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 Why a book about Gertrud? The great Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s fourteenth and final film, Gertrud (Palladium, 1964), is easy to both praise and damn with the same breath; it is, after all, a perfect exemplar of that awful category, the “minor masterpiece.” Awful, because, like its brethren (Raul Ruiz’s Three Crowns of a Sailor, Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up—the list could go on for pages and pages), we must admit about Gertrud: few have seen it, and of those who have, few love it. And yet. For, we might say, it is the quality of the love of those few that is so remarkable. From Jean-Luc Godard to Lars von Trier, from Paul Schrader to David Bordwell, Gertrud has transfixed the passionate regard of filmmakers and critics with a peculiar power of fascination, a fascination not unlike, I shall argue, that which Gertrud herself holds for her many failed lovers. As the last great work of a filmmaker who himself sums up the oddly quizzical critical status of the cinema d’auteur, an auteur who appears to disappear into his own, often stylistically quite radically different films, Gertrud acts as a kind of cinematic vanishing point: we can claim that a powerful strain of modern European film practice organizes itself around it, but it is in and of itself not an object subject to vision—it is rarely cited, revived, or celebrated. With this little book I hope, of course, to correct that general oversight; but I also, perversely, want to cherish the reasons for it. Even more perversely, I  For more on the film’s reception, as well as a detailed look at Dreyer’s work of adaptation, see Morten Egholm, “The innovative and wilful [sic] adaptor—What Carl Th. Dreyer did to Hjalmar Söderberg’s Gertrud,” TijdSchrift voor Skandinavistiek 27, no. 2 (2006), available from http://dpc.uba.uva.nl/tvs/vol27/nr02/art09. See also Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1988) and David Bordwell’s magisterial The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Lars von Trier has announced that he is making a documentary about Gertrud: available from http://www.hollywood.com/celebrity/Lars_von_Trier/190003. W hy a b ook a b o ut G ertrud ?  would love to somehow preserve Gertrud’s relative invisibility even as I try to spread the reflected glory it radiates. To celebrate Gertrud is to praise paradoxically the ultimate cinephilic fetish, for we all know that what the cinephile most loves is the unseen and unseeable (“You mean you haven’t seen Ozu’s silent comedies? Even better than his fifties films!” . . . “I’ve got a bootleg of the subtitled French version of La jetée—I can’t believe you’ve only seen that terrible version with the English voice-over!”). Gertrud is a film that goes right to the heart of that terribly sad—and transcendently liberating—love of the unseeable and unknowable object that is the cinema itself. That is why writing a monograph about Gertrud is such a daunting task.The genre of the film monograph is supposed to provide the reader with something of a sustained reading of the film at hand: themes, motifs, production history, the place of the work in the filmmaker’s career, a bit of gossip, the synopsis, an account of the form of the film, and the major influences that shaped it. There’s some of all of that in the following, but not as much as you’ll find in other movie monographs. In fact, this is something of an antimonograph monograph: I propose here something I hope you’ll find even more in keeping with Gertrud as both film and idea; instead of a straightforward reading, scene by scene, of the film, this essay is a meditation—a collection of reveries, digressions , and extended footnotes and excurses—inspired not so much by Gertrud as by a single moment in Gertrud, a moment (or scene, or image—I’m purposefully rather loose about defining it) that has engaged my interest as exemplary of so much of what makes Dreyer such a disturbing and inspiring figure: his lifelong researches into the relations between word and image in film; his obsession with female martyrdom, and the ways in which his heroines enact and embody the struggle between text and picture—the paragone between...

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