If there is one film in the canon of Carl Theodor Dreyer that can be
said to be, as Jacques Lacan might put it, his most "painfully
enjoyable," it is Gertrud. The film's Paris premier in 1964 was covered
by the Danish press as a national scandal; it was lambasted on its
release for its lugubrious pace, wooden acting, and old-fashioned,
stuffy milieu. Only later, when a younger generation of critics came to
its defense, did the method in what appeared to be Dreyer's madness
begin to become apparent.
To make vivid just what was at stake for Dreyer, and still for us, in
his final work, James Schamus focuses on a single moment in the film. He
follows a trail of references and allusions back through a number of
thinkers and artists (Boccaccio, Lessing, Philostratus, Charcot, and
others) to reveal the richness and depth of Dreyer's work--and the
excitement that can accompany cinema studies when it opens itself up to
other disciplines and media. Throughout, Schamus pays particular
attention to Dreyer's lifelong obsession with the "real," developed
through his practice of "textual realism," a realism grounded not in
standard codes of verisimilitude but on the force of its rhetorical
appeal to its written, documentary sources.
As do so many of the heroines of Dreyer's other films, such as La
Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), Gertrud serves as a locus for Dreyer's
twin fixations; written texts, and the heroines who both embody and free
themselves from them. Dreyer based Gertrud not only on Hjalmar
Soderberg's play of 1906, but also on his own extensive research into
the life of the "real" Gertrud, Maria van Platen, whose own words Dreyer
interpolated into the film. By using his film as a kind of return to the
real woman beneath the text, Dreyer rehearsed another lifelong journey,
back to the poor Swedish girl who gave birth to him out of wedlock and
who gave him up for adoption to a Danish family, a mother whose
existence Dreyer only discovered later in life, long after she had died.
