Word: dreyer
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...characters in Carl Dreyer's film Gertrud move from one beautifully photographed pose to another discussing the meaning of their lives. "Life is a long chain of dreams," the middle-class heroine Gertrud tells her young lover. "The world is an illusion" her former lover echoes. But it is not what is said that is important. It is the tone of voice and the rhythm of phrasing that are essential; blending with the pictures on the screen they produce Dreyer's hauntingly unique style...
Gertrud, which will be shown tonight as the final film in a series of Dreyer's work, is the director's last film. It culminates the style Dreyer developed in a career that spanned nearly the whole development of film technique (1919-1964) yet produced only fourteen feature-length films. Until Dreyer was honored in 1952 with the Danish government's award to its important filmmakers--the lease of a Copenhagen cinema--he suffered from a chronic lack of financing. He was apparently never able to get sufficient funds for several projects that he dreamed of--such as a production...
...Dreyer's slow pace is just one aspect of an artistic process he calls "abstraction." Though his films are conventional narratives (except several sequences involving supernatural elements and his horror film Vampyr), Dreyers shuns a naturalistic reproduction of the world. He advises a director to replace "objective reality with his own subjective interpretation." Thus the characters in Gertrud move in a slow and stylized manner into positions within the frame that are composed and lighted like 17th century Dutch paintings. The actors rarely look at one another. They inhabit rooms simplified down to a minimum of objects that suggest...
...symbolism of the film is, and is clearly meant to be, prominent. Though the many symbols are presented heavy-handedly, their unabashed obviousness is well in keeping with the abstract style. As far back as 1925 Dreyer used such symbols in Master of the House, a fairly naturalistic household drama in which the beating of a clock with a heart-shaped pendulum suggested a wife's return to life with her family. Gertrud tells her lover Erland that she suffers from a recurring dream in which she is pursued by two dogs. When she tells him good-bye after...
...looking at a concave or a convex object," Mailer elaborates. "In Maidstone, I was making an attack on reality. Fact and fantasy keep coalescing." Mailer admits that he is not the first to have made such an assault on tradition. Although the names of Buñuel, Dreyer and Antonioni are evoked in Maidstone, Mailer believes that his strongest single influence was the San Francisco film maker Bruce Conner, whose dazzling short works (A Movie, Cosmic Ray and Report) constantly explore and test the limits of illusion...