Hair Going Places (in-progress book) Carl Dreyer section
After so many years in thrall to cinema, I still don’t quite know what it is, except to say “magic,” a la Ingmar Bergman’s Magic Lantern (the name of his autobiography as well), a precursor to cinema itself. It comes to us out of its own duration and it makes space in our imagination when before there was only time — Serge Daney: “The day I realized that what I had expected from the cinema, what I had loved in cinema and what it gave me, was the invention of time, starting with me. Inventing a time, in which I might live, but which is also someone else’s time and not the image.” Is a notion like this still possible? Isn’t this the only notion possible regarding cinema?
I think there are few directors like Ford, Mizoguchi, Dreyer, and Ozu. They all began in silent cinema and all grandly graduated to talkies, making some of the most uncompromising work, that became art. Carl Dreyer has to be termed a special case. Where did he come from and how did he get to where he is? Certainly, the history of cinema would be quite different if he didn’t “occur,” though he has said he was influenced by Griffith in some things. Watching the Cinema de Notre Temps episode on him, one learns of the actors themselves professing that they needed to “empty” themselves before a performance reached film, so there was a bevy of rehearsal — and one can see and feel that the actors in Dreyer set the stage for those in Bresson and Kubrick. All three create ulterior universes where the actors cannot really be said to be acting, they are doing something else, something more primal — they are digging beneath the surface to pull out alien objects, as Yeats counseled someone about writing poetry. And indeed one sees this again and again in Dreyer, especially in the last three films — look at the perplexed but simplistic stares of Johannes in Ordet.
There is so much space in his films — one might remark, with a Solaris-like aspect that they take place in outer space, though that cosmos resembles planet earth, and when in Ordet there are brief shots of a horse cart going through the countryside, one seems to be taken out of oneself — we thought we were fully in the country of the blue, a Jamesian space that doesn’t allow for the common goings-on or known landscapes setting the scene. And indeed one’s experience of coming out of Ordet is akin to returning to this “known” reality that some cinema lazily duplicates. When the lights came up at the MOMA after a showing the film, my wife and I sat there not knowing exactly what to do, though we had tears in our eyes — the “word” love had been uttered so much in the films, in the final three as well, that we’d come to a different understanding of it. I’ve always wanted to show other people films I’ve love — not to test them, but to see their reaction to them. Did they have a similar experience? What did they make of this or that? So strange how I’ve used cinema to suss out relationships to others — quite distinct from Daney’s “inventing a time, in which I might live.” I wanted the other time, the time after the art, to go on perpetually, like the vaunted mists of time that are somehow only viewable in art, or alone in nature.
The images of Dreyer now take on a new meaning at 50. It is almost as if the bilious mantra from The Deer Hunter: “one shot,” can stand in for Dreyer’s “method,” which for the most part is very improvisational — no storyboarding and he set up the shots mostly the day of, a la Kubrick, yet they feel like there was absolutely no other way to film things. One shot. Take any shot in the last five films (Two Women doesn’t count because it’s been disowned) and there you have it — one shot, especially in the last three films, for example Day of Wrath. I had to rewatch it piecemeal because it is so rich, so full of things, emotion, the interstices of life. Take a few frames, and then take the dialogue that billows out from the image, like ripples on water. (Dreyer: ”If you talk about very serious things, you can’t go too fast with the dialogue, with the reply…it is necessary to allow time to hear the reply and understand it…to leave the words on the screen.”) And perhaps he used some of those ripples in the famous boat scene and in answer to Martin’s question “Anne, where will we end up?” We get:
I wouldn’t call Dreyer’s images full of painterly aspects, more cinematographic ones. Seeing into the world as the world might seem on some days to the earth’s greatest artists, as Michel Butor wrote of a famous scene in Proust, “If I look at the fog, I have trouble seeing the cathedral behind it, but if I look at the cathedral, I have trouble seeing the fog concealed in front of it, though concealing it.” This is emblematic of many images in Dreyer. There is something in front of the characters — is it the viewer of sorts (who is in the film, magically), or is it the implied narrator, or Dreyer himself? We have to say that the auteur director lives in the image since mise-en-scene and everything in that image sparkles with her experience, her intelligence, her unconscious — just as the camera’s lens appears (invisibly) in front of what it is filming. Many critics have found Kubrick’s frames (his world) cold and cerebral, and many have found Almodovar’s warm and fuzzy with love and laughter and crying. Dreyer’s are more mystic — maybe more mystic than anyone’s except Mizoguchi. Such an unassuming man being interviewed, such a force within his frames as they are abundant before one’s eyes for 116 minutes, 126 minutes, 100 minutes (the final three). They can’t be exhausted, they become more mysterious, as Daney wrote of Gertrud:
It is hard to talk about Dreyer because there is something blinding or disarming (like a Moebius strip that can’t be edited together) in his way of opening the cinema out onto an extra dimension, the dimension of thought, when time and space are reversible…You slide between the frame, the shot and the scene. The present is immediately the past (and Gertrud holds herself on the wave of the present, empty and ecstatic), but the past returns intact as if it had never been present; the dream is real but reality has no more weight than a reverie. 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.
Preben Lerdorff Rye, who starred in two Dreyer films (the only actor to do so), said Dreyer would call him up at four in the morning to discuss something for the next day — in that way, with the night still strong and dreamscapes of 4am, Dreyer gets to more of the mystic I’m seeking to define — a glory to behold.
Think of a sequence in Gertrud — the first park sequence between Gertrud and her lover, Erland — there will be one more. It’s about eleven minutes long. Three shots, the first follows Gertrud to the tree and then they walk back to a bench, then a flashback by a piano, and then the two characters on the bench. The scene begins on movement following Gertrud to Erland, as she passes a statue — Amor:
They kiss and share words of love, then Gertrud walks over closer to the camera where they embrace. But the camera draws back, to include the statue by the pond
— about three minutes. Then a flashback to a piano recital. The back to the park, with Erland laying on a bench, parsing their relationship.
Gertrud asks him not to go out to a party that night, but he won’t promise her he won’t. (And this party will end their relationship.
I lay it out so because when one watches it he or she might miss the magic in these three durations (“times”) where the camera waxes laterally very slowly, and because with certain directors (just as certain writers or painters, etc.) there is not just one film on the screen but multiple, including the ghostly iterations — even the cross-outs that could be there, the images that Dreyer might have though of to instruct these — for example the reproduction of The Lonely Ones by Edvard Munch, which will show up later in Gertrud’s house.
What is Dreyer doing? Is this simply the relationship in a microcosm?
And the camera moves a bit to the right to reveal an obelisk (a boundary marker of sorts), just as Erland introduces the subject of her old lover, a poet, who is being celebrated for his 50th birthday. The obelisk fits with those large (oak?) trees and Gertrud soon brings out the sterling information that she has told her husband she will leave him. Then they kiss — she says, “Give me your lips.” They pass the Amor statue again, but she is pointing the opposite way from there they are walking.
In trying to answer why this film continues to haunt, I’m not sure what the answer is. Daney’s “You slide between the frame, the shot and the scene” is the best approximation. I keep rappelling between these large Rushmore-sized faces of Gertrud with four fairly different men revolving around her, although the two artists have some cross-over. In those slow camera movements and shifts, where you thought you were alters and the world has changed — Sonnet 116: “Love is not love that alters where it alteration finds.” That’s the fitting banner for this scene because both of their loves for each other are being threatened the more they find out about each other. So love is not love, it’s something else — and Dreyer shows what that something else is.
