Gertrud **** (1964, Nina Pens Rode, Bendt Rothe, Baard Owe, Ebbe Rode) – Classic Movie Review 10,813

Gertrud: ‘The man I’m with must be completely mine. I must come before everything. I don’t want to be an occasional plaything.’

Writer-director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1964 Danish black and white classic film Gertrud is based on a pre-World War One work by Hjalmar Söderberg, the 1906 play Gertrud, and is Dreyer’s final film, his first in nine years since Ordet.

Gertrud is a Henrik Ibsen-style drama about a married woman, Gertrud Kanning (Nina Pens Rode), who ends her marriage to Gustav Kanning (Bendt Rothe) and takes a lover, the younger musician composer Erland Jansson (Baard Owe). Gertrud has a doomed fling and leaves him, and finds out finally that there is no such thing as ideal love. Flashbacks explore her affair with Gabriel Lidman (Ebbe Rode), who wants her still.

Gertrud is a highly impressive excursion into Scandinavian doom and intensity, and might be one of those thousand films you must see before you die for those who can surrender to the slow pacing, gloomy mood, stationary camerawork and low-key, unemotional acting style. The film mostly comprises long takes of shots of two or more actors talking to each other. Indeed it is quite  remarkable for its long takes, one of nearly 10 minutes with Gertrud and her ex-lover Gabriel Lidman (Ebbe Rode) talking about their pasts.

Filming took three months, but film editing just three days.

The film premiered at Le Studio Médicis in Paris on 18 December 1964. The 50th Anniversary of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud was celebrated by MUBI on 18 December 2014.

Also in the cast are Ebbe Rode, Axel Strøbye, Karl Gustav Ahlefeldt and Vera Gebuhr.

It runs 116 minutes.

It was screened at the Cannes Film festival, where it was booed, and later screened at the 1965 Venice Film Festival, where more than half of the audience walked out, but those who remained gave the film a standing ovation.

Carl Theodor Dreyer died on 20 March 1968, aged 79. His 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc is considered one of the greatest films ever made. His other best known films include Michael (1924) Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (1955), and Gertrud (1964).

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,813

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