Gertrud
Director: Carl Th Dreyer
Released: 1964
Featured Actors: Nina Pens Rode, Bendt Rothe, Ebbe Rode
General Impressions & Themes
- Set around 1900
- Seeks ‘ideal love’ and examines the institution of marriage (also studies fidelity)
- Note: the grammar of glances
- More than in the other Dreyer films, visuals & dialogue are balanced
- Again, in this film Dreyer prunes the narrative and its presentation…he subtracts
- Central character is, once more, a woman…she is the primary focus
- Dreyer’s long interest in the struggle for love and salvation is personified by the social predicament of women
- In Gertrud, Dreyer reduced his already self-conscious style to basic locations and a gestural, hieratic manner of performance that avoids false pathos
- No scene numbers in the script, shot/scenes are continuous
- worked on the script and vision for 30 years
- People would die for love, would they die for sex?
Characters
Gertrud
- Consider: “what is she attempting?” – “what is she trying to accomplish?”
- While most women would embrace the opportunity to have a powerful husband, with the comforts that money & power can provide, Gertrud is lonely & wants something else
- Portrayed through mirrors…a kin to a piece of art in her husband’s collection
- She is framed in the scene (again, like a painting)
- She grows in self-awareness through the film’s plot
- Each man temporarily resolves her issues
- She gains knowledge through her encounters with men
- Summary, she is in pursuit of an ideal
- “Love is all”
Cinematography
- Dreyer’s style has been pared to its dreamy essence — extraordinarily long takes, a few simple interiors, a handful of characters.
- Gertrud uses a lot of tracking shots. Because the script isn’t divided into scenes, but more like one unbroken string of action
- This lent towards fewer takes
- Only completed one take per day
- Shot around what would be natural for the actor
- Actors must be “in their place”
Dreyerisms
- As a meticulous film-maker/artist, Dreyer sought to capture Truth with insistence on details
- For example, the settings, though sparse, contain documentary-like details. The headache pills from Paris are actually headache pills from Paris. When an actor opens a drawer, the drawer contains scattered contents that might be contained in a drawer (for that particular character)
- Tragedy is the form in which he preferred to place his perspective
- Dreyer, “I don’t think about the audience when I make a film. My only consideration toward them is that they understand the film.”
- Dreyer, “What is imperfect, lives. What is perfect is dead and set aside.”
- Great Dreams are unfolded in silence, people conceal feelings and don’t reveal their raging emotions
- In artistic films, we want to learn about the emotional experience of human beings
