Carl Theodor Dreyer's final film, Gertrud (1964), was screened yesterday as the opening selection of a wonderful series currently at BAM Cinematek called "Booed at Cannes." It was shown in a superb 35mm print from a German archive and received a gratifyingly respectful reception from the cinephile audience, a far cry from when I originally saw it in the 70s at a 16mm college screening where it provoked a mixture of boredom and derision. Time has been kind to Dreyer's masterpiece.
Considered hopelessly old-fashioned and stagy by most of its original Paris and Cannes audiences, it was praised by the young critics-turned-filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague as well as by Andrew Sarris at the time of its release. Dreyer has stripped his style down to its essentials, using minimally decorated sets and highly subjective lighting, long takes (only 89 shots in 2 hours), and extremely stylized positioning of his actors. The long two-character theatrical dialogue scenes are punctuated by two flashback sequences which are blindingly overexposed to emphasize their artificial distance from the present action. The final scene, set many years in the future, employs the same bright lighting to set it apart from the rest of the drama. There are also two scenes of Gertrud and her young lover set in a park beside a reflecting pool (also clearly a studio set), again to contrast with the heaviness of the other dialogue scenes.
The beauty of Dreyer's masterful visuals and Nina Pens Rode's performance alone would be enough to make this a great film, but the drama of Gertrud's interaction with a series of men who will all disappoint or betray her in one way or another builds to an almost unbearable melancholy. There is an amazing scene of Gertrud's preparation for her seduction by the callow young pianist she is obsessively in love with, filmed in one take in which she enters the bedroom, pulls down the shade, lets down her hair, moves out of frame and begins undressing as seen in silhouette, before the camera tracks back to the main room to frame her lover in closeup waiting in a chair, fading out on that image. The final shot of the film simply focuses on the door to Gertrud's room after she goes back inside, slightly pulling back and then resting for several seconds on this lonely image. This is the film of an old man looking back perhaps at his own life and loves with a mixture of joy, regret and finally resigned acceptance, channeling more than four decades of refinement of his art into this radically unfashionable testament in which he says, "Gertrud, c'est moi."
