the silence (w&d bergman)

The third in a Bergman trilogy.

Spanish dwarf troupe - tick

Kid out of tin drum - tick

Psychological warfare - tick

Adorable elderly hotel worker - tick

Language games - tick

Playfulness - tick

Female sexuality - tick

Imposing female characters - tick

Mystery - tick

Plot clarity - cross

Narrative ‘development’ - cross

The last two are perhaps the most intriguing. This is a film that takes place over the course of little more than twenty four hours. (The three Bergman films I have seen this week have a carefully composed and restricted timeframe). The film starts and ends on a train, but at no point do we know where the boy and his mother are going. ‘Home’ apparently, but what home is or means is never clear. The boy’s father is alive but we don’t know if he’s going to be there. We don’t know why they, and the woman’s dying translator sister, left home in the first place. We know the women want things - not to die, to connect physically with someone - but we don’t know why one is at death’s door and the other is picking up a stray man whose language she can’t speak. A tank dawdles down a nighttime street and we don’t know whether it belongs to the good guys or the bad guys. There’s a transcendent absence of clarity. And yet this film is one of the most remarkable, engaging films you will ever see. It’s a dream state, a child’s eye view, a lacuna, a pause in the earth’s turning. Which is also what going to the cinema is.

Things I love about Bergman: you never quite know what to expect with his films. In spite of his reputation there is no model. Each film has an idiosyncratic flavour. All those years ago, when the Electric was still a fleapit, I was taken to watch a double bill. Time of the Wolf and Le Mepris. I didn’t value Bergman then. Godard seemed more sexy. I was wrong about that, probably, and it took many years for me to start to separate the films from the myth about the films. Claro, they contain darkness, they contain their stuff of the human spirit, but they also contain such light, such perfect shading, such nuance. 

winter light (w&d bergman)

What might peak “Bergman” look like? The name is placed in inverted commas under the assumption that the idea of the auteur supersedes the reality. “Bergman” is bleak, despairing, nordic, snowy. Not all Bergman films share these qualities. Some are more “Bergman” than others. Winter Light is in this sense quintessentially “Bergman”. It opens with a ten to fifteen minute sequence of a church service, unadorned, save for the way the camera picks out the few faces in the congregation, who we assume might be characters we will later follow. Some are, some are not. Not to give too much away, what follows is despair, random suicide, emotional violence, snow, cold, and some kind of doomed human resilience. It is, perhaps, peak “Bergman”, as austere as one could hope for, a few hours stripped back to a kind of desperate pointlessness, religion that fails to console, lives that are endured rather than enjoyed. I have to confess to enjoying it, noting that the scene where the priest tells his would-be paramour how much he hates her, and she reciprocates, is a scene where the bleakness spills over into a kind of warped, gothic humour, completely undercut by what immediately follows. 

through a glass darkly (w&d bergman)

Bergman’s film goes through all the gears, from the mundane to the extraordinary. A chamber piece, four characters on an idyllic Swedish island, it gives little sign of the coming storm in the opening act. A novelist father returns from time in Switzerland to visit his two children, Minus, (17) and Karin who is married to Max von Sydow’s down-to-earth Martin. There are petty family resentments, and they entertain him with a twee medieval drama about seductive death as a maiden. However, gradually deeper tensions begin to emerge, on the part of both children. Karin is sick, with an incurable illness, but she is also going mad. She hears things in a deserted room. She’s convinced god is there. She rejects her husband sexually, but in the room on her own she seems to be possessed of a sexualised psychosis. When the father leaves, this erupts in to a full-blown psychotic episode. Scratch the surface, and under the veneer of civilised society there lurk uncontrollable forces, waiting to take over your sanity. Strangely, the room where Karin goes to see her abusive god reminded me of Mariana Enriquez’s haunted houses, with rooms where the spirits hide. What seems so extraordinary here is the way Bergman constructs a completely convincing and attractive normality, only to render it asunder in the final act. Harriet Andersson gives an astonishing performance: another aspect of Bergman’s talent was his ability to push actors to completely credible extremes. There are other elements which are faultless: the sound design is brilliant, and the use of a static camera acting as witness whilst a character enters then leaves the room, (which Haneke later adopted), affords a tension-building voyeuristic element, long before surveillance cameras had become a thing/ trope.  

