Gertrud

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

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.

You might be dismayed the first time you view Gertrud. Is this a masterpiece you might ask yourself? Nothing seems to happen. People sit and talk. Sometimes they get up and move about and then go and sit down again. When they do talk, it is not always facing one another. Gertrud herself often appears to be in a trance, staring towards another world, a beyond of perfection where no mortal man can exist or match up to her dreams. By the end of the film she seems to have become as bloodless and lifeless as a statue. Whiteness has overcome her and it is as lethal as the powder in the mill of Dreyer's Vampyr.

This is a film that must be watched several times in order for all its qualities to be revealed. The characters movements are exactly choreographed. The decor is stripped down to its essentials. There is nothing in the frame that does not comment. It might appear on the surface to be a naturalistic film, but it is, in fact, as staged and controlled as any Fellini. Gertrud is about the martyrdom of a woman who seeks perfection in a flawed world. Its surface, is as still, and tranquil, as a lake in a park, but underneath, everything is turmoil and volcanic emotion

Even by Dreyer's standards "Gertrud" displays a rigidity rare in cinema. When it first appeared critics hated it, (just as they hated "The Searchers" and "Vertigo"). Now, of course, all three films are considered masterpieces but while "Vertigo" and "The Searchers" were commercial films aimed at a mass audience, "Gertrud" was strictly art-house, the kind of film critics were expected to like. It was also Dreyer's last film and it was archetypal Dreyer but this was also the mid-sixties and movies had moved on. We had had a renaissance in France and Italy and Czechoslovakia and even in the UK while America's 'New Wave' was just about to strike. It was a time for young film-makers and Dreyer was an old man. "Gertrud" looked and felt like it could have been made 30 years earlier. Of course, hindsight is a great thing and today "Gertrud" seems more 'modern' than many of the fashionable 'flash-in-the-pan' movies that hit us in the sixties and which now seem like time-capsules from a by-gone age. "Gertrud's" almost somnambulist pace and Dreyer's insistence on long takes, keeping his actors mostly static while allowing his camera to move, however slowly and deliberately, instead now seems almost revolutionary at a time when movies were chiefly about movement and movement in a pell-mell style. While taken from a 1906 play the theme of the film also seems peculiarly modern for the mid-sixties. It's about a woman's liberation from the constraints that men would seek to put upon her, even if that freedom means the sacrifice of romantic love in favour of higher, more intellectual pursuits. At the beginning of the film Gertrud leaves her stuffed-shirt of a husband because he's not prepared to love her unconditionally and attaches herself to a younger man who showers with romantic affection. But his love, too, is a sham and Gertrud is just another of his many conquests, so Gertrud leaves both men, and the poet she truly loved but who put his work above her and has now returned to reclaim her, and settles instead for a solitary but more 'intellectually' satisfying existence. It is a cold movie, it moves at a snail's pace and it is a film of ideas almost devoid of emotion if not feeling, (there is so little happening on screen it often seems like it could just as easily have been done on the radio). The acting is either intensely wooden or deeply cerebral depending on your point of view and since the characters are really only paradigms it is very difficult to engage with any of them. But it is also an incredibly beautiful film, displaying all of Dreyer's visual mastery, (as a 'stylist' Dreyer has always seemed very under-valued), and it's a film that challenges our preconceptions of what a romantic melodrama should be. Even by European art-house standards this is a much more rigorous dissection of the relations between men and women than we are used to. It won't be to everyone's taste but stick with it and you will be richly rewarded with a difficult and a bold film that strives to be a serious work of art and more than succeeds in its aims.