User Reviews

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.

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 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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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

Cinema Great Carl Dreyer's final film is said to be his masterpiece as well. The innovative b&w cinematography, featuring only a handful, drawn out scenes in confined spaces, makes use of mirrors, shadows and suggested action. The story begins ca. 1900, studying several characters in depth. Gertrud, the wife of a wealthy lawyer with political aspirations, feels unappreciated by her work-consumed husband. The viewer quickly learns that Gertrud is about to end what appeared to be years of boredom as the "attache" of a man who lives mainly for his secular accomplishments. Despite his protests and assurances that he couldn't live without her, she leaves to see a lover.

Drawn to men of the arts, Gertrud herself was once a celebrated opera singer. A lengthy love affair with a man who later becomes a nationally honored poet, left the jilted author heart broken. Another man, a pioneer in the field of psychiatry, becomes Gertrud's friend and confidante, but never a lover.

The story, via flashbacks, present action and time scan forward shows Gertrud's entire adult life. The final scene offers somewhat of an explanation for why this woman has seemingly denied herself any true happiness. The men who offered her everything, even with the greatest possible concessions on their part, were told not to bother. Gertrud's extreme sense of pride, as noticed by a young musical genius who sees her as a convenient fling, leaves no wavering of the determined mind.

If this film appeared to be scandalous in 1964, how would society view this kind of real activity in the early 1900s? A strong sense of "truth", as a philosopher may call it, will always override any kind of compromise. "Love is all", the only words on Gertrud's head stone. There must be more to life than strict adherence to an ideology, especially at the high cost. A critically acclaimed film, "Gertrud" nonetheless lacks entertainment value due to its fatalistic story telling

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.

If anyone tried to say that Carl Theodor Dreyer's final film wasn't heavily inspired by Ingmar Bergman's 50s and early 60s output, I would call that person a dirty liar. This movie is infused with a Bergmanesque sensibility and would have felt right at home in Bergman's body of work in the late 50s. I don't know if it was intentional homage, if Dreyer just absorbed so much of Bergman's work in the decade after he finished Ordet that it seeped into his basic approach to filmmaking, or if it was something else entirely, but there's no denying the influence.

This is a film about dreams. Unlike Vampyr, it is not a dream in and of itself. It is very much in some kind of tangible reality where people, particularly the titular character Gertrud, are recalling literal dreams as well as dreams of the past and trying to reconcile those with the quieter and, yes, austere reality they find themselves in. It feels like the characters are all on a quest for some kind of perfect manifestation of love, destined to come up short and disappointed in the results.

Gertrud (Nina Pens Rode), a former opera singer, is the wife of a successful lawyer potentially being called up to be a cabinet minister in the Danish government, Gustav (Bendt Rothe). Their marriage is a very stale one where they have separate bedrooms in their large apartment in Copenhagen. Recently, they have grown even further apart with Gertrud locking her bedroom door to her husband over the past month, all while entering the earliest stages of an affair with the young pianist Erland Jansson (Baard Owe). Coming to town to be heralded is the poet, and Gertrud's former lover, Gabriel Lidman (Ebbe Rode). So we have Gertrud's past, present, and future manifestations of love coming together in one place and time.

It must be noted how Dreyer films the movie. There are less than 90 shots total in the entire film. Dreyer used long takes extensively, must like he had in Ordet, and the way he frames the actors in the spare spaces often feels unnatural. That's entirely by design. This uncomfortable positioning of two bodies in a space, often not even looking at each other as they speak, is all about the inability of these people to actually connect, to ever find the commonality between them that they so desperately seek. Within this context there are shot types that Bergman used rather extensively such as one character in the foreground looking off to the side while another in the background looks at the other.

The film is about the three men that swirl around Gertrud's life (and a fourth who takes a prominent place in the film's coda), and yet the film is mostly made up of scenes between different pairs, much like Bergman's much later film Saraband. The film starts with Gertrud uncomfortably receiving the news of Gustav's potential appointment and, after a brief visit from his mother, becomes about Gertrud admitting her affair and telling him that she's leaving him, having found herself feeling homeless in her own home and without love. Next she goes to meet Erland, and I think the movie's greatest failing is here.

