Ingmar Bergman: New Edition (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Studies) [New ed.] 0814333605, 9780814333600

Citation preview

ingmar bergman

ingmar bergman New Edition

Robin Wood Edited by Barry Keith Grant

wayne state university press detroit

contemporary approaches to film and media series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Barry Keith Grant Brock University Advisory Editors Robert J. Burgoyne University of St. Andrews

Frances Gateward California State University, Northridge

Caren J. Deming University of Arizona

Tom Gunning University of Chicago

Patricia B. Erens School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Thomas Leitch University of Delaware

Peter X. Feng University of Delaware

Walter Metz Southern Illinois University

Lucy Fischer University of Pittsburgh New edition © 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 17 16 15 14 13

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wood, Robin, 1931–2009. Ingmar Bergman / Robin Wood ; edited by Barry Keith Grant — New ed. p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and media series) Includes bibliographical references and index. Filmography: p. ISBN 978-0-8143-3360-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8143-3806-3 (e-book) 1. Bergman, Ingmar, 1918–2007—Criticism and interpretation. I. Grant, Barry Keith, 1947– II. Title. PN1998.A3B469 2012 791.4302′33092—dc23 2012010812

Typeset by Newgen North America Composed in Dante Photos are from the collections of the Robin Wood estate and the editor.

To Göran Persson, who taught me to think about Bergman

contents

Foreword by Barry Keith Grant Preface by Richard Lippe xv Acknowledgments xxiii

Notes

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1

Introduction: Journeys: För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor 4 Parents and Victims: Frenzy, Prison, Port of Call 24 Innocence and Experience: Summer Interlude, Summer with Monika, Waiting Women 34 Broken Dreams: Sawdust and Tinsel, Journey into Autumn

55

Lessons in Love: A Lesson in Love, Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries 72 Doubts and Fears: The Seventh Seal, The Face, The Devil’s Eye 99 The Isaksson Films: So Close to Life, The Virgin Spring

119

The Trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence 133 Intermezzo: Now About These Women 180 The World Without, The World Within: Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Shame 186

contents Moments of Release: Cries and Whispers (1973) Call Me Ishmael: Fanny and Alexander (1983) Persona Revisited (1994)

239 245

252

From the Life of the Marionettes: Bergman, Sweden, and Me (2000) 275 Notes 307 Filmography Index 343

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foreword

Ingmar Bergman is the third book by influential film critic Robin Wood to be republished by Wayne State University Press within its Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series. Like Wood’s other early auteurist studies, Ingmar Bergman was an influential milestone when it was first published in 1969. At a time when few reviewers and critics were taking film study seriously, Wood’s careful and thoroughly cinematic commentary demonstrated the potential of film analysis in a nascent scholarly field. It influenced a generation of students and cineastes. Wood’s great contribution as an analyst of Bergman’s films is to make a compelling case for the logic of the filmmaker’s development over a period of some twenty years while still respecting the distinctiveness of each individual film. Wood constantly compares and contrasts the Bergman movies under discussion, pointing out similar themes, motifs, symbolism, and narrative strategies. He is especially insightful on how Bergman utilized a stock company of actresses for multiple appearances in different films. The astuteness of Wood’s insights into Bergman’s work is clear when one considers how well they apply to the films Bergman made after the book was published. It is not only the book’s insights into Bergman’s films but also its style and distinctive voice that make it an important

foreword work of film criticism. Ultimately Wood’s greatest achievement as a writer is to communicate a passion for films and their seriousness—a message that is, alas, at least as pressing today as it was in 1969. Back then, no one seriously interested in movies read this book without feeling an equally passionate response, nor will readers today. Wood’s voice is unmistakably his own, and his tone is wont to provoke. Because Wood is both dogmatic and transparent, the cruxes in his critical terminology so obvious, it is more productive, and certainly more exhilarating, to disagree with him than to be persuaded by most other writers on film. In short, as a work of criticism, Ingmar Bergman is exemplary in eloquence and insight. From the vantage point of today, however, over forty years since the book’s appearance and the successful establishment of film studies in academia, it might appear to some that the book is, as they say, “dated.” After all, Wood completed it before Bergman made such important later films as The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers, From the Lives of the Marionettes, Scenes from a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander. A significant part of Bergman’s career, which included many of his films for television, was still to come when the original book, which ended with a perceptive discussion of Bergman’s great 1968 film Shame, was published. This incompleteness is perhaps most poignant in Wood’s comment that Bergman was interested in mounting a production of The Magic Flute, a project the filmmaker did indeed successfully bring to the screen in 1975. It is unfortunate that Wood did not get to revise the book as part of a projected plan to revisit several of his early monographs for Wayne State University Press on the model of what

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foreword he had already famously done with his work on Alfred Hitchcock. The only one he had managed to do before his death was the volume on Howard Hawks, which was published by the Press in 2006. At one time Wood told me that he wanted to revise his Bergman and Satyajit Ray volumes next, and he looked forward excitedly to doing so. Undoubtedly, the astonishingly and always perceptive Wood, by incorporating new ideas from his own subsequent development as a critic, a development quite as remarkable in its way as Bergman’s, would have offered new insights on the director’s important later films as well as on such ill-conceived projects as The Touch and The Serpent’s Egg. Thus one might think of Ingmar Bergman as an incomplete account of one of the world’s most protean filmmakers from one of the world’s most resourceful critics, with much of each one’s future development uncharted here. The book noticeably lacks anything resembling what became accepted as “Theory” in film studies for decades after its publication. Throughout its pages Wood offers pronouncements on “the western cultural tradition” with complete assurance, in a manner that contemporary scholars would not dare since such terms have become, in the postmodern era, far more hotly contested. Wood’s commonsensical defense of that tradition, and his framing of Bergman as a fellow-defender, may strike some contemporary readers either as surprisingly conservative or as quaint Leavisite piety. Yet it would be incorrect to conclude that Ingmar Bergman lacks a critical stance. Indeed, one of its central values is that it is perhaps the best elucidation of what is regarded as Wood’s early “humanist” perspective. The critic’s deep knowledge of Bergman’s films and his unerring sense of their place in a larger

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foreword cultural conversation impart an enviable authority even to his seemingly casual remarks. It is true that the book was written before Wood’s transition to his Marxist/feminist/gay liberation position, but it is apparent to anyone who has paid close attention to his work that the popular notion of these two “phases” of Wood’s career is simplistic if not fallacious. Wood’s emphasis on questions of value (What makes a work important? How does it address our lives?) informed his entire career, and in Ingmar Bergman it surfaces perhaps most explicitly in Wood’s anguish, along with Elizabeth’s in Persona, over the horrors of the Vietnam War. In later years Wood’s own view of Bergman became mixed. Toward the end of his life, he felt Bergman’s art to be too insulated, too naïve about ideology, and too caught up in personal neurosis. Yet Wood felt Bergman’s work still central enough to his experience of art that he would return to it periodically. The four succeeding essays, also included in this edition, address the later films Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander, and From the Life of the Marionettes and offer a significant reassessment of Persona. These pieces provocatively suggest the more political directions Wood would have taken had he been able to produce Ingmar Bergman Revisited. Ultimately, the fact that Robin Wood’s Ingmar Bergman has been out of print for nearly forty years is less a comment on the book’s value and importance than on our collective cultural priorities. In its day, Ingmar Bergman was one of the most important volumes on the Swedish director published in English, and it remains so today despite the multitude of books that have appeared on the director since. It confirms Wood’s place as one

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foreword of the preeminent critics of the cinema. Although written decades ago, I see no contradiction in including it in Wayne State University Press’s Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series.

barry keith grant

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preface

In August 2006, Robin signed a contract with Wayne State University Press to reprint the monographs The Apu Trilogy, Ingmar Bergman, Claude Chabrol, and Arthur Penn with the idea that he would update each of the books. I don’t remember if it was suggested that he begin the project with the Bergman book; in any case, although he considered doing so, Robin decided against it. Instead, he chose to begin with the Satyajit Ray book and began watching the director’s films he was less familiar with. Robin’s decision to write on Ray was based on his concern that Ray, whom he regarded as a major filmmaker, had been neglected critically through the years and deserved contemporary recognition. The decision was also based on his feeling that the project would genuinely engage him. When considering writing on Bergman, Robin came to the conclusion that he couldn’t face up to the idea of systematically watching the numerous films that followed Shame (1968), the last film he wrote on in Ingmar Bergman. I think he also felt that since the publication of the Bergman monograph, he had made clear, beginning with “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic,” Film Comment 14, no. 1 ( January–February 1978 [reprinted in Personal Views, rev. ed., by Wayne State University Press (2006)]), his rethinking of the director’s work. In that article Robin addressed his problems in accepting Bergman’s in-

preface ability or refusal to recognize that “the human condition” isn’t a given but is shaped, to a significant extent, by ideology that produces cultural and political dictates that can be changed. As it turned out, Robin never got beyond watching Ray’s films. In 2006, he taught a graduate-level summer course at York University, was still actively involved with CineAction, and occasionally wrote for Artforum and Film Comment; however, his health was becoming a more serious problem. He abandoned the Ray project in favor of concentrating on Michael Haneke’s work with the idea of publishing a book on him. Robin felt that the director, like Patrice Chéreau and Tsai Ming-Liang, was a master filmmaker who intelligently addressed political life in our present-day civilization. Sadly, he never managed to do more than make a few introductory notes on the Haneke book project. By the spring of 2008, Robin was too often ill to write regularly although, at the time, he wasn’t fully aware of the severity of his condition. It wasn’t until late in the year that he was made aware of the critical state of his health. In May 2005, Robin went to Stockholm to deliver a presentation at a Bergman symposium. According to our friend in Sweden, Olaf Hedling (see CineAction, no. 84 2011), the presentation received a mixed reaction. There were several participants who felt that Robin’s manner was somewhat unprofessional, citing his casual approach (such as the reliance on small pieces of notepaper while lecturing) and attire (his usual choice of a T-shirt and sweatpants). In addition, the lecture included the showing of an extract from The Passion of Anna (1969), which he considered the best of Bergman’s post-Shame films, and an extract from Marleen Gorris’s Antonia’s Line (1995). His point essentially was that in contrast to Gorris’s feminist film, which xvi

preface celebrates life, Bergman’s doesn’t allow any of his characters to move beyond their respective neuroses, dooming them to isolation and/or self-loathing. Robin’s qualified endorsement of Bergman and his work also may have added to a disapproval of the lecture. While some of his colleagues may have been disappointed with Robin’s presentation, he was delighted by Liv Ullmann’s response. After the lecture, she introduced herself to Robin and told him that she agreed with his comments on Bergman’s absolute insistence on having a “personal” vision. (The DVD of The Passion of Anna includes several extras including “On-Camera Interviews with Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson”; Liv Ullmann says that Bergman, after soliciting her improvised comments on how she interprets Anna, the character she plays, didn’t use most of what she said in the final cut of the film. In her concluding remarks about Bergman, Ullmann says, “Ingmar is a great director of his own life. And maybe that’s where he’s done his best direction. His life has not been directed completely by God. It’s been directed by Ingmar Bergman himself.”) As Olaf Hedling mentions in his CineAction article, Robin used notepaper (actually, 4 x 6 sheets of notepad paper) in giving his lecture. For some time he had been using notepads both for his lectures and to jot down thoughts he had for an article he was planning. At the time of Robin’s death, there were stacks of notepaper sitting on a table in his room. In preparation for this preface, I looked through the papers and found a number that dealt with Bergman. They weren’t dated but were written in the course of the last few years of Robin’s life. Below, I am directly transcribing several of the comments he jotted down. xvii

preface [(1) The Passion of Anna] Speaking for myself, however, I was relieved when Bergman at last dumped “God” . . . which brings me to L182. Bergman: L182—The title unique in all of B’s films. Testament film? In retrospect, this seems to me very much to be the case. Roles for the actors/actors for the roles? Whose “passion”?—the old man—Von Sydow? “Existentialist” island (Faro). Without anything beyond—he’s just discovered Existentialism, perhaps for himself in private? The film stands out from the other late works for its perfection, which is also its limitation. Bergman essay—Faro & “humiliation.” Humiliation as Existential reality (central to L182). All the 5 characters are “humiliated,” but respond to this in different ways. Ullmann clearly believes that dropping the bowl was an accident, just as she believes that the car crash when she was driving, that killed her husband and child, was an accident. Her sense of self (the good, devoted wife and mother in a happy family) depends upon this belief. [On Patrice Chéreau and, I assume, Gabrielle] Chéreau’s film has been (misguidedly, if understandably) seen as a “Bergmanesque” psychodrama, like for example, the film Bergman called L182 (its number in the Svensk Filmindustri catalog) but in America was retitled The Passion of Anna, inevitably linking the wrong character to the wrong kind of passion. But that is to deny the film (Gabrielle) its most important dimension, the sociopolitical, the dimension Bergman’s film, set and shot on his beloved isolated island of Faro, totally lacks. xviii

preface [(2)] The two Bergman films I really love were among the first I ever saw, and remain today as fresh as ever: Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries to which I would add The Virgin Spring and Brink of Life, the only two of Bergman’s narrative works that he directed but didn’t write—he was a marvellous director of actors—or, more specifically, of actresses. Ten years from now there will be a Bergman resurrection, a rediscovery, which will reestablish him as one of the giants of cinema. And I think quite rightly. Today we are still too close to him, and people like myself are looking for the angry, revolutionary filmmakers who are going to overthrow our present governmental systems, save our civilization and save our planet . . . at least I can hope. [(3) On the 2008 deaths of Bergman and Antonioni] As we all know, Bergman and Antonioni died on the same day. We also know that there has been in the wake of their deaths, led by Jonathan Rosenbaum, a general dismissal of Bergman, who had, apparently, been cheating us all these years—I think the crime of which he should be convicted was that he made far too many films, a number of them quite bad, whereas, Antonioni made only a few. Those few, for me, include one masterpiece, L’Avventura, which really stands alone. Of its predecessors, Le Amiche is of interest, and of its successors, Blow-Up. I hope I never have to sit through La Notte again, and I have little interest in L’Eclisse. Bergman certainly, over his long and prolific career, made quite a large number of moderately or extremely dreadful movies, in the course of which he also gave us about a dozen that merit a place somewhere in anybody’s Pantheon. But, leaving xix

preface aside the masterpieces for a moment, have we really already forgotten—in its blow your nose, cast it aside, pocket handkerchief age, the pleasures of Summer Interlude, Summer with Monika, A Lesson in Love, Women’s Waiting (NOT “Waiting Women”), Smiles of the Summer Night (the summer night has three smiles; definitely “the,” not “a”—the latter suggesting “ooh la la among the haystacks”), Wild Strawberries. Readers will of course object that I have omitted most of Bergman’s most problematic films from his late period. I do not intend this to be read as denigrating most of the films for which he has become famous. They are of course his most “important” films, as they deal directly with all our contemporary (and eternal) metaphysical problems of “meaning,” “reality,” “identity,” the existence or non-existence of God, etc. . . . problems we all face and never resolve (unless we fall back on some “belief ” that we choose and adopt). And it’s easy to see why these have become the films which are regarded as “important” (which, one assumes, Smiles of the Summer Night, a film of which I never tire, is not). In the above notes, the Bergman films that Robin singles out as important to him were made in a period in which the director tended to display a generosity toward and affection for his characters. As his career progressed into the 1960s, this occurred less frequently. Perhaps Robin valued the earlier films because of their deeply felt humanity and more fully rounded response to human existence. The final essay Robin wrote on Ingmar Bergman is “From the Lives of the Marionettes: Bergman, Sweden, and Me,” and it is something of a testament to the director. In it he says: “My book xx

preface on Bergman, written in the period of his strongest influence on me, of course is deeply indebted to him.” It is fitting that a director who was from the beginning committed to a “personal” voice should be celebrated by a critic who, like Bergman, most valued the “personal” response. In both cases, as their respective careers developed, each delved deeper into giving greater expression to the inner self. In this context Robin’s most perceptive piece of writing on Bergman and his work is, arguably, “Call Me Ishmael,” his review of Fanny and Alexander. It is an honor to write the preface to this new edition of Ingmar Bergman. As Barry Keith Grant’s forward to the book illustrates through his discussion of Robin and his critical practice, Ingmar Bergman was relevant in 1969 and remains so in the present day.

richard lippe

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acknowledgments

Ingmar Bergman was originally published in the United States in 1969 by Praeger Publishers. © 1969 by Movie Magazine Ltd. “Moments of Release” appeared originally in the Times Educational Supplement (March 2, 1973). “Call Me Ishmael” appeared originally in Canadian Forum 41 (November 1983): 41–42. “Persona Revisited” appeared originally in CineAction 34 ( June 1994): 59–67 and was revised for Sexual Politics and Narrative Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 248–61. The latter version is included here. “From the Life of the Marionettes: Bergman, Sweden, and Me” appeared originally in Swedish in Filmhäftet 28, no. 111 (2000): 12–20. This new edition would not have been possible without the assistance of Richard Lippe, Robin Wood’s partner of many years and executor of his estate, in granting permission to reprint the material included in this book. Annie Martin, senior acquisitions editor at Wayne State University Press, was a staunch supporter of the project from the beginning and throughout. Michael Tapper, film critic for the Swedish daily Sydsvenskan and the former editor of Filmhäftet, along with the help of Olof Hedling, assistant professor in film studies at Lund University, Sweden, managed to unearth the original English version of “From the Life of the Marionettes: Bergman, Sweden, and Me,” xxiii

acknowledgments which was translated into Swedish and originally published in Filmhäftet. Tom Leitch, Department of English at the University of Delaware, and Christopher Sharrett, Department of Communication at Seton Hall University, were eloquent supporters of this book, and with their permission some of their thoughts inevitably have worked their way into the preface. Malisa Kurtz, doctoral student in English at Brock University, Canada, and Fredrik Gustafsson, Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Film Studies, University of St Andrews, Scotland, helped track down some of the references. Daniel Barnowski applied his computer skills to the manuscript once again, and Stephanie Clayton prepared the index. Both are students in Brock’s interdisciplinary MA program in popular culture. Dr. Tom Dunk, Dean of Social Sciences at Brock University, generously provided a research grant to help in the preparation of the book.

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notes

The principle of dynamic drive on which most of Bergman’s best films are constructed, and which expressed itself most typically in the form of a journey, is equally apparent on a much wider scale in the development of his work as a whole. For this reason it seemed inevitable that the following survey should respect chronology. At the same time, an artist never develops in a perfectly straight line, work by work. A main line of development may seem to disappear for a time, like a stream going underground, then reemerge in a new form; there are likely to be cross-currents and an occasional backwater. In Bergman’s work, for example, both Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and Wild Strawberries (1957) develop out of A Lesson in Love (1954); between the two earlier films comes Journey into Autumn (1955), which has strong links with Sawdust and Tinsel (1953); before Wild Strawberries came The Seventh Seal (1957), which in certain important respects is more clearly connected with The Face (1958) than with either of its immediate neighbors. I have not hesitated, therefore, while preserving an overall chronology, to depart from it in detail in order to trace a particular line of development. Usually, these lapses from chronology will be made clear by explicit reference; any momentary confusion the

Notes method may cause can be cleared up by a glance at the filmography at the end of the book. Many of the British and American titles of Bergman’s films are inaccurate, ranging from total substitutions to subtle distortions. It seems worth pointing out the following: Fängelse means “Prison,” not The Devil’s Wanton. Sommarlek means “Summer Games,” not Summer Interlude. The film is not about an interlude but the transience of the joyful innocence of youth. Kvinnors väntan means “Women’s Waiting,” not Waiting Women. It is the waiting that the film is about. Gycklarnas afton doesn’t mean Sawdust and Tinsel but (approximately) “Night of the Clowns”; the American title, The Naked Night, is rather good if one overlooks its sensationalistic overtones, as the metaphorical stripping of the characters is a main theme. Kvinnodröm means “Women’s Dreams”; Journey into Autumn has a loose relevance but a wrong emphasis—it would be a more appropriate title for Sommarlek. Sommarnattens leende means “Smiles of the Summer Night.” To point this out is not mere pedantry. The reference is to Åke Fridell’s speech about the summer night having three smiles for different kinds of lovers. “Smiles of a Summer Night” has an oh-la-la quality not present in the Swedish. Nattvardsgästerna means “The Communicants,” not Winter Light: curious that the English title furthest removed from the original should be (as an alternative) the most acceptable of all these. För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor, rendered in English as Now About These Women, should really be “Not to speak about all 2

Notes these women.” Besides directly contradicting the original, the translation lacks its delightful prolixity. For the sake of clarity and convenience I shall use the English titles (apart from a refusal to call Prison anything but Prison); but readers might as well have the nuances of the originals clear in their minds.

3

Introduction Journeys: För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor

The first mental images that the name Ingmar Bergman conjures up are probably of the bizarre, the outlandish, the extreme, the abnormal, the picturesque; the apparitions of Death, the chess game, the flagellants, the witch burning in The Seventh Seal; the dream sequences of Wild Strawberries; the horribly detailed rape and revenge of The Virgin Spring; Harriet Andersson’s vision of God as spider in Through a Glass Darkly; masturbation, sodomy, and dwarfs in The Silence. Certainly Bergman has given us some of the most startling images in the history of the cinema. From this has arisen a composite image of the director: morbid, sensational, neurotically obsessed with cruelty, horror and abnormality, but with a certain intensity and power and a gift for striking compositions. Except for those who think that cinema is a matter of picturesque images, or those who think the ability to create a coherent personal world is sufficient to make anyone a great artist, this is a terribly limiting description; it is also a travesty. The presence of the extreme, the bizarre, the horrific in an artist’s work does not necessarily mean that he is not centrally

Journeys concerned with universal human experience: it would be easy to find as many “sensational” situations and images (both dramatic and verbal) in Shakespeare’s plays as in Bergman’s films; there are scenes in King Lear that are at least as outlandish and, by rational standards, as overburdened as anything in Bergman. What matter are the quality and nature of the experience we feel has provoked the images. One can easily demonstrate that most of Bergman’s films deal with themes or concerns absolutely central to human experience, themes that are either the most fundamental or the most banal, depending on the artist’s response to them: transience and mortality (Summer Interlude); marriage and family (A Lesson in Love); the varieties of love (Smiles of a Summer Night); the shadow of death (The Seventh Seal); old age and the need for self-knowledge (Wild Strawberries). And Bergman’s recent work, especially The Silence, Persona, and Shame, seems to me to be among the most essential investigations in any art form of the contemporary condition—of what it really feels like to be alive today. In attempting to define the real nature of Bergman’s art, I want to begin by considering, at the risk of obviousness, certain general characteristics. Thinking back over the films, one is struck by how seldom one sees Bergman’s characters in their permanent homes. Marie (Mai-Britt Nilsson), the ballet dancer of Summer Interlude, is seen only in the theater and in the summerhouse she revisits in order to relive the past. The women of Waiting Women are in their summerhouse awaiting their husbands’ arrival from the city. The first episode is also set in the summerhouse. In the second, Marta (Nilsson) is seen briefly in her apartment where, pregnant and unmarried, she lives alone 5

introduction with a cat; most of the episode deals with her temporary stay in Paris, which is shown in flashbacks from the hospital where she gives birth to her child. In the third episode we see Fredrik (Gunnar Björnstrand) and Karin (Eva Dahlbeck) briefly in their home (they get no further than the hallway); most of it takes place in a lift stuck between floors. In Summer with Monika, which was adapted from a novel, we untypically see the characters in their homes quite a bit; but home there is merely something to escape from, and the main body of the film concerns the couple’s escape to the islands. The characters of Sawdust and Tinsel and The Face, and the traveling actors of The Seventh Seal, have no permanent homes, living in caravans and moving continually from place to place. The Knight (Max von Sydow) in The Seventh Seal reaches his home only at the very end of the film: a dark, cold, almost empty castle. Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) in Wild Strawberries is seen in his apartment only for the first few minutes. Neither So Close to Life nor The Virgin Spring was written by Bergman, so we need not expect them to conform to these generalizations, and the latter doesn’t; So Close to Life is set exclusively in a maternity ward. There is a home and a family in The Devil’s Eye, but the central character, and very much the film’s emotional center, is Don Juan, whose only home is Hell. We see the characters of Through a Glass Darkly only in their summer holiday house on an island. We never see where the priest in Winter Light lives, and we see the schoolmistress only in her kitchen (it’s her aunt’s house anyway). In The Silence the two sisters are stranded in a foreign city; in Persona the two women are staying in somebody else’s summerhouse. The couple in Hour of the Wolf are also seen only in their summer cottage. The case of A Lesson in Love is especially interesting, as it is 6

Journeys

Manda Vogler (Ingrid Thulin) and Dr. Albert Emmanuel Vogler (Max von Sydow) in their coach. The Face (1958).

centrally concerned with family relationships—with the family as a unit—yet at no point do we see the central characters in their own home, only in the doctor-husband’s consulting room and laboratory. Hence Bergman’s protagonists seem continually suspended, without permanent roots, often in the process of movement not only from place to place but from one condition to another. The importance of journeys in Bergman follows from this. I am not of course claiming that this feature is peculiar to him, or even very unusual: one has only to think of Alfred Hitchcock, the central figures of whose last five films either have no fixed 7

introduction

Marianne Borg (Ingrid Thulin) and Dr. Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) on the way to Lund. Wild Strawberries (1957).

homes or are never seen in them (with the exception of poor Norman Bates), and in whose work journeys have an extreme prominence; or of westerns. Nonetheless, journeys play leading parts in nearly all of Bergman’s mature films and determine the structure of several of his finest. Interestingly, the prominent exceptions are his two retrospective comedies, Smiles of a Summer Night and Now About These Women, where the comparative stability of the action contributes greatly to one’s impression that in them Bergman was more (in the later) or less (in the earlier) deliberately pausing, surveying, consolidating. Several films are based on interrupted journeys, where important new developments and spiritual decisions in the characters’ lives are 8

Journeys precipitated during the hiatus in their traveling: Sawdust and Tinsel, The Face, and The Silence. One of Bergman’s favorite narrative forms is that of a journey during which present events and memories of the past combine to steer the protagonist to a point of self-confrontation, provoking in him or her a radical change in attitude toward life, a new orientation with regard to the future. A synopsis suggests that this is at least adumbrated in Thirst, the second of Bergman’s films to be made from an original screenplay. In its mature form it is the basis of four marvelous films. The main action of Summer Interlude (framed by the scenes in the theater) has Marie returning to the summerhouse where she used to stay, where she relives in memory the love affair that has been crucial to her experience and whose tragic outcome has arrested her further development, preventing her from accepting the possibilities life still offers. A Lesson in Love shows the resolution of a marriage problem during a journey from Mjölby in central southern Sweden to Copenhagen, with complicated flashbacks for both husband and wife and various encounters that directly or indirectly affect the outcome. Wild Strawberries takes place mostly during a journey from Stockholm to Lund, during which the central figure revisits the people and places of his past and sees different aspects of his own life reflected in people he meets. The basis of Winter Light is the priest’s progress from morning service at one church to evening service at another, again with memories and actual events and confrontations interacting to bring about a crisis and partial resolution in his life. The importance of this structure to Bergman is suggested by its recurrence at such different stages of his development in four films so distinct in tone and mood that also happen to be among his most satisfying. 9

introduction These four films have another structural feature in common: the strict time-unity within which the past (in the shape of flashbacks) is contained. The sense of tautness and compression that unity of time and place gives is clearly very important to Bergman and often appears in his work, especially the later work, in a rigorously pure form, without recourse to flashbacks. The Ulla Isaksson–scripted So Close to Life is an obvious example of this, and among Bergman’s own scripts there are The Face, Through a Glass Darkly, and The Silence. The journey structure prohibits unity of place, obviously, but Bergman preserves strict unity of time in Journey into Autumn and the other Isaakson film, The Virgin Spring. But some of the richest of Bergman’s films are those in which the past is felt as a continuing presence, with the characters’ re-living and revaluation of it playing a crucial role in their development: the films where strict time-unity in the “present” narrative is counterpointed with extreme timefreedom in the flashbacks it contains. Wild Strawberries is the most obvious because the most elaborate example, but in Winter Light, which contains only one brief flashback, the central figure’s past is very strongly felt. This presence-of-the-past is also particularly important not only in the other two films built largely on flashbacks, Summer Interlude and A Lesson in Love, but in Sawdust and Tinsel (not only in the introductory Frost-Alma flashback) and Hour of the Wolf. Our sense of the characters’ suspension; the presence of the past; a brief, often twenty-four-hour, but crucial period wherein a turning point is reached and the course of the future decided; the importance of journeys: these points take us some way, I think, toward defining the essential nature of Bergman’s art. One finds similar characteristics in the work of 10

Journeys Antonioni, and comparison seems to me instructive. The characteristic structure of Antonioni’s films bears some resemblance to that of Bergman’s: for the traditional plot-and-action narrative the two directors tend to substitute a thematic narrative, wherein a character passes through a series of apparently random events and encounters that all contribute to bringing about a self-confrontation. The essential difference between the two directors can be seen in the different use they make of journeys. In Bergman a journey always has a definite purpose and the purpose is usually fulfilled. Occasionally the purpose is consciously related to the characters’ inner development: thus in A Lesson in Love, David (Gunnar Björnstrand) goes to Copenhagen deliberately to retrieve his wife from her lover and to reestablish his marriage and the family group on a new and securer footing. More usually the ostensible purpose of the journey is not directly related to the inner development, and often an ironic contrast arises between ostensible purpose and inner discovery: one thinks of Isak Borg’s journey to Lund to receive his honorary doctorate in Wild Strawberries, and of Tomas’s journey to Frostnäs in Winter Light to take the evening service. In Antonioni, on the other hand, journeys tend to be a haphazard and goal-less wandering: those of Aldo (Steve Cochran) in Il Grido (1957) and Lidia ( Jeanne Moreau) in La Notte are the clearest instances. When there is a purpose, it tends to get lost from sight or the characters allow themselves to be diverted from it: think of the search for Anna in L’Avventura (1960) or of the repeated deflecting of Thomas (David Hemmings) in Blow-Up (1966). Underlying the frequently episodic structure of a Bergman film one can always detect a progress in a straight line, and this dynamic characteristic of the films is also a qual11

introduction ity common to their characters. Antonioni’s characters, on the other hand, tend to be helpless, allowing things to drift, allowing their destinies to be shaped by their own abdication of responsibility. The contrast is strikingly apparent if one juxtaposes the two directors’ films about crises in mentally and emotionally disturbed women. Giuliana (Monica Vitti) in Il Deserto Rosso (1964) mostly drifts; if she takes positive action, like going to Corrado (Richard Harris) in his hotel, she has to be driven to it by an overwhelming pressure of events upon her, so that it is little more than a reflex action or a plea for help. Karin (Harriet Andersson) in Through a Glass Darkly takes her fate in her own hands and precipitates, at least half deliberately, her own final breakdown. The characteristic movement of an Antonioni film is toward a defeat that has something in it of self-indulgence, so little energy is summoned up to combat it; that of a Bergman film is a dynamic drive from sickness and imprisonment toward a health and freedom not necessarily reached but passionately sought.

