[Gertrud tends] toward abstraction, and its method, as Dreyer wrote in 1955, is simplification. It is this simplification that, not "dug"—not grasped from head to toe—becomes the boredom or the anachronism of which [Stanley] Kauffmann [see excerpt above] and his sympathizers complain. But the boredom, one feels, is the tension that the unremitting purity of Dreyer's film creates. It is not an objective boredom; it is not the depiction of boredom by being boring; it is a simplification and selectivity that leaves the viewer with nothing to become distracted by, that provides him with the opportunity to make contact with only the truths of a situation, of himself, so that suddenly the gnawing of his own spirit becomes perceptible. Gertrud is one of the coolest works of art ever made, but its arctic white is really an incandescence.

Much of the reaction to Gertrud parallels reaction to...