Erland is obviously a kind of lowlife the minute we see him. At no point is it possible to look at this young man in his introductory scene and not think he's doing anything but using Gertrud for a bit of fun with no notion of continuing any sort of serious relationship with her. I never considered her future plans with Erland to be anything other than complete fancy, and I think that undermines her journey a bit. I think this needed to be believable. I think we needed to be sold on the idea that Erland meant his protestations of love, but he barely gets any out at all. We need to buy into Gertrud's ideas of a future passionate love with a man in her own field (music) who can understand her, but his obvious dismissal of her concerns about him going out to have an endless string of drunken nights doing whatever he wants keeps the audience from seeing what Gertrud sees. I really feel like Erland needed to sell to Gertrud, and to us, that he was going to be the man she dreamt him to be. Exciting, young, passionate, and faithful. His introduction, though, comes off as flippant and dismissive. This, I think, undermines the later emotional punches.

Gertrud goes to the large dinner that celebrates the national poetic hero, Gabriel Lidman. Honored by a military procession of youth who quote his poetry back to him, poetry about how love is ultimately meaningless since two souls will only ever be alone, and we can begin to see how a relationship with him would fall apart. He still longs for Gertrud, though, and yet he cannot feel good about informing her about the lewd behavior her young lover, Erland, had gone through just the night before at a party they were coincidentally at together. I really feel like if Erland had been sold as a good man in his introduction, this reveal would have had greater impact, but it just ends up feeling like a revelation of something we already know. Though, considering that Gertrud kind of acts like she already knew as well, maybe that's the point.

Everything's fallen apart. She's already informed Gustav that she's leaving him. Gustav knows about the affair and vacillates between kicking her out and pleading with her to stay forever (or until she starts loving him again) and back. Erland does not love Gertrud, and even if he did he's already having a child with another woman. She could fall back to Lidman, but their initial break, where she discovered that she could only be second to his work, lingers in the back of her mind and so she cannot go with him to Rome. Instead, she chooses to go with her male friend, Axel (Axel Strobye) to Paris to re-enter the world of music.

The world of reality cannot live up to the promise of dreams, and Gertrud chooses to live her life free of the dreams of love. In an epilogue we see Gertrude, a spinster and dressed rather mannishly, greet Axel after decades apart, and they spend a few minutes reminiscing about how they never turned to love. This scene feels sad and kind of empty for Gertrude. She has everything she wanted professionally, but all she has personally is a manservant she orders to clean the kitchen floor. Was her inability to live up to her own dreams of love worth casting them aside completely? She doesn't seem that happy with the decision.

This takes me to another Bergman influence. There are two flashbacks and the coda decades ahead that functions as a flashforward, and all three are bathed in white. White walls and clothes and bright lights that make everything whiter, this was a very similar visual approach Bergman took to the flashbacks in Wild Strawberries. It creates an aesthetic that implies happiness even though the actual memories are all three tinged with disappointment and pain while also easily separating it out from the main narrative.

Overall, I found Gertrud an interesting, thoughtful film that never quite engaged me emotionally the way I felt like it was trying to and Dreyer had done before. There's obviously a lot to chew on intellectually. It's a formally impressive film with very precise and almost mannered performances, nearly all done in very long takes that allow actors time to breathe. I just wish I could have been with Gertrud more on her journey.

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.

Critics can analyze and defend this film all they want but I challenge any normal person to get through this thing with a straight face. The proper response to all this deadly serious nonsense is to howl at the moon. It gives "art" a bad name. All those two-person conversations where no one looks at each other! The only movement being from one sofa to another! The expressionless faces! The endless talk about work vs. love and whether the twain shall ever meet! Who talks like that? The same theme has been done better (and faster) elsewhere (i.e. "The Red Shoes"). Whatever good intentions went into this film are negated by the mannered execution, so stagy it takes several minutes just for each character to drift in and out of the room. It must be seen to be believed! I'm giving it a couple of stars just for the utter gall of foisting this ponderous yackety-yak on an unsuspecting public.