För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor If one were asked to name the cinema’s greatest director of women, the automatic response would probably be “George Cukor.” But on further reflection one might be tempted to retract this and say, “No, Ingmar Bergman.” The reason one does not think of Bergman at once is obvious: his oeuvre is so consistent as a record of a personal development, while the only really consistent feature of Cukor’s is his excellence at realizing his actresses’ potentials—it is impossible, in Hollywood, to be a “personal” director in quite the sense Bergman is. 12

Journeys Incompatible as these two directors seem, Bergman’s handling of actresses in his more relaxed films is strikingly like Cukor’s. The director’s exploration of the actress’s potentialities is felt as a major factor in the creative act, an end in itself rather than a mere means: consider, for example, Mai-Britt Nilsson in the middle episode of Waiting Women or Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika and Journey into Autumn. A number of Bergman’s films are unequivocally woman-centered: Summer Interlude, Waiting Women, Journey into Autumn (Swedish title: Women’s Dreams), So Close to Life, The Silence, Persona. He has returned repeatedly to a remarkably inward exploration of the essential experiences of womanhood from the woman’s viewpoint: sex, marriage, childbirth. To claim a very special importance for women in Bergman’s films is not to belittle the role of men: to list the excellent performances given by Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, and others would clearly be superfluous. Yet with one or two notable exceptions (Åke Grönberg in Sawdust and Tinsel, Victor Sjöström in Wild Strawberries), Bergman’s use of male protagonists is quite different from his use of female ones. In his major roles before Shame—The Seventh Seal, The Face, Hour of the Wolf—von Sydow is less an independent personality than a projection of Bergman into the film. Björnstrand, an actor of extraordinary versatility and technical resource whose performances are among the chief delights of many Bergman films, is nonetheless very seldom their emotional center. In the obvious exception, Winter Light, he is again essentially a self-projection of the director, though distanced and viewed more objectively; it is of crucial importance, I think, that Björnstrand and not von Sydow played the part. Jarl Kulle in The Devil’s Eye is another 13

introduction fairly obvious Bergman persona (there is even some physical resemblance). The same could be said, less obviously and with reservations, about Sjöström in Wild Strawberries. One reason that film and Winter Light are so markedly superior to, say, The Seventh Seal, The Face, and The Devil’s Eye is that the characters who embody the problems that obsess Bergman personally are in these two films less immediately related to the director, the problems thus becoming more distanced and universalized. But the relationship of director to character remains clear enough. This personal identification is clearly not the case with Bergman’s women, with again one or two partial exceptions: Ingrid Thulin in The Silence; perhaps Harriet Andersson in Through a Glass Darkly. Nonetheless, Bergman’s actresses have played an important, if ambiguous, part in his development. One sees fairly quickly that different actresses have had particular importance for him at different stages. The ambiguity arises from the relationship between Bergman’s use of an actress as a means and his use of her as an end: between Bergman the maker of personal, self-exploratory films and Bergman the Swedish Cukor. The emergence of a new actress to be used consistently through a succession of films invariably marks a new phase in Bergman’s progress. But to what extent he seeks out and uses an actress to express new inner developments and to what extent his artistic relationship with her itself provokes them are impossible to determine. In terms of individual actresses, then, one can distinguish since Bergman’s early apprentice-cum-experimental period five partly overlapping but fairly clear-cut phases. (1) A Mai-Britt Nilsson phase. (2) A phase juxtaposing Harriet Andersson and

14

Journeys Eva Dahlbeck, sometimes within the same film. (3) A Bibi Andersson phase, overlapping with (4) an Ingrid Thulin phase. (5) The present Liv Ullmann phase. It will be objected at once that most of these actresses turn up in films outside their specific period; but there is an important difference. During her phase, each is used consistently in closely related roles that develop a single clearly defined personality; when she turns up out of period it is in a role quite distinct from this. Hence Bergman uses Eva Dahlbeck with absolute consistency as a personality from her first appearance in his work in Waiting Women, through A Lesson in Love and Journey into Autumn, to Smiles of a Summer Night; when she reappears in So Close to Life she is used as an actress and gives an entirely different performance in a role that has an entirely different function in relation to the whole. The characters embodied by Harriet Andersson during the same period are more diverse, yet they have points in common that are absent from her out-of-period role in Through a Glass Darkly. Bibi Andersson in Persona is no longer the Bibi Andersson of The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Face, and The Devil’s Eye; the Ingrid Thulin of Hour of the Wolf is scarcely recognizable as the actress from Winter Light and The Silence. Now About These Women, partly a Bergman testament-movie in which he clearly tried to reunite as many of his actresses as possible, is obviously a special case and as such does not constitute a genuine exception. The case of So Close to Life is more complicated. Made in the middle of the overlap of the Bibi Andersson/Ingrid Thulin phases, it was not scripted by Bergman and hence was a less directly personal work than its immediate neighbors (Wild Strawberries and The Face); Bibi Andersson gives a “character” performance rather distinct

15

introduction from (and preferable to) the personality Bergman encouraged her to develop elsewhere. Ingrid Thulin’s performance, on the other hand, is absolutely central to Bergman’s development of this actress’s potentialities, and one is left wondering what contribution (if any) the revelations of So Close to Life made, directly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously, to the genesis of The Silence. I want now to examine each of these periods in more detail and try to show the relation of each actress to the different phases of Bergman’s development—a development that can as legitimately be seen in terms of the progression from Doris Svedlund (Prison) to Liv Ullmann as in terms of the inner progress it parallels. One can hardly speak of a Doris Svedlund period; I choose her because the character she plays in Prison is representative to the point of parody of the women most typical of Bergman’s early work. These remarks are necessarily tentative, as there are numerous gaps in my knowledge of the early films: I have not seen Crisis, It’s Raining on Our Love, Ship to India, Night Is My Future (all adapted from other people’s work), or the Bergmanscripted and reputedly very important Thirst and To Joy. But it seems clear that the type of the fallen girl (Frenzy—written by Bergman, directed by Alf Sjöberg) or prostitute (Port of Call, Prison) who ambiguously and often very unconvincingly retains her virginal innocence is of special significance in this period. The chief (and crippling) characteristic of the early Bergman films I have been able to see is the director’s manifest inability to come to terms with adult life. The protagonists tend to be young, helpless, and doomed, presented without critical recognition of their feebleness; their elders are corrupt, hostile, and exploitive, presented without sympathy or true insight. When 16

Journeys there is an attempt to come to terms with the older generation, through some deliberate decision of the protagonists (as at the end of Port of Call), the effect is perfunctory in the extreme and its practical means and outcome remain unexplored. The dichotomy of young and old seems absolute: there is no sense of how one can develop into the other and no sense of any possibilities for life enduring into full adulthood. The Mai-Britt Nilsson phase develops out of this. It comprises only three films, To Joy (which I haven’t seen), Summer Interlude, and Waiting Women, but the vividness and strength of the actress’s personality and the sensitivity with which Bergman guides its unfolding leave one in no doubt of its importance. Summer Interlude is the great film of Bergman’s early period, at once the definitive statement of the vulnerability-of-youth theme and the first film (to my knowledge) in which it begins to be transcended. Mai-Britt Nilsson’s personality has a depth and resilience that offer possibilities far beyond anything revealed in the Mai Zetterling of Frenzy, the Nine-Christine Jönsson of Port of Call, the Eva Henning and Doris Svedlund of Prison. These qualities make possible the expression of the transition to maturity and the acceptance of the fully adult world, disillusioned perhaps, but still holding out possibilities for further living. This progression is repeated in the central episode of Waiting Women, which is very much the emotional core of the film. After that, Miss Nilsson disappears from Bergman’s work and is a great loss. The Mai-Britt Nilsson phase gives place to the period that balances Harriet Andersson and Eva Dahlbeck. There is an overlap in Waiting Women, the last episode of which has Miss Dahlbeck as its center. Harriet Andersson first appears in the next film, Summer with Monika, and is again the leading actress 17

introduction

Marie (Mai-Britt Nilsson) with Uncle Erland (Georg Funkquist). Summer Interlude (1951).

of the next, Sawdust and Tinsel. The following film, A Lesson in Love, has the two actresses together for the first time, with Andersson subordinated to Dahlbeck. In the next, Journey into Autumn, the two are exactly balanced: indeed, the film is built on the contrast between them and takes on an unexpected importance when Bergman’s development is considered from this viewpoint. The Dahlbeck-Andersson phase ends with Smiles of

18

Journeys a Summer Night, with its character of a Bergman retrospect. The opposition of these two actresses during this period is perfectly logical. With Harriet Andersson and Monika begins an entirely new attitude toward youth, which is no longer regarded with dewy-eyed and sentimentalizing idealism. The young girls incarnated by Miss Andersson stand in striking contrast to the Misses Henning, Svedlund, and Jönsson, as well as to Mai-Britt Nilsson. They are tough, sensual, brimming with energy, often fickle or at least unfaithful. At the same time, through Eva Dahlbeck’s personality and its balancing of warmth and tolerance with a shrewd protective irony, Bergman begins to explore the possibilities of full maturity, the world of adult compromises and impurities in which, however, life can still be lived and a partial fulfillment reached. The two women represent opposite poles of values, on the tension between which the films of this period are constructed. The next phase, which (leaving aside the two Isaakson films) consists of the progression The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Face, and The Devil’s Eye, is the only one clearly dominated by men. Here Bergman explores an anguish one must believe to be personal, characterized by the torments of religious doubt, agonized self-distrust, the fear of emotional and spiritual sterility. Though it contains one of Bergman’s great films (Wild Strawberries, which is not without flaws), this is one of the least satisfying phases of his work, containing the least likable films of his maturity. Bibi Andersson is in all four films, throughout which she is used rather monotonously to embody much the same values. Essentially, Bergman seems through her to have sought to recapture, when it was much too late, a sense of youthful innocence

19

introduction

Monica (Harriet Andersson) with Harry (Lars Ekborg). Summer with Monika (1953).

and spontaneity as a leading positive value: though never without charm, the actress tends to be arch and artificial, the spontaneity forced, the charm too knowing. One blames Bergman for this, not the actress, who is so remarkable in So Close to Life and Persona: clearly what he wanted from her in the films in question prevented him from exploring her full potential. It is during this period that Ingrid Thulin rises to prominence: in Wild Strawberries and The Face there develops an opposition of values embodied in her and Bibi Andersson comparable with (while quite different from) the Eva Dahlbeck/ Harriet Andersson duality earlier. Then a poised, ironic, and so-

20

Journeys

Desiree Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck) with Fredrik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand). Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).

phisticated maturity was balanced against a vigorous and direct but unreliable youth; now a very different, tragic maturity is opposed to a somewhat suspect youthful innocence and spontaneity. The anguished questioning of existence one associates with the Knight in The Seventh Seal is carried on in Wild Strawberries, in The Face, and above all in So Close to Life, through the tragic eyes and twisted, drooping mouth of Ingrid Thulin. For three films she disappears: for part of the time she was working for directors outside Sweden, an unsatisfactory and restless period for her as it was for Bergman. The hesitant and uneven nature of his work at this time suggests that he wasn’t quite ready for

21

introduction

Sara (Bibi Andersson) with Dr. Borg (Victor Sjöström). Wild Strawberries.

the exploration of the actress’s potential that was to come, and which was to be also the definitive exploration of Bergman’s own personal anguish. Or, if Ingrid Thulin had been available, would that extraordinarily rapid and radical development have come sooner? That development, one might say, has made Liv Ullmann possible; at any rate, she emerges from it with an uncanny appropriateness. It was difficult at first to see exactly what her significance was to be, her roles in Persona and Hour of the Wolf being so different from each other. What they do have in common, however, is a capacity for total emotional commitment, expressed as much in Elizabeth Vogler’s withdrawal from in-

22

Journeys

Ingrid Thulin as Ester. The Silence (1963).

volvement in a too horrifying reality in Persona as in Alma Borg’s profoundly intuitive-empathic relationship with her husband in Hour of the Wolf. In Shame she becomes the repository—at once very strong and very vulnerable, marvelously sensitive and open to experience, capable of the deepest emotional responses—for all Bergman’s positive feelings about humanity.

23

Parents and Victims Frenzy, Prison, Port of Call

In Hour of the Wolf the artist Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) describes a childhood punishment that has affected all his subsequent development: he was locked in a completely dark cupboard in which, he was told, there lurked a small creature who would bite his toes off. When he was at last released (after experiencing the most extreme terror), his father asked him how severe a beating he deserved, and he asked for it to be as severe as possible. Questioned about this story in an interview, Bergman said that it was taken from personal experience: “This happened forty or forty-two years ago, and not just once. It was a ritual. It’s amazing I came out of it with my life.”1 I am not concerned with the factual basis of this and have no wish to blacken the character of Bergman’s Lutheran pastor father. What is relevant here is that the whole nature of Bergman’s early work is dictated by his feelings about parent figures, the immature imbalances of the films arising from the obsessive and unforgiving nature of those feelings. The basic pattern of this early phase is clearly established in Frenzy which, though directed by Alf Sjöberg, was the first 24

Parents and Victims film to be scripted by Bergman. Variations of it form the basis of Prison, the first film Bergman both wrote and directed, and, rather less strikingly, of Port of Call, Prison’s immediate predecessor. Frenzy is arguably the best of the three, and in many ways decidedly a director’s film, stylistically striking and coherent: oppressive, louring shadows, high angle shots making the characters appear tiny and vulnerable, a sense of fatality and doom that completely undercuts the explicit optimism of the ending. The acting is far more detailed than in the other two films so that the characterization has greater density and is less schematic. Yet the conception and the fatalism seem very much Bergman’s. The film is particularly rich in father-figures: there are no less than four, covering a wide range of possibilities. (1) The student-hero’s actual father, insensitive, emotionally and spiritually dead, caring only about reputation and appearances. (2) Caligula (Stig Järrel), the sadistic Latin master who persecutes JanErik (Alf Kjellin) in school and who is morally responsible for the death of the girl he has systematically tormented. (3) Birdie (Mai Zetterling), the elderly form-master, comic-pathetic, kindly, who stands up to Caligula surprisingly firmly in one scene but ultimately proves ineffectual. (4) The headmaster, a conservative traditionalist with a conscience. Caligula, in Stig Järrel’s justly famous performance, dominates the film: the character is more rounded than his counterparts in other early Bergman films. Yet the presentation is not entirely satisfactory. It is difficult to see why, having dropped unmistakably broad hints that it is Caligula who is Bertha’s mysterious tormentor (she is for no adequately established reason terrified to reveal his identity to Jan-Erik), Sjöberg and Bergman maintain the pretense that the 25

robin wood audience hasn’t guessed this until over halfway through the film. It does make possible a melodramatic quasi-horror-film buildup with ominous shadows on walls, slowly opening doors, closeups of Mai Zetterling screaming. The intention was presumably to contrast the terrifying doom-like monster (who has his ancestry in Nosferatu and Caligari/Cesar as well as in Bergman’s personal psychology) with the wretched, frightened psychopath he is gradually revealed to be, but the two presentations remain obstinately separate. What is interesting—and characteristic— is the girl’s helplessness, her utter failure to take the obvious steps toward doing anything about her situation, her passive acceptance of Caligula as Doom. The acceptance is clearly masochistic and seems unsubstantiated and unconvincing within the framework of the film—simply taken for granted. But it becomes convincing if we imagine her as a very young child at the mercy of seemingly omnipotent parents, with that nightmarish child’s sense of impotence. The most consistent—and consistently weak—aspect of these early films is the role of the women. The love scenes in Frenzy are very badly written, painfully trite and conventional, and Sjöberg does little to transcend the basic conception. The trouble is that Bergman seems to use women during this phase solely to express the sensation of childish powerlessness. They are completely and monotonously passive. Not only do they do nothing positive to fight for their lives, they seem unable to consider the possibility of doing so. They exist only to be victimized. The film is very strong in wish-fulfillment: Jan-Erik denouncing and striking Caligula before the headmaster; Jan-Erik denouncing and walking out on his father; the headmaster coming round to find him and make amends for the hurt he has 26

Parents and Victims

Jan-Erik (Alf Kjellin) and Caligula (Stig Järrel). Frenzy (1944).

been done, for which the school system is partly responsible; Caligula whining and pleading for pity on the staircase, begging for “light” as Jan-Erik strides manfully and resolutely past him and out into the sunshine. The creative impulse behind these scenes is very clear; they are emotionally very effective, but one remains aware of the immaturity that underlies them. The headmaster, the only one of the four father-figures who is benevolent without being ineffectual, remains uninterestingly conventional in conception, although the character is defined well enough in the actor’s performance. The penultimate sequence, where he restores Jan-Erik’s faith in life, interestingly anticipates the end of Through a Glass Darkly and is almost as 27

robin wood disastrous. “Maybe it was good for you,” he tells Jan-Erik. “I believe there’s a reason for everything that happens.” Christianity at its vaguest, most complacent, and insensitive: one waits for it to be firmly put in its place, but waits in vain. Jan-Erik is bucked up no end, takes the money the headmaster leaves for him, and, with a smile on his face and Bertha’s cat under his coat, goes out to return to Life, in the shape of a suddenly sunny skyline and some modern blocks of flats. The emotional balance of the film is gravely upset. Certainly we never for a moment question the rightness of Jan-Erik’s total rejection of Caligula, but the emotions aroused by our glimpse of his private hell of misery and isolation are not to be overruled by the shallow optimism of the last shots. To see the father-figure as a grotesque, sadistic monster is itself a kind of wish-fulfillment, in that it simplifies the relationship and justifies unmitigated hatred. But Sjöberg’s and Järrel’s Caligula refuses to be so simplified. He is horrifyingly human in his misery, and emotionally the spectator remains back there in the convenient sunlight with the young man whose faith in life can be restored with a few platitudes about returning to his place in society and the money for a hotel room. The young girls of these early films seem to represent the continuing child in Bergman who can’t grow up. The comparative youth of the tormenting couple in Prison, the fact that they are brother and sister, the fact that the man is—nominally at least—the heroine’s fiancé, should blind no one to their essential function as disguised parent figures. The heart of the film, within all the clumsy, pretentious, and unassimilated framework, is essentially identical with that of Frenzy. Birgitta, the Doris Svedlund character, is closely patterned on the Mai Zetterling archetype: as a dramatically realized figure she is again 28

Parents and Victims quite unconvincing but intelligible enough when one grasps her function as part of a psychological pattern. The “parents,” who again dominate her to the extent that she has no will to take any steps to alleviate her situation, are again the malicious destroyers of all potential life. It is they who persuade her to let them kill her illegitimate baby, of which the man is probably the father (Bergman: “It’s amazing I came out of it with my life”). The unlaid ghost of the cupboard-and-small-creature punishment seems to lurk behind certain key scenes. At one point the girl is forced by her father-figure fiancé (who prostitutes her regularly for a living) to stay in a room with a sadist who burns her with a cigarette (the ensuing scene where she creeps into the “parents’” room to look at them before she leaves evokes unmistakably the sense of a child running away from home). Earlier the girl hid in a dark cellar, where she was found by a small boy in a Redskin suit with a very sharp knife, which he leaves behind; near the end of the film (after the lighted cigarette incident) she returns to the cellar and uses the knife to cut her wrists, slowly dying in the darkness. As in Frenzy, the girl accepts her destruction at her parents’ hands as a kind of fate, with a child’s helplessness: she can periodically run away and hide, but it never occurs to her to fight. In both films, at the point where the heroine could explain herself fully to her young lover and ask for his help, she deliberately breaks with him and puts herself at the mercy of the parent figures, an action at once fatalistic and masochistic. The fact that in both cases the sadistic father-figure is also the girl’s lover suggests the tangled interconnection of parent-child relationships and sexual feelings. The dream sequence in Prison is at once very bad (thoroughly phony and pretentious) and very interesting. 29

robin wood

Doris Svedlund as Birgitta-Carolina. Prison (1949).

Its one unforgettable moment is that in which a doll (stand-in for the murdered baby) becomes a fish that is then broken in a pair of masculine hands: a brutal expression of the castration fears implicit in the cupboard punishment (the small creature biting the toes—shades of Edward Lear!). The close association of sex with pain and humiliation in certain of Bergman’s films (above all, Sawdust and Tinsel) probably has its roots here. Prison is a turgid, tedious film finally invalidated by the tendency to inflate a personal neurosis into a Vision of Life. Its explicit thesis is that life on earth is already Hell, that the devil rules. But all one could deduce from the evidence it presents is that some people are very nasty and others very ineffectual. Bergman was at this stage of his development too much the 30

Parents and Victims prisoner of his obsessions to be capable of genuine insight into the characters and situations they give rise to. Nevertheless, the intensity of expression the obsessions produce is already striking and personal. Prison looks like the work of a gifted and technically very precocious student who has been granted the sort of facilities students dream of but seldom get: it is technically a very ambitious and polished work. The film’s pretensions are clearly, and rather disarmingly, suggested by the famous silent comedy pastiche—the film Thomas (Birger Malmsten) and Birgitta project for themselves during their brief period of doomed happiness in an attic. (A fragment of it is quoted in Persona.) It has a dual function: on the one hand, it is the occasion for a shared moment of relaxation and innocent amusement as the two people are taken out of themselves and their respective “prisons”; on the other, paradoxically, the film epitomizes in a schematic slapstick form the idea of life-as-hell. If my ten-year-old’s memory is correct (all but the very beginning of the pastiche having unaccountably disappeared from the 16-mm print available in Britain), the sequence shows characteristic slapstick acts of hectic mutual aggression and one-upmanship, until death in the figure of a skeleton appears and defeats everyone. The idea is original and daring, but it partly fails for two reasons. (1) As soon as one grasps the point of the pastiche sequence, its inclusion seems annoyingly arbitrary and obtrusive. Bergman was to solve the problem brilliantly later with the clowns’ act in Sawdust and Tinsel and the jesters’ song about “The Black One on the shore” that accompanies the mutual seduction of Skat and Lisa in The Seventh Seal, both of which have a similarly epitomizing function while arising naturally from the dramatic action. (2) Given the inad31

robin wood equacy and contrivance of the context from which it springs, the sequence’s generalizing pretensions become unacceptable. The proposition that life is insupportably painful is one to which Bergman has returned subsequently; but it is one thing in the context of Persona, quite another in the context of Prison. Port of Call, made the previous year from a story by Olle Lansberg, need not detain us long. Ostensibly a piece of neorealist social criticism, its chief interest is the way in which Bergman, within this framework, gravitates to a highly characteristic situation of pure-prostitute-destroyed-by-the-older-generation for the film’s emotional center. The heroine of this competent and mediocre work is clearly in the Zetterling-Svedlund line. The parent figure here is female—the hard, puritanical mother (again presented without insight or sympathy) who deliberately reports her to the probation authorities when she finds the girl has had a (nice) man in her room. The chief contribution the film makes is the extension of Bergman’s antipathy to parental figures to include the social authorities, presented with consistent hostility. The limitations of these early films are crippling. It appears to have been impossible for Bergman at this stage to conceive of an acceptable maturity. One can see signs of a tentative awareness of the need to come to some sort of terms with adult life in the ending of Port of Call, where the young couple reject the chance of flight in favor of staying on to talk things over with the girl’s detestable mother and the scarcely less detestable authorities, and in the ending of Prison, where the young man is accepted back by his wife in a spirit of weary and illusionless compromise. But both endings are perfunctory in the extreme, a matter of the merest gesture toward reconciliation, on the 32

Parents and Victims level of verbal statement. To judge from synopses, the two films Bergman made between Prison and Summer Interlude (Thirst and To Joy—neither has been released in Britain) are both concerned with the need for transition and compromise, and this is consistently an essential theme of all his following films up to and including Smiles of a Summer Night. One would especially welcome the chance to see To Joy: Victor Sjöström has a leading role in it; it gives early expression to Bergman’s interest in music; and it was his first film with Mai-Britt Nilsson.

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Innocence and Experience Summer Interlude, Summer with Monika, Waiting Women

Of the Bergman films I have seen, Summer Interlude is the earliest in which one feels in the presence of a great artist, not merely a gifted, precocious, or ambitious one. The film shows an achieved mastery both in the overall line, the inner movement, and in the minutiae of mise-en-scène in which that movement finds local expression. The one small but embarrassing exception is the “experimental” use of animation where cartoon figures drawn by Marie (Mai-Britt Nilsson) and Henrik (Birger Malmsten) come to life on the paper: we are momentarily back in the world of Prison—the world of an immature artist who can’t yet grasp what works and what doesn’t, and who is reluctant to sacrifice the incidental bright idea for the preservation of line—the continuum of tone, mood, theme, the fil whose importance Leopold Mozart impressed upon his teenage son. Summer Interlude is already fully characteristic of mature Bergman in its structure of flashbacks contained within a strict twenty-four-hour unity. Particularly it anticipates the form of Wild Strawberries, that great culmination toward which all Berg34

Innocence and Experience man’s previous work moves and which marks a kind of watershed in his career so far: the journey at once backward (into a relived past) and forward (in terms of spiritual progress). Besides the general structural relatedness, two scenes in particular point forward to Wild Strawberries: the scene with Henrik’s cancerous aunt, which clearly anticipates the visit to Professor Borg’s mother (with Nilsson’s reactions foreshadowing those of Ingrid Thulin); and the scene in which Marie and Henrik pick wild strawberries together. It is perhaps worth pointing out that the fruit in question is not the wild strawberry we are familiar with in Britain but the smultron, a much larger species very popular in Sweden—one can buy them by the kilo at market stalls. They also recur in The Seventh Seal, and Bergman’s consistent association of them with the idea of happiness and fulfillment has its roots in national tradition. The importance of Summer Interlude in relation to Bergman’s early films is immediately evident: it both continues and develops the characteristic preoccupation with youth and the vulnerability of innocence. But here the transition from innocent youth to experienced adulthood is really explored, and with it the possibility of coming to terms with the world of Experience. At the same time, the presentation of the leading embodiment of Experience, Uncle Erland (Georg Funkquist), who, as in Prison, is both father figure and potential lover, shows far more insight and sympathetic understanding. The film’s most distinctive characteristic is perhaps its feeling for nature. While nature is obviously of great importance in, for example, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, I know of no other Bergman film where it is felt as a pervasive influence to the extent it is in Summer Interlude: sea, sunlight, clouds, a precise 35

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Henrik (Birger Malmsten) watches Marie (Mai-Britt Nilsson) practice. Summer Interlude.

sense of the time of year and time of day (consider the scene of Marie’s awakening and early morning fishing, her second meeting with Henrik); images of natural fertility counterpointing the development of the relationship (the wild strawberry scene). Bergman uses nature to express the natural processes of life and death, the theme of transience so dear to the romantic poets (and the Keats of the narrative poems and the odes is not so very far away from the “feel” of Summer Interlude). The film’s poignant emotional effect arises largely from the antithesis of summer and autumn (felt as actual concrete presences) in the counterpointing of flashbacks and present time. One might single out 36

Innocence and Experience the scene of Marie’s arrival on the island where, through a bleak autumnal landscape of half-bare trees against a dull, clouded sky, she follows an aged woman in black (only much later identified as Henrik’s aunt) up a hill path. Marie, just past her youth, in smart city clothes, is set against the suggestions of natural decay (the landscape) and death (the ancient black figure, sinister and pathetic). One gradually becomes aware, in the course of the film, of Bergman’s unobtrusive use of dead trees, present in nearly every outdoor scene right through the summer flashback sequences. Such trees are common enough on the islands of the Stockholm archipelago for the symbolism to seem quite natural and unforced: a continual reminder of death in the midst of life, especially poignant in the wild strawberry scene. But perhaps the most striking single instance of natural imagery is the cloud that overhangs Henrik’s fatal accident: the camera tilts up from the broken body struggling on the rocks to frame a single dark cloud suspended as if motionless above. A chance occurrence of which Bergman made use on the spur of the moment, or did he and his cameraman wait all summer for just such a cloud in just that spot? It precisely defines the emotional effect of the moment, taking up the nature imagery that runs through the whole film, uncannily crystallizing the sense of the end of summer adumbrated in the preceding scenes between the lovers. The use of the cloud also relates, however, to what one registers as a lingering immaturity in the film: its romantic fatalism. This is partly rationalized in the sense of the difficulties facing the lovers when they return to the world from their summer in the islands: their inevitable separation, Henrik’s future at university, Marie’s career as a ballet dancer. But such practical considerations don’t entirely account for the sense of doom that 37

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Marie and Henrik pick wild strawberries. Summer Interlude.

hangs over the film, implicit in the flashback structure itself (we know from the outset that the lovers’ relationship is doomed in some way), explicit in the lovers’ premonitions. The fatalism is to some extent inseparable from the theme of transience, but it seems also to derive from that sense of childish impotence in an adult world that characterizes early Bergman. Henrik, touching in his openness but somewhat ineffectual, comes across as not just a sensitive and perceptive study in youthful vulnerability but also as the only kind of hero Bergman was capable of conceiving at that time. (The importance of Sawdust and Tinsel in his development will be already evident from this.) Against the real world of nature, transience, and decay is set the ideal romantic world of classical ballet, formalized, tradi38

Innocence and Experience tional, “frozen” in time: the mortal dancer seen in the context of an undying tradition. The ballet in question is Swan Lake, itself concerned with a doomed love; the function of the ballet sequences is central and complex. Bergman’s handling of them could serve as a model for filmed classical ballet. There is a perfect balance between his sense of theater and his sense of cinema: his every shot acknowledges the necessary theatricality of classical ballet, the necessity to preserve with fidelity the stage compositions and formal groupings, yet within these limitations he uses the cinema’s resources of camera movement and editing with the utmost sensitivity in relation to the music and the dancers’ movements. If the feeling for nature in the film tempts one to think in terms of a northern Renoir (the harmonious merging of figures into compositions of sunlight, trees, and water, the delicately anthropomorphic use of the seasons, like the sunshine and rain of Une Partie de Campagne [1936]), the comparison may be partly suggested by another connection with French Impressionism. Certain theater scenes remind one irresistibly of the ballet studies of Degas, with their affectionately ironic juxtapositions of physical grace and physical awkwardness. I’m thinking particularly of the use Bergman makes of Annalisa Ericsson, as Marie’s friend and fellow ballerina, at once gazelle-like and angular, whom we watch removing her ballet slippers and rubbing her cramped feet in the dressing room, and the contrast between such moments and the poised beauty and grace of the stage performance. Through Marie’s art, then, Bergman expresses something more than the old story of career-versus-love: as she moves out of her personal life into her role of ballerina, Marie sheds her private individuality to enter a formalized, composed world that at once expresses and 39

robin wood transcends the real world of transience, purging it of imperfection and compromise. The film is about Marie’s progress toward not resignation but positive acceptance through a reliving of the past that enables her wholly to assimilate its experiences. Through that assimilation the past ceases to be merely lost: Marie shares it with her journalist boyfriend David (Alf Kjellin) by giving him Henrik’s diary to read, so that it becomes a presence in their relationship. David is not unlike Henrik to look at but coarser, more worldly, less vulnerable. The sense of irreparable loss is balanced at the end of the film by a sense of new and different possibilities: we see Marie accepting a life built on compromise

The ballet master (Stig Olin) and Marie. Summer Interlude.

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Innocence and Experience but in a spirit of affirmation, to make the best of what there is. When David—who has now read the diary—comes to see Marie from the wings, there is an almost exact repetition of an earlier dialogue between Henrik and a stage-keeper when Henrik first tried to gate-crash backstage. The effect is poignantly to evoke at once the similarity and the difference between past and present, to balance what has been lost with what can still be gained. Before Marie is ready to make her acceptance, she has to pass through a process of near breakdown. The idea that one must fully confront and embrace one’s despair before it is possible to move beyond it is common in Bergman and will become of crucial importance later in Winter Light and The Silence. Marie’s sense of futility is crystallized in her conversation with the ballet master (in his Dr. Coppelius makeup) in her dressing room. Coppelius in the ballet is a doll maker who has devoted himself to his art to the exclusion of life, and is left finally amid the ruins of his art as life triumphs in the young people in the world outside. The sequence of fifteen shots leading up to the ballet master’s appearance, without dialogue and with Marie alone before her dressing table, is worth detailed examination for its use of evocative poetic images to create atmosphere and express meaning. (1) Marie at the dressing table. She is tired and without hope. Dissolve to (2) subjective shot: Marie’s reflection in the window. She is framed as in a picture, as if her living were over and she (in her ballet dress) were reduced to a mere portrait. The window is awash with rain, suggesting tears, evoking late autumn, the season that by now has accumulated such emotional and symbolic significance. Dissolve to (3) Marie again: a tap in 41

robin wood the background. (4) The tap dripping slowly. (5) Marie’s face in close-up at right of screen so that only half the face is shown, eye cast anxiously to one side. The rest of the image is a pattern of light on shadow on the walls, cast by the rainwashed window. (6) The tap: a larger close-up as the sound of the slow drips (evoking the sense of time passing) imposes itself on Marie’s consciousness. (7) Marie looking down. (8) Subjective: figurine of naked dancer on the dressing table, seen from above, suggestive at once of artificiality and fragility. The figurine catches the dancer in suspended motion; its emotional effect is complex, suggesting a yearning for the timelessness of ballet and a sense that, as a dancer, Marie is reduced to something less than fully human. Beside it is the makeup, reminding us of the artificial nature of ballet, of the gulf that separates Marie-as-ballerina from Marie-as-human-being. (9) Marie again. (10) Subjective: ballet shoes, with cotton wool stuffed in the toes, and makeup remover. (11) Marie. A long-held shot. She puts her hand wearily to her forehead, looks down, hand over eyes. (12) Subjective: the diary. The young Marie of the “summer games” emerges from its pages in superimposition. (13) Marie. She begins to remove her makeup. (14) Subjective: Marie’s reflection in the dressingtable mirror. She watches herself removing the false eyelashes. Darkness surrounding, as if closing in on her. (15) Medium shot of Marie. She gets up and goes toward the door—the left of the screen is in total darkness. The camera tracks back as she approaches, then tracks before her into the corridor. Dr. Coppelius is suddenly revealed right of screen in the semidarkness, a figure both frightening and frightened, hovering behind her; he seems to have materialized out of the mood the sequence has defined.

