Week 24/2023

“Life is a long, long chain of dreams drifting into one another,” Gertrud muses in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s eponymous 1964 film. Her words sum up this week’s film selection of three reveries. Dreyer’s Gertrud is a hopeless romantic who pursues an idealized notion of love that will always elude her and who must try to come to terms with reality. The French filmmaker Jacques Rivette called it a somnambulist’s film, a telling of a dream. 

Similarly, Otto Preminger considered his all-black cast musical adaptation of Georges Bizet’s Carmen as “really a fantasy, the world shown in the film doesn’t exist.” He shot Carmen Jones (1954) in pioneering Cinemascope format and Deluxe Color. Dreyer also dreamed of filming Gertrud in color. And maybe on 70 mm film, too, critic Tag Gallagher added. Carmen and Gertrud both are independent women who live by their own rules and discard the men in their lives. 

Perhaps no one was more fascinated by dreamlike sensations than the Surrealists. In Marcel Mariën’s L’imitation du cinéma (1959), a young man with a strong desire to be crucified spends a night with a prostitute embellished with a dream. At the end, we literally see the cinema lights coming back on and one of the characters leaving the movie theater in plain clothes. Once in the street, he sees an image from the film: a boy reading against the background of a Tigra poster. He knocks the book out of his hands and the film is over. “During the solitary walk after the screening (heading for some café or other), the last scraps of twilight reverie are shaken off,” Herman Asselberghs wrote in his notes on Roland Barthes’s ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’.

Gertrud

Hopeless romantic Gertrud (Nina Pens Rode) inhabits a turn-of-the-century milieu of artists and musicians, where she pursues an idealized notion of love that will always elude her. She abandons her distinguished husband (Bendt Rothe) and embraces an affair with a young concert pianist (Baard Owe), who falls short of her desire for lasting affection. When an old lover (Ebbe Rode) returns to her life, fresh disappointments follow, and Gertrud must try to come to terms with reality.

EN

Erland: Who are you, really?
Gertrud: I am many things.

 

“Let’s take the risk of plunging into film without asking permission. Let’s invent our own standards and trust only in spontaneous criticism, which does exist. There are quite a few of us who believe in nothing else. Quite a few of us see the names Carl Theodor Dreyer or Jean-Marie Straub on a poster or a flyer and go to see their films. They are filmmakers whose films the professional critics forbid us to see. That alone is reason enough to go and see them.

In 1964 one of the great film masterpieces, Dreyer’s Gertrud, was killed and buried by the critics (it played in Paris for one week). Who was responsible? You, who believed the critics. Too late.”

Marguerite Duras1

 

“At once the telling of a dream and a session of analysis (an analysis in which the roles are unceasingly changing; subjected to the flow, the regular tide of the long takes, the mesmeric passes of the incessant camera movements, the even monotone of the voices, the steadiness of the eyes – always turned aside, often parallel, towards us: a little above us – the strained immobility of the bodies, huddled in armchairs, on sofas behind which the other silently stands, fixed in ritual attitudes which make them no more than corridors for speech to pass through, gliding through a semi-obscurity arbitrarily punctuated with luminous zones into which the somnambulists emerge of their own accord...).”

Jacques Rivette2

 

“Seeing again Gertrud today, or quite simply seeing it as if no one had ever seen it before, amounts to a shock. Dreyer is one of the giants of cinema. In 1964, this theatre play filmed in black and white, with its antiquated theme (Love with a capital L), its unknown, straight-laced Danish actors, looked like some quaintly old-fashioned and half-witted classic lost among the spruce new-wavery of modern cinema. Only his admirers perceived once more Dreyer’s terrifying modernity, the logical progression of forty years of cinema spent probing the bottomlessness of love, and the false bottoms of the scenographic cube, employing white as torture, and music (or else tears) as what arises when words are no longer enough. And today, at a point when this modernity is apparent to everyone, the film is still ahead of its time. (...) The most beautiful grey-scale photography in the history of cinema lays out endless layers of light like clouds of time, and since everything is irremediable, nothing looms through them.”

