Gertrud · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two people sit on a sofa. One has just said the word love, or is about to. And yet neither looks at the other. The woman gazes down, or into the middle of the room, at something we cannot see and she cannot quite reach. This is the gesture Dreyer repeats across the whole of Gertrud, his last film: declarations of feeling delivered to the empty air, betrayals confessed to the floor. Once you notice it you cannot stop seeing it, and the film stops being a chamber drama about a woman who leaves her husband. It becomes a film about where a person looks when she has stopped expecting the world to answer.

Gilles Deleuze had a name for what Gertrud has become by the time we meet her. He called such a figure a seer — a voyant. In the older cinema, the cinema of action, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it: she sees an obstacle, she removes it, the story is the chain of those removals. Deleuze's word for that whole regime is the movement-image, and its motor is the sensory-motor link, perception flowing into deed. Gertrud has fallen out of that link. She perceives — acutely, she is the most clear-sighted person in the film — but nothing she perceives can be converted into an action that would get her what she wants, because what she wants (love that is everything, with no remainder) is not the kind of thing an act can secure. So she watches. She endures. She measures each man against the absolute and lets him fall short. Deleuze would say the film has crossed from the movement-image into the time-image, and Gertrud is its patient instrument.

What lets us feel the crossing is, above all, duration. Gertrud has one of the longest average shot lengths in narrative cinema; Henning Bendtsen's camera holds a two-shot while a conversation that classical Hollywood would have chopped into twenty reverses simply goes on, unbroken, the silences between lines lengthening until they have their own weight. Deleuze called these stretches where nothing advances the plot temps mort, dead time — not failure of drama but the thing itself, the everyday and the inward held long enough to be seen. And he called the images that result opsigns and sonsigns: pure optical and sound situations, moments where a character (and we, with her) can only look and listen because no action is available. The slow lateral track that Dreyer inherits from his own Vampyr — a camera that glides free of any character's purpose — is the form of pure seeing made visible. The camera observes; it no longer chases.

Then there is the face, and here Dreyer is doing something exact. Deleuze, after Bergson, called the close-up the affection-image: a feeling registered on a face but not yet discharged into any act, intensity with nowhere to go. Its purest variety he named the qualisign — the immobile, reflecting face that expresses a single sustained quality, wonder or contemplation, rather than reacting to anything in front of it. Nina Pens Rode's Gertrud is a qualisign held for two hours. Her composure is not coldness; it is a face turned toward an inner image. When she looks away from the man speaking to her, the averted gaze is the technique by which Dreyer externalizes the film's whole argument: Gertrud loves an ideal, not the men who keep failing it, and so she literally cannot direct her eyes at them. The look goes past the body to the thing the body was supposed to embody.

The film also keeps a door open onto time itself. There is a flashback — Gertrud's memory of an earlier passion — which Deleuze would file under the recollection-image, the dated image of a former present summoned because the present one offers nothing to do. And there is the coda, decades on, an aged Gertrud looking back over a whole life organized around a single principle. Between the flashback and that epilogue the film stops being the story of a few months and becomes the cross-section of a destiny. Around her, the tapestry of a naked woman pursued by hounds hangs on the wall and says, without a word, what the men cannot: woman as quarry, the thing run down. It is a symbol in the strict sense — one object that condenses the relation the whole film is built on.

Dreyer did not arrive here suddenly. The economy of The Passion of Joan of Arc — a film reduced to one suffering woman's face and the white light around it — is already the spiritual portrait that Gertrud moves indoors and slows down. The frieze-like blocking, figures planar and side by side, is the grammar of Day of Wrath refined to severity. The autonomous gliding camera is the ghost of Vampyr and, further back, of Murnau's unchained camera in Sunrise. What Dreyer added, at the end of his life, was nerve: the willingness to let a scene last past the point of comfort, to stake everything on stillness. The Paris premiere booed. The slow cinema that came after — the long durations, the patient frontality, the trust that a held face can carry a film — descends in a straight line from this calm, unfashionable masterpiece. Watch it once for the story and you may find it inert. Watch it for where Gertrud is looking, and the film opens like a held breath finally let go.