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David (Alf Kjellin) with the diary. Summer Interlude.

robin wood This sequence, with its striking physical presence, its precise evocation of time and place, beautifully conveys Marie’s situation: her isolation, her feeling of advancing age, the failure of her art to satisfy her as a human being balanced by her sense that it is the only means to fulfillment still available to her. In particular, her situation is summed up in the three “images” of her—her “portrait” in the rainy window, the young fresh Marie who looks out from the diary, the tired, mature woman removing the false lashes. The sequence establishes the mood in which she is led by Coppelius to confront her sense of futility and from which she passes to a positive, stoic acceptance of her role as dancer, and subsequently of David as a possible husband, marked by her surrender of the diary to him. The film ends with Marie re-integrated in the world of ballet, a focal point for the shifting and reforming stage compositions. During a minute offstage she meets David in the wings. The reconciliation of life and art is beautifully suggested in the shot of her feet as she goes up on her points to kiss him. Summer with Monika is the perfect companion piece and complement for Summer Interlude. Again the subject is an idyll in the Stockholm archipelago and its inevitable transience. The boy, Harry (Lars Ekborg), is another variation on the innocent and vulnerable Bergman hero. But the center of the film is Monika, an entirely new character in Bergman’s work; this was his first film with Harriet Andersson. It is a less personal work than Summer Interlude and relatively minor; it never achieves the generalizing significance of the earlier film, being in a more restrictive way a study of character and

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Innocence and Experience of a particular relationship. There is also a sociological slant that does not come naturally to Bergman: certain early scenes, a bit obvious, a bit schematized, such as Monika and Harry’s cinema visit, look rather like textbook illustrations to a cruder “Uses of Literacy.” But the primary source of inspiration was perhaps Bergman’s discovery of Harriet Andersson, his delighted exploration of the cinematic potential of a new actress, and, through this, his discovery of a new and necessary attitude toward youth that complements his growing ability to treat maturity. Stylistically, the film is very interesting. Bergman seems to have imposed upon himself the discipline of trying to organize the action of every interior scene within a single shot so that, for example, the whole of Monika’s home background, her parents’ relationship, her attitude toward them, is given us in one take, the only one in which the parents appear. The island scenes, on the other hand, employ a much freer cutting technique, a greater variety of camera angle and range. This may have been partly dictated by necessity (elaborate camera tracks over rocky islets inevitably presenting problems), but it has a very marked expressive effect, intensifying the opposition of constriction and freedom. For example, in the sequence in which, with summer ending and Monika pregnant, the lovers try to steal food from a summer cottage, we share the freedom of cutting from position to position, from close-up to medium shot to long shot, until Monika is caught and dragged into the house, whereupon we are immediately imprisoned with her once again within the constriction of a continuous take until her escape. In some respects Monika seems an inverted mirror reflection of Summer Interlude. In the earlier film we experienced every-

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Monika (Harriet Andersson) with the daughter of the couple from whom she tries to steal food. Summer with Monika.

thing through the eyes of the heroine; here, although Monika is the center of the film, she is regarded objectively almost throughout, and the spectator’s identification figure is the boy, Harry. Nature is as potent a force here as in Summer Interlude and the locations—though we are rather more remote from civilization—not dissimilar; yet Bergman’s use of it is radically though subtly different. We are seldom tempted here to think of a “northern Renoir.” In Summer Interlude nature seemed almost an extension of the human characters, reflecting and expressing their moods; in Monika, although nature is felt as an escape from the constrictions of Stockholm working-class life, it is presented with scrupulously objective realism and an insistence on 46

Innocence and Experience discomforts and difficulties. The film encourages a physical empathy to an extent new in Bergman’s work and pointing forward to Sawdust and Tinsel. The ending, though in its total effect more pessimistic and defeatist than that of Summer Interlude, is again a kind of mirror inversion: here the girl is lost (not dead, but we are in no doubt as to the life into which Monika is being sucked) and the boy goes on to achieve a partial maturity, more resigned, perhaps, than accepting. With a tendency to sentimental indulgence that is not exclusively the character’s, the emphasis at the end is on nostalgia and loss; but Henry has accepted his baby girl, named after her mother, and his responsibility to provide for her. On the whole, the past here is felt as merely lost, where in Summer Interlude it was assimilated and felt to nourish the future. But the most important thing in the film is the extremely complex and detailed treatment of Monika. She is the direct opposite of the helpless child-woman and pure prostitutes of the early work. She entirely lacks purity, but the loss of innocence is felt to be inseparable from her splendid energy, her animal vitality, and sensuality. Such a character is not merely absent from the early work but utterly incompatible with it in the sympathy, indeed delight, of the presentation. The creator of those early Bergman women could only have recoiled from Monika in horror. She (and I mean character and actress to be indistinguishable here) brings a whole new range of possibilities to Bergman’s work. Monika’s betrayal of Harry and her failure as a mother are extremely painful, yet the spectator is led to understand her so well that she retains sympathy to the end. Some of the film’s early sociological observation may seem a bit trite, but Bergman 47

robin wood succeeds brilliantly in making us feel the constriction of urban working-class life in the parental backgrounds, in the routine of daily work, in the cramped rooms and drab, unlovely furnishings. Monika is an animal imprisoned in a cage: her attitude toward her baby immediately suggests an animal, her healthy body as if made for childbearing, her carnal delight quickly giving way to indifference and the sense of the child as an encumbrance. One likes Monika so much that one is inclined to get angry with Bergman for not supplying her with a Harry who could handle her; but that is modern Sweden as much as Bergman. Besides, we never lose our sense of sympathetic identification with Harry. Near the end of the film, Monika sits in a café picking up another man. She turns her face in close-up straight to the au-

Monika after the birth of the baby. Summer with Monika.

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Innocence and Experience dience, and Bergman darkens the screen around her—almost the only departure from strict naturalism in the film. The shot is held, the eyes, at once ashamed and defiant, lost and determined, stare into ours. Gradually we find it difficult to face this terrible steadiness: identified with Harry, we would like to be able simply to condemn Monika, but we can’t. The shot is the perfect cinematic equivalent of “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” Between the two Summers came Waiting Women; it is the most overtly concerned of the three films with the transition to full adulthood. Although something less than a masterpiece—a word one is tempted to use of Summer Interlude—it is perhaps the central work of the period in its thematic development. We are once again in the Stockholm archipelago. Four women are waiting for their businessmen husbands to join them from Stockholm. Three of them tell the stories of events in their marriages that proved decisive in some way to the relationship; the fourth, whose marriage is a matter of empty formalities (“I almost wish he’d beat me,” she says of her husband), refuses to join in. Meanwhile Mai (Gerd Andersson), the younger sister of one of the women, is preparing to elope with the son of another (who is coming out with the husbands). The hitherto uncorrupted and idealistic love of the young couple is set against the compromises—“cheating” is Mai’s word—of their elders. The structure—three detailed studies of relationships set in a somewhat perfunctory and contrived framework—is less unsatisfactory than this description suggests but undeniably loose. The three stories reveal certain parallels: each describes a crisis in a relationship whose resolution brings something decidedly 49

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Märta (Mai-Britt Nilsson), Rakel (Anita Björk), Maj (Gerd Andersson), Karin (Eva Dahlbeck), and Anita (Aino Taube). Waiting Women (1952).

less than perfection yet provides a workable compromise. But the stories relate and interact no more organically than that; one has the feeling that, thematically central as the film is, an important part of the creative impulse was Bergman’s desire to provide vehicles for his actresses. The film strikes one as comparatively relaxed, the pressure of creative necessity and direct personal involvement more intermittent than in, for example, Summer Interlude or Sawdust and Tinsel. This, however, has its advantages, enabling Bergman to explore the “cheating” of the Experience-world freely and with sympathy. The first episode is by far the least likable: the characters are too unpleasant for the spectator to feel much concern about 50

Innocence and Experience their future, and Bergman’s treatment is overexplicit and rather cold. Curiously, it is the only time Bergman worked with Anita Björk (Sjöberg’s admirable Miss Julie) in a film: her performance as Rakel is the best thing in the episode. The action arises out of Rakel’s frigidity and the inability of Eugen (Karl-Arne Holmsten) to awaken her. We seem to be invited to explain the frigidity rather simply in terms of Rakel’s childhood love-play with Kai that her father interrupted by shouting at them through the bathhouse door. Her infidelity with Kai ( Jarl Julle—the character bears a clear family likeness to his later roles in Smiles of a Summer Night and The Devil’s Eye) and the subsequent disclosures, for she has always pretended to Eugen that he satisfied her, tear away the façade the couple have erected to cover their incompatibility. Eugen is persuaded to shoot neither the adulterers nor himself and to take Rakel back, on the grounds that “an unfaithful wife is better than no wife at all.” Rakel, for her part, resigns herself to a marital relationship in which the man is more like a child than a husband: though not exactly “successful,” the marriage has become at least workable, built on some self-knowledge and mutual acceptance. The second episode is the emotional core of the film and, unfortunately, the end of Bergman’s cinematic association with Mai-Britt Nilsson. The entire piece is lovingly built on her personality, and its beauty is inseparable from hers, Bergman’s exploration of the actress’s potential being at one with his exploration of female psychology. The sequences leading up to and including the birth of Märta’s illegitimate baby, in particular, carry us into the woman’s world with extraordinary sureness and delicacy. It is the experience of childbirth that makes Märta fully realize her love for Martin (Birger Malmsten again) 51

robin wood and accept him, knowing that their relationship is far short of the ideal she once thought it. The poignancy of the moment of awakening from the anesthetic, passing from the dream of perfect fulfillment with man and child to the uncertainties and loneliness of the real world, arises from the balancing of a nostalgic regret with a positive acceptance, strongly reminiscent of Summer Interlude. The last episode, if it necessarily lacks the emotional intensity of the preceding one, is at least equally important in Bergman’s development. Here husband and wife are past the threshold of middle age, their marriage more a matter of habit and social convenience than of meaningful relationship. They get stuck for the night in a lift between floors, and the prolonged confrontation at close quarters makes them realize their importance to each other. The man’s pompous self-sufficiency is undermined by the technological breakdown so that his real needs emerge from under the debris of his self-congratulatory confidence in himself as a businessman. The outcome the next day appears at first sight entirely cynical but isn’t: if there has not been the transformation that the lift scene prepared us for, there has at least been modification—Karin now accompanies her husband on his travels whenever possible. Apart from its obvious importance for the good-natured and sympathetic treatment of characters whom the younger Bergman would have allowed little grace, this episode marks the introduction of Eva Dahlbeck into the Bergman repertory company and the beginning of her partnership with Gunnar Björnstrand, which is so fruitfully developed through A Lesson in Love to Smiles of a Summer Night. In the lift scene of Waiting Women the playing evokes comparisons with Cary Grant and 52

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Karin and her husband, Fredrik (Gunnar Björnstrand). Waiting Women.

Katharine Hepburn in their best 1930s comedies, with no sense of inferior imitation—a remarkable extension of Bergman’s range in the cinema. The treatment of the young lovers is comparatively perfunctory though perfectly adequate to their function in the film. But Mai’s denunciation of the “cheating” of her elders is given sufficient weight to be rather more than merely silly or childish. The ending of the film achieves a balancing of sympathies that is very beautiful and very characteristic of this phase of Bergman’s development. The young lovers slip away in a boat. A few hundred yards from shore, the engine fails. Märta and Paul (Hågan Westergren), the husband of the woman who refused to confide her story, watch, and Märta wants to stop them 53

robin wood in order to save her young sister from hurt. Paul tells her they should be given their chance. The engine starts. It’s as if the lovers’ escape depended on their elders’ permission—as if the elder generation, enmeshed in their “cheating,” were generously allowing the younger to try for the purity they have missed. At times in the film one feels the old resentments lingering on: the worst scene in it is again that in which the older generation “does down” the younger—Martin and Märta’s confrontation with his family in the middle episode, where Gunnar Björnstrand is made to behave in a completely inflexible and inhuman manner at odds with his character elsewhere in the film. But on the whole the generosity Bergman allows the older characters corresponds to a new generosity on his part toward them. The movement toward Wild Strawberries, with its mutual forgiveness across the generations, is already clear. And so the spontaneous gaiety of the reunion of the couples in the security of the cottage, a celebration of the continuing possibilities of relationships in the world of compromise, is set against the boat disappearing toward nature, darkness, and the unknown: a fitting last image for a film that opened with a toy ship washed up at the edge of the sea.

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Broken Dreams Sawdust and Tinsel, Journey into Autumn

Sawdust and Tinsel and its immediate successor, A Lesson in Love, both have distinctive flavors unique in strength if not in kind in Bergman’s work; and they are at almost opposite poles. A Lesson in Love is arguably the warmest and funniest of all Bergman’s films, characterized by an overall atmosphere of relaxed good nature. Sawdust and Tinsel has a tone of savage bitterness and rage that nowhere else in Bergman’s work erupts with such intensity or establishes itself so unequivocally as the central creative impulse. It is discernible elsewhere though, even, very muted, in the occasional tartness that serves to spice the prevailing good humor of A Lesson in Love. People often express surprise that Beethoven could have worked on his fifth and sixth symphonies simultaneously; if that is surprising, then the proximity in time of A Lesson in Love to Sawdust and Tinsel is hardly less so. But a little reflection on the complexities of an artist’s creative life, or even on the complexities of human life itself, should be sufficient to remind us that this proximity is not really so surprising. It should serve, however, as a valuable reminder

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robin wood of how completely an artist Bergman at his best is. There is a tendency (and certain of his films encourage it) to read his films primarily as personal revelations, as the direct expression of a private anguish. His best films, on the contrary, achieve the autonomy of great works of art: they are the creations of an artist exploring and developing the possibilities of a given subject, related to his own personal attitudes and inner conflicts, certainly (what work of any value isn’t?), but not restricted to them in significance. Though his films are unmistakably products of the same personality, each has its own peculiar distinguishing character, its own particular artistic integrity. Sawdust and Tinsel expresses a view of life one can hardly find balanced or objective. Clearly, in a sense, Bergman “meant” it; but it must not be taken as absolute. Though it is not as narrow as first impressions and the introductory flashback might suggest, its peculiar intensity and narrowness limit Sawdust and Tinsel, but they also give it its distinctive character and hence its value as the expression of one aspect of the Bergman world. The whole film gives the impression of having been made by the artist in the sort of hypersensitive, “overwrought” condition D. H. Lawrence describes as Ursula Brangwen’s after the first round of her love battle with Skrebensky in The Rainbow: Her life was always only partial at this time, never did she live completely. There was the cold, unloving part of her. Yet she was madly sensitive. She could not bear herself. When a dirty, redeyed old woman came begging of her in the street, she started away as from an unclean thing. And then, when the old woman shouted acrid insults after her, she winced, her limbs palpitated

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Broken Dreams with insane torment, she could not bear herself. Whenever she thought of the red-eyed old woman, a sort of madness ran in inflammation over her flesh and brain, she almost wanted to kill herself. And in this state, her sexual life flamed into a kind of disease within her. She was so overwrought and sensitive, that the mere touch of coarse wool seemed to tear her nerves.2

Except that an artist only in that state would be quite incapable of the sustained imaginative creation of a Sawdust and Tinsel. This intensely physical sensitivity informs Sawdust and Tinsel: there is a shot near the beginning of bent weeds that a cart wheel passes over and presses down as the first raindrops splash into an adjacent puddle. No other Bergman film, not even The Virgin Spring, which has a more detached presentation, evokes quite such intense and consistent physical empathy in the spectator: one is reminded of Bergman’s great admiration for Arthur Penn. This physical quality is established from the outset. Consider the opening shots: (1) Camera static; caravans silhouetted against the skyline, slowly moving. (2) Water; the reflection of a bridge, then of the caravans, inverted, moving across it. The camera tilts up slowly to frame the circus as it crosses. (3) Forward tracking shot of trees from below; rising mist; dawn. The driver’s voice is heard, a strange, melancholy keening, with the plod of the hoofs. So far the images are beautiful, composed, almost like a parody of the “art” film. The next images, bringing us closer to the physical realities of what we have watched so far as almost a series of (moving) paintings, have the function of undermining this peacefulness. (4) The driver of the caravan,

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robin wood heavily wrapped and padded against the cold, huddled as he sings. (5) The horse’s head, as it struggles forward. (6) Hoofs, plodding doggedly, patiently. (7) The crude, heavy cart wheels turning laboriously. The image of an old horse and its disproportionate burden to suggest painful effort, the dragging on of a life against impossible odds, turns up again in a more extreme form in The Silence. The image of the wheels dissolves into (8) a static windmill with broken sails—emotionally the shot completes the movement toward breakdown implied in the preceding ones. This dissolves to (9) the driver’s head, which in turn dissolves to (10) the bear, ungainly and restless, lurching about in its cruelly cramping cage. The series of dissolves ends with (11) the caravan the man is driving, with “Cirkus Alberti” painted on its side. Cut to (12) a long take with a number of small camera movements necessitated by Bergman’s determination to keep us in as close physical proximity as possible to the characters and to suggest the cramped and cluttered nature of their existence. Albert (Åke Grönberg) wakes up, puts his hand up to the clock, lifts it down. The camera follows the movement to reveal Anne (Harriet Andersson), lying still asleep. Albert looks at her a long time, then kisses her shoulder. Her arm comes up around his neck, but she doesn’t wake up. We are aware of her physical beauty and delicacy, his bear-like heaviness. Having got up, he comes to tuck Anne in. She turns over in her sleep. We see his anxious solicitude for her that is also a sort of uneasy possessiveness. (13) Low angle shot, Anne’s head in foreground. Albert looms over her (and over us) with a heavy cover he is lifting over her to keep her warm. The effect is at once touchingly considerate and oppressive. The next three shots show Albert clamber-

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Broken Dreams ing out of the stuffy interior into the coldness of the morning, hurrying along beside the caravan, and climbing heavily into the seat beside the driver. One can question certain aspects of the method. There is the recurrent problem of Bergman’s symbolism—a more complex problem than is usually recognized, demanding careful discrimination. The windmill image is obtrusive, and inadequately incorporated in the action, yet its expressive effect is undeniable. The bear is another matter. The parallel between it and Albert— both ungainly and clumsy in their movements, both caged, both seeming uneasy and restless—may appear too obvious, but it is completely justified in retrospect by the expressive use Bergman makes of it later in the film: for the cumulative emotional effect to work, it is essential that it be established memorably at the outset. What saves the sequence from the pretentiousness on which it verges is its powerful physical reality and one’s resulting impression of a director who feels his material very immediately and intensely. Not a word has been spoken, but the essential reality of the film’s central relationship has been conveyed, as well as the hardship and discomfort of the existence within which it is to be worked out. One is free to interpret the circus as in some sense symbolic of the Human Condition, although the film doesn’t seem to me to insist on it; but first and foremost it is a circus, with its own particularized reality. If one sees the sequence showing the erection of the Big Top in the pouring rain as expressive at once of human achievement and human wretchedness, this is not a matter of any “imposed” symbolism but of meaning growing naturally out of naturalistic and powerfully tactile images.

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The clowns. Sawdust and Tinsel (1953).

The film is remarkable for its acute communication of discomfort and pain. The pain, both mental and physical, is centered in sex, where the human being is most sensitive, where the greatest damage can be done and the pain of existence be felt most strongly. Bergman finds a way of epitomizing his theme less arbitrarily and obtrusively than with the silent slapstick film in Prison: just before the film’s climax in the ring, we are shown the clown’s act, traditional knockabout consisting exclusively of acts of humiliation and retribution. This is the principle on which the world of Sawdust and Tinsel is constructed. It characterizes almost every relationship in the film: between Albert and 60

Broken Dreams Anne; between Albert and his wife (Annika Tretow); between Anne and Frans (Hasse Ekman), the actor; between Albert and Frans; between the circus people and the theater people. The intended function of the flashback near the beginning, where the driver tells Albert the story of the clown Frost (Anders Ek) and his wife Alma (Gudrun Brost), who went bathing in the nude with the military, is clear enough. It establishes very forcefully the principles of pain and humiliation we are to see developed through the film and associates them from the outset with sexual relationships; in particular it foreshadows the humiliation and beating of Albert in the circus ring at the climax. One can see the literal exposure of Alma and Frost (she naked, he stripped to his long underwear, looking angular and ridiculous) as anticipating the metaphorical exposure of Albert and Anne to each other as well as the public exposure of Albert. The FrostAlma story also expresses—in a very terrible form, because the clown is broken by the experience—the idea that total exposure is necessary before compromise can be accepted and made to work: one can see the film as growing out of the unsuccessful first episode of Waiting Women. But while the thematic relevance of the flashback is not in question, its artistic validity is. It attracts an attention to itself that could be felt disproportionate. The whole is done in a stylized, grotesque way that isolates it from the rest of the film; it is deliberately jarring and strident in tone, its images of gratuitous cruelty verging on the hysterical. Sexuality is rendered gross and monstrous in the intercutting of Alma’s flaunting herself before the soldiers with close-ups of cannons firing; the direction of the actors (especially Frost, but also the crowd) and the choice of camera angles combine to emphasize the ungainly ugliness 61

robin wood of the human body. The whole flashback expresses a disgust and loathing that can hardly be the caravan driver’s and that we must therefore take for Bergman’s; there seems no way in which the tone of this is “placed” in relation to the film as a whole. Above all, the culminating images of Frost as Christ carrying his cross (Alma) barefoot up a stony Calvary—though there can be no doubt of the genuineness of the emotional pressures that provoked them—are very difficult to justify. The flashback, coming so near the start, is misleading in tone, however central thematically: the main body of the film, for all the continuing emphasis on cruelty and humiliation, is altogether saner and more complex.

Alma (Gudrun Brost) and the soldiers. Sawdust and Tinsel.

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Broken Dreams The main action shows both Albert and Anne trying to extricate themselves from the crude and basic brutalities of circus life, a process involving them in mutual deception and betrayal. Each pursues a dream that proves incapable of realization: Albert trying to persuade his long-abandoned wife to have him back, Anne seduced by the comparative glamour of the theater and by the actor Frans, whom she supposes will take her away as his mistress. Both, we feel, are betraying themselves as much as each other, for their need for each other is very powerfully conveyed: whatever the legal position, we feel them throughout as husband and wife. The implied parallel with Frost and Alma breaks down when one realizes that Albert is as guilty as Anne. The simple thesis that woman is man’s cross is undermined by the very complex response both characters arouse. The confusion of Albert’s impulses comes out strikingly in the scene with his wife: one minute he is telling her, with every appearance of sincerity, how impossibly dull her settled way of life would be for a man like him, how much he needs his circus existence; the next he is begging her to take him back and let him manage one of her shops. Anne is more unequivocally tempted by the spurious romance of the world the actor appears to offer her; but we are made aware that a precipitating cause is her intuition that Albert is visiting his wife and her fear of being abandoned. Bergman’s elaborate use of mirrors in certain of the theater scenes brilliantly creates the impression of a world of glittering and deceptive appearances into which Anne is being lured. The film rises to great heights in its final third—from the point where Albert, humiliatingly rejected by his wife, guilty himself of moral infidelity yet bolstering his ego with a show

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robin wood of self-righteousness, is confronted with the fact of Anne’s unfaithfulness. Both Frost and the bear figure prominently in these scenes, and Bergman uses them here with considerable complexity. Albert’s self-pity merges into a universal pity that at moments embraces even Anne. It is Frost who first suggests killing the bear, as an act of kindness. “And shoot my wife,” he adds, “as an act of kindness.” Albert turns it back on Frost— shouldn’t the acts of kindness begin with him?—whereupon Frost, the revolver at his temple, immediately finds reasons for living. There follows the extraordinary scene where they burst out of the dark and oppressive caravan into brilliant sunlight,

Sawdust and Tinsel: Frost (Anders Ek).

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Broken Dreams careering around the circus encampment past galloping horses, playing and dancing circus people, the chained bear, in a sudden excess of wild energy that is partly revulsion from death, partly something more positive. Intense joy in existence alternates with equally intense rage at existence, Frost following Albert’s moods and movements and words like an echo. Tenderness for Anne gives way to fury at her betrayal, which slips at once into the recognition that “I’d do the same.” Then the show. The clowns’ act gives place to the serious and horrifying slapstick of Albert’s and Frans’s mutual humiliations: Frans publicly exposes Anne as she performs her riding act (“How do you feel after our escapade? Shall we ride tonight?”); Albert knocks his hat off with his ringmaster’s whip. The scene is full of sexual overtones. It culminates in the horror of Albert’s near (?) castration at Frans’s hands; he is very like the bear as he falls. Then Anne savagely attacks Frans, scratching his face, until she is forcibly dragged off. At the point of supposedly greatest estrangement and mutual disgust, the couple’s actions proclaim the strength of their attachment to each other. Afterward, Albert attempts suicide, clenched in terror as he pulls the trigger. The gun clicks—the chamber was empty. He shoots his reflection in the mirror, then, finding that insufficient satisfaction, rushes out to shoot the bear, Alma struggling to hold him back. The caged bear is more than a stand-in for Albert, a kind of proxy for his suicide. It is also a scapegoat on whom his need to vent his rage can be taken out. Above all, it typifies for Albert what the emaciated horse typifies for Ester in The Silence: it is a reflection of his own misery, but it also epitomizes the miseries of the world, with which he has come to feel a sympathetic kinship. The scene expresses magnificently the 65

robin wood release of the bottled-up desperation that has been accumulating throughout the film. Shooting the bear is at once an expression of despair and an act of catharsis; for despair is not the final note of Sawdust and Tinsel. We see Albert beside the horses, hesitant. Then he reaches the decision to move off, which is also the decision to carry on with life. It is dawn, as it was when the film began; the circus vehicles are beginning to move. As they walk, Frost tells Albert his dream of retrogression to a fetus, finally to a seed, inside Alma’s womb. Alma calls him to their caravan: “She can’t sleep, you see, if I’m not there,” Frost tells Albert. Anne comes up. The two couples are alike in demonstrating the human need for permanent and mutually dependent relationship, but at the end it is the difference that the film stresses; Frost and Alma broken to a mutual dependence that is pathetic and helpless, Albert and Anne stripped of their dreams, reaching toward each other with a new self-awareness and humility. They exchange tentative, half-ashamed smiles and move off toward the light. It may at first sight seem arbitrary to group Journey into Autumn with Sawdust and Tinsel. Yet if one removes the flesh from both films, the skeletons prove closely similar, as will be clear from the fact that the following synopsis would do for either: Two people, one verging on middle age, the other young, irresponsible, and played by Harriet Andersson, travel to a town where the older has links with the past. During their short stay, each tries to make real a personal dream: for the older, a dream of stability connected with the old acquaintance settled in the town; for the younger, a dream of romance and glitter, developed through a chance encounter with a man she has never met 66

Broken Dreams before. Both dreams prove illusory or incapable of fulfillment. The two people, reunited, leave the town together in a mood somewhere between resignation and acceptance. Sawdust and Tinsel is the much richer film for a whole host of reasons, most of which are directly related to the central narrative point that the above synopsis ignores: the fact that in the earlier film the two protagonists are felt as husband and wife. At once one sees that Sawdust and Tinsel has a structural density that Journey into Autumn lacks. What happens to each woman in the latter really matters only to herself: the need of Suzanne (Eva Dahlbeck) for Doris (Harriet Anderson) as a model is too trivial to count for anything. In Sawdust and Tinsel, on the other hand, we are aware continually of the pain—actual or potential—inherent in the relationship, as we watch each partner’s ignominious attempts at infidelity. The difference determines the final effect of the two films. While Sawdust and Tinsel is much more painful, it has by far the more emotionally satisfying ending. Whatever we may think the future holds for Albert and Anne, we are strongly aware of their importance to each other, of the potential value of the relationship, and of the new possibilities arising out of their exposure to each other. The end of Journey into Autumn, on the other hand, communicates only emptiness: the lives the two women are resigning themselves to seem equally unfulfilling, and the sense of potential value is entirely lacking. One suspects that the chief creative stimulus behind Journey into Autumn was the prospect of continuing to work with Eva Dahlbeck and Harriet Andersson, both of whom had appeared in the intervening A Lesson in Love. Bergman seems to have built the film around the contrast between their personalities, falling back, whether consciously or not, on the ground plan of 67

robin wood Sawdust and Tinsel to provide a blueprint for the new film. This is not meant to suggest that Journey into Autumn is in any way uncharacteristic or that Bergman compromised himself artistically by making it: on the contrary, it is thematically in the mainstream of his development, and in Bergman thematic development is nearly always inseparable from his use of actresses. But the film strikes one as thin-textured beside its neighbors: it lives too exclusively in the performances, though it remains consistently interesting and enjoyable. Although only loosely connected by the narrative, the two plots—Suzanne’s attempts to reestablish her relationship with a married lover, Henrik (Ulf Palme), Doris’s encounter with

Doris (Harriet Andersson) is drawn by Otto Sonderby (Gunnar Björnstrand) into a world of glamorous appearances. Journey into Autumn (1955).

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Broken Dreams Otto (Gunnar Björnstrand)—are thematically parallel. It is not only the “Women’s Dreams” that are broken: in each encounter Bergman shows us two dreams crossing, failing quite to meet, and being shattered by a brutally realistic and ruthless intruder (Otto’s daughter, Henrik’s wife—the two women, hard-faced and dark-haired, are not dissimilar physically). The Otto-Doris scenes, conceived very much as a display piece for Harriet Andersson but with a marvelous and selfless performance by Björnstrand, are the most freely inventive in the film. We are aware throughout of the hopeless incompatibility of the two; we watch both surrendering to a dream we—and they—know can’t possibly lead to anything. Otto buys Doris clothes and jewelry then, at her request, takes her into an amusement park where her increasing exhilaration and abandonment are matched by his increasing panic. The episode culminates in a ride on the Ghost Train, where Otto is assailed by a series of death images and a snapping wolf ’s head. After it, as they leave the fairground, he collapses. At his home, he tells Doris that his wife has been insane ever since the birth of their daughter, whom she thought had the head of a wolf. For Doris, the nature of the dream—the lure of material wealth, luxuries, and adornments—is simple enough; Bergman shrewdly balances her genuine spontaneous delight with the knowing charm with which she leads the elderly man on. For Otto the dream is more complicated and more poignant. Doris bears a resemblance to the portrait of Otto’s wife; she could easily be his daughter. His real daughter accuses him of meanness: he keeps control of all her money, and she has a “wolf ’s nature” under her beautiful face. We gradually realize that Doris has intruded upon a private world of nightmarish horrors in which Otto is imprisoned and which may be partly of 69

robin wood his own making. He can give to Doris what he can’t, for reasons part practical, part emotional, give to his wife (whom he seldom visits) and daughter. His “dream” is an attempt to realize what might have been. Doris is both his wife as she once was and the daughter they might have had. She also gives him an opportunity to expiate his guilt, as it were, through a proxy: unable to break the tormenting emotional deadlock between himself and those he is closely involved with, he lavishes extravagant gifts on the girl who stands in for them. Before Doris leaves, he turns on her bitterly, humiliated by his exposure before her, desperate

Suzanne (Eva Dahlbeck) begs Henrik to see her again. Journey into Autumn. 70

Broken Dreams at the puncturing of his dream and the denial of this one outlet for his permanently frustrated emotions. Our last view of him is very haunting: a face peering from a window as Doris walks away, leaving behind everything he has bought her. One admires Bergman’s skill in suggesting so much more of the character’s existence than we actually glimpse through the eyes of Doris. Doris’s emotional shallowness contrasts strongly with Suzanne’s depth. In one respect the two stories are mirror inversions of each other. In the Doris-Otto story a light, shallow girl intrudes on a world of deep despair she can do nothing to alleviate; in the Suzanne-Henrik story the depth of feeling is on the side of the intruder. Suzanne is clutching on to a relationship that is supposed to have ended. She tells Henrik (and herself ) that she will accept any compromise just to meet him occasionally. But the real nature of her dream is revealed by the way she spies on his house, on his wife and family (the spying is obsessive—it is mentioned by the girls in Suzanne’s studio at the beginning of the film), and by the moment where she gazes at a stranger’s baby in a pram: her real need is not for a few days with Henrik in Oslo but for home, children, stability. To Henrik, however, she is essentially a mistress. When he makes love to her in the hotel, he too is surrendering to a dream of himself as romantic lover; but he can’t, when it comes to the point, leave wife, “things,” and financial security for her. Though a minor work in relation to its neighbors, Journey into Autumn makes its distinctive contribution to Bergman’s development, adding new threads to the cumulative thematic network. The more one gets to know Bergman’s work, the more one realizes that no film is superfluous or redundant.

