GERTRUD Movie Review

In the early 1970s I managed to get on the wrong side of my college film studies instructor by suggesting that the newly released Claire's Knee was a wonderful piece of cinematic storytelling. “Rohmer's movies aren't even cinematic,” the young scholar informed me sternly. “His camera hardly ever moves.” It's a lucky thing, I suppose, that my chosen example wasn't Carl Theodor Dreyer's Gertrud, or I might have been tossed out of the third story window bodily. The “instructor” wasn't—and isn't—alone in his thinking, of course; there are legions of moviegoers, and movie critics, who equate the notion of “cinematic” with constant motion, or at least with an egomaniacal camera calling attention to itself, as in, say, Arabesque. But by the end of his career, Denmark's great Carl Dreyer didn't just want to simplify his technique; he wanted to purify it by making all mechanical barriers between the audience and his actors vanish. Gertrud, set in 1910, is the story of a woman who is unhappily married, who examines the possibilities of seeking passion elsewhere, and who ultimately chooses to live alone. The actors deliver their lines directly to us, and Dreyer photographs them in long, fluid takes that surround them with space and force us to focus our attention on what they are saying, judging it for ourselves rather than being bludgeoned into accepting what to think or what to feel by the filmmaker's traditional editorializing methods of punctuation-style close-ups or “cue card” reaction shots. It's a demanding, sophisticated, daring technique, which, like any tool, can prove disastrous when placed in the wrong hands. These aren't the wrong hands. Thanks to Dreyer's rigorous, uncompromising, visionary brilliance, Gertrud (with all due respect to my former “instructor”) is as “cinematic” an experience as any I've ever had.

NEXT STOP … The Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, Pickpocket

1964 116m/B DK Nina Pens Rode, Bendt Rothe, Ebbe Rode; D: Carl Theodor Dreyer; W: Carl Theodor Dreyer; C: Arne Abrahamsen, Henning Bendtsen; M: Jorgen Jersild. VHS FCT, DVT, HEG