#127: Gertrud

Carl Th. Dreyer released his final film, Gertrud, during a cinematic revolution. Against the backdrop of the French New Wave, Gertrud seems overly mannered, a relic of a lost time even when it was released. Based on Hjalmar Soderberg’s 1907 play, the film itself is meticulously staged, with the actors speaking, in arch dialogue, about the impossibility of love. Dreyer opts for static camera placement, rarely using reverse shots; in fact, he rarely has the actors speak face-to-face, instead having them look obliquely towards the viewer, replicating the theatrical experience. Bendt Rothe, who plays the husband, reported that “there was not a movement that Dreyer did not supervise and direct. None of the acting was ours, it was all his, expressing his ideas.” Amid jump cuts, non-linear stories, and handheld camerawork from other directors, Dreyer remains uncompromising in his artistic vision.

When I described my work-in-progress to my agent, I used the phrase “obnoxiously literary.” She didn’t bat an eye. I explained: this novel would take its style from classics of German modernism. We were seated at the bar of a French restaurant in Portland. Robert Musil, I said. Thomas Bernhard. Bertold Brecht. As she nibbled off a plate of toothpick-skewered olives, I wondered if she was calculating her earnings on fifteen percent of zero.

When Gertrud premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, audience-goers jeered. In the film, Gertrud, a former singer, has a firmly-rooted idea of what she wants from a lover and never relents, even as she is disappointed, again and again, by the men in her life. One is consumed by his career; another too self-centered; a third blinded by his own vision of love to understand hers. As Jytte Jensen describes it: “She is concerned only with arranging to live out her life according to her strict adherence to her unique—and in Dreyer’s world feminine—ideal. Love is all.” Her refusal of anything less leads her to abandon her men, eventually refuse to entertain even the possibility of love.

Or, as Whitney Houston puts it, she “would rather be alone than unhappy.”

My agent neither encourages me to continue my path, nor does she dissuade me. Instead, she takes a hands-off approach; when I finish my manuscript, we’ll discuss it then. Besides, at our meeting, she had more important things on her mind: she announced that she was pregnant and would be stepping back for a while.

Meanwhile, I continue working.

In his version of Gertrud, Dreyer adds an epilogue, revisiting the heroine decades later, at home. Gertrud’s unwillingness to compromise comes at a cost. Elsa Wright describes the final scene, in which “Gertrud’s room is virtually changed into a tomb under your very eyes—by the closing of a door, a shifting light, and the distant sound of bells.” But before the door closes: she reads a poem, which she had written at age 16. She still, she says, stands by those words.

#126: Ordet

I.

Jesus told his Roman executioners, “After three days I am to rise again,” and, as if dared, they set, over his tomb, a wax seal with rope. The price of breaking that seal was death. Three days later, his disciples found the stone covering the tomb rolled away, and nothing inside except the linens that had wrapped his body, bearing the shape of a body, but with no body. They concluded that he had, indeed, resurrected.

II.

At the end of Ordet, Dreyer frames the deceased Inger in beatific light. Throughout the film, she has been the heart of the Borgensgaard farm: tending to piglets, rolling out dough, rearing two daughters. But now, her hands are clasped upon her torso, dead after a harrowing medical procedure. Her resurrection starts at her extremities. Her fingers twitch. Her eyelids flutter. As she revives, she kisses her husband’s cheek with gentle nibbles, though I somewhat expected her to rip, zombie-style, a bloody chunk out of his face. Thomas Beltzer points out that the scene is purposefully uncomfortable: Inger has been granted not a spiritual resurrection, but a physical one. “The bodily resurrection,” he writes, “means that God loves our bodies as well as our souls and that he wants to be fully involved in our material lives as well as our spiritual lives.”

III.

When I watched Ordet, a month ago, around Easter, I was in a dark place. I had, like others, sealed myself into a tomb of my own making. I had trouble sleeping. I tried to relax by crossing my hands upon my chest, but beset by uncertainty and fear, was left imagining what it would be like to be dead—a holdover from my teenage years, when I thought about death with the romantic curiosity of someone far from it. But, with its possibility close, I thought it might be nice—like an endless night of sleep. When it came time to wake up, to rejoin the living, I resisted. I felt, not like Inger, but like Johannes, who, driven mad by Kierkregaard, believes he is Jesus: “You must rot, because the times are rotten.”

IV.

Leonid Andreyev, in his story “Lazarus,” questions what happens after resurrection. Before his death, the character of Lazarus takes sybaritic joy in living, but after his resurrection, these former pleasures fall by the wayside. Only emptiness remains. As the rich and curious seek him out to uncover what it means to die, they come away without answers, and haunted. I read that story in middle-school, trying to discover what it meant to die but came away without answers, and haunted. 

V.

A nearby church bears a banner reading “WE ARE EASTER PEOPLE”; it’s been flying for almost two months. What does resurrection look like? Buds on trees have brought forth blossoms; ferns curled into themselves have unfurled fronds; shoots scraping their way out of the ground have grown dark foliage. Elsewhere: streets await the spill of traffic; strip malls await the switch of dusty OPEN signs; skies await screaming airplane engines. We await the moment we can roll the rock from the cave entrance of self-isolation to see how world has changed. I urge myself, wake up. Wake up.