Serge Daney3

 

“Gertrud is the invention of a man, the invention of two men: the film was made after a play by Hjalmar Söderberg. Gertrud is a statue, a monument, like many women in Dreyer’s films. Her demands are as absolute as the contours of the film, its spaces and the gestures of its characters are hard and angular. Her demands are too idealistic, which is how you recognise the detour via the men. But occasionally you hear the long dresses rustle, a certain intimacy setting in. And then she goes to Paris to study with Charcot, Freud’s teacher. This real name in a fictional context forces a breakthrough comparable to that of the nature image in Michael. The long-valid order now cracks. With reality, another dimension emerges.”

Friede Grafe4

 

“In Gertrud (1964), his very last film, Dreyer uses frame compositions to situate characters near sculptures that express or inform on their state of mind – in the scenes in the park, for instance, Gertrud and her young lover are in the vicinity of a copy of the Medici Venus. In addition, the stasis and long-take aesthetics of Dreyer’s later works are worked into a series of tableaux vivants that give the characters a statuary presence. His films play on a certain monumentality of the human figure, that is fixed. In so doing, the characters in Gertrud can be compared with the sculptures that Dreyer filmed for Thorvaldsen (1949).”

Steven Jacobs5

 

parispremiere

  • 1Marguerite Duras, « Othon: Jean-Marie Straub, » In: Outside: Selected Writings (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 155-157. Originally published in Politique-Hébdo on January 14, 1971. Translation: Art Goldhammer.
  • 2Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre and Jacques Rivette, “Montage,” In: Jacques Rivette: Texts and Interviews (London: BFI, 1977). Originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, nr. 210, March 1969. Translated by Tom Milne.
  • 3Serge Daney, “Gertrud,” Serge Daney in English, November 14, 2020. Originally published in Libération on October 12, 1983.
  • 4Frieda Grafe, “Carl Theodor Dreyer. Spiritual Gentlemen and Natural Ladies,” Sabzian, May 24, 2023. Translated by Sis Matthé. Originally published as “Carl Theodor Dreyer. Geistliche Herren und natürliche Damen” in Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 9-10, 1974.
  • 5Steven Jacobs, “Carving Cameras on Thorvaldsen and Rodin: Mid-Twentieth Century Documentaries on Sculpture,” In: Steven Jacobs, Susan Felleman, Vito Adriaensens and Lisa Colpaert (eds.), Screening Statues: Sculpture in Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 65-83.

FR

« Dreyer a pressenti le cinéma futur car il a eu la force de filmer la parole. »

Manoel de Oliveira1

 

« Gertrud est égal, en folie et en beauté, aux dernières oeuvres de Beethoven. »

Jean-Luc Godard2

  • 1Manoel de Oliveira, « Éloge de Gertrud, » Cahiers du cinéma, nr. 557, mai 2001, 102-103.
  • 2Henrik Stangerup, « L’accueil de Gertrud à Paris, » Cahiers du cinéma, nr. 207, Décembre 1968, 74.
screening
CINEMATEK, Brussels
Carmen Jones

All-black musical based on Oscar Hammerstein’s Broadway version of the Georges Bizet opera Carmen, now set in the American South during wartime. The tempestuous factory worker Carmen Jones (Dorothy Dandridge) sends the young soldier Joe (Harry Belafonte) down the road to ruin as he is swept up in Carmen's carnal anarchy and her all-consuming desire to escape her unhappy life.

EN

“This was really a fantasy, as was Porgy and Bess (1959). The all-black world shown in these films doesn’t exist, at least not in the United States. We used the musical-fantasy quality to convey 'something of the needs and aspirations of colored people.”

