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In the emphasis on the so-called
spirituality of Dreyer's work, it is sometimes forgotten that our physical
selves and sexual energies are as important within his films as our hearts
and souls and minds. It is not surprising that Dreyer should be interested
in both aspects of his characters. His films take as their subject practical
acts of expression. Our bodies are the way we express our spirits for
Dreyer. That is why, despite the fact that he is often thought to be the
most chaste of filmmakers, there are scenes of sexual encounters, or references
to sexual encounters, in each of Dreyer's films from Vampyr to
Gertrud. Our practical sexuality is one of the principal ways we
express our emotions in the world, as not only this film, but Dreyer's
next important film, Ordet, emphasizes.
 Furthermore,
sexual and physical expressions have a very special and diacritical relationship
to social forms of discourse in Dreyer's work. If Dreyer is the supreme
poet of all of the ways we attempt to rise above or go beyond the limitations
of social categories of understanding in our "higher" selves
(in our dreams, visions, and emotions), he is also the poet of all the
ways our "lower" selves equally escape from social structures
and repressive understandings. Our sexual and physical selves are as much
at war with the repressions of society as our spirits are, and it is not
accidental that Dreyer would be interested in those aspects of our being
which extend below man-made rules and ideologies. To understand "transcendence"
in this way–not as as a state of pure spirituality, but simply as meaning
any escape from systems of normalization and control–is to realize that
our bodies and senses potentially "transcend" limiting representations
as much as our souls and ideals do.
One of the ways in which Dreyer
asserts an alternative to the semiotic depersonalizations and neutralizations
represented by Absalon and the churchmen is through a reinstallation of
the actual physical body into a depersonalized expressive system like
that of the church's rituals of interrogation and torture. Herlofs Marte's
body in particular represents a realm of the senses that is pointedly
not accounted for by the theological abstractions involving sin and transgression
in the books of the church elders and the confession she is tortured into
giving.
The actress who plays Marte,
Anna Svierkier, has an extraordinarily interesting body and face, of which
Dreyer and his director of photography, Karl Andersson, heighten a viewer's
awareness in a variety of ways. The key-lighting and choice of lenses
encourage an almost painfully over-intimate awareness of her wrinkled
skin, her sagging breasts, her disheveled hair, the lines on her face,
and the moistness of her eyes. The point is to reinstate a particular,
physical body at the center of an otherwise impersonal ceremony of confession.
Herlofs Marte will not be made into a disembodied functionary in an impersonal
system. While the churchmen and their ceremony attempt to neutralize or
deny the body, for the sake of saving the spirit separate from it, Dreyer
and Andersson affirm the reality of the realm of the senses.
Reinstalling the human body
and senses, in all of their ungeneralizable particularity, at their place
at the center of life, and as the fundamental source of all expression,
is only one step in a larger expressive project in which Dreyer is engaged
in Day of Wrath. The larger project is a demonstration that Marte
(and later Anne) will not be reduced to being impersonal functions in
any system of generalized, formal relationships. As Dreyer realizes, if
capitalism depends on the denaturing of commodities to make productive
standardization possible, it depends equally on the denaturing of the
producers, the abstraction of their identities. Just as Protestantism
defines the body as something that must be subjugated or ignored for the
sake of the soul, so capitalism reduces the individual to an abstracted
functionary in an impersonal system.
The passionate expressiveness
of Marte's face and frightened eyes, her unpredictably shifting vocal
tones, her whimpers, screams, pleas, and sobs, her agitated, impulsive
gestures, and her tears represent manifestations of eccentric, fluxional
imaginative energies that will never be abstractly summarized by or "spoken
within" an abstract system of understanding. They are her reply to
the normalizing, standardizing understandings that the church would apply
to her. As the churchmen try to categorize her, to repressively understand
her as a witch, to subject her to a series of impersonal ceremonies of
interrogation and confession, her expressive mobility, eccentricity, and
wildness tell us what their systems can never understand or eliminate.
Contrast the ways in which
the churchmen who conduct the interrogation are represented. Not only
are their vocal tones normalized but the very questions they ask and the
answers they record during the interrogation are abstract, depersonalized,
dispassionate formulas. In contrast with Marte, who is wearing a rough,
ragged, torn dress that reveals as much flesh as it conceals, their bodies
are buttoned up from foot to throat and are hidden. They have sacrificed
their distinctive expressive identities to institutional systems, while
Marte is emphatically what will be "spoken" neither by an abstract
system of clothing nor within a formal ceremony of theological interrogation....
This
page only contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's Speaking
the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer. To obtain the book
from which this discussion is excerpted, click
here.
To read more about critical
fashions, see the essay "Sargent and Criticism" in the Paintings section,
"Capra and Criticism" in the Frank Capra section, and "Skepticism and
Faith," "Irony and Truth," "Looking without Seeing," and other pieces
in the Academic Animadversions section. To obtain more information about
Ray Carney's writing on contemporary criticism, click
here.
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