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So what, after all, is the tapestry quoting?
- University of Washington Press
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33 So what, after all, is the tapestry quoting? Let us now turn to our chosen moment, and ask: what does the tapestry Gertrud regards have to do with the obscene presence of language in Dreyer’s films? Let us first make note that the tapestry is itself preeminently a quotation —a visual quotation, to be sure—but a quotation nonetheless. It figures, in some way, Gertrud’s dream of persecution: like a dream, it is not simply, as we noted above, an image but a story, a narrative of some kind. And, just as importantly, it quotes, in its haute bourgeoise way, as a reference to some prior text, some story which it figures forth—for we can assume that no fashionable turn-of-the-century Copenhagen parlor would display a depiction of such a horrendously violent scene without the representation being motivated and explained by its literary, “cultural” origins. As a tapestry, the image is itself a kind of weaving or text—a textile, a fabric of meanings, the “textus” from which our later idea of text as written composition emerges as a kind of rhetorical “figure”—that Western culture, at least since Homer’s Penelope, has associated with the feminine, and in particular with the wife whose husband is not at home. Its weaving is an act of faith, but also an act of rejection—Gertrud, like Penelope, refuses her suitors in the name of a purer, more real love. But unlike Penelope, Gertrud includes in that rejected category even her husband. And this difference is what marks the difference, the rhetorical gap, between Gertrud’s citations and the tragic irony of their meaning in the film. Gertrud, the film, as text, as a kind of weaving, mobilizes and embodies this “difference ”: it can itself be understood as a montage of tragically ironic citations of and commentaries on the celebrations of marriage that it, as we shall see, obsessively quotes. The tapestry in the parlor is emblematic of this citational obsession. It plays as a bit of story business, while serving as a figure of at least one person’s— S o w h at, a ft er a ll, i s t he ta p e st ry qu ot in g ? 34 Gertrud’s—interpretation of the narrative. But it prefigures the plot, too—in this case the scene just minutes later, when Gertrud will collapse under the emotional weight of her hangdog admirers. And it also functions in what might be called a postleptic fashion in regard to Gertrud’s own, interior dream vision. Gertrud had already seen, at least in some sense of the term, the tapestry—or perhaps the story the tapestry references—before she looked up at the wall. Like a musical number, the tapestry both slows down the plot, making the film’s characters momentary spectators and readers, while at the same time relaying important narrative information. It is one of many moments in the film when the characters, and in particular when Gertrud herself, stops before a frame within the frame of the screen to pause and consider, to comment and interpret—indeed, most of Gertrud’s commentators and interpreters make of the film a kind of apotheosis of hermeneutic desire: statues, paintings, mirror images, tapestries, songs, poems—just about every aesthetic object imaginable is contemplated and interpreted in the course of the film by Gertrud and the other characters. One could argue, indeed, that the act of interpretation is one of the primary “actions” the film depicts. But such interpretive acts are intimately connected with the violence that the image within the tapestry inscribes and offers. And like many of the most violent images in Dreyer’s films, the scene on the tapestry is both straightforwardly brutal and strangely serene. It is one of a long line of conflations in Dreyer’s work where high art and low violence—in particular misogynistic violence—are identified as coefficient (and the “gynistic” aspect of the tapestry is hard to miss—the pictured woman’s sex serves as the image’s approximate vanishing point). Certainly, one would think, the depiction of such raw brutality could only be excused by the status of the depiction itself as “art”—and its status as art is itself dependent on its status as citation, as a woven image that is also in important ways a quotation of a verbal text. For Dreyer, though, it is perhaps precisely this textuality, and the aesthetic imperative it embodies...