Dreyer's Gertrude

“Theatricality in Dreyer’s ‘Gertrud’,” unpublished academic paper, fall 2000

In 1965 the Danish director Carl-Theodore Dreyer said this about his most recent film, Gertrud: “I seek before all else, and in all cases, to work in such a way that what I must express becomes cinema. For me, Gertrud is no longer theater at all, it has become a film.”

Ironically, the director’s comments stood in stark contrast to critical evaluations of the film. Stanley Kauffman, writing in The New York Times, called Gertrud “the least fluently cinematic of any work of his that I know,” while Dwight McDonald leveled a much harsher critique of the film; writing in Esquire, McDonald charged Dreyer with descending “into cinematic poverty and straightforward tedium. He just sets up his camera and photographs people talking to each other, usually sitting down; just the way it used to be done before Griffith made a few technical innovations.”

Dreyer, commenting on the film in the wake of the criticism that greeted its Paris debut and hostile reception at Cannes (where it was booed), was mindful, if flatly dismissive, of his critics.

Gertrud was attacked, implicitly or otherwise, for its brazen denial of the “cinematic” and, conversely, for its staid compliance with the “theatrical.” These evaluations, by no means composing the minority dissent in the generally abusive reaction to the film, are meaningful for the manner by which they set up a dialectic between what in cinema constitutes the “cinematic” and what constitutes the “theatrical.” (The divergence becomes especially acute in contrast to Dreyer’s assertion.)

McDonald’s allusion to D.W. Griffith is particularly instructive. Film scholar David Bordwell offers this description of the pre-Griffith film: “The actors are arranged in a row and stand far away from us. They perform against a canvas backdrop complete with wrinkles and painted-on decor. The shot unfolds uninterrupted by any closer views. Today, such an image seems startlingly ‘uncinematic,’ the height of theatricality.”

Central, perhaps, to any allegation of theatricality in film criticism is a conviction that the theater, while proving felicitous in the film medium’s formative period, is no longer useful to, or congruent with, the objectives of filmmaking. Furthermore, one finds articulation of the view that to employ theatrical, and therefore uncinematic, devices — of which Gertrud offers many examples — is a compromise of the singular aesthetic of the film medium.

Writer and director Susan Sontag offers this insight — an insight, it should be noted, for which she issues a caveat: “This view is far too simple.”

The history of the cinema [Sontag writes] is often treated as the history of its emancipation from theatrical models. First of all from theatrical “frontality’ (the unmoving camera reproducing the situation of the spectator of a play fixed in his seat), then from theatrical acting (gestures needlessly stylized, exaggerated — needlessly because now the actor could be seen "close-up”).

Having taken Griffith’s cue, the logic goes, the cinema was freed of the constraints of so-called “filmed theater,” embarking on a forward path, as Sontag characterizes it, “from theatrical stasis to cinematic fluidity, from theatrical artificiality to cinematic naturalness and immediacy.”

Directors who were seen to represent resistance to the cinematic program — the French director Marcel Pagnol perhaps chief among them — were accorded the requisite derision, regardless of commercial prowess. Pagnol even went as far as to declare that “the talking picture is the art of recording, preserving and diffusing the theater.”

For Dreyer’s part, he had by 1964, the year of Gertrud’s release, become closely identified with “theatricalized” film projects, having adapted in the course of his two previous films, Day of Wrath and Ordet — both of them imported from the stage — a filmic style at variance with his previous efforts (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Vampyr).

Ordet (1954) in particular evinces a theatricalized design. David Bordwell identifies Dreyer’s use of “sound, mise-en-scene, camera movement, and the long take” as the director’s primary gestures toward theatricalization, pointing to the long take as a device that “offers rich possibilities.” The film marks Dreyer’s initial experiment with the long take, by then a device firmly situated in the repertory of many directors — Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, William Wyler and Alfred Hitchcock among them. In the film, Dreyer extends his use of the long take to a lengthy seven minutes, and installs as one of the film’s formal strategies an economy of cutting (114 shots in Ordet compared to 436 shots in Day of Wrath).

With Gertrud (the director’s next and last film, released 10 years after Ordet), the strategy endures. But rather than betraying a facile theatrical sensibility, Dreyer’s use of the theatrical is, in fact, potently cinematic.

II.

To begin, I will provide both some background on the film and a survey of the putatively theatrical devices Dreyer adopts in constructing it.