Dreyer's final film views as a testament to idealism, the desire to put love above everything else in life and the cruel reality which thwarts this. Gertrud is married to a wealthy lawyer, about to become a minister. However material wealth is all he can offer and spiritually she is starved. >

With a theatrical set-piece style characterized by long takes, Dreyer creates an intense and involving atmosphere. Passions are seen as the formative experiences in life in a society stifled by convention. Gertrud prefers nothing to having second best, she refuses to compromise her ideals. She resigns herself to a single life but retains in her mind the vibrancy of her chain of lost loves. A moving portrait of a strong woman. Scandinavian sombreness has rarely been so devastatingly effective.

I rewatched "Gertrud" after seeing "Les dames du Bois de Boulange" (1945, Robert Bresson) some time ago. It is not so strange to compare a Dreyer film with a Bresson film, because the two directers are often named in conjunction with each other. This is mainly because similarities in style, but let's first look at the themes of the two films.

In both "Gertrud" and " Les dames du ..." a relationship between man and woman is ending. This has nothing to do with adultery (Gertrud has a lover, but their love is only consumed after she has informed her husband) but everything with love slowly fading away. In "Les dames du ..." it is the man taking the initiative in ending the relationship, in Gertrud it is the woman. In "Les dames du ..." the abandoned wife is very revengeful and unsympathetic, in "Gertrud" the abandened man is very liberal and sympathetic. In "Les dames du ..." the man in the end forgives his new lover her shortcomings. In "Gertrud" the woman remains single because she keeps searching for the perfect lover.

The character of Gertrud is a complicated one. Is she a feminist avant la lettre? Her remarks that she can't bear to be less important to her husband then his work / career maybe interpreted as an indication in that direction. Unfortunately for Gertrud, since then women have adopted the ethics of men instead of the other way round. Is Gertrud an idealist, unable to compromise? I think this is closer to the heart of the film. The fact that the character Gertrud is also the title of the film awakens the expectation that she also is the heroin of the movie. This expectation is dismantles little by little during the film. In any case, she is not a sympathetic heroin. Wealthy as she is, she can afford to ignore everyday practical considerations, conserving her highly romantic very idealistic view of perfect love. She is totally ignorant to people for whom trivialities such as earning a living is an important thing, offending them in the proces. For example she really don't understand that it is humilating for her new lover to live on her pocket and that it is important for him to earn his own living. At the end of the film the old Gertrud inhabits a simple cottage. She is very proud on herself that she has abandoned all luxury, but at the same time she orders the housekeeper (in a very imperative voice) to mop the floor.

When the film premiered the critics were devastating. In part that can be attributed to the very high expectations because Dreyer hadn't make a film for so long (a similar effect did occur when Kubrick released "Eyes wide shut" (1999)). There are however also objective reasons. The movie was according to the critics much to static and theatre like. This is true. The only movement is when the characters move from one couch to the other. The dialogue is unnatural. The actors do not have eyecontact, they seem to read their lines from a piece of paper. There are more films who are clearly based on a play (("Rope", 1948, Alfred Hitchcock) ("My dinner with Andre", 1981, Louis Malle)) but they are much more lively than "Gertrud". Even Robert Bresson, known for his preference for unnatural play by his (non professional) actors, never stretched it to the limit Dreyer does in "Gertrud".

Apart from the justified criticism, there is also much that one can say in favor of "Gertrud". Dreyer makes Gertrud not a heroin but a complicated character. Dreyer brings the work of the playwright Hjalmar Soderberg under the attention. This writer has been living in the shadow of August Strindberg (who incidentally also did write about the men - women relationship). The compositions and lightning in "Gertrud" are extremely well thought out and very beautiful. The ending with the closed door is very symbolic. The door can be interpreted as the transition from this world to the hereafter (in this stage of her life Gertrud is very occupied with her funeral) or the closed door can be interpreted as an obstacle from one heart to the other. An obstacle Gertrud was unable to overcome her whole life.

All in all "Gertrud" is a movie that provokes strong opinions. Personally I do not find it entirely successful. "Gertrud" is at any rate a worthy conclusion of a very idiosyncratic oeuvre.

Married woman has affair with younger man, falls in love, wants to leave husband. Younger man doesn't love married woman, married woman decides to leave husband anyway and live the rest of her life alone. Then there's her former partner who wants her to come back to him, but she doesn't love him anymore.

That's all there is to the story. The movie consists of 10 or so scenes in which above-mentioned persons talk to each other. Without looking at each other. Displays of emotions are kept to a minimum. Conversations are carried out in a detached and deadpan manner and are rife with philosophical platitudes about love and male-female misunderstandings.

