Long Pauses

Tag: Region: Denmark

  • Dogville (2003)

    Dogville (2003)

    Dir. by Lars von Trier

    Images: Digital video, much of it hand-held, on a spare soundstage. Day and night are represented by flat white light and darkness. The homes and businesses of Dogville are constructed from white chalklines on the floor and from synechdodal objects — a church bell tower, a shop window, a medicine cabinet. Favorite images: The warm light on Grace’s face after she throws open Jack’s window, the God’s-eye views of Dogville, Grace surrounded by crates of apples on the bed of Ben’s truck, every shot of Harriet Andersson.

    • • •

    There’s little sense in writing about Dogville without discussing its final sequence, and there’s little sense in watching Dogville if you know how it ends. That’s your warning. If you haven’t seen the film, and if there’s even the slightest chance that you will someday, stop reading. Seriously. Or risk ruining a fascinating encounter with a remarkable film.

    For the first two-and-a-half hours, Dogville is similar enough to Lars von Trier’s previous film, Dancer in the Dark, that it lulled me into a kind of detached resignation. Nicole Kidman’s Grace Mulligan wanders into the small, Depression-era town of Dogville, where she’s greeted at first with suspicion, then (with time) charity, then (with more time) abuse and scorn. Like Bjork’s Selma Jezkova in Dancer, Grace is too thick with allegorical weight to survive the inevitable tragedy, I was led to believe. She is a Flannery O’Connor character, I assumed, or a tall, blonde version of that donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar — grace offered, grace accepted, grace corrupted, and grace refused.

    Being so detached, I was free to marvel at the film’s clashing styles: part fairy tale, part corn pone Americana, part Brechtian materialist commentary, Dogville wears its influences on its sleeves and doesn’t give a shit if you notice. That’s part of its charm, actually. Dogville is like an episode of The Simpsons for the angsty, agnostic, anti-corporation set: a patchwork of cultural references and competing mythologies so dense as to suffocate any message beneath all of the damned media. I relished it, though, and just knew that I was one step ahead.

    But then, in the final act of the film, the gangster from whom Grace has been hiding out arrives in town and we learn that she’s one of them — a gangster, I mean. An ambivalent gangster, a gangster clinging desperately to the possibility of sacrifice and redemption, but a gangster nonetheless. After suffering quietly the countless lies and abuses heaped upon her by the townsfolk, Grace turns to her father and says, “If there is one town that the world would be better without, it’s Dogville.” And it’s done. Grace’s tormentors are Tommy-gunned in the most hyper-stylized sequence of an already hyper-stylized film, turning small town America into hell on earth.

    Now, I wish I were making this part up . . .

    I saw Dogville in a nearly empty theater last night. I say “nearly” empty because, other than myself, there were only two other people in the 1,000+ seat auditorium. They sat together, just two rows behind me, of course, and talked incessantly. When Grace sentenced Dogville to death, one of my tormentors cackled loudly and applauded. And here’s the thing: I shared his exhilaration. I did. As much as I love Dancer in the Dark, I can’t bring myself to watch it again — not all the way through, at least. It’s just too hard.

    Viewers of Dogville, however, are spared the painful purging of classical catharsis and are instead treated to its late-20th century (and, as some might argue, American) equivalent: Rambo/Braveheart/Gladiator-style ass-kicking. Ah, revenge is sweet. Critics of Dogville find in it evidence of von Trier’s growing cynicism or his adolescent anti-Americanism or, most interestingly, his abandoned faith in a theology of grace. I’m not so sure. For me, watching the last act of Dogville was a suitably uncomfortable Brechtian experience, as I was washed whole into the fantastic tide of redemptive violence, before coming — finally — to my senses. Suddenly, like so many of her neighbors, I was shamed by my behavior in the presence of Grace.

    A few random notes on Dogville:

    • How wonderful to see Harriet Andersson sharing scenes with Lauren Bacall — two still-beautiful actresses who have allowed their faces to age.
    • I don’t understand how von Trier’s screenplay failed to win more accolades.
    • Zeljko Ivanek needs more work. Damn, he’s a talented actor.
    • Dogville ranks pretty high in my “Films that make effective use of voice-over narration” list, falling in somewhere behind Badlands and Barry Lyndon. Bonus points for hiring John Hurt for the job.
  • Ordet (1955)

    Ordet (1955)

    Dir. by Carl Th. Dreyer

    Images: Ordet is, quite simply, one of the most beautifully photographed films ever made. Dreyer’s cinematographic trademarks are all on display: slow, elegant tracking shots and pans; stylized, almost expressionistic lighting; meticulously orchestrated movements and compositions. Favorite images: those clothes blowing in the wind, Morten Borgen isolated (as in his life) in the lower right corner of the frame, Peter the Tailor’s family arriving at the funeral a la The Searchers (also one of my all-time favorite music cues), and, of course, any number of shots from the final sequence.

