Gertrud (film) - Production

Production

This was Dreyer's last film and his first since Ordet in 1955. In the nine-year period between films he had attempted to make films based on Euripides' Medea, William Faulkner's Light in August, and wrote treatments based on Henrik Ibsen's Brand, August Strindberg's Damascus and Eugene O'Neil's Mourning Becomes Electra. He also worked on his long planned but never realized film about the life of Christ. According to Carl Theodor Dreyer, he had considered adapting two Hjalmar Söderberg works in the 1940s, the 1905 novel Doctor Glas and the 1906 play Gertrud. None of the projects were realised at the time. The Gertrud project was revived when Dreyer read a 1962 monograph by Sten Rein called Hjalmar Söderbergs Gertrud, which pointed out the original play's use of dialogue: how the story often is driven by trivial conversations and failures to communicate. This inspired Dreyer to make a film where speech is more important than images. Adapting the play into a screenplay, Dreyer chose to abridge the third act and added an epilogue. The epilogue was inspired by the life of Maria von Platen, Söderberg's original inspiration for the Gertrud character.

The film was produced by Palladium, and filmed at Nordisk Film's studios in Valby, since Palladium's own studios were used by Danmarks Radio for a television production. Exterior scenes were filmed in the Vallø Castle park. Filming took three months, and editing three days. The film was mostly made up of long takes of shots of two or more actors talking to each other and continued Dreyer's devotion to the principles of kammerspiel. Over the years, Dreyer's filming style had become more and more subdued and compared to the fast cutting in The Passion of Joan of Arc or the tracking shots in Vampyr, this film contained slowed down camera shots with restricted angles and an increased length of single takes.