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.