Strategems of Identification

Much of the work on identification in cinema has centered on mainstream film and, in particular, the function of the point-of-view shot structure. This paper will attempt to explore identification in a non-mainstream film, Dreyer's Gertrud, in two interrelated ways. On the one hand, it will examine the implications for film narration and spectatorship of the way in which Gertrud undermines the conventional structures of POV and shot organisation in cinema. On the other hand, it will consider the way in which the issue of identification is nevertheless central to the film, both in relation to its central female character and to its several male characters. Dreyer himself has spoken of the sympathy for Gertrud which he was trying to evoke in audiences, and of his own concern lying primarily with his women protagonists in all of his films: 'I'm interested in generally a single person in the film, and generally women.' Cinematic identification has been centrally discussed in terms of the look. Film is of course a visual medium, but it is characterised not just by its ability to show us an absent world recorded in its images, but more importantly cinema as a specific narrative form comes into existence when the series of 'views' becomes organised as a structure of looks. 'Moving pictures' in this sense refers not merely to the fact that the figures etc. within the recorded views are moving, but also to the way in which in cinema the spectator is moved through the narrative world, the diegesis, of the film. American film has been styled 'classical cinema' for its development of a structure of conventions for handling narrative relations of time and space which are both highly economic in narrative terms, and which efface their own conditions of production, giving rise to a

Biology · Identification (biology · Cinema and Media Studies · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Ecology