolves Dreyer into a chronicler of human connection and discrepancy, human movement and human stagnancy on both the physical and cognitive levels, as existing in similitude. While filmmakers tend to counterpose cohesion and disruption through the daily dance of tracking/panning and editing, Dreyer binds the two modes together, constructing a conscious camera that actively strives to find association in disparate existence, to discover separation in ostensible community. In doing so, not only is Day of Wrath a technical marvel but a perceptual case study in altering the consciousness of the filmgoer. Continue reading →