Watching this film feels like sitting in the theatre watching a high brow, boring and pretentious stage play. More than ever, this movie made me yearn for mindless, over-the-top action flics.

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.

The Carl Dreyer's film, Gertrud, is the last masterpiece of the great director. The history treat of the woman in isolation. Adapted from a 1920s play by Hjalmar Soberberg, Gertrud plays out in long takes, with few close-ups and exterior scenes.The pace and rhythm of the actions and interactions are retarded to the point that many of the conversations take on an almost incantatory quality. A small gesture and sound effect at the very end of the coda epitomize the complexity of feeling that Dreyer creates about the worldly renunciations and imaginative substitutions in Gertrud. Though initial critical reaction to the film was largely unfavorable. The picture is deliberate and reflective but not boring. I recommend.

(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.

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

I was completely shocked when I first saw this masterpiece, and I still get shocked every time I see it again.

Dreyer's long and austere takes will not, of course, be liked by many, easy-goers, because he achieved by them to tell the unspeakable, he reached true Art. But to appreciate this means to have previously developed and refined one's taste, a tough effort which unfortunately not everybody is willing to make. And I say unfortunately because when eventually getting to understand Dreyer's idiom you'll find out that what it can tell you is much greater and soul-satisfying that anything you can get via other more readily-understandable ways.

Carl Theodor Dreyer was a very odd sort of filmmaker. Although he had a very long career, the time between films was often very long-- sometimes a decade or so as is the case with "Gertrud". He apparently liked to do things his way or not at all. Regardless, "Gertrud" is his final film--completed just a few years before his death. Because of this, you would hope it would be an excellent film, as he did make quite a few classics. Sadly, though, the movie is just dreadful--- the sort of pretentious and boring drivel some artsy folks might like but also the sort of film that most people would truly hate.

The story is very simple. Although you might think Gertrud would be happy since she has a husband that loves her and money, she is filled with ennui. She instead wants a young lover and to cast aside conventions and run off with him. Erland, on the other hand, just wants another notch on his bedpost. Soon after sleeping with Erland, she meets an old lover, Gabriel. Unlike Erland, he wants her. However, instead, she leaves her husband and Gabriel and lives alone.

If this sort of story sounds interesting, believe me, it is NOT. There are so many problems that conspire to make this a bore-fest. First, the performances are underplayed to say the least. The characters really DON'T talk and interact--especially Gertrud. Instead, they talk out into space and these scenes are often filled with folks also staring blankly. Second, nothing interesting happens in the film nor does it really make a lot of sense. Third, you really don't care about anyone. Fourth, it's full of nonsense lines such as 'Love is unhappiness...love is suffering'....wow, where do I even begin to start with claptrap dialog like this?! Overall, it's an artsy-fartsy mess of a film--one that left me wondering why Dreyer would make this as his ultimate creation.

When you first start watching it, the film feels like a bad SNL sketch where the host hasn't memorized his lines, constantly looking at cue cards. The actors here are often speaking unemotionally about incredibly emotional subjects -- sometimes appropriately (fearing the other person's reaction), sometimes inexplicably -- and tend to never be looking in each other's eyes at the same time. The film is set up with long, hypnotic takes as a staged play, with the actors sometimes moving into new positions just to appear more stage-like. At first, it takes you out of the story -- it seems like inept filmmaking, but because we know it's deliberate (it's not shoddily made, just different) I stuck with it. It takes a few to get into the style and familiarize ourselves with the bareness; it's not so much that it's boring as that it's largely silent.

The characters exist both as mouthpieces for Carl Dreyer and as people in real situations. (Aside from Erland's naturalness and Gertrud's presence, you could say the acting is generally unpleasant.) They give lengthy speeches always, they pause, their movement and reactions are not authentic life behavior or "normal" film acting. Yet this film is one of the greatest examinations of marital commitment on film. But it's more than that. It's about knowing by experience, and big ideas nothing less than Womanhood and Love, the pleasure of the flesh that results in an ignoring of the soul, the path of the artist and an argument against fatalism. The film is like a dream where all your subconscious thoughts and conscious feelings are spoken openly and plainly, as if you're possessed. Everything is open; no one, not the characters or Dreyer, insults us with any unnecessary treats. I actually watched the movie with the lights on, purposely, so I wouldn't get absorbed in the story, so I could always be aware of what was really going on.