Otto Preminger1

 

“Despite itself, Carmen Jones is one of the most important all-Negro movies Hollywood has yet produced. [...] This is an opera having nothing to do with the present day, hence, nothing, really, to do with Negroes. [...] The script failed to require the services of any white people. This seals the action off, as it were, in a vacuum in which the spectacle of color is divested of its danger. The color itself then becomes a kind of vacuum which each spectator will fill with his own fantasies. [...] The characters could easily have been dreamed up by someone determined to prove that Negroes are as “clean” and as “modern” as white people and, I suppose, in one way or another, that is exactly how they were dreamed up.”

James Baldwin2

  • 1Otto Preminger cited in Gerald Pratley, The Cinema of Otto Preminger (London: Zwemmer, 1969).
  • 2James Baldwin, “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough,” Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 47-58./fn]

screening
Cinema ZED, Leuven
L’imitation du cinéma

In this surrealist short film, a young man receives the book The Imitation of Jesus Christ from a priest, which induces a strong desire to be crucified. He embarks on a search for a suitable cross in the city.

EN

“But perhaps a term like ‘transgression,’ defined as the breaking of rules or exceeding of boundaries does not completely cover the overtones. Most theories of transgressions argue that rule and transgression in practice are strongly complicit, in the sense that transgressions do not so much seek to abolish the rule as to temporarily suspend it, and that rules already inscribe their violation (Jenks, 2003). To only speak about Mariën’s work in terms of transgression, seems then to be missing the point and neglect the light, often pun-like humor which disarms the violence inflicted by transgression. As we saw, Mariën seems more interested in moving between two terms, or following a side-track, than with the actual crossing of boundaries.

[...]

lndeed, humor operates as a device to de-route the binary confrontation of rule/ taboo and transgression. It traces an altogether line, a line of flight, which is more affirmation than negation. Where transgression ohen operates against the public by scandalizing or repulsing it, humor only succeeds by grace of an audience.”

Mieke Bleyen1

 

Today, Easter of this holy Year,
Here, in the basilica of Notre-Dame in Paris,
I accuse the Universal Catholic Church of the mortal hijacking of our living energies to the profit of an empty heaven;
I accuse the Catholic Church of piracy;
I accuse the Catholic Church of having infected the world with its mortuary morality,
of being the canker sore on this decomposed western civilization.
Verily I say unto thee; God is dead.
We puke up the agonizing insipidness of your prayers,
because your prayers have so generously manured the battlefields of our Europe.
Go forth into the tragic and exultant desert of this land where God is dead,
and run your naked hands through the earth again,
your proud hands,
your hands free of prayer.
Today, Easter of this holy Year,
Here, in the basilica of Notre-Dame in Paris,
we proclaim the death of the Christ-God in order
that Man might live at last.

Marcel Mariën2

  • 1Mieke Bleyen, Minor Photography. Connecting Deleuze and Guattari to Photography Theory (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), 58.
  • 2 Address from Notre-Dame by Marcel Marien, delivered by Serge Berna and Michel Mourre Paris, April 9 1950.

NL

“Onlangs werd een verachtelijke en beruchte film vertoond in het Paleis voor Schone Kunsten in Brussel op het initiatief van de ‘Ciné-Club de la Jeunesse’ voor een veeltallig publiek van jonge mensen en jonge meisjes. De film in kwestie is een heiligschennende parodie van het christendom, doordrongen van een obsceniteit die elke verbeelding tart. Wij hopen dat het parket de noodzakelijke maatregelen zal treffen om deze schandaleuze film, een beschaafd land onwaardig, uit circulatie te halen.”

La centrale catholique, 1960

FR

« Un film ignoble et infâme vient d’être présenté au Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles sous les auspices du « Ciné-Club de la Jeunesse » devant un nombreux public de jeunes gens et de jeunes filles. Le film en question est une parodie sacrilège du christianisme mêlée d’une obscénité qui dépasse toute imagination. On espère que le Parquet prendra les mesures nécessaires pour mettre hors de circulation pellicule indigne d’un pays civilisé. »

La centrale catholique, 1960

screening
Botanique, Brussels
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