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Lessons in Love A Lesson in Love, Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries

A Lesson in Love is one of Bergman’s most underestimated and neglected films. Critics tend to dismiss it as a lightweight and marginal throw-off or as a sketch for Smiles of a Summer Night (though the film it more strikingly anticipates is Wild Strawberries). One guesses that Bergman himself doesn’t attach great importance to it. “Thrown off ” perhaps it was: it gives the impression of having been made with unusual facility, in a mood of sustained relaxation, a loose improvisation in which idea is allowed to follow idea without care for solidity of structure or stylistic unity. To some extent the impression seems justified. Important flashbacks that carry the main emotional weight of the film are strung on an apparently trivial storyline involving bets about kissing a woman during a railway journey; and it takes a certain conscious effort on the spectator’s part to relate into a coherent pattern all the seemingly disparate flashback episodes—Dr. Ernemann (Gunnar Björnstrand) and his daughter (Harriet Andersson), the interruption of his wife’s intended wedding to a sculptor, the stay with his parents and the picnic in the woods. After several viewings, the precise 72

Lessons in Love chronology of the marriage development is still not clear to me: where do the affair with the mistress and the picnic in the woods stand precisely in relation to each other? If the two are concurrent, as they appear to be, surely we should be made to feel this? Another weakness seems to me to be the fact that in a film centrally concerned with marriage and family we nowhere get a scene showing the family together in their own home: such a scene might have provided the film with the core it needs around which all the parts of the jigsaw would fall into place. As it is, the sense of family is never quite adequately established (despite the splendid sequences at the home of Ernemann’s parents). The relationship between father and daughter is realized very perceptively, but one never really “feels” Eva Dahlbeck as Harriet Andersson’s mother. The film, then, is not perfect. But it seems to me a great mistake to regard it as trivial: on the contrary, it is one of the major works of this period, scarcely inferior either to Sawdust and Tinsel or to Smiles of a Summer Night. Its air of relaxation, of not taking itself seriously, though it helps account for the weaknesses, brings with it compensating strengths. It is notable among Bergman’s work for its freedom and spontaneity of invention, its emotional richness, warmth, and generosity, its effortless flexibility of tone. The film is a useful corrective for those who feel that the essential Bergman is adequately represented by Sawdust and Tinsel or The Seventh Seal. The flexibility is evident both on a large scale—in the inclusion of so many different moods within a single film—and in small details: see, for example, the absolutely natural transition during the “wedding” flashback from the slapstick-comedy collapse of the ceiling when Marianne (Dahlbeck) tries to hang 73

robin wood herself to the entirely serious “It’s for life, David,” almost immediately after, to the intended best man whom she has abruptly decided to marry. Such moments anticipate the more deliberate “Mozartian” effects of Smiles of a Summer Night. The generosity is apparent almost everywhere. One could single out the family reunion flashback, with its incomparable birthday breakfast scene. The family prepares to honor the grandfather with a “surprise” breakfast in bed and the whole family gathers around the bedstead, in the traditional Swedish manner. With wonderful economy and adroitness Bergman sketches in the various family tensions underlying the show of perfect conviviality. Ernemann resents his mother’s referring to him as her child (he is middle-aged) and becomes childish in his resentment; Marianne, less personally involved, is able to cope with the family situation more affectionately, maintaining her poise and charm. Nix, the daughter, going through an adolescent tomboy phase of resentment at her own developing sexuality and an early Bergmanian rage (but presented here with a buoyant sympathetic humor) at the messy compromises and deceptions of her elders, is furious at being forced to wear a dress, descending to an exchange of physical violence with her younger brother when he teases her. The grandfather regards the whole show (put on at great trouble for his benefit) as a ridiculous charade to be endured to please his wife, who arranges it annually to please him; though, as she points out, he has put on clean pajamas for the occasion. The continual play of irony is never for a moment unkind, the warm sympathy for all the characters (so far removed from the tormented intellectuals supposedly typical of Bergman) never patronizing. The popular image of Bergman as a frigid intel-

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Lessons in Love lectual can scarcely survive a viewing of A Lesson in Love. Indeed, the generosity shown to the characters quite contradicts the opening’s visual suggestion that they are to be regarded as music box mechanical dolls and the superior-ironic tone of the introductory commentary, which tells us we are to see a very elementary lesson that we can watch with an “indulgent smile.” This is, of course, the point: Bergman’s irony here is directed not at the characters of the film but at any superiority to them that we may affect. The improvisatory freedom of construction allows Bergman a satisfying inclusiveness in his treatment of human relationships. Husband and wife, husband and mistress, wife and

The birthday breakfast. A Lesson in Love (1954).

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robin wood lover, father and daughter, man and parents; relationships between three generations; different stages in the development of attitudes toward marriage, from Nix’s adolescent demand for idealism and purity, through the varying contacts, compromises, and breakdowns of the Ernemanns, to the stable but very limited relationship of the grandparents; different stages in the development of social attitudes, from the grandparents’ unquestioning acceptance of the permanence of the marriage union to the breakdown of such conventions in the Ernemanns’ generation and their consequently more casual attitude toward marriage and family: in A Lesson in Love Bergman covers all this with a marvelously sure touch. The structure may look loose but the proportions are perfect. The film, in its rich profusion of ideas, proved a mine of raw material for the more consciously worked films to come. Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries might seem to have little in common were it not for their common ancestry in A Lesson in Love. Smiles takes up and develops what one might call the spatial aspect of the earlier film, its juxtaposing and comparing different love relationships; Wild Strawberries takes up and greatly extends its temporal aspect, the treatment of relationships between generations. The family reunion flashback of A Lesson in Love, with all three generations interacting, was clearly Bergman’s starting point for the later film, with its detailed anticipations of the memory sequence of Uncle Aron’s name-day. The structure of Wild Strawberries—memories and dreams used to build up a dense and complex impression of the past, all contained within the twenty-four-hours’ time-unity of a journey— is in all essentials taken over from A Lesson in Love, except that in the later film one is very much more aware of the intellectual 76

Lessons in Love control and virtuosity behind the construction, not entirely to its advantage. The most startling (because so unexpected) anticipation of a later work has yet to be noted. In one of the flashbacks Dr. Ernemann talks to Nix, confiding in her (as they become more relaxed and intimate together) rather more than he intends. “Everything leaves me cold,” he says. Nix quickly grasps the implications of the words. “Even Mother and me and Pelle?” she exclaims, hurt. Father and daughter are played by Gunnar Björnstrand and Harriet Andersson; we suddenly find ourselves confronted with the embryo of Through a Glass Darkly.

Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand) shows the theater tickets to his young second wife, Anne (Ulla Jacobsson), while his son Henrik (Björn Bjelvenstam) looks on. Smiles of a Summer Night.

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robin wood Smiles of a Summer Night was one of the first films to establish Bergman’s reputation in Great Britain. One might be tempted to regard it, ignorantly, as an early work and to try to see his subsequent films as growing out of it. Of course it is no such thing; and now that so much more of Bergman’s earlier work has become accessible, one can see that Smiles is less a beginning than an end: it has something of the nature of a combined culmination and retrospect, its achieved perfection associating with its consolidating rather than exploratory character. It marks Bergman’s farewell to Eva Dahlbeck and Harriet Andersson: or, more precisely, to the Dahlbeck and Andersson personalities built up through the succession of films from Waiting Women. When they reappear (in So Close to Life and Through a Glass Darkly, respectively) it is in roles quite distinct from Bergman’s earlier use of them or in that more deliberate retrospect, Now About These Women. In Smiles, both actresses give the definitive versions of the personae they had developed. The film offers a foretaste as well: among the girls in the play Eva Dahlbeck is appearing in near the start of the film one notices Bibi Andersson, who was to become prominent in Bergman’s next four films. It is also possible to see Ulla Jacobsson’s role of Anne Egerman as a reference to those taken earlier by Mai-Britt Nilsson, though the character is altogether slighter and shallower. The change is significant. The intensity with which Bergman could feel the vulnerability of young love—his balancing of its immense value with its frailty—was the great quality of Summer Interlude and of the central episode of Waiting Women. But he had passed beyond it when he made Smiles and doesn’t attempt to treat it with the same intimacy and inwardness. If one were to find any fault at all with the film, in fact, it might be in the 78

Lessons in Love almost cruelly ironic treatment of Henrik (Björn Bjelvenstam), the young son by a previous marriage of the lawyer Egerman (Björnstrand), studying for the church and hopelessly struggling with unmanageable sexual feelings. It can be felt, however, to balance the irony with which the amorous entanglements of Henrik’s elders are also treated; the movement toward establishing a balance of sympathies between idealistic young love and the compromises of Experience that Bergman began rather clumsily in Waiting Women reaches its final and perfect expression in Smiles of a Summer Night. The eight main characters resolve themselves in the course of the film, with what is felt as a perfect appropriateness, into four couples: Egerman and his mistress (Dahlbeck); Henrik and his father’s young second wife ( Jacobsson); Count Malcolm ( Jarl Kulle) and his own wife (the remarkable Margit Carlquist— sadly, almost her only appearance in a Bergman film); the maid Petra (Harriet Andersson) and the coachman Frid (Åke Fridell). None is exempt from the pervasive irony; on the other hand, none is treated without sympathy. Count Malcolm gets rather less than anyone else: he anticipates Don Juan in The Devil’s Eye (played by the same actor), except that he is a Don Juan who hasn’t yet recognized his own emptiness. The complex interaction of the characters in the course of the intrigue makes the film a continually shifting kaleidoscope in which different relationships and attitudes toward love become juxtaposed, to be compared and evaluated. Balance, then, is the keynote of the film: the balancing of irony and sympathy, the balancing of different attitudes. The period setting increases the total effect of a formally conceived, stylized, patterned quality. It seems clear that part of the 79

robin wood inspiration came from Mozart opera. The formalized effect of the film reminds one at times of Mozart’s ensembles. At one point Bergman has Gunnar Björnstrand hum a few bars of “La ci darem la mano,” the Zerlina-Don Giovanni duet. (The effect is ironic: Egerman, caught in absurd night attire in the rooms of his ex-mistress by her present lover, is in a thoroughly ignominious position which his attempt at a careless composure via the great seducer’s love music merely underlines.) But it is the parallels with The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute that are most striking. The overall construction in terms of a complicated love intrigue in which upper-class characters and their servants are involved and in which different

Tamino (Josef Köstlinger) and Pamina (Irma Urrila). The Magic Flute (1975).

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Lessons in Love sorts of love are juxtaposed offers a general likeness to Figaro. In both works there is a philandering yet insanely jealous Count and a Countess who wants her husband to herself. But it is the actress, played by Eva Dahlbeck, who most resembles Mozart’s Countess (both are anxious about advancing years and feel the need for emotional security), and she takes the role of a Countess in the play Egerman takes Anne to near the beginning of the film. Henrik is like Cherubino in his tendency to be attracted to every girl he comes in contact with. Petra in some ways resembles Suzanna. As in Figaro, the last “act” moves out closer to the world of nature (the pavilion in the garden) for the resolution of the intrigue and the final sorting into couples. Petra’s Frid is not much like Figaro, but he is rather like Papageno from The Magic Flute (an opera Bergman said recently that he has long wanted to produce and which plays a prominent part in Hour of the Wolf).3 The servant-lovers are separated much more from their social superiors than in Figaro; the paralleling of a comparatively serious love story with a comic, earthy one is more reminiscent of The Magic Flute. Toward the end of the opera Papageno, apparently unable to obtain his Papagena, tries to hang himself; he is prevented by the Three Boys (part of the opera’s supernatural machinery), who tell him to play his set of chimes; when he does so, Papagena is given to him. In Smiles, Henrik, confronted with the apparent impossibility of his love for Anne, tries to hang himself in his bedroom. He falls and grabs at an ornamental knob to save himself; by an apparent miracle (though the mechanism has been explained to the audience earlier) the wall slides open and, to the accompaniment of music box chimes culminating in a comic little fanfare by ornamental cherubs, a bed glides through from the next room 81

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Egerman, Desiree (Eva Dahlbeck), and Count Malcolm (Jarl Kulle). Smiles of a Summer Night.

with his beautiful young stepmother asleep in it. The parallel is at once too free to constitute a “borrowing” (Henrik as a character is utterly unlike Papageno) and too close to be coincidental. More important than such incidental echoes is the Mozartian emotional complexity of much of the comedy: that delicate and flexible movement to and fro between humor and pathos, between different shades of emotion, that is supremely characteristic of Mozart’s music. Examples abound in Smiles: one of the most striking is the transition from bitter comedy to near tragedy and out again to farce at the pavilion climax. Count Malcolm challenges Egerman to Russian roulette to settle their love

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Lessons in Love disputes once and for all. Egerman’s cowardice is both funny and disturbing, Malcolm’s unruffled aplomb funny and cruel. It reaches the point where the next shot must almost certainly release the single bullet. It is Egerman’s turn. He presses the gun to his temple and hesitates; we are ready for some twist or reversal to resolve the tension into comedy. Abruptly, Malcolm reminds him quietly that Anne has run away with Henrik. In one of the most poignant moments in any Bergman film we see all desire to live drain from Egerman’s face, and his finger squeezes the trigger. Cut to long shot, from outside. The shot shatters the silence, the women run to the pavilion. The film has astonishingly turned to tragedy. They open the pavilion door. Malcolm is roaring with laughter, Egerman is sitting upright in an absurd attempt at preserving his dignity, his face blackened. The bullet was a blank. The earlier scene of Anne and Henrik’s elopement offers a parallel between Bergman’s mise-en-scène and Mozart’s ensembles, where different characters express contrasting emotions and attitudes simultaneously. The young lovers, filled with a sense of joyous release, ride off wildly in a carriage. Frid and Petra help them: their presence adds the sort of extra emotional dimension to the scene that the presence of, say, Zerlina, Masetto, and Leporello adds to the Don Giovanni sextet. From the shadows, meanwhile, unseen by the others, Egerman watches, deeply hurt yet not feeling he has the right to stop them. Bergman makes us share his despair and the lovers’ joy simultaneously, maintaining very precisely the balance of sympathies on which so much of the film’s complexity of effect depends. The complexity can be localized in the detail of Anne’s veil, blown

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Henrik, Anne (Ulla Jacobsson), and Petra (Harriet Andersson) during the elopement. Smiles of a Summer Night.

back by the wind as the lovers ride off, falling at Egerman’s feet: it is the token at once of Anne’s release (the casting off of virginity) and his own failure (the long-unconsummated marriage). This much said, it must be added that Bergman isn’t Mozart. Smiles makes use of the formalized effect of Mozartian opera and captures a similar emotional complexity. It is quite different in flavor, the astringent bitterness that relates the film to Journey into Autumn and even Sawdust and Tinsel being quite alien to Mozart. One sees the difference most readily by placing the film beside what is perhaps the most Mozartian film ever made, Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu (1939), which has not only the Mozartian charity and generosity but the seemingly effortless flow of 84

Lessons in Love spontaneous invention that is another aspect of the same basic human gift. Beside it, the effects in Smiles look calculated. Though this implies to some extent a limiting judgment, I mean it more as definition than as criticism. With its own individual and complex flavor, the astringency balanced and modified by qualities of warmth, tenderness, and charm, Smiles of a Summer Night remains one of Bergman’s perfect films. If Smiles of a Summer Night has its source in Mozart opera, Wild Strawberries is founded on Bach fugue. Again Bergman provides a concrete clue: during the central dream sequence, while Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) dozes in the car, Bibi Andersson, as the Sara of Isak’s youth, picks out the first bars of the E flat minor fugue (the eighth of the “Forty-Eight”) on the piano. The film’s construction can best be explained in terms of a time-fugue. Each generation of the Borg family—Isak, his ninety-five-yearold mother, his son Evald—constitutes a statement of the fugue subject, with Alman (the Catholic husband from the car accident) as a variant. The two Saras—past and present—represent statements of the countersubject. The various parts are developed contrapuntally in continually shifting combinations; the point of maximum contrapuntal involvement is the central dream sequence. Though the parallel is quite close, the form is not forced or externally applied, and there is no question of a schematically detailed working out; indeed, the film could almost equally be seen in terms of a sonata-rondo structure. The sense of a “musical” structure, at once dense, broad, and complex, however, is essential to the total effect and indeed to the meaning of the film. Above all, one mustn’t think of its “musical” form 85

robin wood as something abstract that could be discussed in isolation from the content. As with the use of Mozart in Smiles, the impression given is not of self-conscious and grandiose pretensions but of an artist expressing his natural affinities. One still tends to think of film as related to literature (by reason of narrative content) and painting (by reason of visual composition); the analogies with music are at least as important, film having, unlike painting, a fixed duration in time. The essence of film, as of music, is movement: that complex of movement within the frame, movement of the camera, movement from image to image, which expresses the inner movement of ideas, of thematic development, of the director’s impulses and perceptions and attitudes. It is natural for a director to whom music is itself of personal importance to think and feel film musically. Satyajit Ray told me once that he was conscious of the influence of Mozart throughout the making of Charulata (The Lonely Wife [1964]), and he went on immediately to mention Bergman as a “musical” director (instancing particularly The Silence). The “theme” of Wild Strawberries, incarnated in the successive generations of Borgs, is death-in-life, emotional-spiritual atrophy. It is not simply repeated from generation to generation but developed. We see it in Isak’s much-admired, aged mother (Naima Wifstrand), a hard, mean-minded complacency masquerading as a disillusioned realism of outlook: her children only visit her when they want to borrow money (doubtless true enough!); the relics of the past, photographs of her sons as children, and so forth have become mere “rubbish.” She clutches her souvenirs because they are about all she has left, but they have long since ceased to have any meaning for her. Her life is all peevish, self-pitying bitterness: she cannot see herself as 86

Lessons in Love she is; her existence is a kind of spiritual prison; she will never find the true understanding or serenity toward which we follow Isak’s progress throughout the film. No one has ever told her about herself; Bergman allows us to see her as the “wonderful old lady” of conventional acceptance at the same time as we are aware of her hardness. Like Henrik’s aunt in Summer Interlude, she “doesn’t die”: both old women seem to be clinging on to life by a sheer effort of will. They remind one very much of Granny in Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy: there is the same ruthlessness in their creator’s treatment of them, the same refusal to be blinded by the aura of sentimentality that “wonderful old ladies” are conventionally surrounded by. Isak, on the other hand, is redeemable: the protective façade of complacency and selfrighteousness that precludes spiritual contact can in his case be undermined. Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) says to him in the car the things that no one has ever said to his mother: she shares something of Bergman’s ruthlessness. In Evald (Gunnar Björnstrand) we see the transmitted spiritual condition reach full conscious awareness: if Evald seems the most wretched and tormented of the Borgs, this is the sign that he has the greatest chance of breaking out of his imprisonment. Beyond the three generations we actually meet in the course of the film, Bergman suggests past and future by having Isak’s mother talk of her mother, whom Isak used to visit, and by having Marianne express her fears for the child she is carrying, lest it inherit the “living death” of its forebears. The fact of the child becomes an important presence in the last stretches of the film. Though alluded to only very indirectly in Isak’s last conversation with Marianne, it is very much present in their minds and in ours and becomes one of the focal points of our awareness 87

robin wood of the progress of the film: the dynamic movement toward salvation through many generations as natural life strives to overthrow repression. Hence by means of actual presence or reference, Bergman encompasses five generations within the twenty-four-hours’ time-unity of the film. The “countersubject,” embodied in the two Saras, is spontaneous aliveness. Again there is development between the generations (using the term more loosely—the Saras are not related): Sara I, growing up amid the restrictions and humiliations and lack of privacy of a large Victorian-period family, seems the more confused and disturbed, torn between natural impulse and the dictates of an imposed morality, just as she is between the two brothers Isak and Sigfrid. Something of the complexity and scope of the film can be gauged from the contrast between the two brothers (briefly sketched as it is), with its implied comment on the society that produced them. There is no schematic opposition of inhibition and freedom: both brothers are limited and stunted by their upbringing, but they represent contrary reactions. Isak (Sara says) talks to her about sin and will only kiss her in the dark; Sigfrid is shallow and frivolous, cut off from all the deeper emotions and commitments. (Bergman explores a related but more profound opposition within a family relationship in The Silence.) The contrast between the two Saras shows a similar insight, in terms of social development. If Sara II is freer than her predecessor, she is not presented as an ideal: we are kept aware that the sort of reaction she represents has something in it of willed and self-conscious recklessness, that her freedom is not entirely natural. (At the same time one cannot help feeling that Bergman failed to realize just how annoying Sara II is at times in her insistent “spontaneity”: we are presum88

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Sara II (Bibi Andersson) and her boyfriends present Isak with flowers. Wild Strawberries.

ably meant to share Isak Borg’s attitude of tolerant indulgence.) Part of the ambitiousness of Wild Strawberries lies in its use of the characters to epitomize the movement of society since the late nineteenth century: more than the generations of a single family is spanned in the course of Isak’s journey to Lund. The musical organization of the film can be seen as well in its detail as in the main lines of its structure: everywhere we look we find visual motifs taken up, varied, and developed, like musical themes. There are not just the obvious (at times too obvious) recurrences of images like the watch with no hands. Consider, for example, the following motivic development: during Isak’s daydream, as he lies by the strawberry patch near the 89

robin wood summerhouse where his childhood holidays were passed, he sees one of his cousins (Sigbritt) take her baby from its cradle under the trees; the image contributes to the general impression of fertility in the scene. When he visits his mother, she mentions among her reminiscences how Sara used to look after Sigbritt’s baby. At the beginning of his dream in the car, Isak follows and watches Sara, who goes through the woods to the cradle, under a darkening, ominous sky aswirl with nesting rooks, holds the baby in her arms telling it not to be afraid, then carries it into the house. The family summerhouse merges into the house where she and Isak’s brother dine together during their early married life. Isak approaches the now empty cradle, looks in it for a moment, then moves away toward the house beneath a claw-shaped branch of the tree the cradle is under. Bergman dissolves the image of the branch into the next close-up of Isak as he approaches the house so that for a moment the claws seem to be closing round his head. When Isak wakes up from this dream, Marianne tells him of the day when she delivered her ultimatum to Evald. In flashback we see them standing in the rain by a dead tree; she has just told Evald that she is pregnant, and he tells her of his sense of being “dead, though still alive.” The dead tree symbolism, somewhat crude and obvious in isolation, is partly redeemed, I think, by the complex interaction of ideas and associations here: birth and death, fertility and sterility, the tenderness of motherhood and the barrenness of isolation, the passing of time, the interaction of memory, dream, and reality, the continuity between generations. As one pauses on this set of images, they seem to put out tendrils all through the film. There is the nature imagery associated especially with the two Saras: in opposition to the dead trees, the 90

Lessons in Love wild strawberries themselves; the bunches of wildflowers Sara II and her two boyfriends pick to honor Isak with during the trip to Lund; the meadow of seeding grasses through which Sara I leads Isak to find his parents in the last fantasy. The MarianneEvald flashback is enacted against a somber and troubled sea; in the last sequence of the film Isak tenderly surveys his parents across a sunny and tranquil bay beside which his father is fishing. The dead tree images are linked through the ideas they embody with other images of sterility, life failure, or impotence: the smashed wheel that nearly crushes Isak in the first dream; the burnt ladder of the central dream, by which Isak stands to watch his wife’s adultery in the woods. (The ladder, unburnt, was propped against a tree by the summerhouse in reality earlier, during Isak’s visit: an unobtrusive example of “musical” organization that is also psychologically satisfying, the ladder— of which Isak showed no awareness—being subconsciously absorbed and transmuted into a meaningful image in the dream.) At the climax of the film, when Isak receives his honorary doctorate in Lund cathedral, his voice on the sound track tells us that his mind went back over the events of the day and that “in this jumble of events I seemed to discern an extraordinary logic”: a sentence that provides the clue to reading the whole film. It is hardly necessary to offer a detailed analysis here: for all the complicatedness of its surface, the essential pointers to interpretation are given clearly enough in the film. The explicitness, one hastens to add, is perfectly valid: the pointers are given through Isak’s realization of the relation of the day’s events to his own condition and that realization is what the film is about, so that (for example) when he tells Marianne that the quarreling couple from the accident reminded him of his own marriage, 91

robin wood the admission comes across as dramatically very important, not merely as an explanation for the spectator. The introductory dream confronts Isak with the fear not only of death but of death after a sterile life. The setting of deserted streets and boarded windows represents Isak’s spiritual condition; the clock with no hands suggests not only death but impotence. The man with the parched, shrunken, eyeless, and mask-like face is a dream image of Isak himself; as the dummy man collapses (exuding a thin liquid instead of blood), church bells ring out and the dream passes from death to funeral. The hearse wheel grinding repeatedly against the lamppost and breaking off suggests masturbation (relevant to Isak’s whole nature of a man incapable of warm outgoing feelings toward others). The dream reaches its clearest crystallization of Isak’s fears in the image of the living corpse that pulls Isak down into the coffin and into itself. The corpse is Isak, dressed as for burial in the formal clothes we shall see him wear to receive his doctorate: the human being feeling himself finally swallowed up in his public image of formal dignity and venerated though hollow benevolence. All the episodes that follow during the journey to Lund— actual encounters, further dream, daydream-cum-memory (for Isak “remembers” scenes at which he wasn’t in fact present)— are like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that Isak, jolted by his own subconscious sense of human failure (the dream) to a new vigilance, must learn to put together in order to pass through selfawareness to salvation. The central dream draws together many of the threads. After watching Sara and Sigfrid move from the piano to the dinner table, Isak becomes aware of the moon—of his exposure to its cold, dead stare that seems at once a reflec92

Lessons in Love tion of himself and an accusation—and tries to move out of its glare as, in the first dream, he cowered from the glare of the sun. His hand rubs on a nail by the window as he tries to attract attention, to get inside to security and warmth. The window has blacked over: all he sees in it are reflections of the sky and of his own face. When he looks at his palm it is bleeding. Various ideas are present here: Isak’s sense of exclusion and isolation; masturbation again; and (the bleeding palm recalling the stigmata) a desire to see himself as a martyr, sinned against rather than sinning, which associates with Sara I’s earlier remarks about how he always talked to her about sin and with (later in the dream) his wife’s accusations of his self-righteousness in applying Christian forgiveness as a cold principle. As his face moves away from the window, the place of his reflection is taken by the face of Alman, who in the ensuing examination sequence becomes Isak’s alter ego: essentially, he is interrogating and condemning himself. The examination takes the form of the Swedish Studentexamen (roughly equivalent to the British A level), where the teacher interrogates the student publicly, in the presence of the examiners, except that here, roles are reversed—the old man is examined while the students (including Sara II and her young men) look on. The dream uses Isak’s memories of his medical examination to express his examination (and ignominious failure) in essential humanity. He can’t remember “a doctor’s first duty” (which turns out to be “to ask for forgiveness”); he is found “guilty of guilt” and judged “incompetent.” (The unintelligible writing on the blackboard is an annoying weakness, lacking the suggestive quality of much of the dream imagery and demanding an attention out of all proportion to its expressiveness.) His last test is to diagnose a patient (Alman’s wife, 93

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Isak fails his examination: Sara II and boyfriends look on critically. Wild Strawberries.

Berit) whom he judges dead. She opens her eyes and laughs hysterically and mockingly; in the next episode of the dream the laughter becomes that of Isak’s long-dead wife (still very much alive in his subconscious as one of the sources of his guilt feelings) as she commits adultery in the woods at night. One can easily see why Wild Strawberries has always been not only one of the most admired but most loved of Bergman’s films: its culminating effect of achieved serenity and fulfillment is unique in his work. After his moment of illumination in the cathedral, as the human failure is honored for his public success, Isak sets about putting things to rights as best he can in the time remaining to him. Each attempt is tentative and very 94

Lessons in Love limited in success: his suggestion to Agda, his old housekeeper, that they could now decently address each other by the familiar “Du” is indignantly rejected on grounds of what-would-peoplethink, but we see Agda show him a tenderness not hitherto revealed; his attempt to tell Evald he will let him off repayment of the longstanding loan is misunderstood, yet something of the old man’s mood communicates itself to son and daughterin-law and contributes to their move toward reconciliation. The moment of tenderness and mutually acknowledged affection between Isak and Marianne confirms one’s impression that although the young people seem offered as the alternative to the Borg death-in-life, it is Marianne rather than Sara who embodies the real moral positives of the film. Between the Agda and Evald scenes comes, however, one of its most touching moments: Sara II and her boys serenade Isak under his window before they leave for Italy; the boys depart, and as Sara follows she calls out to Isak that it’s him she really loves. The poignancy arises from our seeing this from two viewpoints: it’s the easy, meaningless banter of a young girl conscious of her own charm, and Isak partly recognizes it as such; but we also know that to him the two Saras are not entirely distinguishable, that the lost possibilities of his youth are present to him again in the girl’s careless remark. After she has disappeared into the darkness he calls softly after her to come and see him, knowing as he says it that she is already out of earshot and would never come anyway. All these incidents lead up to the last dream (or fantasy— Isak is still half-awake). Isak is back in the strawberry patch; Sara I comes to tell him that “There are no strawberries left” and that he has been sent to find his mother and father. He tells her helplessly that he can’t find either of them. She leads him through a 95

robin wood sunny meadow hazy with seeded grasses and shows him them across a bay, father fishing, mother knitting, a stylized group as in a painting. Sara departs, leaving him alone. His parents smile and wave; the father’s rod is bent toward the water, presumably by a hooked fish. Isak smiles tenderly and benignly, as he might at two children, and he is smiling, back in his bed in present reality, as the film ends. Whether his parents really were like that is unimportant; what matters is that Isak can at last see them like that, though their separation from him across the water and his own isolation, as an old man, add a poignancy to the effect of reconciliation. The sense of all Isak has lost in life is balanced, and indeed outweighed, by the peace that arises from the sense of reciprocal forgiveness between the generations—Isak’s parents, Isak, Evald. . . . We recall, perhaps, by association, Marianne’s pregnancy. Wild Strawberries represents the culmination and fulfillment of the Christian side of Bergman; the presence of a benevolent deity seems to permeate the film, in form as well as in an overall mellowness of tone that easily assimilates the incidental asperities. Isak became aware of “an extraordinary logic”: Bergman seems to reconcile this hint at predestination with the sort of “natural” religion upheld by The Seventh Seal (which, it should be remembered, preceded Wild Strawberries). The “extraordinary logic” is also the working out of a natural process. The “musical” organization, the sense of a quasi-fugal working out, satisfyingly expressed Isak’s sense of a pattern in existence. It is significant that the Bergman film embodying the Christian virtues of love, forgiveness, and humility should be centrally concerned with forgiveness between parents and children. The fact that the film proved for Bergman something of a dead end 96

Lessons in Love doesn’t invalidate it. Isak Borg’s relationship to Bergman himself is obvious enough; but equally obvious is the fact that unlike certain of these other figures, Isak exists quite independently as a fully realized character in his own right. The recurring problem for an artist as “personal” as Bergman is that of finding a satisfactory objective correlative to distance his personal concerns sufficiently from himself. In his best work, he becomes too completely an artist for the personal obsessions to intrude to the detriment of the film’s self-sufficiency, and Wild Strawberries is among his best work before the Trilogy. What is a solution for Isak, then, is not necessarily a solution for Bergman, though one cannot but feel that the film fulfilled one side of Bergman’s self, even if it was fulfilled only to be discarded.

The central dream. Wild Strawberries.

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robin wood At the same time, Wild Strawberries, viewed from beyond Persona, will never again appear quite the unchallengeable masterpiece it seemed when it first came out. One’s awareness of what was to follow makes one give more weight to certain doubts that tended to be swallowed up at the time by the impression of completeness the film gave. In retrospect it looks on one level almost too complete, too self-contained in its jigsaw puzzle structure, to stand as an adequate response to the stresses of the contemporary world. Though far removed from Art for Art’s Sake, it is perhaps more satisfying as a Work of Art than as a record of fully lived experience. Aren’t both Isak’s problem and its solution posed (beneath all the rich and complex structural paraphernalia) in too simple terms? Isn’t there a disproportion between the “doing” and what is actually done? And one is so aware of the intellectual virtuosity of the working out that one begins to ask whether it is not all too conscious— whether Bergman was working from the whole of himself— whether the deepest levels of his being were not still untapped. Retrospect brings such doubts to full consciousness, but once they have been recognized, further viewings tend to confirm rather than annihilate them.