So it's about marriage and love and commitment on one simple level -- there's a joke about it, too: the opera Gertrud says she's going to is "Fidelio." Gertrud says she's leaving her husband; another man, Lidman, a celebrated poet, wants her; and she's having an affair with a young musician, Erland. The film is really a scrapbook for Dreyer's various theories. Gertrud tells Erland, the musician, to play a nocturne -- one of his own, though, not someone else's. Why copy or interpret someone else when you can be yourself? Sometimes you need someone like Gertrud (or Dreyer) to remind you of that simple truth. And it hits home because Dreyer is what he preaches. The characters are always talking directly to us -- a character begs Gertrud to elaborate, "Things are easier when one understands" (of course we don't), someone tells Gertrud, "How beautifully you sang. As if I had never heard the song before." Dreyer is talking about himself -- he's the artist showing us things we never saw before that we've been looking at all along.

The self-congratulatory tone that hammers us did try my patience, however. There is a musical procession for the poet, and they sing a song to his face about what a truthful artist he is, an artist who refuses false pathos, sentimentality, and derides the mediocre hidden underneath a shiny veneer. This is all fine and good, but Dreyer didn't have to make it so damn obvious he's talking about what a great artist he himself is. He could be a little more broad. He seems to be rubbing our faces in how inaccessible he knows his film will be -- the screen is constantly so bright that it whites out the actors' faces, and he has Gertrud at one point comment on the light hurting her eyes. That's my small quibble that prevents me from giving this a ten, but I wouldn't argue with those who call it a masterpiece. Myself, I rank this among my essential movies for "life," movies you return to every few years that will (or at least should) stay new, because they're about human ideas and nothing else. They may not give answers, but they deepen our feeling and understanding about life's simplest issues in very profound ways. 9/10

Werner Erhard says, "You don't have to go looking for love when it is where you are coming from". For the chilly, statuesque wife in Carl Dreyer's last film Gertrud, love is not a living, breathing reality, but an ideal to be sought in its purest form. Reviled in its day for its being an artistic anachronism, Gertrud is now recognized for the complex masterpiece it truly is. With its long takes and static camera, it seems at odds with the French New Wave jump cuts and innovative techniques, yet it has much in common with those films of the 60s that depict the soulless fragmentation and alienation of modern life even though Gertrud takes place at the turn of the century.

In Gertrud, love is something to strive for but is unattainable on Earth and each character (like perhaps Dreyer himself) is a figure living to one degree or another in loneliness. Shot with very few close-ups, the camera keeps us at a distance throughout, perhaps reminding us of the isolation of the human condition. Based on a 1906 play of the same name by Hjalmar Soderberg, Gertrud (Nina Pens Rode), a former professional singer, is an emotionally unfulfilled woman who finds something missing in the four primary relationships in her life. She is married to Gustav (Bendt Rothe), an ambitious politician, but sees him as being more interested in his career than in her.

She is in love with a young concert pianist, Erland Jannson (Baard Owe), but is repelled by his consorting with other women and using her name to brag to others about his conquests. She feels that another suitor, poet Gabriel Lidman (Ebbe Rode), cares more about fulfilling his own desires than nurturing hers, and that psychologist Axel (Axel Strobye) is more interested in an intellectual liaison than a physical one. Although her emotional expression never becomes very intense, Gertrud tells Gustav that she is leaving him on the very day that he is supposed to receive a promotion to cabinet rank. Deeply hurt by her suggestion that he didn't show her enough love, he pleads with her not to leave him but his pleas are met with coldness.

When she tells him that she is going to the opera that evening, he pursues her to the theater, only to discover that she did not tell him the truth about her whereabouts. In the drive to the opera, we are privy to Gustav's thoughts, the only time during the film that we are allowed entry into the character's mind. He is determined to win her back, only to discover later that she stayed at the home of Erland Jannson. In a subsequent meeting with Erland in the park, she asks him to go away with her so that they can live together by the sea but he rejects the idea, telling her that he has a relationship with Constance that he cannot break off. It is shortly thereafter that an old lover, poet Gabriel Lidman, reveals that he ran into Erland at a party, boasting of the fact that he had conquered the aloof Gertrud.

