Let’s have a mind and raise flowers.

Gertrud Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer 1964

Dreyer’s heroine Gertrud is an answer to Kierkegaard’s heterosexual imagination and also to his ‘Johannes the Seducer’. We see here a strong female who in the film’s context of 1883 is a rebellious iconoclastic forerunner of the ‘liberated woman’. Throughout the film, we are given time to view Gertrud’s search for a love whose definition is evolving. This evolution finds its way through the course of three primary relationships whereby she achieves one of love’s great aims; knowing oneself.

Gertrud is in a loveless marriage with Gustav, a well to do aristocrat who is eyeing ever higher positions in the government. He is an echo of Torvold from Ibsen’s Dollhouse, a reasonable man who embodies Kierkegaard’s ethical realm. In Gertrud’s revealing argument with Gustav, she says that the way that he treats her is “worse than indifference. It is a lack of feeling.” Gustav is absolutely stunned by her finding the marriage unsatisfactory since she has been given a life of ease and creature comforts. But she has felt alone and isolated. “Work shouldn’t exile a wife.” She says. “But it is a man’s nature to work.” Gustav replies and argues from the cultural expectation of the day. To complete the picture of Gustav being representative of the ethical sphere of existence and without any aesthetic or immediate connection to his wife, he admits, “The woman that can drive you crazy doesn’t exist.”

In contrast to Gustav is Erland, Gertrud’s passionate lover who is a famous pianist and composer who accompanies Gertrud’s professional operatic singing. Together they comprise a passionate duo reveling in the aesthetic. As is appropriate to the aesthetic sphere, Gertrude says to Erland, “Life is a dream. A long, long clamor of dreams drifting into each other.” Erland asks, “Even my kiss? My mouth?” “Yes, also a dream.” She answers. As the story unfolds, we find that true to his seductive air, Erland is merely playing with Gertrud’s affections and has many lovers of which she is but one. In this way, she has become a Cordelia from Kierkegaard’s Seducer’s Diary.

It is then revealed that Gertrud, before either Gustav or Erland, had been married to a poet laureate of Denmark named Gabe Lidmann. He is known as the county’s “poet of love” and his famous work of poetry is titled Love and Thought. At once the initial thought is to consider Gabe the ‘love’ and Gustav the ‘thought’ but it is more complicated than that dichotomy. Gabe says to Gertrud, “I believe in the pleasures of the flesh and the loneliness of the soul.” which would seem to paint him in the aesthetic sphere with Erland, but Gabe also says, “A woman’s love and a man’s work are mortal enemies.” And because of his interest in the ‘pleasures of the flesh’ to inspire his poetry, his work begins to “dry up” because of their dwindling passion. His actions are also similar to Erland the seducer in that Gertrud discovers that Gabe had steered the relationship to create the illusion that it was Gertrud who left-when in reality she finds it was he pushing her away.

Gertrud’s attitude towards love changes in the film and we are led to believe that her final embodiment of it is the best for her and a high and estimable standard. She says early in the film, “Love is suffering. Love is sadness.” and it seems that along with the sadness, there is no joy, but that changes in the epilogue. In a very Kierkegaardian fashion, when there are flashbacks in the film, there is an abstracted quality, an unreal feeling. Through the use of lighting and camera technique, the cinematography takes on a dreamy quality. For the epilogue too, this technique is used. It seems to hearken to Kierkegaard’s idea of ‘recollection’ as being projected in the past and future. In the epilogue we learn that Gertrud has lived completely independent of men and has learned, “Amor Omnia”, that “love is all”. She is not unhappy, and quite content living the solitary life. Not only has she found happiness in releasing herself from the past and from dependence on others, but we find Gustav and Gertrud’s secret admirer have also. All three at different times come to destroy the fetishes of their love-letters and pictures. As they do so, they free themselves from the ‘hoarding of an objectified love’ in the style of Kierkegaard’s seducer. As the movie closes, our attention is drawn to the beauty and religious nature of Gertrud’s new found faith/love of which she says, “there is nothing but love” with the herald of ringing church bells. Lars von Trier uses this same herald for the heroine Bess’ faith/love.