Carl Theodor Dreyer's Gertrud: The Moving Word

How does the struggle between Dreyer’s words and images open us up to the Real?

91 How does the struggle between Dreyer’s words and images open us up to the Real? If in much of the theory and practice of Western textuality language functions in the service of a powerful symbolic order that relentlessly seeks to regenerate and extend its power over and through the material body of its subjects, the reading of the body as a symbol of resistance to the symbolic appears to beg the question of just what place the body—and its image—has in this struggle. Adding to the significance of this paradox is the insistent “gendering” of the issue, which, as we have seen, is formidable, in the Western tradition at least. Feminist theory has crucially remarked upon this engenderment, especially in the wake of psychoanalytic, and particularly Lacanian, theory. The alignment of the “feminine” with the prelinguistic “Imaginary” realm, and of the masculine with the “Symbolic” imposition of “the name of the Father” (the interpellation of the human subject into the order of language) has allowed psychoanalytically inclined critics to uncover a powerful set of dynamics in works such as Joan and Gertrud. They trace a narrative that depicts how the feminine is both excluded from and imprisoned within the “regime of the symbolic ,” to paraphrase from Deborah Linderman’s careful account of The Passion of Joan of Arc in her essay “Uncoded Images in the Heterogeneous Text.” In that essay, Linderman argues that Joan includes “extra,” surplus shots (such as the images near the end of the film of a baby being breastfed by its mother, or of the carnivalesque circus performers) that “signify the impossible position of the feminine in the symbolic order of the patriarchy.” These marginal shots,  Deborah Linderman, “Uncoded Images in the HeterogeneousText,” Wide Angle 3, no. 3 (1980): 34–41.  Ibid. H ow d oes th e st ru g g le bet ween D reyer’s wo r d s a n d i m ag e s o p e n u s u p to t h e Re al ? 92 according to Linderman, interruptive as they are of the “dominant diegesis,” and easily “excised from both the narrative track and the image track without damage to the textual system,” function as a kind of subversive index of “the violence suppressed by the textuality of the text.” Linderman sees, by definition, the exclusion of the maternal and the feminine from the symbolic, but at the same time seeks to show that this excluded feminine can appear somehow within or alongside the “textual system” without being a part of it. But just how these uncoded images get coded as uncoded, how it is that they signify their insignificance, is difficult to say if we stick too closely to too straightforward an opposition between Imaginary and Symbolic , feminine and masculine, image and word. Linderman is certainly correct in identifying a violent textuality at work in The Passion of Joan of Arc, but perhaps it is precisely this “textual system” that requires the inclusion of the “uncoded” presence of a marginal, seemingly “insignificant” feminine. The presence of images coded “feminine” is therefore not necessarily, in Linderman ’s words, “the inscription of inadvertent meanings into a text,” meanings that “reveal ambivalent intentionality,” but is, perhaps, a necessary and intentional part of Dreyer’s text. Julia Kristeva has herself warned of too insistent a “valorization of difference ,” as Toril Moi says, in which, as Kristeva puts it, “it is all too easy to pass from the search for difference to the denegation of the symbolic. The latter is the same as to remove the ‘feminine’ from the order of language. . . . In other words, if the feminine exists, it only exists in the order of significance or signifying process, and it is only in relation to meaning and signification, positioned as their excessive or transgressive other that it exists, speaks, thinks (itself) and writes (itself) for both sexes.”  Ibid., 35.  Ibid., 38.  Ibid., 35. In conclusion, Linderman proposes that the “enunciations of his camera may have suggested to Dreyer a doubt of which he was hardly conscious.” “Uncoded Images,” 41. Linderman is here able to support an idea of ambivalent intentionality only by ascribing such intentionality to Dreyer’s camera.  Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 11. H ow d oes...