GERTRUD (1964) B/W widescreen 119m dir: Carl Theodor Dreyer

w/Nina Pens Rode, Bendt Rothe, Ebbe Rode, Baard Owe, Axel Strobye, Vera Gebuhr, Anna Malberg, Eduard Mielche, Karl Gustav Ahlefeldt, Valso Holm, Lars Knutzon, William Knoblauch

From Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films: "Around 1910, a woman (Nina Rode), who is unhappily married to a lawyer meets a famous poet (Ebbe Rode) whom she had loved, has an affair with a young composer (Owe), and decides to live alone in Paris. Dreyer's last film, while not his best, is rigorous, poignant, and profound."

From Cinema: A Critical Dictionary: The Major Film-makers, edited by Richard Roud, where Noel Burch writes about GERTRUD in "Carl Theodor Dreyer: The Major Phase": "Gertrud is one of the most difficult films of post-war cinema. Booed by a fairly sophisticated audience at its world première in Paris, it has been shown publicly in very few countries and still meets with hostile puzzlement from even the most favourably disposed spectators. In no other film perhaps is there such a wide breach between the 'libretto' and the 'music'; indeed, it is like an opera in which all the words might be spoken so that one would have a tendency to regard the music as secondary or not even hear it at all. The text of the film is taken from a play by Hjalmar Soderberg, a Danish disciple of Ibsen, and Dreyer made no effort to modify the rather archaic quality of the dialogue or what seems today to be a somewhat naive approach to the theme of women's condition in society. Not surprisingly, most audiences seem to read Gertrud solely as filmed theatre, and the occasional spectator who professes to like it will almost invariably be found to have been drawn to the play as such, to the actors, the theme, etc. However, despite superficial appearances, the play is not the film. Though respecting quite rigorously the text and architecture of the original, Dreyer has built another structure 'into' it, and it is at the locus of the quasi-operatic coexistence of these two organized wholes, which are almost completely autonomous, that we find the actual result of Dreyer's work which, in spite of his textual fidelity, is ultimately as far removed from the Soderberg play as Debussy's Pelléas is from Maeterlinck's.

"I distinguish three basic options underlying the tectonics of the film. Gertrud is well known for its very long takes, and while one cannot speak of a 'one-shot-per-sequence' approach, most of the film's eight sections are composed of only a few shots. Now it has generally been stated or implied that these shot-changes are incidental, that the essence of the film's texture is in the camera movements and framing, which are, indeed, of vital importance. All Dreyer's sound films have generally been felt to be the work of a director for whom 'editing' (i.e. the shot-change as formal function) is secondary. Like Mizoguchi (of whom the assertion is largely true), he is purported to be an exponent of what Japanese critics, borrowing more or less accurately from the French, call photogénie as opposed to montage. As we have already seen from our examination of Vampyr, nothing could be further from the truth. And in Gertrud, Dreyer has adopted a drastically strict organizational attitude towards the shot-change. Here again we are dealing with a variation structure: Dreyer has contrived to vary continually and, with certain restrictions, absolutely, the modes of matching in this film. By this I mean that, generally speaking, each mode is used only once in the course of the film or, when occasionally a mode does recur, it is in such a different context that the principle of diversification is respected on the combinatory level. Of course, the mode of a match is in itself a binary parameter. A few examples: cutting from an exit frame right to an entrance frame left as against (for example) cutting from an exit frame right to a shot in which the same character is already in frame; cutting on a standing-up movement as against cutting on a sitting-down movement, a 'concertina in' as against a 'concertina out'; cutting from a one-shot to a two-shot as against cutting from a one-shot to a long shot (this type of figure predominates in the speech-making section of the soirée held in honour of the poet Lidmann).

