An act of cinematic levitation, a testament carved in ice, a dialogue with ghosts. To speak of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s "Gertrud" is to handle a sacred and wounding object, a monolith that fell to Earth in 1964 to challenge everything that the cinema of that explosive and iconoclastic decade was becoming. If the Nouvelle Vague was a kinetic assault on the syntax of the visible, "Gertrud" is its radical antithesis: a séance in which the camera captures not movement, but the stillness that precedes and follows every gesture, the silent echo that fills rooms after words have been spoken.

Its initial reception, met with hisses and scorn at its Paris premiere, is today an anecdote that certifies its greatness, not a mark of infamy. The audience of ’64, drunk on Godard's jump-cuts and Truffaut's vitalism, was not ready for this epitaph to purity. Dreyer, in his eighties, was not making a film for his time, but a work against his time, a return to a spiritual essence that the modern world seemed to have carelessly filed away. The film is an adaptation of a 1906 play by the Swedish dramatist Hjalmar Söderberg, a work born of Symbolism and nascent psychoanalysis, and Dreyer preserves its theatrical origin not out of laziness, but as a precise aesthetic choice. The characters do not inhabit their spaces; they recite them. The dialogues are not conversations, but litanies, existential declarations of intent delivered in a hieratic, almost somnambulistic tone.

The plot, on the surface, is a bourgeois drawing-room love triangle, or rather, a constellation of failed loves. Gertrud, a former opera singer, is trapped in a passionless marriage to a careerist politician, Gustav Kanning. She seeks an absolute love in the arms of a young and fatuous composer, Erland Jansson, while her old love, the poet Gabriel Lidman, returns to haunt her present. But to reduce "Gertrud" to its synopsis is like describing 2001: A Space Odyssey by talking about an ape throwing a bone. The heart of the film is Gertrud’s motto, "Amor Omnia"—Love is all. Not a romantic, carnal, or complacently bourgeois love, but a Platonic Ideal, a flame that demands everything and accepts no compromise. Gertrud is a tragic heroine not because she loses love, but because she finds it too small, too human, inadequate for her hunger for the absolute.

Dreyer translates this intransigence into a visual language of almost unbearable asceticism. His camera moves with a glacial slowness, with long, long sequence shots that do not follow the action but contemplate it. His famous pans, fluid and inexorable, do not connect the characters but rather underscore their unbridgeable distance. They are like spectral fingers tracing the geometries of solitude within the impeccably designed rooms by Henning Bahs, rooms that more closely resemble mausoleums of feeling than lived-in homes. It is a cinema that demands an unconditional surrender from the viewer, forcing them to abandon their perceptual habits and to enter a state of meditative trance.

In this, "Gertrud" finds a spiritual brother not so much in the cinema of its day, but in the canvases of another Danish master, the painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. Looking at his sparse interiors, his female figures seen from behind, immersed in a milky light and a palpable silence, one gets the same sensation of suspended time, of an inner life pulsing beneath a surface of deathly calm. Both Dreyer and Hammershøi paint prisons of the soul, spaces where absence weighs more heavily than presence. Gertrud, who often looks at herself in a mirror or out of a window, is a Hammershøi creature who has begun to speak, but only to confirm the impossibility of communicating her own essence.

The film is also a profound meta-artistic reflection. All of Gertrud’s men are, in their way, artists or creators: a poet, a politician (a creator of speeches and of power), a musician. But they have all betrayed their ideal for life, for compromise, for success. Only Gertrud, the artist who has stopped singing, remains faithful to her one, true work of art: the purity of her ideal of love. In this, Gertrud is Dreyer. The director, at the end of his career, identifies with his heroine. His intransigence, his search for a pure and spiritual form of cinema that rejected the temptations of the market and of fashion, is the same as Gertrud’s. The film thus becomes a disguised self-portrait, the farewell of an artist who, like his protagonist in the epilogue, chooses a proud and luminous solitude, surrounded by the ghosts of his creations and his (cinematic) loves.

One could draw a line connecting her to Ibsen’s Nora, another woman who rejects her role in bourgeois society. But if the door slammed by Nora in A Doll’s House is an act of rupture that opens onto an uncertain but possible future, Gertrud's choice is a reverse movement: not an escape into the world, but a retreat from it. She seeks not social emancipation, but spiritual coherence. Her final isolation is not a defeat, but the definitive triumph of her principle, the only way to preserve the integrity of her "Amor Omnia" from the contamination of reality.

The formal rigor, which to a distracted eye might seem wooden, serves this abstraction. The deliberately anti-naturalistic acting, almost a chant, distances the characters from everyday psychology to elevate them to emblems, to walking ideas. It is a technique reminiscent of Japanese Nō theatre or, to stay within cinema, of Robert Bresson’s approach to his “models,” stripped of all artifice to become pure vehicles of grace or damnation. Nina Pens Rode, in the title role, is extraordinary in her rendering of this living statue, whose face becomes a blank canvas onto which are projected the shattered dreams and inflexible determination of a soul that has seen the Absolute and can no longer be content with anything less.

To see "Gertrud" today is an experience that purifies the gaze. In an era of frenetic audiovisual stimuli, epileptic editing, and hyper-complex narratives, Dreyer’s radical calm acts as a counter-spell. It teaches us to look again, to find the drama in a still face, the tension in a prolonged silence, the universe in a closed room. It is the omega point of Dreyer’s cinema, the place where his quest for a “transfigured realism” reaches its most extreme and perfect conclusion. Not a film to be “liked,” but a work to be experienced, a rite of passage for every cinephile who wishes to understand to what heights of abstraction and purity the seventh art can ascend. It is the dazzling white of a soul that has chosen not to be extinguished, but to burn to the very end in the solitude of its own fire. And its silence, in the end, resonates more loudly than any explosion.