The script to Dreyer’s film is based on the stage play by Hjalmar Soderberg, a playwright whom Dreyer called “a great author who was not highly enough esteemed when he was alive but whose qualities are being to be discovered. Up to now, he has always been in Strindberg’s shadow, for which he was reproached, as he was considered much the inferior.”

Soderberg’s story involves a woman, Gertrud, and the utopian demands she makes of love and of her lovers. The plot, which one critic called a “pallid post-Ibsen revolt against the idea of woman as chattel or toy,” recalls in its early moments the Norwegian dramatist, using a narrative inversion of A Doll’s House: Gertrud charges her husband with maltreatment (“You in a very humiliating way show me how little I mean to you. Am I absolutely nothing to you?” ), revealing her intention to leave him at the beginning of the story, not the end. Dreyer’s selection of the play as the source of his new film was viewed by some critics as evidence of his obsolescence. “That Dreyer takes this play seriously is one index that he out of touch,” wrote The New York Times critic.

Gertrud was one of four plays that Dreyer adapted during the last 20 years of his career, a period that saw the production of only four feature-length fiction films by the director. Previously, Dreyer had adapted novels and short stories or written or collaborated on original scripts. In fact, in the more prolific 26 years that preceded this last period, Dreyer based only two screenplays on stage plays, both of which predated Day of Wrath (based on Hans Wiers-Jenssen’s playAnne Pedersdotter) by 20 years.

Not only does Dreyer come to rely on stage adaptations during this period, but, as has already been suggested, he comes to rely on conventions of the stage in filming the plays. In Gertrud, these include the sustained use of dialogue and the relatively static character of the performances (in physical terms); the use of space, both in terms of set design and blocking; and the acting technique of the film’s actors, most of them well established on the Danish stage. These might also include the frontality of shot and figure placement, and, as Bordwell has mentioned in reference to Ordet, the use of long take and camera movement.

But neither the long take nor the use of camera movement is, by definition, inherently theatrical. Removing from consideration that both are cinematic devices that have nothing at all to do with theater, such a distinction is, still, at best arbitrary and, at worst, specious. Alfred Hitchcock makes extensive use of the long take in his 1948 experiment Rope. It is undeniable that Hitchcock uses the device in filming a stage adaptation, but the finesse and facility of his 10-minute takes — weaving his camera in, out and around the action, tracking in for a closeup, tracking out for a setup in deep focus — is purely cinematic. Likewise, the audacious use of long-takes in certain films by Andy Warhol and Chantal Akerman, I would argue, is divorced entirely from the “theatrical,” and is, again, purely cinematic, in scope and execution.

Camera movement is even more problematic in reconciling any claim to theatricality. An arc-and-pan shot or a crane shot (two technical devices employed by Dreyer in Gertrud) have no counterpart in the theater; even a simple panning sequence, framing and reframing the characters in a conversation (rather than using the more conventional shot-reverse shot approach), ostensibly simulating the gaze of a spectator, is a cinematic conceit, and a more deliberate mode of spectatorial observation than any human would ever engage in (a human spectator’s manner of observation comes much closer to the cutting, the differing perspectives notwithstanding, of a shot-reverse shot sequence).

This has been, of course, too literal an interpretation of the terms before us. But it underlines the important distinctions to be made in evaluating a film based on a play, as opposed to what Andre Bazin dubbed “canned theater.” Another form Bazin identifies is the “conventional adaptation,” which seeks to “cinematize” a play while preserving (more or less) its theatrical dimensions. Examples of this would be the many (more or less) faithful adaptations of 1940s and 1950s Broadway productions — musicals like Kiss Me Kate and Guys and Dolls or a drama like A Raisin in the Sun.

Dreyer’s film, then, must belong to the third class of “filmed theater” that Bazin defines. David Bordwell elaborates on this third class: “Neither canned theater nor adaptation, this alternative seeks to retain theatrical conventions of dialogue and setting.” Or to put it another way, this third type of film aims to find “a set of cinematic equivalents for the theatrical qualities of the original. You transpose the play for a new instrument, you score it in the key of cinema.

