Sightlines · reception
How Gertrud was received
1964 · Carl Theodor Dreyer · Gertrud on Sightlines
The arc
Its 1964 Paris premiere was a legendary disaster — critics jeered and walked out, dismissing it as static filmed theater — yet within years the tide turned, and Dreyer's final film is now widely held up as one of cinema's great last testaments.
What’s debated
The eternal Gertrud fight: is its extreme stillness — the long takes, the lovers who barely look at each other — sublime distillation or just inert, and every Letterboxd thread splits between 'transcendent' and 'I fell asleep'.
Its footprint
It's a founding text of what fans now call slow cinema, endlessly invoked when people argue about long takes and 'boring' masterpieces; the image of two people on a sofa gazing past one another into space has become shorthand for Dreyer's whole late style.
Where it stands
A cinephile rite of passage — the demanding capstone of the Dreyer canon that regularly turns up in Sight & Sound polls and 'greatest final films' lists, beloved by the devout and bounced off by everyone else.
Did you know? At its December 1964 Paris premiere — an event meant to honor Dreyer — journalists and audience members walked out and the press savaged it, yet French critics (Cahiers du cinéma among them) were soon championing it as one of the year's best films.