Gabriel has returned to Denmark to receive an award and has his heart set on reviving his amorous relationship with Gertrud. However, in one of the film's most telling moments, shown in flashback, she recalls finding a note on Gabriel's desk that says "A woman's love and a man's work are mortal enemies". She uses that note to not only rebuff Gabriel but to reject all suitors and decide that she can never find happiness with a man. Refusing to compromise and stuck in the notion that spiritual fulfillment must include emotional pain, Gertrud at long last finds her destiny but only at the cost of emotional connection.

Gertrud

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

I remember having read about Carl Theodor Dreyer somewhere in the same league as Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu and having a transcendental style of cinema. Then I saw Gertrud and it was truly a cinematic experience like no other. The story and the plot are really not important at all. What is truly remarkable is the way in which the film absorbs you, almost literally. The nature of absorption is very different as it doesn't put you to sleep but rather engages you in a much subtle way. The film is held very tightly throughout, with the characters expressing precisely the truth about how they feel and nothing else. There is stark honesty in the dialogues, which may seem somewhat unnatural to some, as we are not such honesty in everyday conversations. As Gertrud's husband says to her, "No woman should be so honest". To some it may seem too stage like, and to some it may seem boring. Some may even think that the actors look more like zombies than real human beings. The film has little physical action, but it's much action packed on another level. There is not a single ambiguous line, no vagueness at any level, really no room for imagination or thought to interpret it in any other way, while you are watching it. It's almost as if the film works on another dimension, like a dream. No other director seems to be so completely convinced of his vision; no other with such mastery and singular use of the medium of cinema.

I had very little beforehand experience, expectations or knowledge of Dreyer's swan song, but what an overwhelming and devastating experience it was! I was however very familiar with his other works like La passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Ordet and Vampyr which I have ranked among the best movies ever made - Jeanne d'Arc being the absolute early zenith of Dreyer's career as an incomparable artistic genius. After Gertrud I didn't feel so much of sadness or grief but more like emotionally paralyzed, ground to my bare bones. The emptiness of soul that follows almost every great film of this caliber and theme; catharsis if you will.

Many critics have seen this film – that is by the way based on Swedish playwright's Hjalmar Söderberg's play – more like an ibsenian or strindbergian social commentary or a story about the difficulty of common understanding between the sexes. I'm not saying this is wrong per se, but I also like to see that the film deals with subjects common to whole human condition.

Amor omnia, says Gertrud near the end of the film. That is also the lifeblood and essence of the film, even though life and love seldom seem to go the way we expect they would turn out. The whole mise en scène and the spacing of the movie, dialogue and actors themselves are crafted around upholding this central idea. Some people here have probably misunderstood this as stiff and pretentious filmmaking, while missing the whole point of Dreyer's razor sharp vision that is painful but captivating to follow at the same time. It's all about the unbearable emotional distance of a married couple, distance that in life is sometimes irreconcilable – isn't the true tragedy of life becoming emotionally estranged from the ones we used to love and hold dear?

In a way the character of Gertrud mirrors the whole spectrum of human condition. We are thrown naked into the world and most of our lives we keep chasing the mirages of our desires and wants, never seeing the things we already have or the motives behind our desires. I generally dislike to quote popular life wisdoms but maybe happiness truly is having what you want & wanting what you have? Probably not, but still we all have the same qualities as Gertrud in the film – chasing her desires blindly and being constantly unhappy with our lot in life – a truly universal character I would dare to say!

Cinematography is downplayed on purpose but mastered with sharp contrasts and is generally excellent. It's not that much of a beautiful film than well crafted; like a good piece of artisanship. Pacing in film is well done and dialogue represents true human characters, if not in form then even more in essence. The composition of images and scenes are like a textbook example of artistic control.

There is also something little bit bergmanian in the whole story and film, which is also the reason I would like to recommend this film to people – were they young or old – who are in custom to hold on to these maybe little bit naïve (mis)conceptions of love and life. I'm not saying it's wrong, but you might want to reconsider your views about eternally lasting love and marriage – for your own sake.