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Why a book about Gertrud?

The great Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s fourteenth and final film, Gertrud (Palladium, 1964), is easy to both praise and damn with the same breath; it is, after all, a perfect exemplar of that awful category, the “minor masterpiece.” Awful, because, like its brethren (Raul Ruiz’s Three Crowns of a Sailor, Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up—the list could go on for pages and pages), we must admit about Gertrud: few have seen it, and of those who have, few love it. And yet. For, we might say, it is the quality of the love of those few that is so remarkable. From Jean-Luc Godard to Lars von Trier, from Paul Schrader to David Bordwell, Gertrud has transfixed the passionate regard of filmmakers and critics with a peculiar power of fascination, a fascination not unlike, I shall argue, that which Gertrud herself holds for her many failed lovers. As the last great work of a filmmaker who himself sums up the oddly quizzical critical status of the cinema d’auteur, an auteur who appears to disappear into his own, often stylistically quite radically different films, Gertrud acts as a kind of cinematic vanishing point: we can claim that a powerful strain of modern European film practice organizes itself around it, but it is in and of itself not an object subject to vision—it is rarely cited, revived, or celebrated.

With this little book I hope, of course, to correct that general oversight; but I also, perversely, want to cherish the reasons for it. Even more perversely, I would love to somehow preserve Gertrud’s relative invisibility even as I try to spread the reflected glory it radiates. To celebrate Gertrud is to praise paradoxically the ultimate cinephilic fetish, for we all know that what the cinephile most loves is the unseen and unseeable (“You mean you haven’t seen Ozu’s silent comedies? Even better than his fifties films!” . . . “I’ve got a bootleg of the subtitled French version of La jetée—I can’t believe you’ve only seen that terrible version with the English voice-over!”). Gertrud is a film that goes right to the heart of that terribly sad—and transcendently liberating—love of the unseeable and unknowable object that is the cinema itself.

That is why writing a monograph about Gertrud is such a daunting task. The genre of the film monograph is supposed to provide the reader with something of a sustained reading of the film at hand: themes, motifs, production history, the place of the work in the filmmaker’s career, a bit of gossip, the synopsis, an account of the form of the film, and the major influences that shaped it. There’s some of all of that in the following, but not as much as you’ll find in other movie monographs. In fact, this is something of an antimonograph monograph: I propose here something I hope you’ll find even more in keeping with Gertrud as both film and idea; instead of a straightforward reading, scene by scene, of the film, this essay is a meditation—a collection of reveries, digressions, and extended footnotes and excurses—inspired not so much by Gertrud as by a single moment in Gertrud, a moment (or scene, or image—I’m purposefully rather loose about defining it) that has engaged my interest as exemplary of so much of what makes Dreyer such a disturbing and inspiring figure: his lifelong researches into the relations between word and image in film; his obsession with female martyrdom, and the ways in which his heroines enact and embody the struggle between text and picture—the paragone between painter and poet, as Leonardo da Vinci put it—that fueled so much of Dreyer’s creative output; the unnerving mix of high-art aestheticism and grotesque violence that marks so many of his films; the way his narratives, from his earliest journalistic writings on the cinema to his last film, revolve around the quest of his characters to “read” and comprehend their own stories, a hermeneutic adventure that inevitably leads to moments of sublime incomprehension and often lethal catharsis; and, finally, the ways in which all of these motifs circle back to Dreyer’s own biography, or figure as fragments of a kind of autobiography, which, as the great Martin Drouzy has shown, Dreyer obsessively figured in his search for the mother he never knew, a poor Swedish woman he could only imagine through his readings of the paper trail left by her short, tragic life—a life interrupted by Dreyer’s illegitimate birth and subsequent adoption by a Danish family, which ended three years after she gave him up, when she poisoned herself in a futile attempt to abort another child.

That she died a few short miles from the home of the real woman on whom the character of Gertrud is based—a home Dreyer visited while preparing the film and that he insisted be meticulously recreated for the last scene of the film—should not surprise us. Dreyer’s journey there was both literal, as he pursued his usual intensive research into the “real” characters who underwrote his fictional ones (and he himself, as “Carl Theodor Dreyer,” son of a Danish printer, was in so many ways a fiction), and figural, as he continued the endless journey back to his origins, to a place made up of words (parish documents, birth certificates, etc.) and the acts of imaginative creation and belief that might bring those words to life.

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Film still courtesy of Palladium A/S

Fig. 1. “I had that dream”: Gertrud and
Nygren before the tapestry, in Carl Theodor
Dreyer’s Gertrud.

