Leaves from Satan's Book

Satan has been punished: he must walk the earth tempting people, and every successful temptation extends his sentence. The film shows him in four periods. In Jerusalem, disguised as a Pharisee, he betrays Christ. In Spain, as a member of the Inquisition, he destroys a monk. In the French Revolution, as a Jacobin, he has a family denounced. Finally, in Finland in 1918, he presses a woman to betray her husband. The subject is not evil but the tempted being able to choose every time. Satan forces nobody; he offers and waits. The woman in the last section refuses, and the film loads all its weight onto that refusal. The form builds the four parts separately. Carl Theodor Dreyer uses a different style of acting and lighting for each period; the Jerusalem section is slow and ceremonial, the Finnish one realist and fast. The production is openly indebted to Griffith's Intolerance, differing in telling its four periods consecutively rather than in parallel. It belongs to Dreyer's early work, and the study of faces he would develop later begins here. The final part rests on the Finnish civil war and its politics are argued over now; the narrative draws the red side plainly unfavourably. Helge Nissen plays Satan. Who it is for: viewers curious about silent cinema and Dreyer's development. Who it is not for: anyone who will question its politics; the objection is fair and the film takes a side.