Jumping from the raw carnality and rugged emotions of Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba to the austere formality and repressed aestheticism of Carl Th. Dreyer's Gertrud didn't exactly make for a natural or comfortable flow for me last week. But I managed just fine anyway. Even though the two features were released within a few weeks of each other in late 1964 (albeit on different continents), they feel as if they come from wholly separate eras in the history of film. That's primarily due to the age of their respective directors, I suppose. Whereas Shindo was just emerging and in the process of making a name for himself, Dreyer was a grand old man of the cinema whose output over the years had been hampered by a lack of funding (due to his decidedly non-commercial inclinations) but was regarded by a consensus of the most ardent cinephiles as art of the highest order. Earlier films like The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, Day of Wrath and Ordet established themselves as benchmarks, with each title earning acclaim as one of the all-time greats, not only in their respective genres but among the very finest and most influential movies ever made by any director, anywhere.
The reverence accorded to those films, combined with the scarcity of Dreyer's work over the nine-year gap between Ordet (1955) and Gertrud, made the latter film's release a hotly anticipated event. During those years, he had been almost completely removed from the movie business, and I can only imagine the intrigue and curiosity felt by his admirers when the news broke that Dreyer was at last returning to the big screen. At age 75, his career was obviously near its conclusion; even though he had long contemplated a final film on the life of Jesus, Gertrud did indeed turn out to be his last creative work.
So after all that hype and build-up, what the audiences saw in Gertrud was not a film infused with the kind of mystical/spiritual preoccupations that many would associate with Dreyer based on his previous work. Indeed, the only overtly religious reference in the film is voiced by its protagonist who acknowledges her lack of a belief in God to help her deal with the pressures she's feeling in her unhappy marriage. Though the themes are deep and philosophical in their application to life and reality, Gertrud is a profoundly secular, natural and humanistic film that places its emphasis squarely on the individual's struggle with emotional affections and contractual obligations that bind us into certain types of romantic relationships and block us from the pursuit and enjoyment of others.
Gertrud's predicament involves a woman who is married to Gustav Kamming, a Danish government official, just on the verge of receiving a coveted promotion to become a Cabinet Minister. As he sits her down to announce and share with her his moment of supreme triumph, his wife has news of her own to share: she plans to leave him in order to pursue an affair with Erland Jansson, a young musician with whom she's fallen in love.
As a trained and accomplished singer herself, she had to compromise her artistic pursuits in order to maintain propriety as the wife of an aristocrat (shades of Grey Gardens!) but that suppression of her creative instincts, combined with Gustav's emotional and sexual neglect and the presumption that his enhanced status will deliver indirect satisfaction to his spouse, has made Gertrud's situation intolerable, at least by her own standards. It's important to point out that at no point is Gustav ever shown to be abusive or especially demanding toward Gertrud; on the contrary, he's willing to indulge, forgive and grant her the freedom to experiment and explore, if only she'll remain his wife. But Gertrud is resolute and decisive, even to the point of rendering herself highly unsympathetic to most reasonable viewers, in refusing to maintain the facade that she herself had a hand in constructing when she entered into the marriage.
As the story develops, we learn more about Gertrud's past romances. She's the kind of woman drawn to passionate, creative temperaments, possessing a strong idealistic streak that places strong demands on those who would be intimate with her. Even so, she's willing to make herself vulnerable, for a time, in order to test the sincerity of her lovers, knowing that she can clamp on her emotional armor quickly as needed once her trust has been violated. At least, that's how she tries to operate, even though the strain shows on a couple of occasions when the burden becomes more than she can physically or psychologically bear.
These moments of emotive eruption occur like thunder shocks on several occasions over the course of Gertrud - not just with the woman for whom the story is named, but also the men who suffer in their own way on account of tumbling into her orbit. Most piteous of them all is the poet Gabriel Lidman, himself a recipient of high honors from the state, who re-enters Gertrud's life after she had broken off a romance with him several years earlier. He's the classic example of a sensitive guy who considers himself a devoted and passionate lover (and let's be honest, a lot of women would be delighted to wind up with such a well-intending, kind-hearted guy.) But when his career ambitions interjected themselves between the lovers' communion, Gertrud's standards and sensibilities were offended, irreparably, by what Gabriel certainly must have seen as a trivial gesture. No matter. Gertrud is unyielding in her determination, unswerving from her creed: Amore omnia ("love is all") - it's the source of her strength and the roots of the curse that will lead to decades of isolation and detachment, but lived on her own terms nevertheless.
In detail, Gertrud lines up quite nicely with another Criterion Collection film of 1964 that I watched almost by coincidence in between this one and Onibaba. Francois Truffaut's The Soft Skin, isn't currently available on a Criterion disc (though it's rumored to be on its way in the near future after completing a theatrical re-release over the past two years), so in my effort to catch up with other great films of 1964, I viewed it through their Hulu Plus channel. Both films involve the dilemma of a comfortably affluent bourgeois person moving into middle age, unfulfilled in their marriage and wrestling with an urgent need to take risky actions to break up the stalemate. Of course, for both of them, it involves initiation of extramarital affairs, and in each case those affairs lead to moments of elevation and fulfillment, only to result in disappointments even more crushing after the fling has run its course than what they had to deal with in the daily grind of emotional inertia they left behind.
The contrasts between the two are crucially informative though. The Soft Skin tells the story of an affair from a man's perspective, while Gertrud is about a woman. Truffaut's story is set in a contemporary modern context involving air travel and communications technology as crucial plot elements, while Dreyer's story is a staid chamber drama set at the turn of the century in a milieu defined by ornate furniture, operatic music, black tuxedos and flowing silken gowns. Save for a few ill-placed letters and doodles in the margins, all the communication that takes place in Gertrud is face to face, in the same room, with ponderous silences and indirect glances often communicating just as much if not more than the actual words spoken.
Alas, the liner notes to the Criterion DVD indicate that Gertrud was not very well received, at least upon its premiere in Paris. The crowd was no doubt composed of all the important critics and scene-makers of the day, along with a lineup of art house legends - Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina are shown in a short archival clip visiting with Dreyer, perhaps musing on Karina's famous encounter with Falconetti's image in Vivre sa vie.) I can't really say what it was that they were expecting that led to boos in the theater and harsh denunciations in reviews both then and now. To me, Gertrud falls right in line with, and indeed advances upon, the trajectory that Dreyer had established in those earlier masterpieces - a remarkable achievement, given the relative lack of opportunity that Dreyer had been given to refine and perfect his craft. It's easy to lament the fact that we only have a handful of feature films that bear his directorial stamp of authority, but perhaps their rarity, and Dreyer's recognition of the short-lived opportunity he had to create his life's work, is what drove him to craft them with such rigorous perfection.
Next: Kwaidan
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