    • • •

    Politics is easy. So are history, biography, and formal technique. But transcendence is tough. That sudden, strange, and fleeting encounter with something beyond ourselves, something almost otherworldly, transcendence is both the aspect of the arts to which I’m most drawn and about which I feel least capable of writing. Which is why it is only now, two years after I first saw Dreyer’s Ordet and instantly declared it one of my favorite films, that I’m making an attempt to explain its peculiar power. If you haven’t seen Ordet, please stop reading. This response will likely touch upon the film’s closing sequence, which really should be experienced for the first time free of prejudice. It’s one of film’s truly remarkable moments. Don’t let me spoil it for you.

    Based on Kaj Munk’s play of the same name, Ordet tells the simple story of Morten Borgen (Henrik Malberg), a prosperous farmer whose three sons have each laid a particular burden on their father’s shoulders. The eldest, Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen), has renounced the religious beliefs of his ancestors, claiming that he no longer has even “faith in faith”; the second, Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye), has gone mad from too much study and now claims to be Jesus of Nazareth; and the youngest, Anders (Cay Kristiansen), has disobeyed his father by pursuing the hand of a young woman whose religion puts her family at odds with the elder Borgen. On the surface, Ordet is primarily concerned with the Romeo and Juliet-like Anders plot, along with a more dramatic sidebar involving Mikkel’s wife, Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), who dies with her infant son in childbirth.

    Ordet is really about faith, though. It’s about the mysteries and contradictions and beauty of such irrational belief. Unlike any other film I can name, though, Ordet treats this subject with both measured skepticism and reverence, forcing us to distance ourselves, even if only temporarily, from our personal beliefs so that we might reexperience “true faith” (whatever that is) free of cultural baggage and biases. Dreyer accomplishes this by way of something akin to the Verfremdungseffekt, Bertold Brecht’s “alienating” approach to theater. John Fuegi has described the purpose of the V-effekt as disrupting “the viewer’s normal or run of the mill perception by introducing elements that will suddenly cause the viewer to see familiar objects in a strange way and to see strange objects in a familiar way.” Ordet does both, defamiliarizing the now-mundane words of Christ, while also making perfectly acceptable the probability of miracles.

    We first see Johannes in a low-angle long shot, his right arm outstretched over a knoll of tall grass. He announces his mission in slow, measured tones: “God has summoned me to prophesy before His face,” he says. “For only those who have faith shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.” His words are familiar, as he echoes or recites-in-whole passages from the Gospels, but his delivery and his movements are stylized, strange, disconcerting. A typical audience’s response to Lerdorff Rye’s performance is mirrored onscreen by all who encounter Johannes. My favorite exchange is with the town’s new parson:

    Johannes: “You don’t know me. . . . My name is Jesus of Nazareth.”

    Parson: “Jesus? But how can you prove that?”

    Johannes: “Thou man of faith, whose own self lacks faith! People believe in the dead Christ, but not in the living. They believe in my miracles from 2000 years ago, but they don’t believe in me now. I have come again to bear witness to my Father who is in Heaven, and to work miracles.”

    Parson: “Miracles no longer happen.”

    Johannes: “Thus speaks my church on earth, that church which has failed me, that has murdered me in my own name. Here I stand, and again you cast me out. But woe unto you, if you nail me to the cross again.”

    Parson: “That’s absolutely appalling.”

    Again, capturing in words such a purely cinematic and transcendent moment is difficult and perhaps even counter-intuitive. I can only describe how these moments, which honestly seem to be particular to Ordet, make me feel. I grew up in the church, so the parables and teachings of Christ are barely distinguishable in my social/cultural memory from any number of myths, parables, fairy tales, and stories. They all seem to occupy the same part of my brain, formed some time during childhood, where they continue to shape the ethics and morals (and something like faith) that determine my behavior. Christ isn’t really real to me, or my life would be radically different. I imagine that is probably true of many Christians.

