Carl Theodor Dreyer’s cinema is at once one of the most fascinating and troubling bodies of work by any film director. Most talk of him centers around 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, a masterpiece of silent cinema, but also a film that pales in comparison to his sound work. However silent they may be at times, Dreyer’s late films—particularly Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud—depend as much on his theatrical and methodical writing as on his entirely cinematic mise en scene.
Dreyer’s last film, Gertrud, is without question one of the key works of the 1960s, though it seems to belong to an era long gone (or, perhaps, one that never existed); the film follows several encounters revolving around Gertrud, an ex-opera singer now balancing three complicated relationships between three men. The first, with her attorney/aspiring politician husband Gustav, is the kind of distant relationship that was so prevalent in films of the early 60s. Think of Monica Vitti and Alain Delon in Antonioni’s L’eclisse, except now they’re older and their petty existential crisis no longer matters. They’ve settled. The difference with Gertrud, however, is she can’t settle. She’s used to playing the role of a responsible and conservative wife (and does it well), but there’s something bubbling below the surface, and that’s where the other men come in.
Erland, a young and brilliant musician, is the man Gertrud goes to meet after informing Gustav she’s spending the afternoon at the opera. Their tender scene in the park (complete with Dreyer’s slow, perfectly timed, camera movements) paints Gertrud as an independent woman and a hypocrite, both at once. On the one hand she puts her bourgeois ideals aside for an affair with a younger man, but on the other isn’t “radical” enough to commit to the other side. When Erland tells her he’s going to a party at night, she coldly comments on how he’s ruining his career by partying too much. The shock of the preceding scene—where Gertrud criticizes Gustav for only caring about his work—and others like it are what provide most of the thematic groundwork in Gertrud.
The final narrative strand focuses on a poet named Gabriel, whom Gertrud once lived with. They meet again at a ceremony honoring him, one in which Gustav, Gertrud’s husband, delivers the main speech. Gabriel seems to be the one of the three men to be most taken by Gertrud; in one of the later scenes he begs her to go away with him. Were it not for the fact that she remembers the exact moment where she stopped loving him (revealed to the audience as an ethereal flashback), Gertrud says, she would have probably gone with him.
Though the film’s narrative, along with Nina Rode’s achingly beautiful performance as Gertrud, is reason enough to call Gertrud a masterpiece, it’s really Dreyer’s formal control that makes this so special. Rarely have black-and-white compositions been used more expressively or evocatively, and Dreyer’s overbearing compositions and complete mastery of the form kept me amazed all the way through.
In addition to the three major relationships in the film, Dreyer also paints two more understated, but equally essential, encounters with one of Gertrud’s other old friends, Alex, a doctor now living in Paris. The final hallucinatory and heartbreaking scene, which takes place 30 or 40 years after the rest of the film, is of him visiting Gertrud. It is in this particular sequence that Dreyer’s desires to build a testament to the wonder of human memory and free will shine through; Gertrud has lived her life, relationships have faded, and sometimes it’s hard to accept what is left. In the end, Gertrud is both completely controlled and unafraid of melodrama, all while never condescending.
In one of the last scenes in the film Gertrud reads a poem she wrote at 16, and there’s really no better way to sum up this staggeringly beautiful and frightening artwork.
"Just look at me
Am I beautiful?
No, but I have loved
Just look at me
Am I young?
No, but I have loved
Just look at me
Do I live?
No, but I have loved."
