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Dreyer’s Gertrud, in its most memorable form to date, has been regarded as the embodiment of a text—an image of words and a conception of what was once spoken and received between characters/faces. Faces that speak and remain silent, reveal and conceal; faces… and their ambiguous reflections. An ambiguity that has turned Dreyer’s most conversational work into his most mysterious: constantly advancing by retreating, and constantly returning to the past by moving forward. When you examine and scrutinize its plot, you see it standing on one side in protest, chest puffed out: it came into existence to strip away the existence of things; to speak, in order to destroy/be destroyed; burning in the heat of expressing more and more (a quiet scream) and unable to stand firmly on its feet (even as it stands with its chest puffed out). And on the other hand, when you examine and turn its plot inside out, you see just how remarkably restrained it is: frozen by the cold radiating from the characters, stripped of the power to move; indifferent and static, merely staring at the world and its people.
The grand architecture of the film’s understatement—for some unknown reason—withholds what the audience longs to comprehend. Just like Gertrud the woman, who conceals her thoughts from her interlocutors (us and the men conversing with her), attempting to pave her escape route by uttering ambiguous phrases (intended to bypass issues rather than confront them)—perhaps to flee, and perhaps so her audience cannot observe her, her true essence, up close. And because we cannot see, we do not know; we do not know which authenticity we speak of, or what this woman/film precisely intends… the very characteristic Kierkegaard identifies as one of the key hallmarks of modern literature: “instead of understanding them as manifestations of a fully described interiority, we observe them from the outside [1].” Thus, in light of this quotation, we might regard Gertrud as the filmmaker’s strangest work. Unlike his previous films, the filmmaker—by merely showing and saying nothing—replaces words with the helplessness of words, embarking for the first and last time with an abstract weapon in search of concepts, hoping perhaps to find them, perhaps to challenge them, perhaps to… In other words, this time Dreyer’s hands are empty of certainty: this time he cannot have faith in the end, when from the beginning he knows no words to speak.
Gertrud is a defeated woman; she has lost everything, and the soul has departed from her face. What happened to Gertrud and why remains unclear; likewise, the woman’s true meaning of love and how she conceives it is unknown. Her continuous efforts to attain love are obvious, of course, as is our doubt regarding the error of her ways. After all, when someone is perpetually unsuccessful in relationships, can we not surmise that the fault lies not with others, but with her failure to understand the nuances of love, right?
It is not terribly critical, of course (if you disagree), since this conclusion stems from the abundance of “maybes” in this text, and the writer himself is hardly certain of its accuracy (such is doubt…). Yet, on the other hand, the existence of these assumptions—their sheer presence—cannot be ignored. From the heart of these speculations floating around Gertrud’s motives and desires, one can reach a more secondary, definitive conclusion and focus on it further: Gertrud is no stranger to the act of trying. Indeed, the pathetic woman Dreyer portrays has been driven into turmoil in her search for love and can no longer remain still. She fluctuates between powerlessness and agency (while remaining mindful of preserving her character’s traditional image). Although she qualifies as a classic woman from every angle and perspective, we must nonetheless concede that it is difficult to analyze her behavioral patterns and reasoning in a classic manner, or to sympathize with her through her more limited history compared to classic men [2]—especially to love her despite her wrongdoings. After all, Gertrud repeatedly violates moral obligations: she cheats on her husband, visiting her lover’s house at night (where the white light of the park location merges with the dark light of her young lover’s home); she acts ruthlessly toward Gabriel, both past and present; she provides insufficient explanation to Gustav as to why she ended their relationship (when, as one party in the relationship, it is his rightful due to know); and it is no exaggeration to say that traces of selfishness and vanity can be found within her (Erland also points this out). Gertrud is a woman who sees only herself, and it is not far-fetched to view her repeatedly standing before the mirror as a manifestation of this very trait.
Gertrud is guilty, and one can easily discern this—or something akin to it—by closely examining her interactions with others. By “others,” I do not mean villainous or malevolent figures choking her! No; ordinary characters who also happen to be cultured individuals. Furthermore, Gertrud’s situation is not one where we could say misfortune fell upon her, leading us to view her as a martyr to unfavorable, unwanted circumstances. The crux of the matter is that Gertrud is a woman living in favorable social conditions with complete freedom of action. The very men who created these conditions for her and granted her absolute autonomy in making choices are the ones left thwarted by her, receiving no affection in return for theirs [3]—and can life truly go on without mutual expectations?
Yet that is only one side of the coin (perhaps its patriarchal side); let us step back from this perspective for a moment. Other facts emerge behind our perception of the film’s screenplay that cannot be ignored: Gertrud possesses a gentle soul and is a character who, broadly speaking, wins us over (not merely because she is the film’s injured party and commands our sympathy). Even under the most unfair appraisal, we can neither brand her a wicked or repulsive woman because of her sins, nor add self-destructiveness to her attributes despite the transformations she repeatedly undergoes. Besides, is it not true that Gertrud—and only Gertrud—has a distinct definition of love for herself (regardless of how personal or incompatible it may be), fighting to achieve it and knowing that within this marital ring there is something absent, missing, never meant to be this way (one can say with certainty that Gustav, at least, fails to realize such a loss)? This fact alone lends no small measure of value to her character. Gertrud is a reflection of a ruined past, and one cannot view her alone as the primary cause of the ultimate misstep—the point at which the film arrives—and confidently summon her to trial as the prime defendant. And after all, how much do we truly know about the film’s backstory to pass judgment on her in the first place?