"With regard to this through-variation on matching modes, one of the film's pivotal moments occurs near the beginning, during the 'confrontation' between Gertrud and her husband Gustav, when she tells him that she is in love with another man. This episode contains the only series of reverse-field shots in the entire film (with one important exception; see below); it constitutes a kind of 'liquidation' of the reverse-field figure and, above all, of the 'three-dimensional' space which it implies. All the rest of the film is shot according to a principle of strict frontality. This confrontation is one of the nodal moments in the film, in that here the two continua, 'libretto' and 'music', as it were, become consubstantial. The privileged dramaturgical function of this set-up and of the resulting eyeline matches is obvious, since this is the only really 'face to face' dialogue until the very end of the film: otherwise, the characters tend throughout not to look at one another. Its structural singularity is equally clear, since elsewhere the diversification of modes is an autonomous phenomenon, an arbitrary structural premise (not unlike Resnais' a priori decision to place the main character of Je t'aime, Je t'aime in the middle of the frame at all times), and the choice as to which mode should come when seems to have been primarily determined by 'blocking' contingencies and by the topography of the set. The second and third seminal options, closely interconnected, concern camera movement and framing. It has presumably been noticed by others, so obvious is the fact, that each shot in Gertrud is made up of a definite number of prolonged stations --- absolutely static frames in which neither camera nor characters move at all --- separated by passages of extensive recomposition in which both characters and cameras move with considerable amplitude; there is no camera-nudging, no incidental actors' 'business'; the dichotomy of movement and fixity is absolutely clear-cut. This observation leads, quite naturally I think, to the next step in a reading of the film, one which reveals a second 'editing scheme' superimposed over the structure offered by the shot-changes. I am convinced that if lantern-slides were made of each of these 'fixed stations' and shown one by one in the order of their appearance in the film, they would constitute a perfectly coherent editing scheme without the inverted commas; in other words all the matches would be harmonious and 'correct'. This is an obvious parti pris, respected with utter rigour; in this respect, it is a completely original attitude and is one of the main factors at the origin of the impression of radical stylization which the film cannot fail to produce, even on its detractors.

"The third option concerns the composition of those static stations. Again it has often been remarked that the characters almost invariably sit or stand facing the camera at a considerable distance and along an axis which runs essentially parallel to the plane of the camera, or rather of the frame. Moreover, in many instances, there is present in the picture, behind the figures, some 'projection' of the frame (a painting on the wall, a doorway) also running parallel to the plane of the frame. Hence the characters, at most of their 'stations', are presented in an extremely flat space (a flatness enhanced by the low-contrast lighting and the depth of focus) while at the same time they seem to be inscribed in a veritable demonstration of (foreshortened) linear perspective. In this sense, Dreyer's film may be said to belong to a long-established but rare tendency in film-making which has sought to arouse in the viewer an awareness of the duality of cinematographic representation --- the projection on a flat surface of an image of depth which is all the more convincing as it is constantly 'verified' by movement --- a tendency the importance of which was theorized as early as 1916 by Hugo Munsterborg in his pioneering book of phenomenological analysis, Film; and which was rendered explicit by the makers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And while many non-narrative or non-figurative film-makers (especially in the United States) have made such problems the centre of their work, I believe that no narrative film-maker has succeeded so completely in integrating this duality and its apprehension into the formal tissue of his film as a whole. The dramaturgical implications of this symmetrical frontality are undeniable: Philippe Parrain defined them thus: 'The rigour with which the frame in Gertrud is divided in half (most of those frontal "stations" are two-shots) does not correspond to a style of presentation only; it also serves to emphasize the characters' isolation, the element in their relationships of "incommunicability", to use a word that has become fashionable.'

"It remains for me to point out the importance of the one other 'violation' of the principle of frontality: a brief return, at the end of the film, to the reverse-field figure of the beginning, but expanded here to the inordinate scale of Gertrud's unlikely parlour (a scale exaggerated by a wide-angle lens) in the scene of the final parting between the heroine and the scientist. Here again, Dreyer displays his awareness of the structural and dramaturgical advantages of both the singularization of a given figure --- visually and spatially this moment is unique --- and the recurrence of a structural motif at privileged moments in the course of a work; an awareness which I regard as one of the sure signs that he is one of the few really major contributors to the development of a specific art film."