cries and whispers (w&d bergman)

You never quite know what you’re going to get with Bergman. Cries and Whispers is an astonishing film. Part Exorcist, part Piano Teacher. As rough and raw as Cassavetes with the added no-holds-barred of Haneke. Four women in a claustrophobic house. Scarcely an exterior shot. Relentless use of the close up, as the anguished faces of the four women flicker with pain, desire or fear. There is not much of a story, this is more of a character study. Agnes, in an astonishing performance by Harriet Andersson is dying. How often has the pain of illness been represented with this much honest cruelty? I can’t remember a film which has had the bad taste and/or courage to show pain with as much candour, a scream from the depths which actively makes you, the viewer, want to turn away. Her other two sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullman), each one bearing the repressed pain of their marriages, each one adopting their own avoidance techniques to distance themselves from their unpleasant husbands. And finally, Anna, the maid, (Kari Sylwan) whose humanity trumps everyone else. A final sequence that is a straight out ghost story, with the bravura of Strindberg in an Ibsenesque world. Cries and Whispers is one of those films which is blazing a trail towards some other vision of humanity, femininity, cinema. Four extraordinary performances in a film which is, at times, almost unwatchable, which is the highest praise that can be bestowed. 

Incidentally, this was in so many ways the most appropriate possible film to have seen on the day that QE2 died, to witness an unadulterated version of death and its consequences. 

shame (skammen) (w&d bergman)

Shame is one of the bleakest most brilliant films I have seen in a long while. Bergman’s narrative takes a couple, Jan and Eva, violinists who have retreated to live a quiet life in the countryside (an island). In today’s language, Jan and Eva might be said to have dropped out. The world around them seems to be in turmoil. There are military manoeuvres and low-flying jet fighters. But they do their best to wilfully ignore the world, content in their bubble, receiving news from neighbours. Their only real interaction with the real world is their radio, which doesn’t work, although they sometimes take the ferry to go to the nearest small town where they sell their fruit. Their marriage is very Bergmanesque: volatile, loving, the fortnight Ullmann a perfect foil for the more neurasthenic Von Sydow. Then reality catches up with them. Undefined opposing forces occupy the island. One army makes Ullmann record a propaganda statement on their behalf. Island folk are murdered. Planes bomb the land at will.  The couple try to flee but they are arrested and rounded up and threatened with being sent to a concentration camp for having collaborated with the enemy. It emerges that Ullmann’s Eva has slept with the local mayor to secure their freedom. They are allowed back home to their island, but when the mayor visits, Jan discovers what’s happened. The mayor is then captured by the other side, who have Jan shoot him. His personality has changed. He’s not the meek violinist anymore. (His violin has been destroyed along the way). He’s a desperate man who will do anything to survive. In a final, breathtaking sequence, the couple flee the island on a boat, which would appear to be a boat to nowhere.

There’s so much going on in this film, that it seems from a resumé, excessive. But the cumulative effect is overwhelming. More so in this era of chaos and fear. Bergman’s use of sound is quite brilliant, from the noise of the bombing to the silence of the boat at the end. The film keeps punching, becoming more and more harrowing. It’s clearly set in a metaphorical world (to the best of my knowledge there was no civil war in Sweden in the sixties), but not only are the effects brilliantly realised (apparently using models), but also the film is all the more powerful for occupying this unclear, open-ended space. It’s a mystery who’s fighting who and why, but what is clear is the destructive effect of the war on the psyche of those caught up in it. Both Ullmann and Von Sydow give grandstanding performances which are rooted in their completely believable marriage. Perhaps the film might be read in more peaceful times as a metaphor for a marriage, but it also feels like a sentient warning of the dangers of an apolitical lifestyle, the impossibility of truly dropping out, no matter how tempting. 

summer with monika (bergman, w. per anders fogelström)

The feeling of sheer pleasure when the film began to screen cannot be overstated. Not just because I was about to watch another of Bergman’s films for the first time, although that was part of it, but also because I was sitting in the new auditorium, watching the film on an immaculate, impressively sized screen, on the first working day of the new Cinematica. Cinema was made to be seen on the screen, not on a laptop or TV. The trouble is that there are fewer and fewer screens available to watch the kind of films that don’t come from the commercial stable. Now, all of a sudden, there are three screens within walking distance. As black and white shots of Stockholm took form upon the screen, transporting me to a world I’ve never visited and never will, I felt as though, in a world where so much seems to be wrong so much of the time, finally something was right. 

