Impossible love, never in the frame, is only to be outwardly gazed at in the imagined out-of-field. Solitude is even more pronounced in this time-space shared with her lovers—this solitude being life’s only guarantee for Gertrud and her irresolvable heart. Love as the perpetually virtual, existing in remembered pasts and dreamed-of futures and never the present.

From Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964)

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