Gertrud

Apresentação do filme por Graça Lobo

Críticas

Screen: A Dreyer Film: New Yorker Presents Danc's 'Gertrud'

CARL DREYER, the Danish director who is now 76, has had one of the most notable careers in all film history and one of the saddest. His career includes such achievements as "The Passion of Joan of Arc" and "Ordet." It also includes some melancholy silences.From 1920 to 1932 Mr. Dreyer made 10 feature films. After a lapse of 11 years, his last four features (to date) were made over a period of 21 years.The reason for the long silences are not all known, but the harmful effect of this inactivity is visible in his most recent film. "Gertrud," which opened yesterday at the New Yorker, was made in 1964 after a pause since 1955. Our regret is not only for the unmade Dreyer films. The waiting—this last wait, particularly—seems to have sequestered him from contemporary life and, in a sense, from his own past film-making life."Gertrud" is based on a play of the same name by the Swede Hjalmar Soderberg, written in 1906. The heroine is a former opera singer, now married to a prominent lawyer who is about to enter the government. She feels that she is secondary to his career (although he certainly tries to demonstrate otherwise). She begins an affair with a young composer who, she thinks, can fulfill her ideal of Love as Life; but she finds that she is only a conquest to him. Before marriage, she had left a lover, a celebrated poet of love, when she discovered that she was secondary to his career. Now she leaves her husband, presumably to live alone. There is an epilogue that is perhaps unintentionally revealing. As an old lady, Gertrude is living alone in the country with one servant, an old man. During a scene with a visitor, she addresses only one remark to the old man: "Don't forget to wash the kitchen floor. "She tells her visitor that she wants "Amor Omnia" on her tombstone, but the one male servant and her treatment of him suggest that "Revenge" might do as well. Mr. Dreyer's theme — the suffering of a woman who finds that men do not devote themselves entirely to love, that they also concern themselves with their careers—can just as easily be seen as feminine egotism instead of male egotism. But this whole subject of Love as Life can hardly be taken seriously today. The script seems a pallid post-Ibsen revolt against the idea of woman as chattel or toy. In these days of "feminine mystique" it doesn't seem to be Love as Life that concerns women. They seem to want exactly what men want: All of Life as Life. And if they share the same hopes, they share much the same disappointments. The spiritual hierarchy of the sexes in "Gertrud" seems as dated as the costumes. But Mr. Dreyer takes this Soderberg play seriously—one index that he is out of touch. Worse, his technique is the least fluently cinematic of any work of his that I know. Its slowness will not surprise those familiar with Dreyer. His tempos have always been deliberate. But here his camera movement and his editing defy the minimal drama in the script. In dialogue the camera often travels back and forth from face to face, instead of cutting from one to the other. "Direction" frequently consists of having characters rise from one sofa, move slowly to another, then sink. Nothing that can be done at length is ever suggested. (When Gertrud goes to rehearse a song at the composer's studio, she sings the whole song.)Further proof of Mr. Dreyer's far remove is his use of Nina Pens Rode as Gertrud. This lady is not only unappealing, she is limited to about one and a half facial expressions and somewhat less emotional fire. It is hard to credit the various gentlemen who express passion for her or who weep with regret at having lost her. Answering one lover's query about her character, Miss Pens Rode replies (according to the subtitles from the Danish) that she is dew, she is white clouds, she is the moon. The meteorological comparison does not hold water. The various gentlemen — Bendt Rothe, Ebbe Rode and Baard Owe—do as well as they can with their difficult assignments. Mr. Dreyer has a famous gift for pictorial composition and for apt lighting. This has often been partly a curse to him, as, for instance, in "Day of Wrath," where the film frequently pauses to imitate 17th-century Dutch painting. But in his best films there has always been an underlying human concern that sustained us through any longueurs of execution. Here, under the slow, posed pictures, there is nothing but the dated theme described above. The man whose intense love for men informed so many well-wrought films will probably never be forgotten as long as films are remembered. Whether or not one likes all of his works, there is in his life and person a quality that can be called angelic. "Gertrud," however, is the work—not of a fallen angel—but of a very old one.

a versão original em papel deste artigo saiu no dia 3 de Junho de 1966 na edição nacional do jornal The New York Times

gertrud foto2

'Ora, foi diante de uma problemática bastante próxima que a revisão de Gertrud nos colocou algumas horas mais tarde: se o filme de Dreyer, mais 'lógico', em todo caso mais cronológico, não opera formalmente como sonho, ele impõe, no entanto, também, o vocabulário 'onírico': ao mesmo tempo narrativa do sonho e sessão de análise (análise em que os papéis são constantemente trocados: submetida à corrente, ao fluxo regular dos planos longos, aos passos magnéticos dos movimentos incessantes da câmera, à igualdade monocórdica das vozes, à fixidez dos olhares – sempre desviados, frequentemente paralelos, em nossa direção: um pouco acima de nós –, à imobilidade restritiva dos corpos, retraídos em poltronas, sobre divãs atrás dos quais o outro permanece silencioso, congelados em atitudes ritualísticas nas quais eles não são mais que o local de passagem para a palavra, deslizando em uma penumbra arbitrariamente pontuada por zonas luminosas nas quais os próprios sonâmbulos vêm se inscrever...). Portanto, dois filmes que impõem, através de vozes convergentes, a mesma analogia entre o seu funcionamento (sua operação) e aquele de 'tudo' aquilo que designamos sob o nome de inconsciente: mas, ao mesmo tempo, dois filmes em que o trabalho fundamental parece ter lugar no nível da intenção e da escrita (pulverização do texto original em Straub; em Dreyer, condensação e 'concentração' desse texto): mas enfim, filmes em que o momento da montagem 'desempenha' o papel de concretização desse trabalho, mas também como intervenção do arbitrário. Ora, essa função 'enigmática' da montagem, constante em Dreyer, é sempre operada por ele por 'imposição' de lacunas (marcas da censura?): cf. como cada início e fim de planos em A Queda do Tirano são sistematicamente interrompidos, picados, ocultados no movimento (sempre parcialmente lacunar), cada raccord 'falso' por algumas imagens: cf. mais ainda todo o A Paixão de Joana d’Arc, e como, de Vampyr a Ordet, Dreyer interrompe e corta no meio quase todos os seus movimentos de câmera: cf. enfim, em Gertrud, os três ou quatro cortes-elipses, na emenda de dois planos-correntes, que intervêm tranquilamente na suposta continuidade da cena: elipses provocantes, voluntariamente perturbadoras, e que fazem que o espectador sinta-se obrigado a se perguntar, por exemplo, para onde 'foi' Gertrud: ora, ela saiu durante a emenda. E talvez seja por esta vontade deliberada de introduzir, na etapa da montagem (ao invés de se limitar a fazê-la recopiar o texto da pré-filmagem, ou de fazê-la desempenhar, como em Bresson, um papel antes de tudo 'musical'), na escrita, tão precisa e monitorada quanto ela pôde ser nas etapas precedentes, esses cortes, essas rupturas, esses saltos: este irracional – que a 'passagem' do inconsciente, encurralado pelo jogo literal, se efetue.'