Gertrud

If you were to just watch this film half-heartedly or with a mind busy thinking of other matters, it would certainly seem like a dry film about infidelity and falling out of love - the kind of stuff that's been done a thousand times before, a thousand times before this film was made, even. And why did Dreyer have to make it so static, you might ask. But if you choose to delve into the matters at hand, feel the film's tenuous but painful emotions, you'll realize that there haven't been many films with more going on beneath the surface than this one. In fact, I can't think of another film that suggests so many themes, especially one with this little physical action onscreen. Most of Gertrud consists of two people at a time sitting on couches and facing opposite directions - no character in this film can bring themselves to look at someone else. These people talk about their relationships, either what could have been, what should have been, or what might be in the future. Although Gertrud is ostensibly a heroine - with the title as it is, we're almost required to believe that she is correct in her thoughts and actions and identify with her - as the film progresses it becomes more and more obvious that she is as much or more of the problem as the men whom she tends to blame. Then we're forced to backtrack and remember what things were involved in discussions earlier in the film in order to interpret it as a whole - take Axel's speech about free will, for instance, and Gertrud's response to it. I have just seen this film once, and I am positive that subsequent viewings will reveal many more layers. For the longest time, Gertrud was unavailable in the US. Now that it is readily available on both VHS and DVD, it's about time that it was completely rediscovered by the serious film watching community. 10/10.

When Gertrud was first released in 1964, the critics weren't kind to it (one can still see on Rotten Tomatoes the Time magazine review, who said "more museum piece than masterpiece"). Seeing Gertrud some fifty years after its initial release - Carl Dreyer's last film by the way, and one wonders if he knew it would be the last - I can understand why: this is very, very understated filmmaking and acting. It's a romance film but much more about loss than about real love... or, I should amend that, it IS about love, and really how impossible it is to hold on to, or to find in the first place, as Gertrud is married to one man (soon to be a Cabinet Minister, oh boy) who she may have never loved in the first place, pines after a younger man who sees it as a fling and is startled to hear there is more on her mind, and one more man, an old friend and respected artist, who has been affectionate to her for years and... then what happened?

Why I understand is this: at the time this was made, and even more-so today, people want to see some PASSION (in capital letters) when it comes to their stories of love, or at least some sense of energy to the filmmaking - Truffaut and Godard exemplified these two sensibilities in their stories of love and loss in the Nouvelle Vague. Dreyer is much more experimental; characters only every once in a while will even *look* at one another in a scene as they talk - and you'll find out if you watch, there is a lot of talking, it's based on a play and it feels every moment of it. This is highly unusual just from an acting standpoint, as in acting the performers will most often look at each other and so that you can't see any of the fakery of their acting or see the "acting" in quotes - when they're looking one another in the eye, it's harder to deceive.

So why watch it? It's certainly not exactly a "fun" time at the movies, but that doesn't mean anything - so many movies out there bring with it the expectation that you'll get some kind of emotional or intellectual catharsis or consciousness-expansion out of it (Dreyer's previous Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath are hard to watch at times, but the thrill of filmmaking is there in spades). Getrud asks for your patience and asks you to meet it halfway; if you do, you'll discover a world of hurt that these actors are conveying in their characters. This is, after all, the world of the upper class that we're seeing as Gertrud is in this loveless marriage, and yet even leaving is such a difficult task - women so rarely left their husbands then that's how you got plays that were so groundbreaking as A Doll;s House - so you have to look deeper to see what's there.

The takes on these actors last quite a while as well; why have unnecessary cuts when a long take will do just fine? It's easy to see people feeling antsy watching it, and it's a difficult film to defend in the sense of 'Well, the movie's really entertaining, it is!' It's not an easy sit. But, this was something that, frankly, I started to watch late at night thinking that it might actually help me go to sleep - not that I was out against the film already, but I could watch a little, fall asleep, and watch it again the next day.

It actually kept my attention and I fought against nodding off. It is about something and people who are pining for something that either was long ago there and no longer is, or was never there to begin with and memories have been created to fill in the gaps, as the husband does with his wife. It's also about how men look at a woman such as Gertrud, and as stubborn as she may be there is more complexity to her thinking and how her view of love and dependency changes. By the end, as an older woman, looking back at a poem written as a teenager, there's both hope and real sadness for what has been gone and what will be forever gone in death. And for as little as seems to be happening with the cuts or those precious moments where characters look at one another (or, for that matter, those gulfs of time spent looking off into nothingness, trying to find something to fill the void in themselves), everything that does happen matters.

Ultimately, Dreyer made a film where we have to see these people. We either can or we won't, but there's little to help along the way. It's bold and provocative, if not something to put on at a dinner party.

Carl Theodor Dreyer marked his place forever in the film canon for his terrific masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. Back in film's most primitive stages, he managed to lift it out from its limitations and give us one of the greatest performances of all-time from Maria Falconetti. 36 years later with his final film, he again studies a single woman in an intimate minimal style. It tackles a complex issue, one of universal sensitivity, with the expectations of love. There's great subdued performances of characters who can hardly bear to look at each other. Based on a play built on a handful of sequences, it ends up inherently stage-like with its 3 walls and dialogue-driven narrative. While it may struggle with pacing with a few too many scenes that don't drive the story forward, its rich backstory is compelling and plays with the imagination. In that limitation, Dreyer makes elegant use of camera movements with long takes that are constantly changing frame size, it's really magnificent to watch. What makes the film hit hard is its sudden epilogue. The majority of the film takes place over a few days and we suddenly jump 30 years into the future to study the consequences. It's a profound, if incredibly dreary film. Many lessons to take from Gertrud, both in filmmaking and in life.