It is here that the filmmaker’s shadow is felt more and more. The Danish director, in his final work, searches entirely for absences rather than presences. He shows nothing, lest he show something he is uncertain of. Consider the film’s soft, flat lighting; a sense of caution permeates it. The gentle contrast created between light and shadow, which remains unchanged even as the camera pans, conveys a form of neutrality, leaving the viewer free to look wherever they wish without having their attention directed toward a specific detail—whatever the filmmaker might desire. The director does not wish to depict one character darker and another brighter.
The omission of the shot/reverse-shot technique mirrors what Dreyer accomplishes with lighting. The film’s dense dialogues could easily have used shot/reverse-shot to nudge the audience toward a moral confrontation (or, by the same token, an immoral one), perhaps favoring one character over another or evoking sympathy at specific moments. Yet we observe that the director inclines toward refraining from judgment and watching motionlessly (notice how he constructs a cinematic plot tailored to his vision out of the inherently theatrical nature of his narrative—the camera position).
The purpose of discussing all this is to suggest a possible return to contemporary cinema—to today’s widely discussed themes of non-judgment, gray characters, the concealed auteur, and the illusion of director suppression (rather than actual suppression). Much of what we receive from newer works today and deem innovative was evident long before in Dreyer’s final masterpiece, in a form far more mature and perfectionist.
From this angle, Gertrud can be considered a great classic work. And if we choose to view the mainstream cinema of the past century across the globe as a path traveled from the past—as we should—and return to cinema’s turning points, particularly the prominent shifts of the 1960s, to analyze current drama more precisely, the influence of a film like Gertrud is visible above all other innovations and experiments of that decade (emphatically within mainstream cinema), its trajectory ripe for examination [4].
And yet another point—the one that constituted Dreyer’s most significant proposal for how to view a drama, as well as his riskier gamble toward a broader transformation of conversational cinema: the focus on human figures.
Recall the party sequence, where Gertrud sings of that which does not exist for her (faith?), only to falter shortly after and faint. It is where the film’s most tempestuous scene unfolds: the camera abandons its usual demeanor, its angle shifts and grows agitated, and the geometric stability of the subject is disrupted for the first time in the film, allowing the director to offer the audience a smoother, more intelligible meaning of his execution. The execution I speak of is the very causality that enables us to derive aesthetic ecstasy from watching Gertrud; otherwise, the film’s tragic premise and the slippery, neutral nature of its narrative approach would yield nothing but sheer frustration for the viewer. For Gertrud is not a film of narrative—or rather, a film of spoken words; Gertrud is a cinema of body gestures, nothing more.
It suffices to watch the film once on fast-forward in our media player, or to click repeatedly through various shots from different parts of the film. Discerning that the figures do not move (like statues) and that the shots do not shift is hardly difficult; it is as though the viewer faces an overarching state—the state of the film itself. The characters are always centered, positioned equidistant from the edges of the frame, consistently seated or motionless, striking similar figures (face and body), with astonishing resembles repeatedly appearing in the distance between their bodies and the camera lens. It feels as though it is distracting the viewer toward a work of architecture, inviting us again and again to observe another of its sections. Without exaggeration, one must admit there is no difference between the heterogeneous shots of The Passion of Joan of Arc and the homogeneous shots of Gertrud; in the writer’s view, both are equally theatrical. The dynamism of Dreyer’s final work in portraying stillness and stability with supreme precision is dazzling and commendable: an attempt to conceive a stability that does not inherently exist within the characters. To the writer, that tempestuous sequence and the trembling of the film’s structure are nothing short of the grandeur of dramatic cinematography. Undoubtedly, had we attended a theater stage to watch Hjalmar Söderberg’s play, given the seat assigned to us, we could never have witnessed these angles—with the camera’s gentle pans—as they appear here in the film. Not to mention the paintings surrounding the characters in the background (had we seen all the paintings in a wide shot, the effect would have palled), or the final scene with the camera retreating from the door Gertrud closes, or… Dreyer’s film is a cinematic experience and nothing else. It is a film in praise of cinematography, in praise of distances, and in praise of the death of the image. In Gertrud, the pleasure of the representation outweighs the pain stemming from the subject of the representation, transforming a bitter drama into an agreeable one—allowing us to enjoy the shadow of a woman falling on a wall as she slowly undresses. Dreyer’s film, despite all its influence on subsequent works in mainstream cinema, remains a work counter to the stream.

Footnotes:
[1] Kierkegaard, Either/Or (Vol. 1), 1959, Translated by D. Swenson & L. Swenson, pp. 140–1.
[2] Women in classical cinema have always received a sympathetic portrayal, which has been her most prominent—and perhaps even her sole—trait throughout the history of classical cinema, in the author’s view.
[3] Perhaps, of course. The only detail that could refute this theory is the scene (near the end of the film) where Gertrud notices an anonymous woman’s letter on Gabriel’s desk. Prior to seeing the letter, Gertrud is, for the first time in the film, a mobile character—doing housework and humming a tune to herself. Yet the author personally cannot weigh this minor shift in circumstances against the other scenes and ignore the far more significant conclusions drawn from the vast majority of the film based on this single scene.
[4] I do not believe it necessary to explain that a film like Gertrud was not uniquely isolated in those years, and reference could certainly be made to other prominent works.