Word: dreyer
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Gertrud. The young art of film has produced few enough old masters, but any cinematic pantheon must make a place for Carl Dreyer, the Danish director whose reputation rests on a handful of somber, infrequent movie classics, among them The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Day of Wrath (1943). Gertrud, made in 1964, is more museum piece than masterpiece, for this muted and stately study of a woman's quest for perfect love already seems to have been gathering dust for decades. It challenges the ingenuity of coterie critics to prove that any Dreyer movie will gleam...
...obstacle to credibility in Dreyer's heroine is that her vaunted passion is so easily mistaken for stony inflexibility. As played by a glacial blonde, Nina Pens Rode, the lady appears mesmerized; a reference, for instance, to her "magic charm" becomes a droll unintentional joke. She describes herself, in somewhat fustian language, as drops of dew, a passing cloud or a mouth searching for another mouth, when in fact she behaves most of the time like a mouth searching for a listening ear. Words are Gertrud's weapons, and Dreyer wields them in characteristically slow and painstaking style...
...extravagantly hailed as the best film ever made about Christ, possibly one of the best films ever made. Nothing in my experience of De Mille-school blockbusters discourages the first label, but I think that a few pitfalls have stopped Matthew short of the summit. A silent film, Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, might serve as a standard to measure Matthew against, since it steered its religious theme around some of those same pitfalls on its way to greatness...
First, like Dreyer's Joan the film is built largely in close-ups: faces or eyes alone filling entire frames. Often such close-ups are held long on stylized expressions of transcendence...
Such problems were simpler for Dreyer to deal with. Joan's characters were neither so numerous nor so challenged by our preconceived images. And as a "trial story," Dreyer's film was better suited to objective, formal set-ups, which are less risky than Matthew's hand-held tracking shots...