Leaves from Satan's Book

A long, dull, poor man's Intolerance, Dreyer or no, and the main thing that had going for it outside the modern segment was the budget. Notionally—but not really—adapting The Sorrows of Satan (which popularized insipid pseudo-mystical doorstoppers about incarnations of Satan), we stiffly march past the Passion, Inquisition, and French Revolution, before ever-so-slightly less drily ending on Red Finland, which receives the same subtlety from this piously reactionary film as the sans-culottes.

Tidig episodfilm av Dreyer. Möjligen berodde det på filmens speltid, men blev de inte gradvis sämre? Passagen om Jesus mycket bra och spanska inkvisitionen likaså. Avslutningen om finska inbördeskriget däremot rätt intetsägande.

A step up from it's spiritual predecessor, Griffiths 'Intolerance', yet perhaps equally pretentious and fascinated with a grim view of the mortal coils. But it is saved by being far better told, and I personally like watching Satan as the protagonist of a story, rather than as a lawfully or chaotically stupid opposition.

(157m. cut) The least impressive work I've seen from Dreyer, "Leaves" is a morally misguided morality play where the Inquisition needs Satanic involvement to be corrupted and Marie Antoinette is an innocent victim. Thematically it has only the blueprints for superior works (Day of Wrath and Joan of Arc in the second and third segments), and Dreyer himself disliked it. Høyer's script (1913), is derivative of Luigi Maggi's "Satan" (1912), which also influenced Griffith's "Intolerance" (1916).

While both a bit of a slog and more shallow in it's handling of religious themes than many of his later films, this early Dreyer film has some nice imagery and I would say each segment is better than the one before. The opening Jesus segment is so melodramatic I couldn't help but create my own MS3K-style commentary in my head to make it through. By the last segment I was invested, even though I think me and Dreyer don't exactly share a worldview.