Gertrud

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.

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

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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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.

(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.