“Carl Th. Dreyer was a modest man, as were his sitting room and, later, his grave. Carl Th. Dreyer possessed the pure heart and natural humility of the passionate individual. Carl Th. Dreyer’s passion was FILM.” — Lars von Trier
Denmark’s first great filmmaker, Carl Theodor Dreyer worked between 1919 and 1964…. though sadly he only completed four features in the last 30 years of his life. Each of these films (Vampyr; Day of Wrath; Ordet; Gertrud) is considered a masterpiece, as is his silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Many of his films (like Lars on Trier’s) focus on the persecution of women. In Dreyer’s case this is invariably in the service of social critique, contrasting female sexuality and power with the repressive strictures of the Church.
In Day of Wrath, Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village’s harsh moral code has disastrous results. Exquisitely photographed and passionately acted, Day of Wrath remains an intense, unforgettable experience. Made during the Nazi Occupation of Denmark, it has been interpreted as an anti-fascist allegory.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 15-minute introduction by a local film scholar and be followed by an audience talkback.
Dreyer’s impious, anarchic drama is a cry of rage at abusive authority, whether political, familial, religious, or moral; he celebrates erotic love as the natural order of things.
Richard Brody, New Yorker
Astonishing in its artistically informed period re-creation as well as its hypnotic mise en scene, it challenges the viewer by suggesting at times that witchcraft isn’t so much an illusion as an activity produced by intolerance.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
A stark, brooding treatment of adultery, incest, and murder, an elemental tragedy not so far from a James M. Cain triangle, albeit shot so as to deliberately evoke the Dutch masters.
J Hoberman, Village Voice
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Thorkild Roose, Lisbeth Movin, Sigrid Neiiendam, Preben Lerdorff Rye, Anna Svierkier, Albert Høeberg
Denmark
1943
In Danish with English subtitles
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Credits
Producer
Carl Th. Dreyer, Tage Nielsen
Screenwriter
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Cinematography
Karl Andersson
Editor
Anne Marie Petersen, Edith Schlüssel
Original Music
Poul Schierbeck
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
