Word: gertrud
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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...
Perhaps the most conspicuously unusual aspect of Gertrud is its leisurely and deliberate pace. The film tells, in a series of protracted scenes flowing slowly from one to the next, the story of Gertrud who leaves her husband Gustav because his love for her is not, she says, complete enough. "The man who I love must belong to me completely. I must come first in his life," she insists. The musician Erland to whom Gertrud turns for the perfect love she seeks disappoints her too. When she proposes going away together, he tells her about another woman who is pregnant...
...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 the milieu of the action and represent the ideas...
...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 a visit to his apartment, she stands before a desk decorated with two harmless looking china dogs. But the next day at a banquet during...