#125: Day of Wrath

When the townspeople burn Herlof’s Marte—not tied to a stake, the way we imagine, but instead to a ladder before being tipped into the fire to die of actual burning, as opposed to the relative mercy of smoke inhalation—Matthew gasps, because of course he does.

He tells me: in Scandinavia, during the witch craze of Early Modern Europe, there were approximately 5000 accusations of witchcraft and 1500-1800 executions. Denmark, following the reformation of 1536, had an intense period of witch hunts and persecutions, particularly under Christian IV’s reign, during which Carl Th. Dreyer sets Day of Wrath. But while that number sounds severe, the Holy Roman Empire saw nearly 100,000 accusations and 60,000 deaths. Countries that didn’t experience a steep rise in witch hunts—Spain, for instance, and the Italian city-states—had strong central governments that weren’t being challenged by reform movements.

Dreyer insisted that Day of Wrath wasn’t a political allegory, even though it was made during the Nazi occupation. But many interpreted the persecution of witches as analogous to the persecution of Jews—and that even in the depths of autocratic rule, love and life could flourish, if even fleetingly. After the film’s release, Dreyer spent the remainder of the war in Sweden.

In college, I was asked to perform wedding ceremony for two witches. They were actually pagans, but the wedding itself was symbolic, anyhow: the ceremony was part of the protests against Pope John Paul II’s Baltimore visit in 1995. D___ and R___ had decided to mutually change their last names to ‘Flatbush,’ appropriate enough, I supposed, for a lesbian couple. D___ wore peasant dresses and kept her straight brown hair in a ponytail, whereas R___ was shorter, squatter, and chubbier, with curly black hair that framed her round face.

I gleaned a few tips off the nascent internet and threw together a hodgepodge of gestures that could be interpreted as meaningful. At the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon, amongst the protestors advocating for gay and lesbian equality and reproductive rights, I gave a blessing to the four elements (a tealight for fire; a pigeon feather for air; a plastic cup of water; a pile of dirt) and bowed to the cardinal directions, and as I quoted Tom Robbin’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (“I believe in nothing; everything is sacred/I believe in everything; nothing is sacred”), D___ and R___, leapt, hand-in-hand, over each of the elements.

I’ve wondered why they asked me, an atheist, to officiate; I knew them only glancingly, though we’d always been friendly. But maybe this was the point: this is how we protest oppression; this is how we live under regimes; this is how we save each other from the flames.

After the ceremony wrapped, the Flatbush wedding party continued down the hill, whooping and hollering, the moment joyously carnivalesque, a glorious inversion, the freaks and weirdoes of Baltimore holding their ground against the throngs of people lined up to catch a glimpse of His Holiness in his bullet-proof buggy.

#62: The Passion of Joan of Arc

(originally published Oct. 8, 2010)

This semester, I taught a section of the First Year Experience, a one-credit, pass/fail class that’s essentially a banner announcing, ‘Welcome to college.’ My students, for the most part, are good kids: sometimes rowdy, sometimes apathetic, sometimes distracted and beyond my reach.

But, as I said, basically good kids.

Prompted by the recent spate of high-profile gay suicides, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to talk to my freshmen about anti-gay bullying and harassment. In particular, the death of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers freshman who jumped off a bridge after an intimate encounter with another student was broadcast without his knowledge by his roommate, raised issues that went beyond the bullying—negotiating privacy, living with other people, controlling your on-line image.

The discussion went well, I thought. When I told Clementi’s story (amazingly, some hadn’t heard about it, which I expected from the international students, but not the English-speaking ones), one of the guys in class (who looks familiar with the Jersey Shore) commented, “That’s fucking demented.” Towards the end of the conversation, he glanced up at the clock repeatedly, but he got it, I thought. He understood.

That night, when I watched The Passion of Joan of Arc, the first thing that popped into my head was: Joan of Arc, gender warrior! Of course, she was persecuted for heresy, but when the warty, jowly judges press her about her preference for men’s clothing, it brings to mind Daphne Scholinski’s The Last Time I Wore a Dress. When Joan is first asked, Renee Falconetti, wide-eyed, nervously fingers her collar, as if the clothes are tightening around her neck. When another judge presses—“So God orders you to dress as a man?”—her eyes are half-closed, as if in resignation. Her answer doesn’t receive an intertitle, but her whisper is unmistakable: Oui.

Yesterday, I took my class to the student center on campus for a lecture. On the front of a building were posters announcing an upcoming drag show. The featured drag queen, Sahara Davenport, was plastered on every window, in every conceivable color Hammermill provides: fuchsia, goldenrod, lime, taupe—a Warholian whirl of fabulousness. As we entered, the Jersey Shorean student muttered, “Seven bucks for a fucking tranny?”

Fucking tranny.

What upsets me is not that he said what he said—but that I didn’t stop right there and say something. I kept walking. Students sat at tables, eating their lunches. The smell of fried Chik-Fil-A sizzled in the air. His words hung there, unconfronted, unaddressed.

I’m no Joan of Arc. At best, I’m Jean Massieu, the monk (played by Antonin Artaud) who knows better but is cowed into silence. He supports Joan in spirit, but when things get hot, he bows his head, and lets his tonsure reflect his shame. We share cowardly silence. As punishment for our sins, how many more martyrings will we be forced to witness?