The inauguration of Cinematica had occurred the night before. I didn’t go, but a friend who’s going to run the coffee shop concession told me that he gave away 600 cups of coffee. I’m not sorry to have missed it. The real opening, the first day of business, was a low-key affair. Staff struggled with a new ticketing system. The staff, who are the same people who worked in the old Cinematecas, greeted those who turned out with smiles. The Pantalla 3 for the afternoon showing of the Bergman was about a third full. Being there felt like belonging to a new community. 

Summer with Monika was an inspired opening choice. A wistful, nostalgic, sexy, film, that seemed to contain the seeds of so much cinematic history that came to pass thereafter. The film narrates the story of a blissful but doomed relationship conducted over the course of under a year. Harry falls for the wilful but charming Monika, they flee the city and lead a Summer idyll on a boat, then they have to come back and it all goes to pot. The narrative is simple and predictable, but the film has a splendid decadent charm. Made in 1953, it seems to foretell the whole of the decade that was to come. Emerging from austerity into a hedonistic, hippy heaven, before grim reality kicks in and the dream turns into a nightmare. Bergman infuses the film with the occasional expressionist touch, such as when Monika, played with insouciant charm by Harriet Andersson, stares at the camera. There are beautiful cameos from a range of character actors, and the way Bergman and his cinematographer capture the Summer idyll by the beach, most of which is without dialogue, is mesmerising. 

Perhaps the film contains an innate metaphor for the act of going to the cinema itself: the escape from reality, the isolated reality in the bubble of the cinema; then the return to the world with its harsh realities. Only this time, as I left the cinema on a suitably rainy December afternoon, and headed to the Farmacia for a coffee, the world didn’t feel so bad after all. 

a lesson in love (w&d ingmar bergman)

Those sassy Scandanavians. This may not be Bergman’s finest film, but all the same there’s a dexterity to the composition and thematic which marks it out. David is a successful gynaecologist who is having an affair with one of his patients. But when he learns that his wife is headed for Copenhagen to hook up with her old flame, Carl-Adam, he realises the error of his ways and takes drastic action.

Although there’s something slightly stagey about the film’s scenes, a reminder of Bergman’s debt to the theatre, there’s also a great deal of play with regard to the timeline and the revelation of information to the audience. At first we have no idea that the attractive woman who David sits next to in the train is actually his wife and the film cleverly manages to sustain the conceit for an entire scene. The writer plays fast and loose with the use of flashback, jumping back twenty years to show the unlikely circumstances under which David and Marianne’s marriage came about. The film, with its set-piece scenes might look a bit dated, but if a contemporary scriptwriter chopped and changed as effectively as this, the critics would be swooning.

In addition, there’s the whole mannered, measured attitude towards the complexities of love and marriage, in such stark contrast to a more straight-laced Anglo-Saxon approach. There’s an understanding that the course of true love does not run smooth which allows Bergman leeway to playfully explore his characters’ attitudes towards fidelity and sex, themes that would recur. It’s a comedy with fangs, which owes more to Shakespeare than the ‘romcom’, to which genre it could probably be described as belonging. 

the seventh seal (dir bergman)

I called the Bergman aficionado from the Barbican. He said, a little sniffily, so you're going to see it for the ninetieth time. Not being a Bergman aficionado myself, I muttered that I remembered seeing it once on TV when I was 19, but even this was a distortion. I'd seen the opening frames, nothing more.

Max Von Sydow sitting on a Swedish beach playing chess with Mr De'ath himself. Horses up to their fetlocks in whippy Northern waters. An eerie, intellectual gloss permeating the scene.

During these first few frames, imposing though they are, I feared that The Seventh Seal was going to prove too austere, too like a Calvinesque cathedral. Beautiful yet far from heart-warming. Which is the preconceived model of a Bergman film, a filmmaker most know more through Woody Allen's failed attempts to become him than his work itself.