The moment in Gertrud that will serve as my jumping-off point is not a particularly dramatic or engaging one; I suppose I could have chosen from among hundreds of other moments in the film for a point of departure. (Perhaps, after reading this book, you will return to the film and discover your own place in which to meditate and from which to wander.) But it does, however slyly, tease us with the promise of deep meaning, by its rich melding of possible references. It happens to occur almost exactly halfway through the film, as Gertrud’s eponymous heroine turns to regard a large, dramatic tapestry hanging on a wall behind her. The tapestry depicts a forested landscape, in the center of which stands a naked woman, attacked from all sides by a pack of hounds (fig. 1). For all its sexualized violence and massive scale, the image on the tapestry is oddly calm, “aestheticised” one might say. Gertrud, after regarding it, turns to her friend Axel Nygren, who is also pausing over the tapestry’s spectacle, and who is in the film one of a slew of masculine suitors—lovers, friend, and husband—who negotiate with Gertrud for her love, and tells him that she had had “that dream”—referring to the tapestry—the previous night. Soon thereafter, Gertrud will sing Schumann’s setting of Heinrich Heine’s “Ich grolle nicht” to her assembled admirers, accompanied on the piano by her current faithless lover, only to collapse in a swoon before her impossibly desiring audience, having just learned from another ex-lover that her current one had publicly boasted of their affair the night before at a soiree attended by lowlifes and whores.

In this book, we shall travel to many of the places that Gertrud’s gesture toward and into the forest depicted behind her will take us—and often travel quite far afield, to the text buried, we might say, in the tapestry, and to the ways in which that text comments on, and is  commented upon itself, by Dreyer’s film. Along the way we shall encounter a number of interlocutors—Joan of Arc, Leon Battista Alberti, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Boccaccio, the French turn-of-the-century psychiatrist J. M. Charcot (as well as some of the patients he housed in his asylum and displayed onstage during his weekly lectures), and others—but we shall always circle back to the pregnant moment when Gertrud recognizes her dream in the tapestry on the wall in that parlor.

“Pregnant moment” is itself of course a term of critical art—we shall trace its roots back through Lessing’s important work on the relation of word and image in the arts, Laocoon (1766), to see how Dreyer’s use of the tapestry challenges our received ideas on how narratives find their ways into and out of images. But the term also carries a host of other meanings and associations, associations that will lead us into an extended detour back to another one of Dreyer’s heroines, Joan of Arc, and into the history of the iconography of that heroine’s depiction, a history that directly bears upon Gertrud, as well as upon Dreyer’s own mother, Josephine Nilsson.

If Gertrud is such a great failure, how is it so great?

Gertrud, like the performance by Gertrud that follows the moment we’ve chosen, was an abject failure. Its premiere at the Salle Médicis in Paris on December 18, 1964, was covered by the Danish press as a national humiliation (even the Danish ambassador to France posted an account in Kristeligt Dagblad the day after the screening, lambasting the film). Hopes for the film had been high: Dreyer’s previous film was the masterpiece Ordet (Palladium, 1955), which had won the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice Film Festival when it premiered there in 1955, and Dreyer’s return to Paris for the Gertrud premiere marked an auspicious return to the scene of another of his masterpieces, The Passion of Joan of Arc (Société générale des films, 1928). Although Gertrud recovered somewhat from its initial critical drubbing (young critics like Jean- Luc Godard and André Téchiné soon rallied behind it, and Gertrud even ended up winning the Bodil Award the next year for best Danish film), it was a commercial failure, treated by the public as a stilted, dated, lugubriously paced swan song from an old man (Dreyer turned seventy-five during the making of the film and would die four years later), based on a respected and periodically revived but not overly admired turn-of-the-century stage play by the Swedish writer Hjalmar Söderberg. And, indeed, the film is stilted, it is slow-moving; its pleasures, to those few who have yielded to them, are not only hard-earned but perversely painful. Of course critics and cinephiles have always found in
cinema’s “bad objects”—those films that bravely take on and subvert the reigning codes of American-dominated classical film narrative construction—a way to transmute the pain and exhaustion most viewers feel when subjected to them into the exquisitely transgressive experience we have come to identify with modern connoisseurship.

