Leaves from Satan's Book

Carl Theodor Dreyer's ambitious early epic, inspired by D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, weaves four stories across history to dramatize Satan's recurring attempts to corrupt humanity. The segments span the betrayal of Christ, the Spanish Inquisition, the French Revolution, and the Finnish Civil War of 1918, with Satan appearing in each as a figure who tempts ordinary people into acts of treachery and cruelty. Dreyer's visual imagination is already remarkably assured — the Inquisition sequence in particular has an intensity that anticipates his later masterpieces — and the film's theological seriousness marks it as unmistakably the work of the man who would create The Passion of Joan of Arc. An uneven but fascinating early work that reveals Dreyer's lifelong preoccupation with faith, suffering, and the human capacity for both evil and grace.