So maybe we’re all finally starting to catch up with a forty-six-year-old film that was widely derided as out-of-date when it first appeared.

But in fact, they seemed to find it both fascinating and emotionally compelling, and the students who came all stuck around to discuss it afterward. Having once viewed the film with the late novelist Iris Owens (author of the brilliant and about-to-be-reprinted After Claude), who disliked its slowness and its characters so intensely that she said that she’d rather leave the country than have to sit through it again, and recalling the reports of the film’s disastrous reception when it premiered in Venice and Paris, I was afraid that it would scare off some potential cine-club members. I’m presently teaching film at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and last month, after starting a weekly cine-club there with a colleague, we hit upon the idea of showing Gertrud as our first film after another colleague, filmmaker Rob Tregenza, said he’d always wanted to see it. The fact that Dreyer once expressed some interest in adapting Faulkner’s Light in August-an interest he shared with Luis Buñuel (and with actors Zachary Scott and Ruth Ford, a couple who once actually held the film rights)-was part of the inspiration and pretext for my musings about Dreyer and Faulkner, but for me the affinities run much deeper.īoth are works I take pleasure in revisiting every few years-they seem to grow in density each time-and I had occasion to revisit both of them this fall. I even managed to find a way of discussing these two works together over the first four paragraphs of my first book, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (I also published a lengthy essay about Gertrud, in which I make glancing reference to the novel). For several decades now, William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) and Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964) have been major touchstones for me-not only separately but also in some mysterious relation to each other.

Light in august by william faulkner