Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Gertrud
1964 · Carl Theodor Dreyer · Gertrud on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice where characters look when they say the word love. (staging)
Dreyer has his actors gaze into the middle distance or downward instead of at each other, even during confessions and declarations.
Payoff: The averted eyes show you that she is measuring these men against an ideal in her head, not really seeing the men themselves. In the reading: attitudes & postures. Deleuze reads this as cinema of the body: a posture that expresses a whole inner attitude rather than reacting to another person.
Watch the camera hold a two-shot long after the line ends. (camera)
Henning Bendtsen's camera glides slowly along the room instead of cutting to a close-up, letting a conversation run far past where a reverse shot would normally arrive.
Payoff: The unbroken take makes you sit inside a silence the way the characters do, instead of skipping past it in a cut.
Listen to how slowly and evenly each line of dialogue is spoken. (sound)
Music appears only in the salons and performance scenes where it belongs to the story, and the film otherwise lets long pauses between lines stand on their own.
Payoff: With no score pushing you toward a feeling, the silence between two people becomes the loudest thing in the room.
Watch how little Nina Pens Rode's face changes across a scene. (performance)
Rode plays Gertrud composed and undemonstrative throughout, her intensity carried in what she withholds rather than in any outward display of feeling.
Payoff: A face this still is not blank. It is fixed on something the men in the room cannot see or offer her. In the reading: icon of quality. Deleuze calls this held, unreacting face a qualisign, a quality of feeling on display rather than discharged into action.
Look for the tapestry of a woman pursued by hounds. (setting)
The image hangs in the room through several scenes, an old emblem of woman as prey that the film never comments on directly.
Payoff: One fixed image in the background says what none of the dialogue says outright about how Gertrud is pursued. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the tapestry a symbol: one object that condenses the whole relation between Gertrud and the men who fail her.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch where her eyes go, not what her voice says. She is measuring every man against an ideal, not answering him.