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Doubts and Fears The Seventh Seal, The Face, The Devil’s Eye

Gathering storm clouds pierced by sudden light as voices sing loudly and challengingly, then the film’s first clearcut image: filmed from a low angle a bird of prey hangs ominously, poised to swoop: “When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven for the space of about half-anhour. . . .” The quotation from Revelations evokes the idea of judgment and Doomsday; the bird of prey hangs like a shadow over the whole film—the shadow of Death. Sea and sky, rocks on which waves beat, slowly eroding through the centuries. In the context of infinity, or at least vastness, Bergman places two men, a Knight (Max von Sydow) and Squire (Gunnar Björnstrand), lying on the beach in attitudes of prostrate exhaustion. Both clutch weapons: the Knight his sword, as he half-sits propped against a rock, eyes open, perhaps perpetually in vigilance; the Squire an unsheathed dagger, as he tosses in troubled slumber. The Knight goes to the sea, bathes his face, kneels to pray: the long shot places him again in the context of the Absolute, sea and sky. A cut in to close-up shows the uselessness of his prayer: his face remains tense and bitter, 99

robin wood he lets fall his hands. We are also shown two horses, standing in the water drinking intermittently, the only relaxed things, without human consciousness. A succession of shots of waves breaking, with rising volume, then sudden unnatural silence. Death (Bengt Ekerot) appears, a black-hooded figure with a white face: a chess game has also materialized mysteriously, shot against a background of the sea, a striking quasi-surrealist image, the transitory and fragile game of life played out against eternity. Death has come for the Knight, his materialization seeming as arbitrary as the swoop of a hawk must appear to its victim; but the Knight says he has known Death was at his side for some time. As the Knight and Death settle down to their game, a slow dissolve tells us to regard it as continuing, metaphorically, throughout the film. The Knight and Squire, linked by their sense of menaces to be fought off (the weapons), are now shown to be antithetical in the life values they embody. The Squire pulls faces and antagonizes the Knight by singing a bawdy song (“Between a strumpet’s legs I lie”) that expresses a stoical acceptance of death and purely materialist values, comfort and discomfort. Against this is placed the Knight’s unsatisfied questing and anxiety. The Squire mentions terrible omens (“Four suns in the sky,” etc.), which relate to the Book of Revelations and again suggest the Day of Judgment. We see Knight and Squire in distant long shot from above, riding along the beach then up a cliff path, or framed between ominous shadowed cliffs, riding across a patch of brilliant sunlight, reduced to mere specks. The sun (the “Eye of Heaven”?) beats down, the Squire wipes sweat from his forehead. All the death-and-judgment associations the film has by now accumulated receive their most concrete and horrific 100

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Death (Bengt Ekerot) and the Knight (Max von Sydow) playing chess. The Seventh Seal (1957).

embodiment in the corpse from which the Squire tries to find out the way on the moor. The abscess on the cheek shows it the victim of the plague that is ravaging the countryside. The Dies Irae rings out, a distorted fragment, on the sound track, and the Squire, asked by the Knight whether the man told him the way, replies that he said nothing but was “most eloquent.” The horses provide the link with the next set of characters, the traveling players, as the Knight and Squire ride past the caravan beside which the players’ horse is quietly cropping. The background for the Knight and Squire was rocks, waves, and barren moorland; for the players it is lush grass, peace, fertility. The sunlight, with the play of shadows, seems kinder; birds trill 101

robin wood where previously we heard only the raucous, unsettling cry of gulls. The disposition of trees and branches makes an exceptionally graceful composition, into which drapes and shawls slung over the tree fit harmoniously, as if the human were here a continuation of the natural instead of a discordant anomaly. Inside the caravan the three players sleep easily, unprotected, disturbed only by mosquitoes. Jof ’s behavior is relaxed and spontaneous; he wishes he could eat grass like his horse. Whereas Death appeared to the Knight amid rocks and shingle, Jof ’s vision of the Holy Virgin teaching the Infant Jesus to walk is set amid profuse natural growth, framed by tree branches in the foreground of the image. The opposition of the two sets of characters is clinched a few minutes later by Skat’s appearance in a mask as Death, the mask soon being slung on a branch: the idea of death pervades the entire film, but to the actors, with

The players (Nils Poppe, Bibi Andersson, Erik Strandmark). The Seventh Seal.

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Doubts and Fears their spontaneous and unquestioning acceptance of existence, it holds no terrors and can be reduced to a joke. The Seventh Seal lends itself beautifully to this kind of analysis and as such is a tempting gift to the critic who has often found himself quite at a loss to express verbally the essential significance of this or that scene in Hitchcock or Hawks (or, for that matter, in Winter Light or The Silence). A clearly related characteristic is that The Seventh Seal is one of the easiest films to illustrate with stills: stop it at almost every frame and you will find yourself looking at a striking, distinguished, and often very beautiful composition. If one thinks of the film, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a precise image or set of images—the chessboard by the sea, the actors’ caravan in its setting of gracefully branching trees, the first appearance of the flagellants’ procession, the young “witch” (Maud Hansson) bound to the ladder—whereas if one thinks of a Hawks film (or, again, of Winter Light) one’s first impression is far more intangible—a general “feel,” an overall movement. This striking visual quality is obviously the peculiar strength of The Seventh Seal. The images frequently achieve great emotional force. Consider as examples two shots using depth of focus: that in which the Knight in the foreground leads away his horse past an arch through which one sees, in long shot, the “witch” in the stocks emitting animal-like howls of pain as a monk swings his smoking censer beside her; and that in which the Knight and Death resume their chess game in the foreground while, in distant long shot across the meadow, the actors ( Jof strumming on his lute) sit relaxed by their caravan, quite oblivious to the sinister presence. It is nevertheless a somewhat equivocal strength. Those who see the cinema as a glorified extension of 103

robin wood the art of photography will doubtless continue to consider The Seventh Seal one of Bergman’s greatest films. Those who see the cinema as essentially a matter of movement—not just the physical movement from image to image but the inner movement of thought and feeling it embodies, the movement, one might say, of the director’s being—are likely to have fairly restricting reservations. I want to refuse the tempting gift of further detailed analysis of the film’s somewhat “applied” poetic effects—having offered enough, I hope, to show how I think it works and how it should be “read”—and ask why The Seventh Seal remains, for all its distinction, so unsatisfying in total effect. This is perhaps the same as asking why it is not nearly as disturbing as one feels Bergman meant it to be. There seem to me a number of reasons, some general, some particular: a) One’s overall impression is of an inextricable tangle of valid creative pressures and a desire to do something Important and Impressive. The film is never crudely pretentious or merely empty (Bergman’s critical intelligence is felt to be constantly in control), but it comes across as predominantly a public film, a work in which the director is continually conscious of the effect he wants to make on his audience. There is not the consistent sense of inner necessity one feels behind, for example, Summer Interlude or Winter Light. b) Bergman’s imaginative reconstruction of the Middle Ages, both here and in The Virgin Spring, has been justly praised for its vivid and convincing detail. Yet obviously we are not meant to take the film simply as historical reconstruction and couldn’t even if we were. Its concerns are essentially

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Doubts and Fears modern: the film belongs to the Doomsday literature and cinema of the atomic age. Its central figures, the Knight and Squire, strike one as consistently contemporary figures and relate clearly enough to the protagonists of other Bergman films, especially those played by the same actors; the traveling players seem timeless rather than specifically medieval—in fact, they seem to exist in a vacuum. One can ask whether the medieval framework doesn’t make the film’s thematic concerns somewhat remote and schematic, without providing a set of conventions (like the western) within which the director could achieve complete freedom of personal expression. The medieval background is too

The flagellants. The Seventh Seal.

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robin wood real, considered as itself, for it to be easy to focus on as symbol, metaphor, or parallel for the modern world. Instead of enabling Bergman to distance the film’s concerns (the fear of death), it allows him to box them up in images too clearcut and simplified to carry much resonance. c) The structure of the film—in particular, the ways in which the various groups of characters relate to each other—is somewhat facile. It’s organic in that all the characters are related to the central compositional principle of juxtaposing different attitudes toward death, but there are organisms and organisms, and this one holds together rather loosely. In particular, the comic subplot, involving the actor Skat (Erik Strandmark) and the blacksmith Plog and his wife (Åke Friddel, Inga Gill), labored and unfunny in itself, seems hardly to justify its presence by the extra dimension it was presumably meant to add. (“Meant to” is a phrase that seems to recur in discussing this film: Bergman’s intentions are usually clear enough, so clear that one becomes too conscious of them and supposes that Bergman was too conscious of them too.) d) The personified figure of Death and the whole business of the chess game, which permit Bergman some of the film’s most striking and picturesque effects, also raise some awkward and unresolved problems. Only by means of conscious effort, I think, does the spectator connect Death-thecharacter emotionally with the idea of death; the relationship between the two seems uneasy and indeterminate. It is difficult for the spectator’s imagination to adjust itself as the film passes from the stylized death of Skat (“Death”

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Doubts and Fears sawing down a tree) to the realistic death from plague of Raval (Bertil Anderberg), the renegade seminarist. Why does Death (who appears and disappears at will and seems at times to have absolute knowledge of human movements and motives) have to descend to subterfuge (his guise of confessor in the church) to find out the Knight’s stratagems? What does the episode of the Knight’s overturning of the chess pieces to allow Jof (Nils Poppe) and Mia (Bibi Andersson) the chance to escape mean? What does their escape imply? Are they now immortal, or what? It seems inadequate to say that all this means no more than itself, that it is just a bit of one-dimensional, though picturesque,

Death hears the Knight’s confession. The Seventh Seal.

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robin wood fantasy, but it is not easy to “translate” it into abstract terms, and it is too clear-cut to give off the multiple resonances of satisfying symbolism. e) There are other annoying obscurities. Particularly one thinks of the silent (mute?) farm girl (Gunnel Linblom) rescued by the Squire and the sudden significance Bergman seeks to impose on her at the end of the film when Death appears in the Knight’s castle and her face lights up as she says, speaking for the first and only time, “It is finished.” Why does she, and she alone, appear to welcome Death? As a merciful release? (Few of the characters have found life offering much cause for rejoicing.) Or because she has at least tried to perform the film’s most Christian action (taking water to Raval during his death throes)? In fact, the character is too undefined to carry the sort of significance Bergman loads on her: we are simply not much interested in her (any more than we are in the Knight’s wife [Inga Landgré], who has counted for nothing earlier and is abruptly thrust upon us at the end with her function and significance only very sketchily defined). Why does she not participate in the Dance of Death over the hillside at the end of the film? (The absence of the Knight’s wife can be explained by the fact that Jof has never seen her, which perhaps casts some doubt on the reality of his visions.) Are we to see her as “saved”? Again, the character would have to have made greater impact earlier for her (unmentioned) absence to carry such importance now. An example, perhaps, of Bergman’s tendency in films of this period (Wild Strawberries and The Face contain others) to mistake obscurity for subtlety. The Dance of Death itself again evokes primarily

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Doubts and Fears the adjective “picturesque”—indeed, the picturesque plays an unhealthily large part in the total effect, giving one the impression that Bergman was too ready to accept the immediately striking. The images tend to become too much an end in themselves; we have insufficient sense that they are the natural and necessary expression of meaning.

Bergman’s personal involvement in The Seventh Seal is seen most obviously in the portrayal of the Knight and his relationship with the Squire. The genesis of The Face is clear enough in their scenes together, particularly the scene of the witch-burning where the Squire torments the Knight with his sense of “Emptiness” as the solution (or non-solution) to the enigma of life and death. Clear enough, also, that in these two films Bergman uses these actors to project an inner conflict: on the one hand, von Sydow’s anguished doubt, with a strong desire to believe; on the other, Björnstrand’s frank skepticism, with an almost equally strong desire not to. The two sides of the conflict come together at last in the Björnstrand character Tomas of Winter Light. In the witch-burning scene of The Seventh Seal Death asks the Knight when he will stop asking questions. “Never,” the Knight replies. Yet, Death points out, he never finds any answers. Bergman’s obsession with the problem of faith and his inability to resolve it decisively either way helps account for the essentially static nature of many of the films of this period and for the sense that, after Wild Strawberries, he failed to develop along the lines that film seemed to promise but fell back into restatements in different terms of the unprogressing dilemma that is the core of The Seventh Seal. This was the period when both public and critical interest in him waned. 109

robin wood The real crisis and resolution came at last, though still not unambiguously, in Winter Light (foreshadowed in Through a Glass Darkly, unequivocally confirmed in The Silence). Part of the unsatisfactoriness of The Seventh Seal seems due to Bergman’s ambition to create a great fresco that would juxtapose many different attitudes at a time when a single particularized dilemma inevitably drew off his chief creative energies. Which is a way of expressing dissatisfaction with the presentation of Jof and Mia. Not that they exactly constitute a failure: up to a point they

Mia (Bibi Andersson) offers the Knight wild strawberries and milk, while Jof (Nils Poppe) strums on his lute. The Seventh Seal.

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Doubts and Fears are surprisingly successful, endowed with considerable charm and freshness, and the scene where they give the Knight wild strawberries and milk is certainly among the film’s successes. But they are necessarily viewed externally and can hardly sustain the weight of significance imposed on them, particularly in the reference, through their names, to the Holy Family. The values they embody are, again, clear in intention but only partially realized, with the result that one feels Bergman has fallen too easily into a sentimental overvaluation of these characters. The presentation of the Knight raises a final objection to the film: a tendency to overexplicitness that at first may seem opposed to the tendency to obscurity but in fact consorts with it logically enough, since both are symptoms of the same weakness—Bergman’s failure completely to digest the ideas that underlie the film and to realize them dramatically. Bergman’s tendency to project himself too directly into his films, to use characters to speak directly for him, making his themes seem rawly stated rather than enacted, is particularly clear in his use of Max von Sydow, both here and in The Face. Von Sydow’s performances are technically admirable. The fault lies in the somewhat shallow conception of his roles: shallow, despite the fact that he is the mouthpiece for asking the most fundamental questions about existence, because those questions are given so little dramatic context in the lived experience of a created character. “Mouthpiece” is not, I think, an unfair word. An artist’s development seldom moves in a straight line: one expects to find contrary yet coexistent movements and impulses, startling advances (Persona) followed by unexpected

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robin wood retrospective glances (Hour of the Wolf). One can see A Lesson in Love and Smiles of a Summer Night moving toward the culmination of Wild Strawberries. The Seventh Seal, The Face, and The Devil’s Eye offer an overlapping progression, but instead of rising to a culmination the creative drive here seems consistently to dwindle, the stream to dry up or freeze over. All three are films in which Bergman is felt as more directly present than he was in the other sequence: the insistent, explicit note of the Knight’s questioning of existence is unmistakable in Vogler’s anguished self-doubt (The Face) and Don Juan’s awareness of a personal hell of emotional sterility (The Devil’s Eye). What is striking in the Knight’s questioning is the acknowledged sense of the impossibility of progress. Out of some such impasse grew the other two films, and they demonstrate fairly conclusively that religious doubt was only the surface manifestation of Bergman’s problems at this stage of his development, the simplified and explicit formulation of a whole complex of fears, tensions, and uncertainties. To follow the three films through is rather like watching the layers of an onion being removed: religious doubt is the outer skin; fears about the validity of his art, a sense of himself as a mere confidence trickster putting on phony shows for the gullible, are the underlayer removed in The Face. In Don Juan’s fears of emotional impotence and spiritual sterility we seem at last to be confronted with what these films (and Wild Strawberries) were really about. But as Bergman gets nearer the core, his ability to handle his subject matter freely and spontaneously lessens, he increasingly erects elaborate façades and detachment effects around it; one is aware of a painful constraint. The Devil’s Eye is like a film made through clenched teeth.

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Doubts and Fears The period between Wild Strawberries and the Trilogy was clearly a very difficult one for Bergman. During it he made four films: The Face, The Devil’s Eye, and the two films from scripts by Ulla Isaksson, So Close to Life and The Virgin Spring. That his best work at this time was done from another person’s scripts has obvious significance: Bergman had written (or in one or two cases coauthored) all his screenplays since Prison. The trouble with The Face and The Devil’s Eye is not just that they are (respectively) an unhorrifying horror film and an unfunny comedy: both insist on emotional and intellectual pretensions which, if realized, would give them value despite such failings. Nor is it just that they confront the spectator with painful emotional stress: Bergman’s best films do that and far more disturbingly. It is the nature of the disturbance the films evoke that is the real obstacle to pleasure or acceptance: the spectator finds himself disturbed less by the films themselves than by his awareness of the state of mind underlying them. One feels that Bergman was for a time emotionally and spiritually paralyzed and was making films out of his agonized awareness of the paralysis. Significantly, of all Bergman’s films they are the ones where one senses least genuine progression but rather (whatever happens on plot level) an emotional stalemate. “Horror film” is not of course at all an adequate description of The Face, yet the element of the Gothic horror film, especially in the eye-in-the-inkwell, severed-hand-on-the-writing-desk attic sequence, is very deliberate, and from the way it is presented one cannot but feel that Bergman meant us to be chilled by it on that level. The miscalculation is revealing. There are two laws the horror film can scarcely afford to break: we must believe, at

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robin wood least until the final explanation (if there is one), that the menace, even if supernatural, is real; and we must feel some measure of identification with the potential victims. By flouting both laws simultaneously, Bergman achieves a horror sequence full of Gothic images calculated to unnerve, which we watch without losing our composure or detachment for a moment. Besides a horror sequence that doesn’t horrify, The Face boasts comedy that doesn’t make us laugh and anguish that entirely fails to move. The film’s distinctive flavor arises from the discrepancy between our much too acute awareness of what Berg-

The charlatan Vogler (Max von Sydow) meets his alter ego, the actor Spegel (Bengt Ekerot), whose name means “mirror,” in the woods during his journey to Stockholm. The Face (1958).

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Doubts and Fears man is trying to make us feel and our almost total failure to feel it. One could, I suppose, talk about “alienation effects,” but the actual experience is closer to boredom, relieved (if that is the word) only by an embarrassed discomfort. The calculated ingredient (the film suggests at times the artist working from a recipe) of comic subplot is not quite as dreadful in its laboriousness as the turgid Plog-Lisa-Skat intrigue in The Seventh Seal (though the film as a whole is much less rich). This is due to the slightly suspect, but still considerable, charm of Bibi Andersson. Its thematic relevance is obvious enough, with its fake love potions and their possible psychological effects parodying the illusion-and-reality concerns of the main plot. One suspects Shakespeare as model (here and in The Seventh Seal), though there may be Swedish antecedents also. But in The Face the thematic interaction of main plot and subplot seems contrived, loose, and obvious in a way that Shakespeare’s use of comic commentary seldom does in, for example, the Henry IV plays or even in so unsatisfactory a work as Measure for Measure. The state of acute and painful self-consciousness that one deduces from the film makes it more difficult than ever for Bergman (always an intellectually conscious artist) to work spontaneously and allow significance to develop of itself. To complain that in The Face Bergman can only state explicitly instead of realizing dramatically is not to deny that the sense of spiritual paralysis is embodied in the film: indeed, it is embodied effectively enough in the fact that he is able to do nothing but state. The leading characters seem only to exist as mouthpieces for explicit statements, the subsidiary figures to fill functions intellectually calculated rather than emotionally necessitated.

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robin wood In The Devil’s Eye—as a sort of protective mechanism, one senses, against too close personal involvement—distanciation technique is pushed as far as it can reasonably go. Not merely is the action framed within two sequences set in a consciously stylized and theatrical Hell where even the tricks are stage tricks: this is but a frame within a frame, for a commentator (Gunnar Björnstrand), his manner consistently detached, pedantic, and ironical, introduces the film and repeatedly interrupts the action. His function is to make us continually aware that we are

Don Juan (Jarl Kulle) with minor devil (Allan Edwall). The Devil’s Eye (1960).

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Doubts and Fears watching a film: he is a lecturer, complete with stick; he makes wretched schoolmasterly jokes, insisting (in case we are in danger of forgetting it, which we frequently are) that what we are watching is a comedy; and he introduces all the scenes on earth as projected on a screen-within-the-screen. The music—Scarlatti, on the harpsichord—though sparingly used is very conspicuous and thus detaches us from the action whenever it is heard. Its function as incidental music to a film is carefully made explicit by the presence of a harpsichord by the screen in the lecture room. Bergman’s objectivity here is very different from, say, Ozu’s. The latter’s is a matter of artistic principle, Bergman’s one of personal necessity. This “comedy” strikes one as among the most anguished of his films, the anguish itself arising from the icy detachment. Hell in the film is defined as the inability to feel, the inability to have experiences, and this is at once its theme and its form. Jörn Donner says it is “one of Bergman’s least important pictures,” and so far as intrinsic artistic achievement goes one agrees: certainly, one feels little impulse to examine it in detail. When he goes on to say, however, that it is “an uninteresting film, a commissioned job, done with skilled craftsmanship, nothing more,”4 he surely misses its particular contribution to Bergman’s oeuvre. Its thinness and slightness may be due to its being a “commissioned job,” but the peculiar frigidity and sourness of its tone make it in a way the key work of this period, where, through the intricate barricade of distanciation effects, Bergman confronts the core of his own fears, in the person of Jarl Kulle’s Don Juan, in Hell not because he has seduced so many women but because in doing so he has never really felt anything.

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robin wood Bergman’s next film was Through a Glass Darkly, another “minor” and unsatisfactory work in terms of actual achievement but of crucial importance in his development: it appears now clearly as the doorway to his subsequent, and best, work. Before discussing it, it is necessary to take a detour in two films that the critic who concentrates only on development is in danger of underrating and neglecting.

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The Isaksson Films So Close to Life, The Virgin Spring

The Ulla Isaksson films are easily the best Bergman made between Wild Strawberries and the Trilogy. At first sight they may appear to have little in common: a film set in a modern maternity ward, centered on the childbirth experiences of three women; a film set in the Middle Ages, closely based on a folk ballad about a terrible rape, an equally terrible revenge, and the redemption that springs out of them. But the two films are closely connected. They stand a little outside the main line of Bergman’s development yet are thematically relevant to the main body of his work: clearly, he wouldn’t have filmed anything that wasn’t. One guesses that it was important to him, during this difficult period, to find sympathetic material that he could nevertheless approach with some detachment—without the direct personal involvement that partly accounts for the unsatisfactoriness of The Seventh Seal and The Face. Detachment and objectivity are the most obvious characteristics common to both films. In neither is there a consistently central consciousness with which one feels Bergman to be in any way identified: the partial exception is Cecilia, the Ingrid Thulin 119

robin wood character of So Close to Life, to whom I shall return shortly. Both films remain intensely personal in that they are unmistakably Bergman’s from beginning to end, personal in a somewhat different sense from that in which their neighbors are personal. They demonstrate that Bergman would still be a great filmmaker if he never wrote his own screenplays, a director capable of expressing himself through his realization of other people’s. His feeling for the buildup of a sequence, his ability to express and hold in relation all the complexities inherent in a given situation, through the clarity and discipline of his mise-en-scène, are nowhere in his work more evident than in these films—for example, in the scenes culminating in the rape of Karin in The Virgin Spring, or those culminating in the revenge of Töre (Max von Sydow). Joseph Losey described The Virgin Spring as stylistically the most Brechtian film he had seen (he hadn’t seen The Devil’s Eye then!). Even in the most emotionally charged scenes, we are kept sufficiently detached to be able to evaluate the characters’ actions; our analytical faculties remain alert. When Bergman is directing his own screenplays he tends to concentrate naturally on the realization of the leading idea of a given scene; in the two Isaksson films, with his less direct involvement, he tends to explore situations complexly through the mise-enscène, keeping the spectator aware of different aspects of the action, searching out the immediate responses of the characters. One meets again—particularly in So Close to Life—Bergman’s delight in exploring the potentialities of his actresses almost as an end in itself, a characteristic of certain of the looser, less central works of earlier days. Bibi Andersson’s performance as Hjördis stands out in this respect. Though no absolute distinction is possible, some difference can be seen between the detailed 120

The Isaksson Films objective study of behavior here and Bergman’s use of his actresses as marvelous instruments for the realization of his own inner drives elsewhere. Coming straight from these films, one is tempted to wish Bergman didn’t write his own screenplays, and one needs a further viewing of Winter Light or The Silence or Persona to put matters back in perspective. Of the two films, So Close to Life plays the more significant part in Bergman’s development, by virtue of Ingrid Thulin’s performance as Cecelia Ellius, which clearly foreshadows her subsequent work in Winter Light and The Silence, and also because the restricted locale and handful of characters strikingly anticipate the format of the “Chamber Music” Trilogy. There is a crucial difference: the women of So Close to Life are objectively regarded characters, while the people of the Trilogy are nearly all recognizably Bergman inner voices. Bergman collaborated on the script; one wonders how much he contributed to the Thulin character, who seems carried over from the immediately preceding Wild Strawberries. There, she was expecting a child her husband didn’t want. So Close to Life begins with Cecelia miscarrying a baby, and it is soon revealed that the miscarriage had psychological rather than physical causes: her awareness that her husband didn’t want the baby. If anyone wants an example of the difference I have been trying to define between Bergman’s attitude toward characters and actors here and his attitude toward those in his self-scripted films, one couldn’t do better than look at the treatment of the two husbands (Björnstrand in Wild Strawberries, Erland Josephson here): the one an instantly recognizable Bergman figure, the other an objective study in character. But Cecilia strikes one as the most typically Bergman character in the two Isaksson films; the other 121

robin wood leading characters of So Close to Life have clear counterparts in The Virgin Spring but not Cecilia. And she alone comes near at times to becoming a central consciousness through whom we are encouraged to see and evaluate the other characters: we are aware of her watching and weighing them, and to this extent we tend to identify with her. She is the most self-aware of the three women, with a terrible clarity that is at first brutal and destructive but which makes possible her subsequent mature acceptance of her situation. She is also used (rather too explicitly, perhaps) as an author’s mouthpiece to tell us how to “read” the film: during her anguished outburst on knowing she has lost the baby, she exclaims that more than the women’s bodies—their souls also—are to be revealed through the extreme experience of childbirth. Having dominated the film’s opening sequences, Cecilia tends to retreat into the background. The main body of the film is taken up with the revelation of the souls of Stina (Eva Dahlbeck) and Hjördis: the former brimming over with enthusiasm for the baby she is to produce at any moment; the latter unmarried, seventeen, and very bitter, loathing the idea of the baby and tentatively considering another attempt at abortion (the baby has just been saved after her first attempt, which is why she is in hospital). The film is built on the apparent paradox of Stina losing her baby while Hjördis keeps hers, on the pattern formed by their symmetrically contrary progressions. The underlying concept seems very close to D. H. Lawrence’s distinction between the “mental” consciousness and the “bodily” consciousness: in each woman is revealed a discrepancy between what the mind wants and what the body wants, with the body triumphing in each case. 122

The Isaksson Films Hjördis: Environment and upbringing have formed a set of attitudes and values quite at variance with her intrinsic nature. She has tried to abort the baby that consciously she doesn’t want; she hides all her pills instead of taking them, so as to give the baby no help, hoping it will die. She talks about it callously and cynically, appearing completely self-centered with no maternal feelings whatever. Yet her body wants the baby: it resists the abortion, is unaffected by the failure to take the pills. Gradually, the girl’s real self, her real wants, are revealed, to her as well as to us; her final decision to accept the baby is the expression of her newfound wholeness.

Hjördis (Bibi Andersson) shows Cecilia (Ingrid Thulin) her collection of pills. So Close to Life (1958).

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robin wood Stina: She has formed an ideal image of herself—endorsed by the society to which she belongs so that even the nurses accept it as reality—as perfect mother figure, warm, loving, positive, open. For some time the film seems to encourage the obvious “stock” response of sentimentality, taking her at her face value (her own evaluation). So much so that there is a danger of slipping into the opposite, almost equally “stock” reaction of superior contempt for the self-deluding sentimentality of her own attitudes or of finding her merely maddening in her tendency to gush. The actual portrayal, while very critical, is more sympathetic than that, giving due recognition to the positive values of her outlook (before she loses her baby, she consistently helps other people) while recognizing also the dangers inherent in so evident a lack of self-knowledge. Stina wants to mother everyone: the other women, her husband, Harry (Max von Sydow). The baby is to be called after him and its grandfathers: it will be known as Torsten, but to her it will be her Harry: what it won’t have is a name of its own. Clearly she would take her big Harry into her womb too if she could, and he indulges her unquestioningly: everything is to be contained within her. The corollary of this is that she can’t let the baby out of her womb. During the very harrowing childbirth scenes we see her, with rising panic, mentally forcing her body to strain; but her body refuses. Underlying it all is perhaps an intense hatred, springing from her “bodily” consciousness, of the lie her life is. The essential Stina, one feels, is expressed in the slap administered to Hjördis’s hand when the girl tries to give her a glass of water, a slap whose sting the spectator seems to feel: a moment of extraordinary concentrated intensity that suggests the crumbling

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The Isaksson Films of the woman’s whole façade, of the whole false self she has erected and has lived by. The continuity between So Close to Life and The Virgin Spring can be demonstrated readily enough by saying that in the later film Gunnel Lindblom has the Bibi Andersson role and Birgitta Pettersson the Eva Dahlbeck: the simplification is too obvious to mislead. The Lindblom/Andersson parallel is the closer: Ingeri, like Hjördis, is pregnant, unmarried, and tentatively considering abortion (it seems, at least, to be one of the things— besides severed fingers and a variety of animal relics—that the self-appointed servant of Odin offers her in his forest hut). A

Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom) and Karin (Birgitta Pettersson). The Virgin Spring (1960).