The long take, camera movement, camera placement: these are options available to the film director and to the film director alone (notwithstanding the cinematographer, director of photography, etc.). Being singularly cinematic in function, they would seem, then, to have singularly cinematic consequences. But directed toward such ends as Bordwell elucidates, the purported theatricality of such devices becomes less problematic. In fact, in Dreyer’s film (if not in Hitchcock’s Rope, or the films of Warhol or Akerman), the long take and the use of camera movement and placement can be seen as working expressly toward this goal, of finding "cinematic equivalents.” The undertaking is, in keeping with my argument, purely a cinematic one and the solutions the director finds are cinematic.

That being said, and the grounds for such an evaluation having been defined, I’d like to give consideration finally to the specific uses of theatricality in Dreyer’s film. I will begin with perhaps the most important of these, the use of frontality. Throughout Gertrud Dreyer films straight-on, framing his actors in a frontal manner suggestive of stage representation. Just as important is the frontality of objects — desks, tables, chairs, walls, doorways. These objects often coalesce in forming flat, proscenium-like compositions. This frontality is only one of the strategies that gives the film, in its visual expression, a stage-like character. The film’s use of precise, symmetrical framing, much of it in mid-shot, is further suggestive of the proscenium.

Characters often walk into the frame, from the left or the right “flank,” as if walking onto the stage. This effect is especially pronounced in scenes where a character marks his or her arrival in a scene. Rather than announcing a character’s arrival with a cut, Dreyer’s insistence on the integrity of the frame emphasizes the notion of discrete onscreen/offscreen space, or, to characterize it more productively, onstage/offstage space. Theatricality is also denoted by the numerous entrances and exits made by characters, Gertrud in particular, through doors and thresholds shot in deep focus. Dreyer sets up a tableau, then has a character enter seemingly from “offstage.” This is how Gertrud makes her entrance in the film.

The fixity of the frame, often over maddening lengths of time, amplifies the theatrical effect. This fixity marks a crucial departure (while pointing to subsequent projects by Warhol and Akerman, with admittedly irreconcilable objectives) from the work of Alfred Hitchcock in Rope. Where Hitchcock was interested in breaking down his long takes into discrete shots, in a sense “precutting” the film using the standard range of shots and angles, all of them advancing the logic of the narrative, Dreyer, while at times employing the same technique (dollying in for a closeup of Gertrude, for example), seems intent to fix the camera’s gaze on a single action. That the single action usually involves two (sometimes three) characters engaged inertly in long passages of dialogue adds to perceptions of theatricality, only now in the most tedious sense of the term. Yet, these conversations appear consonant with Dreyer’s notions of filming dialogue articulated in a 1966 interview: “Why must a dialogue scene be bound to the idea that one either sees the people in profile or sees one actor with his back turned around? That way, the interplay between the actors can easily be washed out. In a dialogue scene, both faces are important.”

Dreyer’s use of fixed two- and three-shots, in the place of a more standardized shot-reverse shot-cutting paradigm, is only one of the uses of shot perspective adhering to a sense of theatricality. Very little point-of-view structuring occurs in the film. This has the effect of creating a “spectatorial” distance characteristic of the theater, where an audience member only “objectively” views the characters onstage, never seeing things subjectively from any character’s perspective onstage. Dreyer’s construction of space is defined by editing or, more often, by the lack of editing.

The director sets up multiple tableaux in the film. “The problem with constructing scenes around tableaux,” David Bordwell writes, “is that of breaking the tableau by a cut. The long take, allied with lateral and arcking camera movements, permits Dreyer to maintain the tableau.” One of the few scenes in the film that deviates somewhat from the use of long take and the construction of tableaux is a scene that takes place in the character Erland’s apartment. His apartment is less certain as a space and is less clearly delineated as such. This effect results partly from the use of dim light, but it derives mainly from the use of cutting; there are five cuts in the first segment, before a flashback occurs. As a result of the editing, and the dissimilarity of shot angle and depth, it is one of the scenes in the film that has the feel and the look of more conventional cinema, albeit more conventional art cinema.

Another consideration in assessing the theatricality of Dreyer’s film is the aspect of performance. The torpor of camera movement and the elegiac pacing of the film are reflected in the delivery of lines and the movement and expression of the actors. In other words, the transgressive effect of using such a narrow filmic vocabulary underlines, and in some way demands, a restraint and stylization in the performances. The title character, portrayed by Nina Pens Rode, is the embodiment of this restraint. Her performance left Times critic Stanley Kauffman bewildered. “This lady is not only unappealing,” Kauffman wrote, “she is limited to about one and a half facial expressions and somewhat less emotional fire.”