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The salutary power of that transmutation has inspired much of the criticism of Gertrud to date; indeed, Gertrud is a perfect case study for turning artistic “failure” into—or, rather, for accepting a kind of artistic failure as—the precondition for another kind of aesthetic achievement. The groundwork for understanding that kind of achievement-through-failure was made by Immanuel Kant some 200 years ago in his third Critique, where he outlines the experience of the sublime—as opposed to the beautiful—as the result of a kind of cognitive failure, a shock to the system, when we initially fail to ingest the limitlessness presented to us in specific moments of experience. In the experience of the sublime, our initial failure and displeasure (at the headache induced by trying to get to the “end” of an infinite progression of numbers, for example, or at the initial recoil of witnessing the overwhelming power of nature’s might) is followed by the exhilarating feeling of having experienced something that, by definition, is greater than anything our faculties could ever allow us take in. For a long time now Western high-art practice has lived under the shadow of the sublime: the aesthetic became the “anti-aesthetic”; great works of art are now by definition “minor,” for what artist would have a chance of getting into the Whitney Biennale with something trivial or kitschy enough to be called “beautiful”? Better by far for the artwork to stage a kind of unpleasant failure, thus generating in the beholder the struggle to grasp the greatness of the concept the artwork enables.

Recent thinkers have attempted to revive the legitimacy of the beautiful within art practice and theory. The wonderful critic Dave Hickey, for example, has passionately defended the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe precisely for the transgressive power of their beauty. I think a study of Dreyer’s Gertrud has a lot to say to these current debates about the sublime and the beautiful, about the very definition of the work of art and the role of art in our lives.
Dreyer’s project in Gertrud represents, on the one hand, a serious engagement with the profound legacy of Kantian sublimity, as that legacy is extended and transformed from Hegel through Jacques Lacan to current thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek. I have no doubt that its “failure,” its “minor” status, is very much entwined with Dreyer’s (and his heroine’s) uncompromising quest to move beyond the confines of cinematic “art” to something more frightening and true. On the other hand, Gertrud is also a work deeply preoccupied with the aesthetic. As critics of Gertrud have repeatedly noted, the dominant presence of aesthetic objects in the film, and the contemplation of them by the film’s characters—along with, of course, the hyperaestheticised feel of the entirety of the film’s framing and staging—makes the film peculiarly “beautiful.” It is as if Dreyer’s fixation with art and artworks in Gertrud, and his characters’ tragically unceasing failure to connect with their beauty (or, even more tantalizingly, their heroically tragic rejection of beauty), created the conditions for what we might call Dreyer’s beautifully sublime aesthetic.

That aesthetic was a function of Dreyer’s radical form of realism, a realism very different from what we usually associate with that word. Dreyer was not interested in mimesis, the faithful imitation in art of some version of our shared reality. His realism does not have the same social or political mission often linked to the Scandinavian and other realists who preceded him. The “Real” that Dreyer attempts to achieve in Gertrud and in many of his other films functions in some ways as the sublime did for Kant, and is even more like the “Real” as it is understood by Lacan and Žižek, as a structuring but largely ungraspable ground of our very being as human subjects.

Film still courtesy of Palladium A/S

Fig 2. Frames and doorways: the final
image of Gertrud.

We noted above the link between Dreyer’s search for his own origins and, in the process of creating Gertrud, his final return to the home of the “real” Gertrud, the closed door of which would become the last image of the film—the last image Dreyer would ever produce (fig. 2). In creating his art, Dreyer sought, and portrayed his characters as seeking, a Real that is both the limit against which the human in us must throw itself to achieve self-definition, and the unknowable territory it is our moral duty to map, even if only by demarcating the borders we always try, and always fail, to breach in order to arrive there. The door onto that reality was always closing to Dreyer, and will always be closed to us—Gertrud herself closes it, and closes herself behind it. But Gertrud attempts, always, to pass into and beyond the frame filled by that image of the door. It is precisely the failure of Gertrud’s words and images to cohere in that attempt—precisely its failure as “art” of a kind—that marks the grandeur of Dreyer’s ambitions: Gertrud, as much as any other film I know, ruthlessly argues the case against art, even its own art, and instead proposes a new kind of painful aesthesis, an aesthetic knowing, born of the rending and opening up of the human subject as it confronts the making of its own life story. For Dreyer, self-knowledge means creating one’s self as an object of self-regard, but in that act of self-creation lies the rub: we are folded back into the falsehoods of aesthetic objecthood, and the abyss of constant interpretation and self-reflection. As we shall see, Gertrud both embraces absolutely this process of self-aesthetisization, and, finally, rejects absolutely its beauty in the name of the Real.