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robin wood leading thread of The Virgin Spring is the opposition of the two girls—dark, corrupted, wicked Ingeri and blond, innocent, good Karin (Birgitta Pettersson)—with very much the same reversal as in So Close to Life. Karin’s innocence and purity (taken at her face value, she evokes the same kind of sentimental response as Stina) are very much a matter of a false image of herself by which she lives and which everyone accepts and encourages. It is Ingeri, like Hjördis, who reaches salvation, her “evil” being conscious, superficial, created by circumstances, alien to her true nature. Confronted, in the depths of the forest, by the embodiment of deliberate evil in the shape of the grotesque old man, her immediate impulse is to flee. The idea of “pride before a fall” links the terrible destinies of complacent Stina and arrogant Karin. The theme of grandeur brought low is inherent in the original folk ballad, and understandably common in folk poetry generally: see, among many less familiar examples, “The Twa Corbies,” or “Sir Patrick Spens”— O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords To wet their cork-heel’d shoon! But lang or a’ the play was play’d They wat their hats aboon

—which conveys very much the same feeling as what happens to Karin. But Ingeri is an Isaksson addition, and it seems clear from the correspondence between the two films that the theme embodied in the character opposition is very personal to her. It is also one to which Bergman responds strongly: one need only adduce Wild Strawberries, Through a Glass Darkly, and Winter 126

The Isaksson Films Light to demonstrate the central importance he attaches to the need for self-knowledge and for the stripping away of pretenses. The first thing people tend to notice (quite rightly) about The Virgin Spring is the convincing reality with which medieval life is created. In fact, the film can be sharply distinguished from The Seventh Seal in that the characters of The Virgin Spring are felt consistently to belong to their environment and their period: the universal relevance of the film grows out of the permanent and fundamental drives of human nature, not out of the placing of essentially modern characters within a medieval framework. Throughout there is the sense of life lived close to the basic physical realities, with little to soften or screen, a life against which Karin’s lovely clothes and coddled sweetness stand out in ballad-like relief, carrying strong positive meaning even when the treatment is most critical. Physical experience is consistently vivid, from the opening shots of the pregnant Ingeri blowing the fire and propping open the heavy, primitive skylight with a pole, through the sequence of her hiding the toad in the loaf of bread Karin is to carry with her on her mission to the church, to the brutal details of the rape (most of the impact and much of the point of which were considerately removed by the British censor) and of the father’s revenge. Two small but striking examples: the youngest brother’s casting of earth over the dead Karin’s body and face after the rape; the middle brother’s wiping up of the spilled milk and bread sops with his hands during the meal at the farm. The child’s revulsion at what he has seen (and helped bring about) is expressed entirely in physical terms through his revulsion from food. Bergman’s sensitivity to the nature of material that in some respects lies quite outside the scope of interests revealed in his 127

robin wood own screenplays is evident in his response to the “ballad” aspects of the film. He uses traditional but highly evocative imagery with great assurance and subtlety. There is the opposition of light and dark, clustered especially around the two girls: their contrasting hair and complexions; Karin’s white horse, on which she rides to church with the Virgin’s candles, and her association with sunlight, sparkling water, fertility; Ingeri’s crouching in dark interiors or in the shadows of steps. The mystical number three runs through the film as a leitmotiv: Ingeri blows the fire three times before it crackles into flame and thrice invokes Odin; Odin’s servant hears three dead men (the ghosts of the goatherds to be slain at the next dawn?) riding north. There are the three bearded men (father, ploughman, eldest brother) who in turn stimulate Karin sexually during the first part of the film; three brothers who are jointly guilty of her rape and death; the ensuing triple murder of the father Töre’s revenge; the three branches we see him hack from a birch tree for his ritual purification before the slaughter. Above all, perhaps, there is the use of the elemental imagery of fire and water: the fire Ingeri blows into being at the outset, which is linked to her deliberately inflaming herself to evil and carries its traditional associations of lust and the flames of purgatory; the purifying waters of the spring that flows from under Karin’s head, where she was struck her deathblow. Bergman returns to the fire repeatedly during the film, and its effectiveness is less a matter of symbolic meaning than of accrued emotional associations and its suggestion of time-continuity. As Töre stands armed with his butcher’s knife to slaughter the two men and a boy guilty of his daughter’s rape and murder, we are shown again the smoke from the fire Ingeri blew up passing through the skylight she propped open; the sky 128

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Gunnel Lindblom as Ingeri. The Virgin Spring.

lightens and a cock crows as they did at the film’s beginning. Thus the nightmarish horror of events is set against our sense of daily routine, and, simultaneously, we are reminded of how relentlessly those events have developed out of that opening. The opposition of light and dark in the imagery suggests a clear-cut duality in nature, a concept the film gradually undermines, giving the simple opposition ironic overtones. Nothing is quite as it appears; nothing is unmixedly pure or simply evil. The goatherds emerge out of “nature” as its representatives: respectively, animal instinct (the eldest is tongueless and can only emit animal-like noises, which the second brother interprets), animal cunning, and animal innocence. They are not symbols of evil, only of a nature where instinct and impulse easily override 129

robin wood concepts of right and wrong. Goats are traditionally symbolic of lust and used as such in association with the goatherds; yet Karin, at her moment of realization, when the toad falls out of the bread and she sees what the men will do, clutches a kid to her as an emblem of innocence. Karin’s own “innocence,” real enough in one sense, is highly suspect in others and is inseparable from her seductiveness. She provokes her own rape by flirting with the goatherds, exploiting her “innocent” charm, spinning romantic fantasies to them about her father’s grand castle—which is why they fail to guess, before it is too late, the identity of the owner of the primitive farm at which they try to sell her fine but bloodstained clothes. The “innocent” boy helps trap Karin. True, he doesn’t know what is going to be done to her, but when he sees a helpless and terrified young girl struggling to escape, his “natural” impulse is not to help her but to help catch her. In the world of The Virgin Spring, good and evil are like subterranean streams, potent, determining matters of life and death but invisible and mysterious. No one is pure. Töre and Karin kiss good-bye like lovers, while the mother (Birgitta Valberg), no longer physically attractive to her husband, gets the merest peck on the cheek from her daughter. The motivation behind Töre’s revenge is slightly suspect, let alone the morality of the action: haven’t the goatherds done to his daughter what he subconsciously wanted to do her himself ? Märeta, Karin’s mother, is eventually led to admit to jealousy because Karin prefers Töre to herself (but never to admitting that her jealousy may be not for her daughter but of her) and has a premonitory nightmare of disaster overtaking Karin that could easily be interpreted as

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The Isaksson Films Freudian wish-fulfillment. The intricate pattern of guilt within the family expresses itself in religious performances of atonement, such as Märeta’s pouring of hot candle wax over her wrists and Töre’s self-flagellation with the birch branches. The treatment of religion in The Virgin Spring is perfectly consistent with that in Bergman’s films from The Seventh Seal to Winter Light. Conscious outward shows (the flagellants’ procession in The Seventh Seal; Märeta’s self-mortification and Töre’s ritual purification) are worthless, stupid, and degrading. Karin’s virgin candles and virgin mission only serve to add to her sexual allure. In the world of “mixed” nature, purification can come only by the fulfillment of evil and the passing beyond it. The spring flows when Töre promises to build a church “with my own hands.” He still doesn’t understand, but the hands (given intense visual and dramatic emphasis, still caked with the dried blood of his victims) that performed a violent destructive action are now to perform a constructive one. The sense of purgation is strongest with Ingeri, in whom the natural process of the purging of evil by its realization has been nearest to full consciousness. The concept of what could be called “natural” religion, God expressed in terms of salvation-through-naturalprocesses, is consistent with the “natural” lives of Jof and Mia in The Seventh Seal and with the transition from a theoretical belief in “God is love” to a practical sense of God-in-humanrelationships, which is one way of interpreting the end of Winter Light. The Virgin Spring is a near perfect film that, for all the Academy Award and superficial acclaim, has not had the recognition it deserves. The “picturesque” elements, never obtrusive, never

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robin wood there for their own sake as in The Seventh Seal, have played altogether too prominent a part in what serious recognition the film has had. Bergman’s one mistake is the hymn-singing at the end in a final tableau that cries out for the sounds of birdsong and running water in the surrounding stillness.

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The Trilogy Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence

At the start of Through a Glass Darkly appear the words “To Käbi, My Wife”: as far as I know, this is the only example of a dedication in Bergman’s work. Diffident as the critic may be about prying into private matters and resolute to talk about the art, not the artist, with films as personal and often introverted as Bergman’s, it becomes difficult to keep the distinction absolute. Here, it seems to me, we have an open invitation to look for personal implications. Immediately before making the film Bergman married Käbi Laretei, a well-known pianist. In making the dedication public, he clearly wished to mark the beginning of a new phase in his development, and, dedications apart, Through a Glass Darkly certainly marks one. The opening images, of four people emerging from the sea, have an arresting freshness that also seems to promise a new beginning. The whole film, with its clumsiness and uncertainty, and its evident genius, has something of the quality of a first work. The leading theme of The Face was a bitter-ironic defense of the artist’s deceptions and trickery: it can be taken as Bergman’s somewhat equivocal acknowledgment (in a film abounding in 133

robin wood the picturesque) of the spuriousness of the “spectacular” elements in his films: all those striking visual effects with which he had achieved his greatest public and critical successes in The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. One thinks of Yeats’s very similar self-realization and rejection of all he had come to feel as external to the essentials of his art, when one arrives at Through a Glass Darkly: I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat.5

Bergman, like Yeats, had come to see that “there’s more enterprise/In walking naked,” and from Through a Glass Darkly on his art does so, despite continuing intermittent temptations to varieties of fancy dress (Now About These Women; Hour of the Wolf). Not only is the spurious coat cast off; The Face’s specious defense is rejected with it. The most obvious distinguishing characteristic of the Trilogy is bareness: a bareness that, in Through a Glass Darkly, leaves every flaw exposed, and that is the outward manifestation of a magnificent self-discipline and self-critical intelligence. The coat that Bergman cast off was not worn merely to impress his audiences, and it is not only the baroque ornamentation and structural complexity that are stripped away. One notices at a glance through Bergman’s recent work that (with the usual exception, Now About These Women) the positive values centered in the Bibi Andersson characters of The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Face have gone for good. One always 134

The Trilogy sensed a willed quality in Bergman’s belief in them; the characters one feels him naturally drawn to are the Squire (who stands out as the most rounded and created character in The Seventh Seal) and Marianne in Wild Strawberries, both of whom have a clear prophetic importance in relation to the films of the Trilogy. Bergman dressed his art in a coat partly to protect himself from its secrets. Perhaps every human being needs a coat, even a Bergman; but to dare to live without one is, one might say, the duty of the major artist and the sacrifice he makes. T. S. Eliot’s “Human kind cannot bear much reality”6 is a simple truism (from one who wove his own particular Anglo-Catholic vestment). Bergman’s progress through the Trilogy to Persona and Shame has been quite simply a movement toward complete exposure of himself to reality. He is a great modern hero. Any criticism of his films, from Through a Glass Darkly onward, that loses touch with the fact of his heroism is mere impertinence. In Through a Glass Darkly the exposure is not absolute. It is an extremely important and extremely unsatisfactory film. To demonstrate its unsatisfactoriness one has only to point to what is beyond question the worst ending in mature Bergman. But it cannot be isolated there: abrupt and arbitrary as the ending seems, it relates quite interestingly to Bergman’s treatment of characters and themes throughout the film—for instance, to his use of Bach. The distance traveled between Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence can be measured by the way Bergman uses Bach in the two films. In the earlier, one of the suites for unaccompanied cello is used as incidental music—as “director’s comment.” Its function is to express the compassion we are meant to feel for the characters and, beyond it, consolation: 135

robin wood it tells us, as clearly as Gunnar Björnstrand and with infinitely greater conviction, that “God is Love.” In the hotel room of The Silence, in an atmosphere at once desolate and suffocating, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) switches on her portable radio and a faint, remote tinkle of Bach harpsichord music emerges. Her sister asks her what it is. “Bach” she replies, “Sebastian Bach,” and her voice expresses a hopeless yearning for a stability and certitude that have become unattainable. Göran Persson’s all-too-brief analysis of Through a Glass Darkly in Movie is a useful starting point.7 Dr. Persson’s suggestion that the film should be read as an interior dialogue, in which the four characters represent different aspects of Bergman’s psyche, seems to me a valuable pointer to understanding not only this film but to some extent the whole Trilogy. The father (Gunnar Björnstrand), horrified at his own tendency to study coldly his daughter’s lapse into insanity, relates clearly enough to past Bergman protagonists appalled by their own emotional frigidity. Minus (Lars Passgård), Karin’s younger brother, anticipates the Jörgen Lindström of The Silence and Persona: the young life whose survival and potential growth becomes of crucial importance. Where Dr. Persson goes wrong (following, perhaps, Bergman’s evident conscious intention against the film’s real emotional pull—a mistake much easier to see in retrospect from beyond The Silence than at the time) is in his treatment of Karin (Harriet Andersson) herself. He sees her as “dismissed” by Bergman, as an aspect of himself he could not outgrow and move beyond. On the contrary: if a single outlook dominates Bergman’s work subsequent to Through a Glass Darkly it is Karin’s: she is the emotional center of the film and Bergman’s attempts to negate or “place” her influence are quite impotent. 136

The Trilogy Karin’s emergence as a new “personal” character is the chief contribution Through a Glass Darkly makes to Bergman’s development, and its importance can scarcely be exaggerated. It coincides significantly with the relegating of the emotionally impotent characters (the father and, to some extent, Martin, Karin’s husband [Max von Sydow]) to a comparatively subordinate role. The concern with emotional paralysis and the anguish resulting from recognition of it, explicit in Wild Strawberries and The Devil’s Eye, assumes different aspects in The Seventh Seal and The Face, but the sense of impotence is common to all these films. The Knight’s powerlessness to help is insisted on repeatedly— the agnostic Squire helps people ( Jof, the farm girl) far more than the Knight does. It is especially striking in the scenes with the “witch.” The most powerful scene in The Face is probably that in which Mrs. Egerman visits Vogler at night and he is tormented by his inability to help her. In Through a Glass Darkly such concerns take second place to Karin’s “madness,” a madness that is also a peculiar clarity of vision. The ice of Bergman’s “frozen” period is shattered at last, and it is Karin who emerges. Perhaps Don Juan’s fear of not being able to feel anything, which appeared the heart of the onion, was after all only another layer, concealing a fear of feeling too much, too intensely. Bergman’s great error in Through a Glass Darkly (an error amply compensated for later) was to make Karin insane. Her vision of reality embodied in a “Spider-God” is (stripped of its pseudo-religious terminology) essentially the vision of The Silence, or what Elizabeth Vogler sees and communicates to Alma in Persona, or the world of inescapable horrors and cruelty of Shame. In Through a Glass Darkly Bergman is clearly half-afraid of her, though she is an essential part of himself that had been 137

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Karin (Harriet Andersson) with her father (Gunnar Björnstrand). Through a Glass Darkly (1961).

struggling for recognition through the whole series of preceding films. So he pretends that “God is Love, in all its forms” and that Karin can be dismissed as mad: he sends her off in a helicopter, to be encompassed with the love of all the men—father, husband, brother. But beside what Karin has seen underlying the petty subterfuges and pretenses of those who surround her, their love is feeble and spurious. Nothing in the film contradicts or even modifies Karin’s vision, yet Bergman hasn’t yet the courage to accept it unequivocally. And, in the comparatively insulated world of Through a Glass Darkly, she can still just pass as insane. The petty failures and spinelessness of her fa138

The Trilogy ther and her husband offer small justification for her vision of a “Spider-God.” It is ironic that the film Bergman seems to have seen at the time as resolving his problems—the film that passes from “To Käbi, My Wife” to “God is Love in all its forms,” the father’s ignominious retreat into an insulating complacency, though it is not presented as such—is in fact the film that at last releases (through Karin) the true Bergman vision. One is tempted to see that ending as ironic, but nothing in the presentation supports this view. One can only say, in Bergman’s defense, that the consistent undermining of the father throughout the film suggests Bergman’s lack of confidence in his last words. They are indeed mere words. In anyone’s memory of the film, it is Karin and her Spider-God that remain; David and Martin evaporate. Minus remains, as yet, a mere shadowy presence. Winter Light opens with a service in which a priest celebrates communion with a congregation of nine (including the verger, there only to take the collection), of whom five are communicants. Only one of the nine (an elderly woman dressed in traditional rural style) appears to feel the service as an important experience; about one other (he turns out to be Algot Frövik, the crippled sexton [Allan Edwall]) the film is at this stage noncommittal. The remaining seven all display varying degrees of apathy or alienation: the old gentleman who begins packing away his hymn book during the closing “Amen” gives the impression of being there because that is what he has always done, part of a way of life; the mother with the bored little girl, who licks the back of the pew in front and then falls asleep, seems to treat the service as the “done thing”; the verger is troubled by a cough in 139

robin wood the middle of the singing, more from boredom than illness. Of those who are to prove major characters in the film, Märta Lundberg (Ingrid Thulin) seems overtly ironic and detached (although she leads the communicants to the altar, after an uneasy pause); Jonas Persson (Max von Sydow) appears preoccupied, and his wife, Karin (Gunnel Lindblom), seems quite unused to receiving. The organist yawns, and surreptitiously reads magazines. The first quarter of an hour of the film is an astonishing tour de force of exposition, with only one word (Mrs. Persson’s “Thanks,” as Märta helps her to her feet—she is pregnant—after communion) beyond the text of the service, but all the main characters and central issues are firmly established. The whole development of the film is implicit in the first shot: in medium close-up the pastor, Tomas Eriksson (Gunnar Björnstrand), standing before the altar, his face and voice tense with reluctance and resentment, speaks the words describing the Last Supper. The sense of absurdity, of which he as well as the spectator is fully conscious, is strong throughout the scene: the spectacle of human beings performing a ritual that is meaningless to nearly all of them, including the pastor himself. Although Winter Light is one of the most uncompromisingly severe films ever made, it hovers for much of its length on the verge of being very funny. The opening service, the conversation with the Perssons about the Chinese and the Bomb, Märta’s breakdown in the schoolroom: our primary awareness is consistently of the tragic, but because of the pervasive sense of absurdity it is a tragedy that threatens continually to become farce. At moments the dialogue even suggests a subtler, more understated Ionesco: Mrs. Persson: “You see, we’re confused. . . . [Pause.] Well, not me so much [self-deprecating smile]. . . . But my husband is confused. . . . 140

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The opening service. Winter Light (1963).

[Pause.]” Tomas (self-consciously, while Jonas Persson sits in a silence half-desperate, half-embarrassed): “And what exactly are you confused about?”—the very word, in its repetition, comes to sound unreal and slightly ridiculous. The receiving of the bread and the receiving of the wine are shot in quite distinct ways. During the former, filmed in a single take, the camera is behind the communicants; we watch Tomas pass from one to the other with the plate of wafers, each time uttering the words about Christ’s body, with an increasing awareness of their meaninglessness to him, so that it is as if the formula must be deliberately forced out. The concentration demanded by the continuous take makes us feel every hesitation. The receiving of the wine is shown in a series of close-ups in 141

robin wood which each communicant is subtly characterized in relation to the communion: the sexton closes his eyes after drinking; the old countrywoman is the only one of the five who places her hands over the priest’s on the chalice, not self-conscious about physical contact, wholly intent on the sacrament; Jonas Persson keeps his eyes lowered throughout (the chalice has to be put exactly to his lips, and he drinks in a clumsy and passive way); his wife looks up at the priest with an ingratiating and apologetic smile, as if pleading for reassurance. The essential of each character is thus economically suggested: only Märta—the only one filmed in profile—is enigmatic here. At the very start of the film, Tomas leads the congregation in the Lord’s Prayer. As the traditional words are repeated, Bergman gives us a brief montage of three shots, showing the exterior of the old church across tranquil water, among wintry birch trees, its wooden bell tower beside it, harmonizing peacefully with the landscape. The whole opening sequence emphasizes the idea of alienation from the past, from the traditional beliefs and customs that formed the basis for a way of life. On one level, the film can be seen as a spiritual documentary on contemporary Sweden, where a life previously rooted in a strongly traditional rural folk culture has been dislocated by the rapidity and efficiency of modern development, so that inhabitants of villages like that shown in the film live between two worlds, belonging to neither, bewildered and unfulfilled. In the opening service, only the old peasant woman seems entirely congruous with her surroundings. Cultural contradictions form an unobtrusive background throughout the film. Jonas, with his “traditional” humble profession of fisherman, drives an expensive-looking shooting brake; as Tomas prepares to leave 142

The Trilogy the schoolroom, a plough horse is led past his large, smart car; the bells of Frostnäs church are rung by machinery, and electric light has taken the place of candles. “It’s my opinion that electricity spoils our service,” says Algot the sexton, and in the context of the film the simple remark assumes a far-reaching significance. Waiting for Märta to bring him some aspirins in the schoolroom, Tomas encounters one of her pupils and they talk briefly about confirmation. The boy’s elder brother has been confirmed—is he going to be as well? An embarrassed “No.” “Didn’t your brother like it?” Tomas asks, with an inane attempt at contact. “I don’t know,” mumbles the boy. But if the scene suggests the obsolescence of the church, it also evokes, through its setting and through the flashy American-style comic the boy has come to collect from his desk, the lack of organic relationship between education, the child’s environment, and the nature of his interests. The incongruities here offer an epitome of the sense of rootlessness experienced by nearly all the characters in the film. Later, as Tomas and Märta drive to Frostnäs church from Mrs. Persson’s house, the car is held up at a level crossing while a train pulling huge industrial containers hurtles before them across the darkening and desolate countryside. The containers are shaped like huge coffins: the symbolism is very complex and inexplicit, a matter more of resonances than of meanings. Tomas has just broken the news of Jonas Persson’s suicide to his widow; as he and Märta wait for the “coffins” to pass, he tells her it was his parents who wanted him to enter the church. Winter Light is an intensely personal film. It is quite short (eighty-one minutes) and covers a period of about four hours in the lives of a handful of characters living in a small and 143

robin wood insignificant corner of rural Sweden. Yet without ever violating strict narrative unity, without any suggestion that anything is being imposed on the characters and situations that doesn’t grow naturally out of the dramatic data, the film epitomizes perhaps the most essential inner movement of Western civilization in the last hundred years: the movement away from religious orthodoxy, the discovery of God’s “silence” (or nonexistence), the progression into a kind of tentative existentialism. We are far here from the grand but spurious gestures of The Seventh Seal; there is nothing picturesque, nothing inorganic, and nothing suspect about Winter Light. Yet Pastor Tomas is clearly a return to the succession of emotionally sterile characters from previous films: in fact, through him this concern reaches definitive expression. He unites within him the leading characteristics of all his predecessors. He has the Knight’s religious doubts, in an even more intense and more urgent form because of his role as priest. In his public capacity he has to put on displays, like Vogler, which have pretensions to supernatural significance and which he feels to be frauds. In his personal relationships he has the “death-in-life” quality of Isak and Evald Borg and of Don Juan. Finally, through his confrontation with Jonas Persson, the “Karin” vision is released in him and accepted as all-too-horribly sane. At the core of the film—it occurs almost exactly halfway through—is Tomas’s full and explicit realization of his atheism. Behind it is the whole spiritual history his conduct of the opening service implies, and more specifically his relationships with two women, his late wife and Märta Lundberg. But what immediately precipitates it is another, more casual relationship,

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The Trilogy that with Jonas Persson. We have here, in effect, the genesis of Persona: one party (priest, nurse) in the relationship has the ostensible function of “curing” the other; he sees his essential, unacknowledged self reflected in the other’s despair and is led to discover that self fully for the first time; the discovery not only leads to his total inability to help but involves him in the destruction—actual or attempted—of the other person and undermines his belief in his assumed, outer identity. The parallel holds good even to the end of the two films, with the protagonist resuming his “uniform,” despite all the changes that have taken place inside. Like everything else in the film, the Persson scenes are remarkable for their economy and discipline. There is nothing in them, in terms of dialogue and action, that couldn’t be done on a stage, yet they are conceived in terms of essential cinema. Anyone who doubts this might consider precisely how the effect is got at the moment when Tomas, having told Jonas automatically that “We must trust in God,” meets the other man’s eye and looks down, with a sudden awareness of his own hypocrisy, of the shallow glibness of the phrase in his mouth, of his own disbelief. It is not just that the acting is cinematic acting, too subtle and understated to make its effect in the theater: the secret is to a great extent in the editing, in the way the cut frames the actor’s movement in time, as it were, as well as in space. Tomas sees his own essential despair made explicit in Jonas. The latter’s fear of the Chinese—they are “brought up to hate” and in a few years (the film was made in 1962) will have the Bomb (“They have nothing to lose”)—is at once slightly (though not rationally) ridiculous, spelled out in the vestry of a village

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robin wood church in rural Sweden, and a perfectly valid focus for the generalized sense of meaninglessness and horror Jonas communicates to Tomas. The Chinese and the Bomb here point forward to the more vivid and “present” use of Vietnam and the Warsaw Ghetto in Persona. We feel rather than are shown the emptiness of Jonas’s background—the failure of the environment to provide the means to fulfillment for a man educated beyond it. There is also his wife, Karin, a character who appears little and says little but is defined with great exactness and justice: a decent, unimaginative woman who would make a good wife for an untroubled country fisherman, satisfied in her role as wife and mother; she is disturbed by her husband’s fears but unable to share them with him, incapable of grasping the issues, either the explicit ones or the unacknowledged ones they represent. We see that Jonas’s description of her as “a good wife” is in a conventional sense perfectly true; we also see that his relationship with her contributes significantly to his despair. We watch Tomas, then, as he offers Jonas the stereotyped phrases of pastorly comfort, discovering their hollowness. During their two scenes together the reciprocal nature of the men’s effect on each other is very exactly conveyed. For Tomas, Jonas becomes an embodiment—almost a demonstration—of his own precariously suppressed sense of nothingness; as that sense is released, surging irresistibly up into explicit realization and statement, the other man becomes little more than a pretext, an object. For Jonas, Tomas’s full realization is the confirmation of his own despair. Through their confrontation, both men find freedom. After Jonas has left (he seems to disappear—he has become so superfluous to Tomas that the latter seems uncertain how long he has been gone), Tomas stands by a church window. 146

The Trilogy The sun comes out, and he is suddenly bathed in a cold, bright light. He exclaims, “God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” It is the film’s central moment—in time (almost exactly) and in meaning. The ambiguity of effect is crucial: the light, directly contradicting the words that recall Christ’s “blackest” moment on the cross, can be taken as ironical, as if nature itself were mocking Tomas, or straightforwardly, symbolic of a true, if terrible, illumination. “Free at last,” Tomas exclaims, and he is promptly doubled up at the altar rail by a fit of coughing. Jonas, too, is now “free” and celebrates his freedom by going out and shooting himself in the head with his shotgun. The sequence of Tomas’s visit to the scene of the suicide is worth detailed examination as an example of the bleak and austere “poetry” (for want of a better word) that characterizes the film. It is filmed entirely in long shot: we see Tomas arrive, talk to the policemen, remain alone with the body until the men come to remove it on a stretcher. Nothing “happens” in the scene; the characters are too distant for facial expression to be clearly visible; their words are obliterated or muffled by the roaring of the rapids. There is little sense of organized “composition”: a drab hopelessness, a sort of emotional paralysis, hangs over the whole sequence, and the seeming randomness of everything emphasizes this. Throughout, a snowy drizzle falls, quite unbeautiful and undramatic, making the natural setting dull and undistinguished: not hostile to man’s despair but merely inanimate and material. We have time to observe all the details of the scene: the body sprawled in a shapeless, ungainly posture, without dignity; the boys who found it standing listless yet curious on the bridge, chivvied away by the policemen; Jonas’s shooting brake parked across the river, just visible, beside 147

robin wood the drab and indifferent forests. We have time to wonder why he drove out there, parked the car, walked across the bridge to blow his brains out on the opposite bank. All this intensifies our sense of meaningless. We see—almost feel—the rough, stiff tarpaulin spread clumsily across the body, supplying a crude wrapping as it is carried away on the stretcher. The water reminds us of Jonas’s profession as fisherman; the dam looks pitifully inadequate to hold back the power of the water, whose dull and unrelenting roar deadens all human intercourse. The atmosphere of the scene becomes an extension of Tomas’s state of mind. Its extreme slowness is dramatically necessary, communicating to the spectator Tomas’s sense of the dragging of time—actively painful rather than merely tedious—in a life lived in the terrible void of “God’s silence.” The extreme detachment allows the spectator to ponder not only the concrete details of the scene but the issues underlying it: the fact of death in a godless world; the complex question of Tomas’s moral responsibility for the death, which resulted from a failure to carry out a duty that no longer held any meaning for him, from his belated and ruthless honesty with himself and the other man; the interchangeability of the two men. Yet the shaping impulse behind the film remains, as usual with Bergman, positive and creative in spirit. Bergman’s fear of falling victim to wishful illusions leads him, in Winter Light and his subsequent films, to distrust all human emotions, motivations, relationships, to underline at every point the insidious twistings of egoism, pride, self-deception in his characters; and the ending of Through a Glass Darkly is there to prove that such a fear is partly justified. It is this rigorous, insistent questioning and distrust that give the affirmative tendency of the later films 148

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Despite Märta’s (Ingrid Thulin) pleading, Tomas (Gunnar Björnstrand) feels unable to pray for a cure for her eczema. Winter Light.

its lean and austere strength. In Winter Light this tendency is manifest especially in the development of the relationship between Tomas and Märta. Märta looks somewhat like Tomas’s dead wife, as we see from the photographs of the latter that he examines before reading Märta’s letter. The photos have “Rakopia” (rough print) stamped across the forehead, like a disfigurement, evoking the difficulty of sustaining one’s feelings for what is dead: Tomas’s “Min älskling” (“My darling”) is spoken more in the tone of a man struggling to feel something than of one really feeling it. 149

robin wood There are hints that his need to preserve his wife’s memory is partly responsible for his taking up with Märta, whose face is like a coarser copy of the pallid, refined face of the photos. Tomas accuses her later of “aping” his wife, telling her it’s a “hideous parody”; Märta replies with surprise that she had never even met her. But if Tomas has looked for his dead wife in Märta, he has found her direct opposite. Where the wife has devoted her energies to nourishing and protecting Tomas in his comforting cocoon of religion, Märta either deliberately or inadvertently undermines his faith with her every speech. The developments in the relationship during the four-hour span of the film’s narrative are all implicit in this basic situation: Tomas’s brutal and vindictive revelation of his hatred for Märta and the subsequent realization of new possibilities emerging out of the ruins of Tomas’s faith. Before such a realization can take place each character must be broken down, all illusions, protections, and defenses shattered. Each is broken down in their own stronghold—Tomas in the church, Märta in the schoolroom. In both cases we are made acutely aware of the inadequacy of public service to provide fulfillment: Tomas tells Jonas that his only purpose since his wife’s death has been to be of “use.” Conventional education is not “treated” in the film in the sense in which conventional religion is, but we are made to feel its irrelevance to the environment. The only possibility of “salvation” the film offers is through human relationships, and that only very tentatively. (In the brief flashback during the letter, Märta recalls how she prayed to God to put her strength to some use, and her prayer has been granted—the “use” in her case is Tomas.) The schoolroom scene is, in its sense of human beings totally exposed to 150

The Trilogy each other, raw-nerved and vulnerable, among the most painful and ugly in all Bergman (which is to say, in all cinema). The analogy that comes to mind is of poisonous secretion at last erupting from a long-covered wound. Tomas turns on Märta to destroy her because she isn’t his wife—because he needs a scapegoat on whom to take out his bitter fury at the wasteful cheat of his existence, because he associates her with the breaking down of his insulating Christianity. At the same time, we see the justice—justice untempered by mercy or charity—of all Tomas says. Märta is a marvelously rounded and complex character: we are very far here from the “illustrative” characterization of The Seventh Seal and The Face, where the characters seem designed primarily to express an idea or point of view (with the Squire a partial exception). There is Märta’s admirable strength, her capacity for deep emotional self-commitment: she kisses Tomas on the mouth; he stands stiffly, making no response, then says frigidly, “Now you’ll get my cold.” Märta smiles and says she doesn’t mind catching it from him. But this is felt to coexist with characteristics of the sort Tomas ruthlessly catalogues for her: he speaks of her “fussy endearments,” of her tendency to demand that he busy himself with her ailments—“your stomach upsets, your eczema, your periods, your chilblains”—and while we are shocked by the emotional brutality, the utter lack of sympathetic insight, we cannot but feel that the attack has its validity. Tomas feels that he must free himself from her imprisoning trivialities. We recall her earlier description of herself (in the letter) as brought up in a family for whom religion was never an issue: she has lived her life on a level where the ultimate questions that torment Tomas, of faith and doubt, of essential meaning, don’t enter. 151

robin wood The turning point of the film is simple, unobtrusive, and apparently arbitrary: Tomas’s moment of hesitation and decision when, leaving Märta seemingly annihilated in the schoolroom, he opens the outer door, pauses, shuts it again, and asks her to come to Frostnäs with him. No motivation is offered; we are shown the action in long shot so that nothing is revealed through the actor’s face; again the long shot has the function of keeping us detached from the action so that we are free to contemplate its causes. This moment of hesitation whose resolution provokes crucial developments, marked by the opening and shutting of a door, has become important to Bergman: he uses it again in The Silence, to mark Anna’s decision to force a showdown with Ester, and in Persona, to mark Alma’s decision to try to compel Elizabeth to speak. In each case nothing is spelled out for us: we are given the external action and are left to guess at the unspoken, perhaps partly unconscious drives it expresses. Tomas’s decision to invite Märta to accompany him grows out of nothing, out of the void the two have reached and must choose to fill or leave empty. The emotional muddle and subterfuges of the past have been swept away: both are without masks, fully revealed both to themselves and to each other. The ending of Winter Light is remarkable for its combination of complexity of meaning with the most extreme simplicity of statement. It is so ambiguous as to verge on the merely enigmatic, but its ambiguities are in fact coherently organized and artistically meaningful. The overall sense of the film is inextricably bound up with its attitude toward Christianity and to Christ himself. No fewer than three of the characters are variously identified or compared with Christ. The immediate reaction of those unfamiliar with the film may well be “How preten152

The Trilogy tious!” One can only insist that the distance between the artist’s ability and his ambitions that the adjective implies—a distance easily apparent in Prison and more subtly disguised in The Seventh Seal—is nowhere evident in Winter Light; the posturing and self-conscious straining after effect that naturally accompany pretentiousness are entirely alien to its austere intensity. At the center-point of the film is Tomas’s “God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” The film covers roughly four hours, and the sexton reminds us near the end that this was about the duration of the Passion. The sexton’s twisted body can itself (in the context of the film) be seen as relating him to Christ’s sufferings; he makes the comparison explicit in the vestry at Frostnäs, when he tells Tomas that physically he has suffered at least as much as Christ. He goes on to say that Christ’s real torment must have been mental—his sense that no one has understood his mission, and his sense in extremis of being abandoned by God: Algot’s repetition of Christ’s words and the phrase about “God’s silence” make clear the relation of this to Tomas’s “passion.” The third Christ figure is Märta: a curious Christ, who is both a woman and a self-professed atheist. But the “stigmata” of her eczema can hardly be coincidence: we learn from her letter that it began around the forehead (the crown of thorns) and spread to the hands and feet. Also in her letter she speaks of Tomas’s “extraordinary indifference to Jesus Christ,” which she has never been able to understand, and of the repugnance her eczema aroused in him so that he couldn’t even pray for her. This point that emerges—which the priest himself is forced to confront—is that Tomas’s “Christianity” has almost nothing to do with Christ. He has believed in a God who, as he acknowledges to Jonas, “loved all men, but myself more than anyone 153

robin wood else”: the comforting private god his dead wife helped him nourish, who instantly became a “Spider-God, a monster” when confronted with reality. Tomas has to learn to accept a Christ who can be found, in one form or another, in the human beings who surround him, in the cruel and ugly physical reality from which he shrinks. A humanized Christ: not necessarily a God. The end of the film, where Tomas decides to hold Vespers in a church empty but for Märta, the sexton, and the organist, is susceptible to quite opposite interpretations, neither of which is decisively disprovable: Tomas’s faith has been restored; Tomas is now a convinced atheist who (I quote from the anonymous blurb on the Calder and Boyars paperback of the script) “lacks the strength to abandon the corpse of his faith.” Both interpretations seem to be more than doubtful, and the fondness for choosing one or other seems explainable only in terms of the natural predilection for the decisive ending one way or the other. I had better say, too, that Bergman’s own retrospective remarks to the effect that in Winter Light he finally settled his religious problems seem to me misleading when applied to the film, however validated by his subsequent works. Tomas’s face at the end as he speaks the words “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, all the earth is full of Thy glory”—apart even from the inescapable irony of the words in the drab, constricted world (both physical and spiritual) of Winter Light—should be enough to warn one off accepting the “Christian” interpretation too easily. If not quite the resentful face we saw at the start of the film, it is certainly not the face of a man who has rediscovered his faith. On the other hand, there are various pointers to make us doubt the validity of the “atheist” interpretation. For one thing, Bergman emphasizes the fact that there is no need for 154

