A Film Canon

This extraordinary film filters the world through a medieval lens, reifying Fate into a medium through which all the characters must pass, slowing their movements and radically circumscribing their autonomy. Simultaneously, it suffuses their lives with Christianity, until the only romantic space left is the Song Of Songs, whose metaphors inspire a series of beautiful pastoral interludes. That said, Dreyer's spirituality is not necessarily Christian, as evinced in his rejection of the body-earth/soul-God dichotomy around which the drama hangs, instead seeking out those experiences in which one makes itself felt as the other, whether that be in the moments just before death, or in the (restrained) ecstasy of romance; a generalised incarnation that ensures that the various sensory textures that pervade the film (songs, smoke, yarn) ultimately feel like so many extrapolations of the sighs that attend both death and orgasm. From this perspective, the characters' preoccupation with witchcraft is little more than an attempt to contain this incarnation, explaining the invocations of the crucifixion within which it tends to be couched. The result is a pervasive mysticism, incorporating the most elusive, paradoxical moments of the Bible ("Whosoever believeth shall live, though he die") into a feeling, rather than a vision, of spirituality, as if Dreyer's aim were to both transform film into an exclusively tactile experience, and subordinate all the other senses to it; an all-pervading shroud, or rosary.