As the quote suggests, Rode’s dolorous expression, a kind of distant reverie, modulates very little in the course of the film. She works within a limited range of reactions and vocal inflections and her physical movement is as precisely calibrated as the camera’s. Just as the camera’s movements are often determined more by overarching aesthetic concerns (as distinguished from Hitchcock’s more utilitarian camera movements in Rope and exemplified by the sweeping “arc” shots that frame and re-frame a single action in long-take, such as Erland Jansson playing the piano), Gertrud will move elegantly across a room, from one chair or couch to another, with no intelligible impulse. This “action” emphasizes the very lack of action, and again underscores the staginess of the filmed play.

The articulation of dialogue works to underscore this lack of action as well. “Speech tends towards recitation,” Bordwell writes. “As the actors declaim, they make little attempt to slur or vary their rhythms naturalistically. The film constantly treats language as performance.” Much of the film’s dialogue is concerned with memory, of recreating or probing past episodes, many which “simply return to events which are already familiar to us.”

Even when dialogue conveys crucial pieces of the narrative puzzle, such as it is, the lines are delivered so languidly and so immutably as to nearly render them meaningless. This seems to have been Soderberg’s intent in writing the play. Commenting on the playwright’s work, Sten Rein notes: “In contrast to Ibsen’s heavily emphasized points, [Soderberg] often consciously introduces a crucial psychological moment through a quietly spoken line.” This is seen especially in a scene involving Gabriel and Gertrud, whose affair has long been over. Gabriel tells Gertrud that he has had an unfortunate encounter with her lover, Erland, who bragged of his “last conquest” — and named names.

There is another crucial component of this scene that illustrates the film’s stylized, theatrical acting. Typical of scenes throughout the film, this conversation finds two characters speaking without ever looking at each other. Instead, characters look off into the distance, on occasion almost looking into the camera, evoking the sense of scenic frontality to which I have referred. This seems an archaic affectation of a highly theatrical variety. (An ironic postscript to this analysis of acting style echoes the contradiction between critical estimations of the film and Dreyer’s own. Commenting in 1965, Dreyer, in contrast to what I have said, contends: “The actors act in a completely natural way. They walk, they talk, in a natural rhythm, and they behave completely naturally in all the situations.”)

I would like to consider in more depth now the effect of shooting in long take. Dreyer commented in 1965:

Yes, I very much believe in long takes. You gain on all levels. And the work with the actors becomes more interesting, for it creates a sort of ensemble, a unity, for each scene which inspires them and allows them to live the relationships more intensely and more acutely.

The long-take format makes demands of both actors and director not otherwise associated with film performance and production. These demands, while also cinematic in character — camera movement and placement, lighting and sound design — rely heavily on theatrical modes of performance and production. Actors must approach a long-take sequence as they would a scene on stage, exchanging long passages of dialogue, hitting marks and blocking movements with precision, over a protracted time frame.

Said Dreyer:

Everything must be rehearsed in such a way that everyone feels the movement and perfectly understands what he is doing. For Gertrud, we rehearsed a great deal. And I was happy with the result. All the more so because all the work was done during the shooting so that the editing no longer posed any problem at all.

This aspect of performance may be seen from another perspective, one concerning textual transposition. “The problem of filmed theater,” writes Andre Bazin, “does not consist so much in transposing an action from the stage to the screen as in transposing a text written for one dramaturgical system into another while at the same time retaining its effectiveness.” David Bordwell, taking Bazin’s cue, considers this problem in the context of Dreyer’s work, arguing that Dreyer, in directing films like Ordet and Gertrud, reconciles the textual conflicts between film and theater. “Dreyer’s films pose the problem of how to represent theatrical texts, how a film may be a 'performance.’”