The Trilogy Tomas to celebrate Vespers. It may be laid down as an official pastoral duty, but neither the sexton nor the organist seems to regard it as such; Tomas is ill and the congregation consists of one woman who accompanied Tomas on entirely non-religious grounds. The presence of just one other person in the congregation would make all the difference: then we could see Tomas faced with the need to decide whether to make a decisive stand on his newfound atheism or simply let things drag on hopelessly. But Bergman has organized the scene so that Tomas could easily go home to bed and think things over: no self-committing decision is demanded of him. If he holds the service, it is from personal choice. There are two other incidents to be taken into account (and, behind them, the whole weight of the film up to and including Tomas’s decision in the schoolhouse to ask Märta to accompany him). The first is Tomas’s conversation with Algot about the Passion. Algot remains to the end a somewhat cryptic figure, mysteriously touching: one can take him as Bergman’s acknowledgment of the continuing possibility—and possible validity— of an unquestioning faith, and he hovers around Tomas at beginning and end as if watching over him. We see that his words to Tomas have some positive effect, even if it is only to open the priest’s mind to further possibilities. Yet the words themselves have their inherent ambiguity. What does Tomas take from them, and from his awareness of the parallel that he himself drew earlier? That even Jesus—experiencing human life, human suffering, human sin to the full as part of his divine mission— had his moment of doubt? Or that Jesus at the ultimate moment was suddenly and horrifyingly confronted with the fact of his own self-delusion? The words could confirm Tomas in atheism 155

robin wood or Christianity equally; the point is that, however ambiguously, they bring him nearer Christ, helping break down his sense of total isolation. The second incident is Märta’s prayer. Before it, the organist deflates for her the myth of Tomas’s “ideal” wife. Märta prays to no clearly defined god: “If only we could believe in something. . . . If only we dared show tenderness. . . .” During her prayer, Bergman cuts to a shot of Tomas huddled over the table in the vestry, also in an attitude of prayer, while Märta’s words continue on the sound track. The overlap suggests that the words are also Tomas’s—it is almost the only place in the film where sound is used non-naturalistically. The hint of some form of communion taking place between them—or at least that both have reached the same state of mind—confirms our sense of new, if undefined, possibilities now open to them. And indeed, one feels the whole structure of the film lies behind this: the ways in which the two characters run parallel, each broken down and stripped of all illusions and pretensions on his own ground, then each receiving necessary, if inadvertent and indirect, help from outside (the sexton, the organist). The form of the film resembles that of Wild Strawberries, though stripped of all ornamentation, and one could still see in the pattern the implication of a presiding deity. The ending of the film is in fact among the most genuinely “open” in the cinema: neither Christian nor atheist, neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It is an ending of uncompromising honesty, its complex impulses and uncertainties evolving inevitably out of what has gone before. Tomas, for all his flu and misery, has an awakening if very tentative sense of fresh potentialities: whether they are Christian or atheist it is impossible 156

The Trilogy to say. Certainly they are bound up with Märta and all that has passed between them. He holds the service at the end for her, and for himself: the irony is very beautiful and touching, the disillusioned priest celebrating Vespers for the confirmed atheist as a sort of inexplicit communion between them, using the traditional forms, which are all he knows, to express something not necessarily related to any orthodox Christianity. “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, all the earth is full of Thy glory”: we have passed from the bitter and unmitigated irony of the opening communion service to an irony complex and qualified. Sibelius’s Fourth—a work as austere, compressed, and enigmatic as Winter Light—is as far as I know unique among symphonies in ending not with a decisive fortissimo or pianissimo but with an indeterminate mezzo-forte. No conductor in my experience has ever played it like that; similarly, few seem willing to accept the very precisely defined “mezzo-forte” of the end of Winter Light for what it is. The Silence is one of the most difficult films to feel one’s way to the heart of: to do so requires an act of courage that testifies to the extraordinary courage of the man who made it. One watches the film almost emotionlessly, as if paralyzed, and comes out feeling that one has experienced very little. Then hours—or even days—later, one comes to realize how deep and disturbing the experience has been; or one finds ways of insulating oneself—it’s a “sick” film, its piling on of miseries and perversions is ridiculous, one was really laughing at it all the time; or, alternatively, it’s too obscure to be accessible, it doesn’t “communicate.” And in the latter case one goes on to talk of symbols: the dwarfs, the tank outside the hotel in the night, the emaciated 157

robin wood horse: they must all “mean” something, and we don’t know what, so we can protect ourselves from the film by pretending we don’t understand. Perhaps it is worth beginning by insisting that the dwarfs are dwarfs, the tank is a tank, and the horse a horse: there they are on the screen, fully integrated in the action, to prove it. There is nothing in The Silence that cannot be explained “naturalistically,” in the generally accepted dramatic-cinematic use of the word, and the film is not particularly obscure. I am not sure that attempts to allegorize The Silence are not also rooted in a subconscious desire to distance and perhaps reduce it—to resist the idea that the characters on the screen are direct reflections of ourselves. Such attempts seem to me doomed to differing degrees of failure. Two are worth considering, one metaphysical, one personal. First, the metaphysical: the film is about the eternal conflict of the spiritual and physical; Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) represents body, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) soul: only through union and harmony could wholeness be achieved, and the two are locked in permanent combat. This sounds—if we withdraw some distance from the detail of the film—temptingly feasible. But the temptation should be firmly resisted: to force The Silence into this kind of allegory is to simplify and schematize. If Ester were merely “soul” she wouldn’t have to masturbate and wouldn’t be physically attracted to her sister: one cannot allegorize away facts given so potent a concrete reality on the screen. And if Anna were merely “body” she wouldn’t feel guilt. Each sister, in fact, possesses in a suppressed and perverted form the more obvious attributes of the other. Ester and Anna are before all else rounded and complex characters that defy allegorical schematization.

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The Trilogy

Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom). The Silence.

The detailed observation of human behavior is very important in the film. Consider the sequence culminating in Ester’s masturbation. We see her hand reach out to switch on the radio. A dance tune: her fingers drum, alertly and rhythmically, on the radio’s top. Then she changes wavelength, finds something romantic-classical. Her face becomes sentimental, self-pitying: we see how easily she can let herself be affected by outside stimuli. The music continuing, she crosses to the next room where Anna and Johan ( Jörgen Lindström) are sleeping. She pauses over Anna, fingers her hair, clearly wants to touch her but daren’t disturb her; then she passes to Johan, touches him very lightly, withdraws her hand. Every detail so far suggests Ester’s

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robin wood need for the satisfaction in some way of urges that remain undefined and her inability to find any. If her desire to touch Anna suggests lesbian affection, her desire for contact with Johan universalizes it into a general need for human tenderness. We are very much aware—here and elsewhere in the film—of time as a physically experienced phenomenon, of minute dragging on to minute, “dreary-swift, with naught to travel to.”8 Ester returns to her own room, gazes out of the window. An old horse, horribly emaciated, every rib visible, is painfully dragging a loaded junk cart. Ester watches it and responds with pity that is also self-pity: she sees the horse as a reflection of herself and as an epitome of the miseries of the world, as, even more powerfully, Elizabeth will stare transfixed at the immolation of a Buddhist monk on television in Persona. Ester turns away and returns to the bed and a bottle of alcoholic drink: a shot of her feet impatiently kicking aside her slippers suggests her state of mind very economically, and we have been made very precisely aware of how that state of mind has evolved. There follows the very charming encounter with the old waiter (Håkan Jahnberg). Ester is already slightly tipsy, and is suddenly caught up in a merriment that bears no relation to the details of her situation but is accountable for in our sense that her moral qualms about getting drunk have been overcome. She tries out various languages and then mimes that she wants another bottle. The masturbation comes as something of a shock on the screen, but retrospectively we can see how logically (yet unobtrusively) every detail has led up to it; it is what Ester had been unconsciously moving toward throughout the sequence, ever since she deliberately rejected the radio’s dance music for music that would lend itself more to emotional self-indulgence. And if the sterility and 160

The Trilogy loneliness of the action, presented so badly, horrifies, there is no sense of simple moral condemnation: having achieved orgasm, Ester turns aside to sleep, momentarily appeased. It is clear that this sequence is not the work of a director concerned with allegory but rather with the complex and unpredictable, yet logical behavior of a given human being in given circumstances. What strikes one especially about the scene is its flexibility of mood and its openness of attitude. If the idea of a dislocation of the physical and spiritual sides of human nature is present in the film, it is as a theme explored through the characters and action, embodied in different ways in both sisters, rather than as an allegory in which each sister stands for something clear-cut. The theory of the film as a personal allegory, in which the characters represent different aspects of Bergman’s own psyche, is much more cogent and much less restricting. One can see it as an image of a shattered personality struggling toward wholeness, or casting off old growth, irreparably stunted and damaged, so that healthy new shoots can emerge. The shock of the sexual scenes has tended to concentrate people’s attention on the two sisters; this interpretation has the great virtue of directing attention to the crucial role of the boy Johan. The emphasis throughout is on the boy’s looking, reflecting, assimilating, adjusting. He has the child’s healthy ability to put aside without fuss whatever he can’t yet cope with, whenever it is possible. Thus the old waiter’s disturbing photographs of his parents’ corpses laid out for burial are pushed casually under the corridor carpet. Having written that, I immediately realize its insufficiency; to pause on this tiny but characteristic detail is to register something of the openness of the film’s method and attitude. The pushing of the pictures under the carpet (as opposed to throwing them aside 161

robin wood or tearing them up) suggests an act of suppression as much as a healthy casualness; if the boy represents new growth in the broken personality of which the film is a reflection, we are never unaware of the dangers that threaten it both from without and within. On the one hand, there are the disturbing forces that impinge on Johan’s consciousness; on the other, our doubts, for all his evident resilience, as to the adequacy of that consciousness to continue to cope effectively with them. Our sense of the child’s vulnerability is intensified by the film’s suggestions that potentially corrupting or stunting forces can be present in even the most relaxed and innocent-seeming encounters—that impurity pervades all adult life. Consider the kindly, humane old waiter, one of the film’s most touching characters, with whom Johan passes some minutes of real companionship, despite the fact that they share no word of each other’s language. He shows the boy the disturbing photographs; he also plays a funny but very macabre game with a phallic sausage, wrapping it up as a baby in a lettuce-leaf bonnet then abruptly biting its head off as a punishment for some imagined incivility. Earlier, Anna’s delight in caressing and perfuming her son’s body came across as charming, yet carrying, in its erotic overtones, obvious dangers. The games with the dwarfs are also charming, but one can hardly fail to see somewhat sinister implications in the all-male dwarf troupe’s alacrity in clothing Johan in a girl’s dress (remember that hand beckoning in close-up from the forefront of the screen!): implications that seem confirmed by the dwarf-boss’s disproportionate rage when he finds the games in progress. (The script is more explicit: there one of the dwarfs “runs up to Johan, takes both his cheeks in his hands, kisses him and begins talking in distraught tones. . . .”)9 It would 162

The Trilogy do the film a disservice to suggest that the disturbing overtones of these scenes cancel out the charm; the point is rather that they are inseparable from it. We certainly don’t see the dwarfs (or indeed any of the characters) as evil. But while sexuality and its pervasive influence and power are among the central concerns of the film, there is another whole range of dangers with which the boy is particularly associated: the mysterious outer world from which the characters are cut off but which is felt as a potent menace. It is the boy who watches the interminable procession of tanks on a passing train as they approach Timoka, the boy who is awakened by the sound of jet planes screaming overhead, the boy who watches the tank that, never revealing any human occupants, lurches noisily into the square outside the hotel in the middle of the night down a street too narrow for it, stops for no explained reason, and some minutes later, equally arbitrarily, lurches out again. The sense of a world out there, at least as terrible in its way as the inner world of desire and its frustration, is the more disturbing for remaining undefined: one has an impression of mysterious and terrible forces quite beyond the individual’s control. The notion that the boy is an embodiment of new growth and new awareness in Bergman gains great strength from this, for this growing awareness of a terrible outer world was to develop in subsequent films: one can trace its development from Jonas’s fears about the Chinese in Winter Light, through the tanks and planes of The Silence and the Vietnam and Warsaw Ghetto references of Persona, to its eruption in Shame, where it becomes the central theme. Further, one now sees the sequence of the intercutting of shots of tanks with shots of Johan’s bewildered watching face as a striking anticipation of the credit sequence 163

robin wood in Persona, where Bergman makes the special function of the boy (same actor) explicit by removing him from the narrative framework. As far as Johan is concerned, the personal allegory approach has something to be said for it, so long as we don’t use it as a means for withdrawal from the film, telling ourselves that if it’s a film about Bergman it can’t also be a film about us. Yet even here it would be a pity if any “symbolic” reading were allowed to detract from the significance arising naturalistically out of the action. Johan as a character in a given situation is throughout entirely credible in his behavior, and any symbolic force he may have must be felt to grow out of this. The film’s last scenes particularly invite a symbolic interpretation. Ester’s letter to Johan, a short list of those “Words in the

The horse. The Silence.

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The Trilogy Foreign Language” that she has managed to pick up, gradually assumes great importance, and certainly Bergman heightens its significance through the heading (“The Foreign Language,” where it would be natural for Ester to write its name) and through the crescendo of train noise that accompanies and seems in danger of overwhelming Johan’s reading. We are certainly encouraged to find “meaning” here: Johan inheriting a tradition of intellectual curiosity (his absorption in the letter coinciding with his turning away from his sensual mother); the difficulties of communication and comprehension. Yet the letter’s importance works consistently in terms of the characters’ individual psychology. Throughout the film we have been aware of Ester’s frustrated need for human contact; she finds it, very tenuously and unsatisfyingly, with the old waiter and somewhat more positively with the boy. Because she knows that Anna and Johan are to leave, that her last chance of meaningful contact is being withdrawn, the word list that was undertaken as a casual game becomes her central preoccupation; her whole consciousness focuses on getting the letter into Johan’s possession. As for Johan, his transferring allegiance from his mother to Ester is central to the movement of the film, and before we see it as a symbolic choice we feel it as a moral decision that arises primarily from his awareness of the women’s attitude toward him. All he carries away, concretely, of Ester is the letter. And so we have the beautifully delicate irony of the last moments, with their implicit judgment of Anna: jealous, suspicious, and guilty, she demands to see Ester’s letter; when she grasps what it is, she hands it back contemptuously, with a patronizing “How nice of her.” She is quite unable to grasp its significance for the boy or to see that it is precisely what she feared it might be: 165

robin wood the token of Ester’s final ascendancy. What makes the whole business of the letter so poignant is our awareness of its precariousness, of its inadequacy to express all that Ester wants to communicate and all that Johan wants to receive. The effect of the film’s final image is dual: we feel the strength and intensity of the boy’s determination to understand and through this the strength of Ester’s need to pass on whatever is left of any value in her stunted, wretched existence; but the crescendo of noise on the sound track seems to obliterate the words that are not, in fact, spoken, reminding us of all the forces and pressures with which the boy’s developing consciousness will have to contend. Clearly we cannot talk here of distinct “levels”: the symbolic significance grows naturally out of the narrative. The most important “symbolic” action involving the boy is perhaps Ester’s “Resurrection” (if that is what it is): an action as unobtrusive in effect as it is uncertain in interpretation. Ester reaches the crisis of her breakdown (which is clearly both physical and psychological) and appears to be in her death-agonies; abruptly she draws the sheet clumsily over her head, as if to signify death, and lies still. Johan advances from the doorway and pulls the sheet back, whereupon Ester opens her eyes and tells him she isn’t going to die. Again, actions and words are perfectly natural, and we are free to take them simply at that level: there is no sense that Bergman is trying to impose significance on them through directional heightening. Yet the boy’s role in the film as a whole leads us to see a meaning here beyond the simple actions: Ester’s words can mean three things: (1) She doesn’t want to frighten Johan. (2) She sees herself as living on in him through the medium of the letter, which she at once proceeds to give him. (3) She feels that she has passed through her crisis and literally 166

The Trilogy won’t die now. Most critics have assumed Ester is left behind to die at the end, but it seems to me that Bergman carefully leaves this open: the uncertainty expresses his personal uncertainty. We are very far, with Johan, from the idealization of youth and corresponding rejection of full adulthood typical of early

Resurrection? (Ingrid Thulin and Jörgen Lindström). The Silence.

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robin wood Bergman. What is emphasized throughout is the inquiring and growing side of the boy’s nature—his progress toward a relatively untrammeled adulthood, in fact—which makes of him a figure very different from the doomed young of the early works. And if Bergman is partly identified with him, this is never at the expense of sympathy with the world of adults. Ester, indeed, is clearly in direct line of descent from the Bergman-projection figures of preceding films—the Knight, Vogler, Pastor Tomas. Like Tomas and unlike the other two, she is a completely realized character in her own right, all that is personal to Bergman in her being adequately distanced and objectified. She inhabits a different world from those of her predecessors, a world where the problem of belief in God has been finally and devastatingly resolved, and consequently she is a very different person; yet few, I think, will question the family resemblance. At the end of The Seventh Seal it was the simply living, “natural” Holy Family— the slightly suspect Christian side of himself ?—that Bergman spared, perversely dooming those characters more central to his own psyche, to give the film a spurious final uplift. Jof and Mia have no counterparts in The Silence; here Bergman is more mercilessly honest with himself, yet at the same time more compassionate toward his own essential nature. One might suggest, tentatively, that the possibility of Ester’s survival of her ultimate crisis corresponds to Bergman’s survival of the experience of the Trilogy, where artistic creation and lived experience seem to interact so closely as to be inextricable; that both are in a sense reborn in Johan; that as The Silence is partly seen through the eyes of Johan as child, Persona is seen through the eyes of Johan as adolescent; and that Shame, in its strong directness, purity, and simplicity, is a film directed by Johan grown to manhood. 168

The Trilogy I entirely disagree with Jörn Donner that The Silence expresses “disgust for mankind.”10 Though the method is consistently objective, there is never any sense that Bergman puts that kind of distance between himself and his characters. One feels his closeness to them personally and the great effort of discipline and control involved in the process of objectification. Stylistically, the film is notable for its searching close-ups of the women’s faces, as if Bergman were trying to get the closest possible contact with his characters while remaining objective in his treatment of them. Any sense that the film expresses “disgust with mankind” might reasonably be felt to center upon the cinema scene, where Anna watches two lovers copulating among the seats while the troupe of dwarfs grotesquely cavort on the stage. That some sort of “meaning” is implied by juxtaposing the two seems undeniable. But equally it seems obvious that the sort of crude and simple A = B parallelism, classically exemplified in Eisenstein, cannot possibly operate in the divided and complex world of The Silence, a world full of conflicts and uncertainties. The lovers and the dwarfs are both presented as grotesque spectacles, with an effect of degradation, but the differences are at least as important as the resemblances. The dwarfs are performing for money; society has reduced them to prostituting themselves and exploiting their own deformities. The lovers, by contrast, are performing not for an audience but despite it: they look up briefly at Anna, as she is shown to her seat, as at an intruder and then lose all awareness of her. The dwarfs on the stage are reduced to the status of a mechanical toy; what Bergman emphasizes in the lovers is their total abandonment so that they are aware of their environment only as a set of minor incidental obstacles insignificant in relation to 169

robin wood the overwhelming force of their immediate need. What is important in the scene is not that we are shown copulation but how it is presented. Leaving aside depictions of rape, has any director shown sheer physical desire and ecstasy so powerfully on the screen? (The only close approximation I can think of is Buñuel in L’Age d’Or [1930].) The awkwardness of the bodies on the seats, the force and brutality of the movements with which the couple handle each other: beside this, almost all other cinematic lovemaking tends to look too aesthetically beautiful. By reducing human lovemaking to its basis in brute desire among such surroundings, Bergman isn’t expressing disgust but insisting on man’s divided nature: on the continuing and unassimilated power of basic drives after centuries of civilization. What is remarkable about the sequence is its complexity of feeling, hence of effect: if it doesn’t express a simple disgust, neither does it express a simple admiration or a simple anything else. If it evokes horror in the spectator, through his civilized sense of lovemaking become a public display in squalid surroundings, it equally evokes a powerful erotic response. (The British censor’s cut, though slight in extent, by depriving the copulation of its climax, does enormous harm by emphasizing the squalor at the expense of the ecstasy: a more “moral” effect, no doubt, but very much less disturbing.) The presence of the dwarfs in the scene brings closer to explicitness the sense of the messy and accidental nature of man’s evolution, the radically un-Christian sense of human existence as a weird anomaly, that underlies the whole film. Through the exploitation of their deformity as public spectacle, the dwarfs add another dimension to our awareness of Bergman’s despair at the very concept of “civilization.” 170

The Trilogy Though we are certainly asked to regard the characters critically, to see their limitations and their weaknesses, we are never allowed to look down on them or feel them as humanly inferior to ourselves. We never lose respect for Ester, even when we watch her getting drunk and masturbating (on the other hand, the attitude is not one of indulgent permissiveness). If anything, we feel the characters as our superiors, in their intensity of feeling, their frankness in pursuing experiences to the uttermost. At the risk of provoking a few raised eyebrows among my readers, I may say that I don’t find the people of The Silence particularly abnormal, beyond the selection and emphasis inherent in the act of creative organization. How many people do you know who are complete human beings? The characters’ abnormalities, in any case, are not the important thing about them. The Silence is a film in which Bergman tries out, through an imagined action, various impulses to see where they lead, examining them honestly, in a very complex way. Before the hotel and the unintelligible foreign language are regarded symbolically (spiritual desolation, impossibility of communicating), their “naturalistic” function must be fully grasped. The completeness of their isolation both throws the two women back on their own inner resources and provokes the crisis of the conflict between them; it exposes them and tests them as they would not normally be exposed and tested in their usual environment, insulated within familiar protections. What is exposed and tested is the essential reality of themselves: they are faced with ultimate truth that, in the bareness of the hotel and the lack of outward contact, there is no hiding from and no softening. And there is no longer the possibility of seeking comfort or meaning in religion. The silence of the title is presumably God’s silence, 171

robin wood awareness of which so tormented Tomas in Winter Light; but here God is not so much silent as completely absent. Only the faintest resonance remains of a past when religion meant something: in Anna’s hesitation before telling Ester that she and her café waiter copulated in a church and then, qualms dismissed, in her use of the revelation as a stroke of particular cruelty and defiance. The sisters, cut off from any sense of meaning beyond their physical existence, and equally from any healthy, developing tradition of which they could feel a part, and which could give their lives dignity and significance, use and misuse their bodies in desperate efforts to find release for the urges imprisoned in them. Hence the film’s insistence on the extremes of sexual experience. The various sexual acts are removed from any framework of conventional morality—from any external and imposed “Thou shalt nots.” If such a morality is present in the film, it is in Ester, and her right to maintain it is consistently undermined and questioned. The acts are presented as part release, part frustration: they give a comfort felt to be purely temporary and in no way a resolution of the deeper frustrations experienced by the characters. Curiously, by the end of the film it is Ester who, for all her sexual disgust (“Semen smells nasty. . . . I stank like a rotten fish when I was fertilized”), emerges as the less abnormal of the sisters: Anna’s ravenous sexuality divorces sex entirely from love; in Ester’s physical approaches to her sister, we can at least feel that sexual yearning is not finally disjunct from the tenderness and complexity of feelings that go to make up complete human love, that it is not exclusively a matter of unsatisfied appetite. Again, the most revealing approach is through the characters’ individual psychology. From the outset the two women 172

The Trilogy are strikingly contrasted in externals: in the heat of the train Anna’s hair is drawn back, but even here she wears it relatively loose, and we become used later to seeing it hang freely; Ester’s is drawn tight, away from her face, giving it an almost masculine appearance. Anna wears a low-cut, close-fitting dress, Ester a plain suit. In the hotel Anna sleeps naked, Ester wears manly pajamas. In her lesbian approach to Anna, Ester clearly wants to take the man’s role in the relationship, protecting and dominating. A few hints help us trace these masculine traits back to Ester’s identification with their father (when he died, Ester said that she didn’t want to go on living). It is easy to see how lesbian tendencies might derive from such an identification, but it is clearly insufficient to describe her feelings for Anna simply as lesbian: she has taken over something of the father’s role. Hence her assumption of the right to pry into Anna’s affairs, to examine her cast-off dress when she comes home, to question her (demanding, as Anna says she has before, “all the details”), to express moral disapproval from a position of apparent authority. All these can be explained equally as sexual jealousy and as the direct result of Ester’s father-identification—so can her repeated use of the word “humiliating” to express her feelings about Anna’s behavior. Anna can also be explained in relation to this part-described, part-implied background. The close communion of father and elder daughter would be likely to lead to precisely the rejection that we see in Anna of all they stand for. Feeling herself cast out, the younger sister reacts by intuitively refusing all those aspects of life through which her father and sister express their intimacy and by correspondingly intensifying within herself that side of life in which the intimacy of father and sister is debarred: it is 173

robin wood a common enough situation. Both women emerge from it as incomplete personalities. Ester’s sexual disgust is a reasonable enough consequence of her relationship with her father, which would at once develop the masculine side of her personality and inhibit the development of normal female sexual feelings. In Anna it is the intellectual-spiritual side that is inhibited; hence she is much less consciously aware than Ester of her own incompleteness. Yet Anna is continually trying to repudiate Ester’s (the father’s?) influence. She denies that she is afraid of Ester any longer, yet she is driven to acts of defiance and cruelty the deliberateness of which implies that Ester is still a force she feels she has to combat. When Ester comes to the room where Anna and the waiter from the café have been making love, Anna carefully “stages” a demonstration of sensual abandon for her; the precariousness of this willed defiance becomes clear in the confrontation that follows, culminating in Anna’s hysterics and Ester’s departure. Those who see the buggery scene as an expression of pure horror are, it seems to me, importing their own simple attitudes and substituting them for the far more complex ones in the film. The scene as filmed cannot be reduced to simple horror. There is a disturbing sense of unnaturalness, certainly, in the way the man’s limbs appear behind Anna, so that we only gradually realize he is there: a moment in which Anna appears to have a second pair of arms. The use of long shot shows us the two in the context of encroaching darkness (Anna, in her hysteria, has overturned the lamp) and keeps us aware of the drab surroundings. As the man enters her, Anna calms, though she never ceases to look miserable and remains entirely passive. One cannot see the man as merely callously using her: there is an unmistakable 174

The Trilogy physical tenderness. In fact, the scene is no more anti-sodomy than it is pro-sodomy: the treatment of the sexual act here is absolutely consistent with the treatment of sex elsewhere in the film. It gives a partial, temporary comfort while remaining quite inadequate to satisfy Anna’s lasting needs; we are aware, from the moment of her breakdown, that a whole side of her being is crying out for expression and for human response. We see her dressing in the bleak morning light, looking weary and disillusioned, the man sprawled over the bed fast asleep.

After denying earlier that she was still afraid of Ester, Anna becomes hysterical when Ester confronts her in the room where she and the waiter (Birger Malmsten) have been making love. The Silence.

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robin wood In denying that the dwarfs were symbolic, I had in mind the simple sort of A = B symbolism suggested by the question “What do they mean?”: one cannot but see them as a metaphor for the characters’ incompleteness, their arrested growth. Yet they are dwarfs first and symbols afterward, and an examination of the scenes they appear in will show that Bergman uses them for much more than a single, easily defined purpose. Tomas in Winter Light said that when he confronted his comforting “EchoGod” with reality, it became “a Spider-God, a monster.” In the God-forsaken world of The Silence, the dwarfs are an extreme image of that reality, products of a cruel accident of mindless nature: the god who wittingly created them would be monstrous indeed. Some strong image to express this idea forcefully was, I think, essential to Bergman at this time. Their relaxed (if, as I have suggested, somewhat disturbing) gaiety in their scene with Johan has to be set against the squalid misery of their stage appearance, leaping each other’s backs like performing dogs, marching off bent double and interlinked like some nightmarish, semi-human obscene centipede: their means of subsistence in a world that can use them only as a spectacle for its debased amusement. The dwarfs, in their robust and uncomplaining acceptance of their lot, are, in a sense, the heroes of The Silence. The full force of Bergman’s use of them is felt at their last appearance, as they pass Ester in the corridor as she stands on the verge of collapse outside the door behind which Anna’s waiter is buggering her. She has never seen the dwarfs before; they are dressed as for their stage show, some in women’s costumes; the last is dressed as Death. One or two of them greet her with gestures, some carry opened bottles: a procession of half-drunk, transvestite or fancy-dressed dwarfs along a hotel corridor in the 176

The Trilogy middle of the night. Ester gazes at them hardly surprised: they crystallize for her the sense of the monstrous absurdity of existence. At the same time, one is very much aware of the dwarfs as human individuals—each has his distinctive dress, his distinctive gesture; they are talking and drinking; they have their lives to get through as Ester has hers, and they seem to be making a better job of it. The scene—a single take, with the dwarfs moving slowly toward the camera from long shot into close-up (as they pass Ester) and out of image—is an act of extraordinary daring on Bergman’s part in its effect of intolerable nightmare farce. I have seen The Silence now some eight or nine times, and I have never heard anyone laugh at it. The effect of the scene in the published script is entirely different: the dwarfs are far more unrestrained; they mock Ester cruelly and laugh at her.11 One sees that Bergman’s view of their function must have changed radically during filming, perhaps as a result of working with actual dwarfs. The common objection that The Silence is a “sick” film needs discussing. Clearly, in a sense the description is just. One can often distinguish between a “sick” film and a film about sickness, but there are also cases where the distinction is impossible. I have said that I do not find the characters of The Silence particularly abnormal. On the other hand, one can say with equal truth (and the contradiction is more apparent than real) that there is no “normality” in the film, nothing that we can point to as a possible norm against which the characters’ behavior can be judged, as we can point to certain aspects of Shame. But can one criticize the film for this? It is difficult to consider the concept of normality in the abstract—out of relation, that is to say, to a given society. And where in society today does one 177

robin wood look for the “normal”? Bergman’s earlier work offers us plenty of norms, implicit or explicit. Marie and Henrik in Summer Interlude, and Monika and Harry, find something that could be called normality, but it exists outside any social framework and is constantly threatened by society. The “norm” of A Lesson in Love, on the other hand, is essentially bourgeois and as such valid only within strict limitations. It is limitations that the Bergman of the Trilogy and above all the subsequent films refuse: he will no longer build his work on values that demand that one’s vision of existence be circumscribed, values that can flourish only within a fenced garden, the wilderness shut out. Besides, “sickness” and “health” are only opposite poles as abstract concepts. In practical terms of our civilization one can talk at best only of degree: which of us can say he is sound and whole? Perhaps the only valid criterion for judging whether a work of art is sick or healthy is that of inner movement, of drives and impulses. From this point of view, The Silence, in its open, exploratory nature, its consistent sense of pain and of a striving toward a release that shall have nothing in it of illusion, is an exceptionally healthy film. The genuinely sick work is one where the attitude toward sickness is essentially complacent or indulgent, whose movement is toward an ever-greater enclosure instead of a bursting of the fetters. The Servant ( Joseph Losey, 1963), La Notte (Antonioni, 1961), and Belle de Jour (Buñuel, 1967) all seem to me, in differing ways and to differing degrees, sick films; all three have a fatalistic, predetermined quality, leading to a Q.E.D. with a show of logic that is in fact artificially contrived. But not Winter Light, not The Silence, not Persona or Shame, nor (if an example outside Bergman be required) the splendid Switchboard Operator (Love Affair; or, The Case of the 178

The Trilogy Missing Switchboard Operator [1967]) of Dusan Makavejev. It is not a matter of material but of style and structure—of all that determines the film’s movement. The sense of dynamic drives, of striving or of exploration, implies the awareness of a wholeness to be striven for, of the possibility of creating or discovering norms even though their precise nature remains undefined.

