Gertrud

Adapted from a long-forgotten play by Hjalmar Soderberg written during the early years of the 20th century, Dreyer’s controversial last film centres on a proud, stubborn woman who demands total commitment in love and forsakes both her husband and a former lover for a young musician who is relatively indifferent to her. The film moves at a slow, theatrical pace with long takes recorded mainly in direct sound (though shot principally in a studio), and deserves to be ranked along with ‘The Magnificent Ambersons, ‘Lola Montes’, and ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ as one of the great haunted-memory films. Its meaning hinges partially on the refusal or inability to compromise and what this implies over the range of an entire life (in this case Dreyer’s as well as his heroine’s). The heroine may be regarded as a monster, a sublime and saintly martyr, or most likely an impossible fusion of the two. Dreyer’s film has a similarly dialectical and contradictory effect—at once narrative and (in the figure of Gertrud herself) nonnarrative, static and flowing, a tribute to free will and a positing of the unconscious as tragic destiny. Reference: Jonathan Rosenbaum. Chicago Online Reader.http://onfilm.chireader.com/MovieCaps/G/GE/03973_GERTRUD.html Cast includes Nina Pens Rode, Bendt Rothe, Ebbe Robe, Baard Owe and Axel Strobye. Note: Adapted from the play by Hjalmar Soderberg. In Danish with English subtitles.