The screen was disappointingly small and the print far from great. I girded my loins and prepared to bathe worthily in the great auteur's gloom, as Max Von Sydow set off with his page to avoid the plague.

If the reader wants to retain the Bergmanesque myth, stop here. Because the film itself fails to honour it. Strange things start to happen. A couple, she beautiful, he a quirky fool, awake in a meadow, play with their child, clown around. A blacksmith loses his wife to a knavish actor, then wins her back in scenes of knockabout comedy. The tone of the film becomes warm, comic, charming.

In a way The Seventh Seal can be summarised as a Black Death Road Movie. Which might have a Tarantino/ Rodriguez ring to it. Bergman's sensibility seems populist. He creates characters who are lovable, and exposes them to danger. The audience roots for their survival. Death seems more of a vengeful sprite than a macabre ghoul. The heavy handed costume and make-up worn by Bengt Ekerot loses any taint of horror, as he plots and plans. This is a character from a medieval morality play, a villain and a rogue, whose gleeful sense of humour is revealed in the film's theatrical closing shot.

The wider philosophical and psychological context of the movie passed me by. No doubt there were things that I missed. Yet, like Beckett, another author whose work is categorised as much by its reputation as its actuality, it would be easy to lose sight of the manifest entertainer at work, were one to dwell too ornately on the significance of the imagery. The title, The Seventh Seal has a portentous ring to it, which the film does not shy away from, but Bergman has been careful to root his fatalism within a kernel of earthy joy. So when Von Sydow is asked by Death at the end whether his stay of execution has been worth while, we, the audience know exactly what he means when he replies that it certainly has.

+++

Note: Less than an hour after writing this I learn that Mr De'ath has caught up with Ingmar Bergman, who shall be playing chess no more.

fanny and alexander (dir bergman)

The Bergman fan summoned me from weekend indolence to come and watch this late epic with him, urging me to book before it sold out. I hadn't seen it in twenty years. The friend had once given me or my wife, he's not quite sure which, the full-length video of the extended version of the film, which was apparently shown on Swedish TV. It sat on a dusty shelf and was never watched.

Sitting down in a half-empty Barbican cinema, I was increasingly glad of that. You can watch a film on TV and the narrative will come across; but not the spectacle. Fanny & Alexander is a big film, in length and detail, and much of that would be lost on a TV screen. The opening sequence, set around an early twentieth century Christmas day in a slightly bohemian Swedish family, lasts for over an hour. It's like watching a tapestry take shape: a stitch here, a stitch there, and gradually the complete vision of Alexander's family comes to life, in all it's bawdy, colourful glory.

This detail is reflected in the film's sets. I don't know there's all that much to say about Fanny & Alexander. I told my friend that I tend to book tickets at the side of the cinema, not the middle, in case I feel the need to flee, and he, a lover of the centre, replied: But this is Bergman! He was right. There was no reason to flee at any point during the course of the film's three hours. Just an invitation to sit back and bask in the physchological portrayals, the occasional surrealisms, the deft pacing of an old master.

So the only revelatory thing I have to offer concerns these sets, the full beauty of which can only be guaged on a cinema screen. The home of the bohemian family, captured in such detail during the first hour, seemed fussy, lavish, Victorian, ornate. The screen is packed to the rafters with rich colours and velvety fabrics. This is contrasted with the home of the wicked stepfather, the hidebound bishop who torments Alexander so. The bishop's home is all austere off-whites, stripped bare walls, an antiseptic minimalism. The point of note is that, at the start of the 21st century, it is the cruel bishop's taste which reflects our notions of civilised living - clean Ikea lines, simple colour schemes. The unruly lifestyle of Alexander's father's family, which Bergman celebrates so vigorously, is allied to out-dated notions of domestic taste; it seems fusty and old-fashioned in comparison with the bishop's bleak modernity.

As noted, the best place to apreciate this is on the large screen. So I am glad I never sat down to watch the video, although, were it still there to be watched, I would now sieze the chance to find out what happens in the other three hours which were ruthlessly cut from the shortened narrative of the cinema release.