8/10

Carl Theodor Dreyer has always been seen as one of cinema's greats and his movies have been praised everywhere and are still being watched by many movie fanatics now days. I however must admit that I have never been a that big fan of his work. It always seemed to me all of his movies were technically very well made ones and visual stunning looking ones but its stories were however always lacking, which never made any of his movies really a pleasant experience for me.

And it's not like the story itself is being bad written, it's more that it's being such an incredibly slow and stretched out one. Seriously, this is not a movie to watch late at night, when you are already feeling slightly tired because this movie will make no attempt at all to keep you awake. It's incredible how slow this movie gets told and half way in you start wondering if you'll make it to the end.

Nothing wrong with slowly told movies of course, as long as the movie remains interesting and intriguing to watch throughout. And this just wasn't really the case for me. I just couldn't really get into this movie, due to the way it was being told and I must say I was glad when it was finally over. It doesn't help much that most of the characters are talking slow, soft and in a very depressed manner.

But having said all this; I can still appreciate this movie for what it is and for what it's trying to do. You can't really call the movie bad for the way it is being made, since it's all done very deliberately and it succeeds at what it is trying to be. It just personally isn't really my cup of tea.

You could say that the movie is providing an up close and personal look into a washed up marriage, told mostly from the female perspective. Its themes and story are all being quite daring and unusual for its time and the time period the movie is supposed to be set in. It's not being a standard, formulaic movie in any way and an unique movie experience on its own. It pretty much is a psychological movie, since it gives you a look into the mind of a woman, in search of love and true happiness, without having to make any compromises for it.

Also visually, Carl Theodor Dreyer's last movie, is a wonderful looking one. He truly turned black & white cinematography into an art and the whole movie also has an old fashioned vibe to it.

Well made and all, just not really my thing, I guess.

7/10

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This is stunning work in my estimation but difficult. You will have to work and earn this movie for yourself, deserve it. Enter before you're ready and all you'll see is an empty room. Enter when you have come some way in your travels and you'll see there was not a single thing missing.

Modern and staid at the same time, Dreyer straddles both eras, someone who began in the silent era but paved the way for modernity. His Joan of Arc was a woman's passion rending the air around her, soul heaving from a body. Vampyr was dreamlike and floated. His next works quieted the passion, dimmed the seeing. Until we come to this, his very last one.

Even more deeply moored in characters, even more placid, even more renouncing of drama. If you simply try to see this as a drama (the way Wrath and Ordet can be seen), you may find the pace stolid, the same lugubrious articulation of feelings tiresome; you might note Gertrud's complete certainty in how she feels and being mildly tired to not find it as complacent.

But like Ordet is not a pastor's work, this is not merely a dramatist's, I don't think. It's true, his subjects give off a musty scent, are set in bygone days, but that's with the exception of this one, which is his most modern. So give it space, and it will begin to shine beyond simply these lives that we see.

Anchored in a woman and the men in her life as they come together for the occasion and part again, the occasion is that she decides to leave her husband for someone else, this is a prolonged contemplation of life gone. It's not just what these people explain about how they feel but these ruminations being deepened and sculpted in time, how they intersect; these translucent openings to rooms that I find myself in, the gentle dissonance between sense and discovery, the camera coming to and going again.

It's all that marvelous sense of inhabiting that room where feelings linger and take shape; for example the flashback to where she visits him in his house and he plays the piano, we don't seem him at first, only the room resplendent in radiant light as if her own soul lights it up and then fills it with song. Later, after she has lied about going to the opera and visits him again, the same room is now submerged in shadows, their hushed love affair far from the eyes of the world.

Two sides of Dreyer show through. Characters pouring out their inmosts gave rise to Bergman where it's the spoken word being sculpted; but even greater, the camera that waits and comes to, the way it stays time, shuffles and reveals, this is what Tarkovsky would extend in his own work. If the next step has been taken, and I think that's in a film with the magnitude of Zerkalo, the blueprint is here.

We glide through all of this stoically, as if it was always apparent that life wouldn't work out as dreamed so it's no real surprise. The husband frets and fights to keep her, later the poet ex-boyfriend pours his heart to her about the mistake of letting of her go; but the husband knows no words can change how someone feels, the other knows that her love grew to be a burden and he preferred his freedom. It's moot to fret now, those are words said to mark the occasion. The pianist turns out to be a boy, she accepts it.

It's all crystallized in the end, with her an old woman and being visited by the man she moved out to join in Paris. Maybe they would have liked to pursue what they didn't, maybe not. Nothing weighs between them. We have moved ahead as freely as we look back.

Everything here is a placeholder for life that you have gone through, maybe let slip through the fingers but neither glad nor saddened. It was what it was all about, life as a series of nights you shared, talks you had, visits to someone's room. Dreyer has prepared, purified, light that suffuses the memory, mends it back into body. The mind doesn't stray anymore, even as it does. It strays without losing its bearings, without giving into anxiety or despair. Dreyer's gaze is Gertrud's soul.