Finally, a brief analysis of the scenic, sound and lighting design is useful in demonstrating the theatricality of Gertrud. With only one exception, the film is shot in interior spaces. These interiors, while revealing a certain naturalism, especially in the plain “modern” decor, are clearly marked as sets. And while these sets have been noted for their natural use of four walls (instead of the more standard three-wall design), at least one set in the film clearly has three walls. As Gertrud enters Erland’s practice space in a flashback sequence, the camera tracks fluidly from the hallway to the practice space where Erland is playing the piano, passing, in effect, “through” the wall. Other examples of “obvious” set design are the banquet hall and the adjoining salon: the decor looks so “stagy” that the walls seem little more than painted backdrops. Even in the exterior scene, the park where Gertrud and Erland meet is given a distinct sense of the artificial. The effect is achieved through suffuse lighting; precise, frontal compositions, which render trees in the background almost abstract; and the framing of the scene in tableau. Moreover, the setting has no function relative to the narrative — they could as easily be in a parlor — thereby de-emphasizing the natural setting.

The scene also points to the use of sound in the film. Birds can be heard chirping, the wind rustles faintly. In filmingGertrud, Dreyer reportedly refrained from using post-synchronized sound altogether, “except, obviously, for the music.” Throughout the film, the use of direct sound has important theatrical consequences, leaving the viewer to deal with only natural sound, and not having to sort out cinematically manipulated or subjective sound elements.

Conversely, the lighting design, in all of its unnaturalness, works toward this notion of theatricality. The lighting in Gertrud is invariably expressive. Lighting effects are most deftly in evidence in the apartment scene where a soft band of light plays across Gertrud’s eyes and a bedroom lamp projects in silhouette Gertrud undressing. The film’s various flashback scenes make use of a diffuse lighting scheme with unnaturally intense sunlight beaming through windows. Bordwell, additionally, makes reference to Dreyer’s “glowing walls.”

III.

Dreyer’s Gertrud is staggeringly self-effacing in its filmic orientation. To recall Esquire magazine’s Dwight McDonald’s assessment: “He just sets up his camera and photographs people talking to each other.” This is, of course, an oversimplification. With his suggestion that all Dreyer is doing is “setting up his camera,” McDonald’s critique fails to account for Dreyer’s particular aesthetic objectives. During his career the Danish director was relentless in his pursuit of the singular and the unorthodox. It is hard to imagine that in 1965 he had become so insolvent creatively that he would settle for the passive brand of filmed theater to which many critics ascribe the film. The comments of Stephen Heath would seem to have more resonance. “One way of restating the limits of cinema,” he writes, “has been precisely the theatricalization of film.” This theatricalization has the effect, in David Bordwell’s analysis, of “[rupturing] many of the classical norms.”

In shooting Gertrud, Dreyer, while citing these classical norms — the use of a shot-reverse shot sequence in isolated opposition to the prevailing mode of two-shots in long take, the corresponding use of a lone point-of-view shot — has unequivocally restated the “limits” of classical cinema. What becomes so difficult for critics and audiences to reconcile is that in doing so, Dreyer has made what appears on its face a rudimentary film, “the least fluidly cinematic of any work of his that I know,” in Stanley Kauffman’s words.

Andrew Sarris, defending Dreyer’s “ever so subtly and so slowly moving camera,” rejects this view as exhibiting “kindergarten notions of kinetics.” Bordwell takes a more complicated view. Returning to a discussion of textual matters, he relates the use of the theatrical with the film’s cinematic and narrative structure, positing an important correlation between the two. “The play text,” Bordwell writes, “becomes a pretext for the slowing of the film’s rhythm and consequently the slowing of the viewer’s 'reading rate.’ An old- fashioned reliance upon theater becomes, in the context of contemporary film practice, a significant archaism, virtually a refusal to be cinema.”

This “refusal” is emblematic of Dreyer’s iconoclastic approach to making films and returns to Heath’s notion of “restating the limits of cinema” through “theatricalization.” Andrew Sarris portrays this restatement less subtly: “Dryer simply isn’t cinema. Cinema is Dreyer.”

Whether one subscribes to such a view, particularly in reference to a film whose value, David Bordwell contends, “is most evident in its ability — in 1964, and still today — to bore us,” it would be difficult to understate the radical cinematic approach of Dreyer’s Gertrud. Ironically, that radicalism is predicated on the film’s overt theatricalization.

Bibliography:

Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema? Vol. 1. (Translated by Hugh Gray). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Bordwell, David. The Films of Carl-Theodore Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Kauffman, Stanley. “Screen: A Dreyer Film.” The New York Times, June 3, 1966, p. 33.

Mast, Gerald, ed. Film Theory and Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Sarris, Andrew, ed. Interviews with Film Directors. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1967.

Sarris, Andew. Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema,
1955-1969. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

Williams, Alan. Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.