    But something happens to me during the last twenty minutes of Ordet. Johannes walks into Inger’s funeral chamber, emerging from the shadows of the doorway, and I experience an overwhelming gratitude, a peculiar emotion that I don’t recall ever feeling in any traditionally religious context. I mean real gratitude, mixed with shame and joy and awe and any number of other emotions and desires that I so seldom feel for things not of this world. I guess, in a word, that is transcendence, and I’m so grateful for this film for giving me that. It’s like a gift. Inger’s restoration to life suddenly feels not only possible here, but inevitable. And I’m left to wonder why, in the “real” world, I actually identify most with the obnoxious Parson, for surely miracles don’t really happen anymore.

    For Brecht, the use of the V-effekt in a film or play like Ordet would be a political tool, a means by which audiences might be wakened to their slavish acceptance of hypocritical or oppressive religious dogma. And, in a sense, Dreyer does just that. But, if I might slip into a hackneyed analogy, whereas Brecht would completely dismantle faith as a dangerous ideological construct, leaving it in ruins, Dreyer strips it to its foundations so that each viewer might potentially rebuild that faith, and rebuild more strongly.

  • Day of Wrath (1943)

    Day of Wrath (1943)

    Dir. by Carl Th. Dreyer

    Images: Elegant, slow tracking shots, often in combination with pans in the opposite direction. Three times during the film, the camera tracks along the row of accusers, as in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Bodies are often half-hidden in shadows while faces, particularly the eyes, remain exposed. Favorite image is high-angle shot of Martin and Anne in a rowboat. Much of the frame is devoted to the water passing underneath, a Tarkovsky-like image of nature.

    • • •

    I can’t imagine how it must have felt to sit in a crowded theater, watching Day of Wrath during its original release in 1943. Set in 17th century Denmark, when rising religious fanaticism gave church leaders the authority to execute those of “questionable” morality, the film must have mirrored, much too closely for comfort, the Nazi atrocities being waged just outside the theater door. In his liner notes of the Criterion DVD release, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests that Dreyer cast the blonde actress Lisbeth Movin in a deliberate attempt to diminish the allegorical implications of Anne’s plight, thereby diffusing a potentially dangerous situation. As with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), however, it’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction here. Day of Wrath is a damning critique of hypocritical authoritarian power told in very human terms, a modern fable that interrogates faith and sin, love and family, desire and its consequences.

    As a fan of Arthur Miller, I must admit that comparing his play to Dreyer’s film pains me. The former was written for more explicitly allegorical purposes — a direct attack on McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). As such, its characters are comparatively two-dimensional. With rare exceptions, they operate, rightly or wrongly, as stock mouth-pieces for Miller’s political and social commentary. Dreyer’s characters, by comparison, are afforded a more recognizably human complexity and moral ambivalence. For instance, we sympathize with Herlof’s Marthe (Anna Svierkier), the old woman accused of witchcraft in the film’s opening scene, not because she is a pious, honorable, and innocent martyr (like Miller’s Rebecca Nurse), but because of her human failings. She has experimented with witchcraft, she does lack Christian faith, and most importantly, she genuinely fears her death — the pain and suffering awaiting her at the stake — rather than her eternity. Dreyer stages Herlof’s Marthe’s scenes in a manner reminiscent of many in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory: they are stark, honest, and completely free of easy sentiment.

    The family drama at the center of Day of Wrath is likewise composed of characters with whom we must sympathize despite their obvious moral lapses. Reverend Absalon Pedersson (Thorkild Roose) is, by most standards, a man of admirable faith and conviction. His piety, however, is cooled by intellectual distance. He respects his family and his God, but is incapable, until the very end of the film, of understanding the human cost of his actions. Anne, Absalon’s young wife, is his most obvious victim. She has been robbed of her youth, of joy, and of children by a man who has never even considered her need for love. Yet, despite her victimization, it is impossible to take any vindictive pleasure from her murderous curses. When she takes Absalon’s son, Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), as a lover, we are again forced to balance our own sympathies for the young lovers with the troubling moral consequences of their symbolically incestuous act.

    Day of Wrath‘s brilliant final scene must have offered little hope to those first audiences. Even Martin has turned from Anne, leaving her resigned to a fate that has always remained beyond her control. It’s a stunning image — the young widow leaning against her husband’s coffin, whispering a confused confession to her accusers. The critical (but superficial) question of Anne’s guilt or innocence is left unanswered, which makes a fitting conclusion to a film that brutally interrogates our lives, but refuses to offer trite solutions.