Gertrud

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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If one can get past the utter simplicity of the story and look at the images, it becomes, for me, a striking film. I just returned to watching the films of Dreyer, those that I had not seen. Apparently, this was the last one. Gertrud is as cold as you can make one. She has a determined role for herself and never varies and slips into perpetual unhappiness. She is a standard bearer for feminine longing, but she can't crack through the realities of the world. She has made bad choices and then seems to punish herself and those who can't live to her standards. Worth a look, certainly.

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

(1964) Gertrud (In Danish with English subtitles) DRAMA

Adapted from the play by Hjalmar Söderberg, which the acting is zombie-esque but that is Carl Theodor Dreyer's style, which involves an unhappy housewife, opera singer, Gertud Kanning (Nina Pens Rode) leaving her husband, Gustav Kenning (Bendt Rothe) just when he announces his promotion to become a cabinet minister. She leaves him for someone younger, who is a pianist and struggling composer, Erland (Baard Owe). Viewers get to understand why she has problems with highly successful men as the movie progresses, once she reunites with an old fling. Co-written and directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer that is also his final film.

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.