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Intermezzo Now About These Women

Each Bergman film since Prison has its own defined individual character, but in obvious ways Now About These Women is unusually isolated from all the rest. It remains—until A Passion is released—Bergman’s only film in color, and it uses color to accentuate the deliberately artificial and stylized prettiness of the decor. Bergman used color, in fact, once before, for some preliminary work on Through a Glass Darkly, and is reported to have scrapped the result and started again because it looked “too pretty”; that he felt color appropriate to Now About These Women tells us something of its character and of Bergman’s attitude toward making it. It is easy to understand that after the sustained intensity of the Trilogy, Bergman felt a desire to make something emotionally (though not formally) relaxed, which would give him a respite from his probing of the deepest levels of emotional experience. To call The Silence a work of extraordinary courage is not to use empty phrases: the creation of such a film involves exposure to emotional experiences most of us would shrink from and the risk of jeopardizing one’s personal stability. 180

Intermezzo But it was impossible for Bergman, from the position he had reached, to recapture the spontaneity and warmth of that earlier relaxation, A Lesson in Love, that followed Sawdust and Tinsel. Now About These Women strikes one as above all calculated and deliberate. No one I have met finds it very funny, and I don’t think (pace Ian Cameron, in his interesting analysis of the film in Movie)12 that it is defensible on the grounds that it isn’t meant to be. When Bergman made A Lesson in Love he was—in however relaxed a way—wholly engaged; when he made Now About These Women he couldn’t afford to be, couldn’t afford to allow the deeper levels of himself to be stirred, or there could have been no comedy, not even an unfunny one. Hence the sense of thinness and brittleness that one gets from the film. One admires Bergman for turning at such a time to the traditional set pieces of slapstick comedy—attempts to balance a huge marble bust, a tea-and-cream-cake retaliation scene, an impromptu and unintended firework display ( Jacques Tati’s Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot) [Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953)] is one of his favorite films), a sequence with the protagonist in “drag”—and bringing them off in a curious sort of way. For if they aren’t very funny, they are never boring, and no sequence is bungled. The laughter evoked by Buster Keaton, by Laurel and Hardy, and for many by Tati is intimately bound up with the warm flow of sympathy they release in the spectator; the slapstick of Bergman’s film is necessarily cut off from any such flow so that one admires its aplomb but keeps a straight face. The film, besides its function as interlude between the emotional rigors of The Silence and Persona, is part retrospect, part testament, and part neither. It collects together a number of actresses associated with Bergman’s previous work, notably Eva 181

robin wood Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, and Bibi Andersson, who play, one might say, “themselves”: that is, they recapitulate their familiar personae from earlier Bergmans. Especially in the case of the two Anderssons, the performances are simplified and exaggerated to an extent amounting to parody, which befits the artificiality of the whole film. It is tempting, therefore, to see it as a film about Bergman and his actresses: each of master cellist Felix’s women satisfies a different aspect of his personality, therefore by extension each reflects the aspect she satisfies and can be taken as expressing it. This idea relates interestingly to the way in which Bergman’s own development has consistently been reflected in his choice of actresses; it is sufficiently suggested in the film to mislead the critic who naturally likes to make everything tie up neatly. For it cannot, in fact, be pressed very far. The significance of the Eva Dahlbeck character, Felix’s wife and protectress of his artistic integrity, goes rather beyond what one sees as Miss Dahlbeck’s role in Bergman’s development, and several of the women have no clear counterparts in his work. More centrally, Now About These Women offers a statement about the autonomy of art and the impertinence of substituting biographical gossip about the artist for criticism of the art. At the end of the film the section of the biography of Felix by the critic Cornelius ( Jarl Kulle) giving the “personal details” is stolen by Felix’s valet (and alter ego?) Tristan (Georg Funkquist), who hands it to Felix’s widow; the suppression clearly has Bergman’s approval. With this goes a statement about the necessity for the artist of preserving his artistic integrity, whatever the transgressions and infidelities of his personal life: hence his wife’s gra-

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Intermezzo

Adelaide (Eva Dahlbeck) at target practice, assisted by the valet Tristan (Georg Funkquist). Now About These Women (1964).

cious toleration of the rota of mistresses and her decision to shoot him dead the moment he begins to play Cornelius’s 14th Abstraction as a means of ensuring his own immortality in the biography. But if I raise this familiar “testament” interpretation of the film, it is as much to reject as accept it. Hour of the Wolf also contains elements of an artist’s testament, and they directly contradict certain aspects of the earlier—but only three years earlier—work. In Now About These Women art exists apart from relationships, which are conceived as satisfying the man’s various

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robin wood needs so as to leave the artist free to fulfill himself independently. Felix’s wife, Adelaide, is the guardian of his art, sworn to kill him if he betrays it; but there is no question of fidelity on his side in the relationship and no indication that she is of particular personal importance to him. In Hour of the Wolf, Johan Borg’s art is conceived as existing and developing inseparably from his relationship with Alma. Artistic fulfillment there is felt as growing (potentially at least) out of the wholeness of the woman and the wholeness of the relationship: the touchstone is The Magic Flute. When Borg’s “demons” undermine the relationship, they undermine the art, too. The comparison reminds us of something the “testament” interpreters (Cameron honorably excepted) tend to ignore or play down: Felix is an interpretative, not a creative, artist; the climactic sequence of the film arises from the fact that he has no body of work to leave behind (apart from an unrecognizably primitive gramophone record) and is dependent on Cornelius’s biography for immortality. He touches on Bergman himself only tangentially. The difference between this film and Hour of the Wolf emphasizes that while interpretative art can exist in and for itself, largely independent of the artist’s life (which has merely to be kept from impinging on it), creative art grows out of the whole personality; it is affected and to a great extent determined by the quality of the life and relationships that feed it. The underlying confusion of the film should now be apparent. It clearly intends a general statement about the Artist, but the moment one substitutes Bergman the filmmaker for Felix the cellist, its argument about the autonomy of art and the irrelevance of personal life to it comes to look much too simple. One can entirely sympathize with Bergman’s attack on 184

Intermezzo the sort of critic who substitutes lewd and prying gossip for an attempt to understand the work and accept the film’s implication that the art, not the artist, is the critic’s proper concern. Yet one can ignore the sense of personal development underlying the development of a cellist’s art as one cannot in the case of a filmmaker, especially a filmmaker as personal as Bergman. One feels neither the need nor the desire to pry into the “personal details,” but one can hardly expect to do justice to Bergman’s art if one loses contact with its quality as (in whatever depersonalized way) a record of lived experience.

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The World Without, The World Within Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Shame

If (and how shall they not?) the sensitive and imaginative freely let their “hearts lie open” to the suffering of the world, how are they to retain any health or faith for living? —F. R. Leavis, Wordsworth in Revaluation

Art comments on life. But does it? Even tragedy, traditionally held highest of the arts, with pretensions to illuminating the significance of human existence, leaves huge areas, and huge possibilities, almost untouched. Those areas have always existed, but in our century they have extended themselves enormously in the artist’s consciousness. He can no longer, for example, shut his consciousness off from the fact of needless and appalling (not “tragic” because utterly unredeemed) suffering; nor can he keep at a manageable arm’s length the possibility that human existence has no significance. Shakespeare approached such issues in King Lear; but even Lear learns something about himself, and the fate of a Lear (leaving aside differences between

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The World Without, The World Within fiction and reality) is more endurable to contemplate than that of the slaughtered women and children of Vietnam. In the William Klein episode of Far from Vietnam (1967), a man stands in a street howling a nonsense-chant on the word “napalm.” It comes across as an expression of the rawest agony, as if the agony of the victims were finding expression through the chanter’s full exposure of himself to the fact of unredeemed and most extreme physical suffering. His condition has the helpless abandonment of insanity and strikes one as perhaps the only valid response. It is not art, but there is a sense in which it goes beyond art—beyond experience that can be ordered and organized and placed in “meaningful” perspective. The true artist, who feels himself committed to being, in some sense, the conscience (= consciousness) of the human race, feels himself increasingly driven in this way beyond what art as we have always understood it can readily assimilate (Eliot put it very succinctly a long time ago in “Prelude IV”). Total exposure to the meaninglessness and chaos the twentieth century has discovered (or thinks it has discovered—we mustn’t assume too readily that it is the last word) cannot but be detrimental to the artist, yet no one who is an artist can refuse it. It can lead to a collapse into total incoherence, or to a hardening and toughening of the sensibility, driving a sensitive mind like Godard’s, for example, to the artistic shambles of Made in U.S.A. (1966), and to that tooready acceptance of the association of vitality with brutishness in his “adoption” of Lemmy Caution, the adoption of a protective covering of insentience. The effects of all this are manifest as a pervasive and determining influence on the arts today. The popular cinema, because of its artistically conservative nature,

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robin wood has been the last stronghold of the traditional concept of art. But it, too, has been fundamentally, if indirectly, affected, and it is probable that no one now will be able to give us a Rio Bravo (1959)—not even Hawks, as El Dorado (1966) is there to prove. Anyone who has seen Persona will understand at once when, in the context of the above remarks, I salute it as one of the most courageous films ever made. It bears, of course, a much stronger resemblance to a work of art than the Napalm “poem” in Far from Vietnam), but in it one can see the whole traditional concept of art—an ordering of experience toward a positive end, a wholeness of statement—cracking and crumbling even as, halfway through the film, the image cracks and crumbles. Breakdown, due to the sort of total exposure I have suggested, is both theme and form—that is to say, it is experienced both by the characters and by the artist, the “formal” collapse acting as a means of communicating the sensation of breakdown directly to the spectator. Useless to talk of the sudden midway reminder of the medium (the depicted projector breakdown) in terms of the Brechtian (or Godardian) alienation effect. What Bergman does here has nothing in common with the continual and delicate—at times near subliminal—play of distanciation devices with which Godard preserves the spectator’s analytical detachment. Bergman, on the contrary, draws the spectator into the film, demanding total emotional involvement: the pre-credit and credit sequences shock and disturb rather than detach; the fiction that follows up to the midway point engrosses, with nothing either to distance or to distract us from a moral and psychological exploration of the characters and their relationship via the emotional-intellectual processes through which we customarily experience fictional narratives. 188

The World Without, The World Within The breakdown, when it comes, is, in terms of its emotional effect, far more closely analogous to the midway revelation in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) or the shower murder in Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) than to anything in Godard: in all these cases, our developed relationship to the film is shattered abruptly, and we are left gropingly to construct a new one. (Besides, Vertigo’s cumulative ambiguities regarding what is, in fact, “real” offer interesting thematic parallels with Persona.) During the film’s climactic sequences the two women seem to merge, their identities to become interchangeable; much has been written, reasonably enough, about the film along these lines. One can discuss this interchangeability another way by

Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann) watches the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk on television. Persona (1966).

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robin wood saying that most people find it possible—even inevitable— during the film to identify with both Alma (Bibi Andersson) and Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann): their consciousnesses find a common denominator in the consciousness of the spectator. Alma is the obvious identification figure: her “representative” quality is plain from the outset; the main body of the film begins and ends with her; it is through her consciousness that we study the withdrawn and enigmatic Elizabeth. Some have been driven to interpret the film as entirely subjective from Alma’s viewpoint (which offers a comfortingly easy Eight-and-a-Halfian way out of the difficulties of deciding what is “real” and what is fantasy). However, there are two key scenes where Elizabeth is alone and where we share her consciousness, very painfully and acutely, learning perhaps more about her withdrawal than Alma ever learns: the scene where she watches the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk on television and the scene where she studies, with fascinated horror, a photograph of Jewish women and children being rounded up by Nazis. Elizabeth recoils—and her response is communicated to us very powerfully and directly—from the horror of existence itself: the horror of a life in which the sort of sufferings and outrages pointed to by the two examples are not merely possible but everyday; the horror of a humanity in which the tendencies that make such outrages possible are inherent and ineradicable. In Elizabeth’s withdrawal—her refusal to take any further part in such a life and such a humanity— we are brought close to the Napalm “poem”: one is passive, the other active protest, but both primarily communicate impotence and despair. What we watch, and are made to share, is an overwhelmingly emphatic identification with the suffering contemplated. 190

The World Without, The World Within Elizabeth’s motivation for withdrawal has, of course, other aspects, some more pervasively present than her exposure to the fact of suffering. The choice of Electra for her moment of decision is suggestive: the play associates cruelty and horror with the tangle of sexuality (already juxtaposed in the credit sequence) and, being a play, adds the further dimension of Elizabeth’s uncertainty as to what is real and what acted—what we mean and what we think we mean. The film is not so much about an exchange of identities on the personal level as about a merging of two representative consciousnesses, or the process whereby the protective façades people erect to defend themselves from reality are broken down. Alma’s “normality” and its precarious and illusory nature are touchingly observed and described. She represents our daily selves; Elizabeth our deeper and acuter awareness. The nurse’s uniform is itself a mask, an assumed identity, Alma’s image of herself as she wants to appear, both in the world’s eyes and in her own: she reassumes it in the film’s climactic sequences (either in reality or in imagination or both) in a final attempt to reestablish the identity that has by now irretrievably crumbled. Other details sketch in Alma’s surface identity (at the start of the film, the only one she is aware of ): as she stands before the psychiatrist (Margaretha Krook), the camera moves down to show her hands clasped behind her back, the stance of a good, obedient schoolgirl before the headmistress; introducing herself in her chatty-and-efficient-young-nurse manner, she tells Elizabeth that she is twenty-five, engaged to be married, and that her mother was also a nurse. The precariousness of Alma’s protective façade is immediately apparent in her desire to give up the case. She tells the 191

robin wood psychiatrist that she “may not be able to cope—mentally”; Elizabeth’s refusal to speak or act shows “great strength,” and clearly frightens her; without realizing it, she feels it as a personal threat. The other woman’s silence, in fact, begins to break down Alma’s defenses at once. As she tries to settle down, restless, for the night, she murmurs that “You can do almost anything you like.” She will marry Karl-Henrik: “It’s a nice safe feeling. So is work, in a different way.” But she sounds quite unconvinced by either. The girl’s unease is communicated to the audience by the restless switching off and on and off again of the light; we are brought very close to her by the almost imperceptible rise in the lighting a moment after it is finally switched off, her face becoming dimly visible as our eyes become used to the darkness—we are there in the room with her. Gradually, Alma’s certainties collapse as Elizabeth’s response to reality communicates itself to her. On the beach among the rocks, Alma reads aloud to Elizabeth from a book she has with her. The passage states that hope of salvation is merely the crystallization of our realization of ourselves and reality, the proof of our awareness and our desolation. Alma asks Elizabeth if she believes that. Elizabeth nods slowly, with an effect of absolute certainty, as if the words had expressed her own thoughts; Alma, with an effect of much less certainty, insists that she doesn’t. At the dinner table, Alma describes a home for retired nurses and expresses her admiration for those who devote their whole lives to something they believe in. Our sense of the somewhat hollow conventionality of her words, of the large areas of the human personality left unfulfilled by a life devoted to good works, is intensified by the silence into which they fall: Elizabeth’s silence. That silence leads Alma on to reveal herself not only to Eliza192

The World Without, The World Within beth but to herself. She begins to talk of experiences she has buried away, to confront their full implications for the first time. Her description of prolonged sexual intercourse with a young boy on the beach (involving also a female acquaintance and another boy), during which all inhibitions were thrown off, is certainly one of the screen’s great monologues. Bibi Andersson’s performance is extraordinary. As Bergman has said, she “makes the scene so remarkable because she tells the story in a voice which carries a tone of shameful lust, and I’ve no idea where she got it from.”13 It is important that there is no recourse to flashback illustration and that much of the monologue is filmed in medium or medium-long shot: the “shameful lust” is there in the way Alma crouches in the armchair as much as in her voice. The experience described, considered in itself, seems a kind of sensual paradise, a sudden revelation of the possibilities of physical ecstasy; but the detached filming of it, with Elizabeth and her silence present in the frame much of the time, encourages us to place it in a context of human complexities—Alma’s relationship with Karl-Henrik and the ensuing abortion—that prevents us from seeing it so simply. What Alma is led to discover during the course of the film is quite simply what is within herself and potentially within all of us: fear that existence may be meaningless; uncertainty as to where “acting” stops and “being” begins; sexual confusion (Eliot’s “may and may not, desire and control”)14; resorting under pressure to “primitive” savagery. The second half of the film conveys a sensation of sinking into a dark, perhaps bottomless abyss of uncertainties, both for the women and for the spectator. Elizabeth’s withdrawal is no solution: we see her defeated at every turn. The psychiatrist understands and seems deadened 193

robin wood by her knowledge—the human being withdrawn into a hard shell of clinical detachment, yet unable to keep the bitterness out of her face and voice, speaking to Elizabeth with an emotional brutality that betrays a resentment of the other woman’s preservation of a certain sensitivity. Silence, she tells Elizabeth, is itself a “role”; and Elizabeth, while she remains alive, cannot stop affecting other lives and inflicting pain. Her very refusal to take part in life becomes, however unwittingly, a positive action with unforeseeable and uncontrollable consequences. In fact, she finds it impossible just to do nothing. There is, for example, the letter she writes about Alma, which Alma reads and interprets as a sign of utter heartlessness, feeling that she has been exploited. One cannot quite see it like that. Elizabeth has shown Alma a sort of half-pitying affection and has listened to her with a sympathetic attention not devoid of an assumption of superiority—Elizabeth, after all, knows more. The letter is to her psychiatrist, on whose part Elizabeth can assume an understanding not unlike her own and in whom she would feel free to confide without hesitation. The fact that Alma is a nurse in the same hospital tells somewhat against this, but one cannot feel that Elizabeth has committed any outrage against the moral code of confidences if one looks at the matter from her point of view. Looked at from Alma’s point of view, on the other hand, it seems very different because Alma is so much more deeply involved in the relationship than Elizabeth. The incident suggests the inevitability of pain in human intercourse. Consciously, Elizabeth is not guilty of deliberate cruelty. Unconsciously, however? She does, after all, leave the letter unsealed. Even the “aware” Elizabeth can’t control her unconscious. There is also Elizabeth’s ambiguous smile when Alma at last 194

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Elizabeth writes to her psychiatrist. Persona.

breaks. Is it cruel—the superior being’s pleasure in watching the girl’s discovery of anguish? Or is she laughing at the absurdity of everything because, if it’s all meaningless, then pain doesn’t matter, it’s of no more account than happiness? Her silence preserves the ambiguity and thereby inflicts further pain. The thematic movement of Persona is, up to halfway, expressed through a clearly developed, meticulously observed, “naturalistic” fiction: one could list at length the details of psychological insight manifest in the mise-en-scène. The moment when Alma, the nice, normal, altruistic young nurse, is forced to confront her own potential for cruelty in the incident with the broken glass completes the exposition of her discovery of reality (the reality of herself ) through her experience of Eliza195

robin wood beth. At that point, Bergman chooses to disrupt the film. The opening shots, showing technical details of film projection, constitute some warning of what is going to be done to us, but they don’t really prepare us for the shock, engrossed as we are in the narrative. After the depiction of the projector breakdown, the “naturalistic” drama is resumed, but we can no longer feel in quite the same relation to it: our sense of security has been (like Alma’s) irreparably undermined, and from here on we have the constant feeling that anything may happen. As the second half develops, doubts begin to grow, at first almost imperceptibly but by the end very powerfully, about the nature of what we are watching.

Alma (Bibi Andersson) waits for Elizabeth to cut her foot on the broken glass. Persona.

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The World Without, The World Within In fact, we can narrow the area of uncertainty down to a long section of five consecutive episodes. There are, to be sure, moments of doubt in the first half of the film, but it is still possible to say there that it is Alma’s doubt that is involved, not ours. Elizabeth’s whispered words to Alma about going to bed before she falls asleep at the table are accepted by Alma as hallucination at the time—she immediately repeats them herself, implying that they have not been spoken aloud. Elizabeth’s visit to Alma’s room at night is given a dreamlike quality by the hazy lighting and the music. (Bergman’s increasing fondness for refusing to direct the audience’s emotional reactions to “real” action by the use of incidental music seems to be largely applicable to Persona, where music is generally—not quite always—used to characterize the scenes that are non-“real.”) Both incidents are denied by Elizabeth the next day, and there is no reason for us not to believe her; both are readily understandable as wish-fulfillments by Alma, who at that stage of the film wants Elizabeth as a combined elder-sister-and-lover and wants to merge identities with her, attracted by her fame, her beauty, her mysteriousness. The section where there is real doubt begins with Alma in bed, tossing in a half-sleep, and ends with her waking up: tempting, of course, to interpret it all as dream, but not quite possible. For one thing, at the start of the section she is in her nightdress in bed, and when she wakes up she is fully dressed, at a table: a series of dreams, perhaps? But the way certain sequences are shot—particularly the visit of Elizabeth’s husband (Gunnar Björnstrand), with Liv Ullmann’s face in the foreground of the screen while Alma and the husband make love in the background—suggests that, if we are watching a dream, it is as much Elizabeth’s as Alma’s. The five episodes are as follows: 197

robin wood 1) The visit of Elizabeth’s husband. Alma, tossing in bed, wakes up, switches on the radio, hears a man’s voice calling “Elizabeth,” goes to the sleeping Elizabeth and comments on her puffy face and swollen, ugly mouth, hears the voice again, and wanders out. Elizabeth opens her eyes, gets up, and follows. The husband (in dark glasses, which at first make one think he is blind) greets Alma by Elizabeth’s name and makes love to her when, after initially denying it, she accepts the role. Elizabeth witnesses the whole encounter, mostly with her back to it, though at one point she guides Alma’s hand to the husband’s face. 2) Alma’s twice-repeated story of Elizabeth’s relationship with her child, filmed first with the camera on Elizabeth’s face then repeated word for word with the camera on Alma’s. 3) Alma talks nonsense-sentences to Elizabeth. Alma is in her nurse’s uniform, which she has never worn at the summerhouse. The culminating sentence is “Many words and then nausea.” This leads to: 4) The blood-sucking. The two women sit opposite one another at a table. Alma lays her bare arm on the table, her lips curl slightly with an erotic suggestiveness, then she gives her arm to Elizabeth, who bites until the blood oozes out from under her lips. Alma strikes Elizabeth’s (offscreen) face repeatedly and savagely. (Episodes 3 and 4 should perhaps be thought of as a single sequence because they are continuous; no time-relationship is suggested between the others or between them and other events in the film.) 5) Back in the hospital room where Alma first saw Elizabeth. Alma in nurse’s uniform again. She holds Elizabeth tenderly and

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The World Without, The World Within beseechingly, and persuades her to repeat after her the word “Ingenting” (“Nothing”). It seems to me clear that none of these incidents is to be thought of as literally “happening.” Two of them (the husband’s visit and the scene in the hospital) are impossible on grounds of content; in common with these two, the others have a surreal, nightmare quality quite distinct from the crisp, lucid, objective tone of the “naturalistic” parts of the film. The doubt is as to the precise level of reality or unreality on which they are to be thought of as operating. Subjective fantasy? If so, whose? Bergman does not, I think, for reasons both thematic and formal, intend us to be able to answer such questions. By this point in the film the idea of the interchangeability of experience, of the identification of Alma with Elizabeth and of both with the spectator, has been carried about as far as it can go through an objective presentation of “real” actions. Bergman needs a means of finding a dramatic approximation for inner states of breakdown, disintegration, and merging—at once the loss of identity and a kind of universal extension of identity. What we see on the screen is to be taken as interchangeable—as happening within (or beneath?) either woman’s consciousness or both, an expression in actions of experiences taking place below the level of action. This makes these scenes virtually impossible to “explain” (and indeed if they could be neatly explained they would lose much of their point). One can, however, offer various pointers toward their interpretation. 1) Shortly before them comes the scene where Elizabeth looks at the Warsaw Ghetto photograph. It is important that we

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robin wood be reminded, at that point, of the extension outward into “surface” existence, into the world of flesh-and-blood physical and mental suffering, of the film’s central concerns. The relationship between the photograph of a public outrage and the psychic cruelty between the two women is very interesting: each has the effect, in a different way, of universalizing the significance of the other. Cruelty, exploitation, the desire to establish and express patterns of power and subjugation—all play their roles in the “hallucinatory” scenes that follow, on the level of psychic interaction: the roots of Nazism in the universal human psyche. 2) The suggestion of a dream given by framing the episodes between Alma asleep and Alma waking is important: the release of suppressed fears and desires that characterizes dreams also characterizes these scenes. But the fact that we don’t take them simply as dreams is important, too: the transitions into and out of the “doubtful” section are not abrupt, and the spectator is in no way adverted to “read” it differently from the rest of the film. We are to take it that what we see is in some sense really happening—locked in psychic conflict, the two women are really inflicting terrible psychological wounds on each other. 3) Each of the episodes can be seen as an attempt by Alma to master the world of experience Elizabeth’s silence opens up to her, by dominating or possessing Elizabeth, each attempt culminating in a highly equivocal victory that is also defeat. In the first, she usurps Elizabeth’s role in her relationship with her husband, only to discover the anguish and humiliation of incompatibility. It is natural to relate the scene of lovemaking back to Alma’s story of her brief sensual fulfillment on the beach: the latter was an account of perfect satisfaction achieved by limiting the sexual relationship to merely animal experience, with all human 200

The World Without, The World Within complexities omitted; the scene with Elizabeth’s husband epitomizes the imperfection of relationships involving emotional demands, the difficulties of yielding up consciousness of self. The episode of the twice-told story extends the idea of human incompatibility and separateness to motherhood. Alma tries to possess Elizabeth by entering her mind and memory, taking over her knowledge of her failure and cruelty as a mother, with which to denounce her. The first time the story is told, we watch Elizabeth’s disturbed face registering recognition of horrible truths she has buried from herself; the second time, we watch Alma’s gradual realization that in taking over Elizabeth’s mind she becomes Elizabeth and thus is talking about herself— that the cruelty she is denouncing is something within her (the relevant reference here is to her account of her abortion). The sequence culminates in the terrifying moment where Bergman merges the two faces—at first crudely, to give a distorted, split image, and then, even as Alma hysterically denies that she is Elizabeth, in a perfect image where it is impossible to detect where and how the faces are fused but which remains disturbingly unnatural. The third and fourth episodes show the breakdown of Alma’s attempts to dominate the silent Elizabeth verbally, as her speech disintegrates into nonsense, followed by a recourse to the most direct physical intercourse of bloodsucking. Another equivocal victory-defeat: Alma dominates Elizabeth by inducing her by suggestion to satisfy her (Alma’s) perverse desire, then reacts with horror and terrifying violence when she realizes the implications of having her blood drunk by the other woman. For this and the last hallucinatory episode, Alma has resumed 201

robin wood her uniform in an effort to insist that her identity remains separate and undisintegrated; in the last sequence, this attempt to enforce a sense that things are unchanged is consolidated by the hospital setting. Alma induces Elizabeth to speak; but again the victory is equivocal, for the one word Elizabeth repeats— “Nothing”—epitomizes Alma’s worst and ultimate fear, and her very means of mastering Elizabeth becomes the sign of Elizabeth’s ascendancy over her. Formally, the spectator’s uncertainty as to the levels of reality is at least equally important: indeed, it is through this formal device that Bergman extends the film’s thematic progress to the spectator. The disturbing perplexities to which the two women are exposed have their counterpart in our own inability to pin down and categorize the nature of what we are watching: Elizabeth and Alma? Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson? Images cast on a screen by light passing through a moving strip of film? The analogy between our experience and the imagined experience of the two characters is obviously incomplete, but the emotional effect offers, I think, a rough working equivalent. Bergman himself acknowledges the crudeness of art beside the complexities of existence in the film’s very first images. After the film projector shots, we see a silent cartoon of a fat woman in a bathing costume washing her hands, framed as on a screen; the cartoon flickers jerkily, breaks down, starts up again. Bergman then cuts in a shot of real hands washing themselves, the image now filling the whole screen (i.e., the cartoon is shown as film, the hands as reality). A way, surely, of admitting, at the outset of one of the most complex films ever made, that, beside reality, art is as crude as are the jerky movements of the cartoon beside the flexible, organic motions of the real hands? 202

The World Without, The World Within More than this, the breakdown constitutes Bergman’s admission that he can’t resolve the problems the film has raised. The last third of Persona gives us a series of scenes of uncertain reality and uncertain chronology; all are closely related, thematically, to the concerns established earlier in the film, and all carry us deeper into the sensation of breakdown due to full exposure to the unresolvable or unendurable. They come across as a series of tentative sketches, which are far from tentative in realization, of possibilities offered by the director who, because of his own uncertainties, denies himself the narrative artist’s right to dogmatize, to say, “This is what happened next.” Given the universal implications of the subject matter, the fact that we can no longer think in simple terms about “Alma and Elizabeth” (despite the fact that the characters keep their fictional identities to the end) compels us to feel what we are shown with unusual immediacy, as if naked experience were being communicated directly instead of being clothed with the customary medium of characters-and-narrative. It is not a question of vagueness or of artistic abdication but of an extreme and rigorous honesty; each sequence is realized with the same intensity and precision that characterized the straight narrative of the first half. The boy who appears at the beginning and end of the film need cause no bewilderment: we need not even go back to the ending of The Silence, where the same actor was struggling to master “Words in the Foreign Language,” to grasp his function, though the continuity is clear. The slow buildup of the pre-credit sequence culminates in his stretching his hand toward the camera, as if trying to make out who we are, on the other side of the screen; the next shot, from behind him, shows him moving his hands on the screen over the merging faces of the 203

robin wood two women. The universalizing identification of the characters with the spectator is thus established at once, together with the child’s efforts (he is just past the verge of adolescence) to grapple with the perplexities of identity. The identifying of spectator with characters is complex: we are not only what the boy sees; we are the boy seeing. The near subliminal flashes that punctuate the credits are also shown (like the tanks at the start of The Silence), as it were, through his eyes: with an effect of frightening confusion, they epitomize the tensions and anxieties to which the characters and the audience are to be exposed during the film. They anticipate key scenes: the burning priest, an erect penis (Alma’s erotic story), the rocks shown later as she reads Elizabeth the book about “our desolation.” It is easy to interpret the child-figure as a symbol for the growing and vulnerable part of the human psyche: one can if one wishes see him as an aspect of Bergman’s own consciousness, but he is also universal, an aspect of ourselves. His reappearance at the end of the film contributes enormously to our sense of its ending, not with a negation but with a question mark. The film offers no resolution: this is its most disturbing feature and the one that—even more than its obviously innovatory qualities—sets it apart from Bergman’s previous work. Gone are even the tentative gropings toward affirmation that ended Winter Light and The Silence. Instead, a complete openness: an openness expressed in the ambiguity of Alma’s face as, dressed in her nurse’s uniform again, she prepares to return to the world; the face of a woman irreparably broken—or ready to begin? (The closest parallel is perhaps the ending of Hitchcock’s The Birds [1963].) Persona excites, troubles, and stimulates: it doesn’t depress. For Bergman, it is a great personal triumph of intelligence 204

The World Without, The World Within and character: the tendencies to self-pity, to masochism—a fascinated prodding of psychic sores—that disfigured certain of the earlier films (Sawdust and Tinsel, The Seventh Seal, The Face) are here quite subsumed into an identification with universal pain. One might think of the Hopkins of the “Terrible Sonnets”: “My cries heave, herds-long, huddle in a main, a chief / Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing.”15 Bergman has been a great filmmaker from (at least) Summer Interlude, but Persona marks not only a new phase in his development but a new extension of his genius, a further dimension. Here for the first time one registers a Bergman film as the work of a man fully and sensitively (hence very painfully) alive to the pressures and tensions of the world we all have to live in, who has been able through his courage and intelligence to convert a private anguish into a universal witness while remaining intensely human. He exposes himself fully to the despair and horror that man must confront if there is ever to be a possibility of passing beyond. For all the anguish and the sense of deep hurt, there is a marvelously sensitive feeling, at once dynamic and compassionate, for human potentialities, for the development of consciousness. Toward the end of the film Alma, incoherently babbling nonsense-phrases, lets slip the words “A desperate perhaps.” And that is exactly what Persona is. Hour of the Wolf derives from a script Bergman wrote before Persona, provisionally entitled The Cannibals. Illness intervened and out of it grew Persona. Bergman then returned to the earlier scenario, revising it extensively. As Persona broke new ground, one expected the new film to combine elements of the old and new Bergman, and such expectations are in the event confirmed. 205

robin wood But the fact that Hour of the Wolf is such a coherent and satisfying work, with no sense of disparateness, also confirms the organic nature of Bergman’s oeuvre, and warns one not to talk too glibly about “the old and the new”: Persona marked a new stage in Bergman’s development but not at the cost of rejecting its predecessors. The themes of Persona can be traced back readily enough through Bergman’s previous work to his early films. Apart from obvious innovatory features of style and method, what strikes one most in it—and what is the outcome of the prolonged and rigorous self-disciplining of the Trilogy—is its artistic impersonality: its distancing and universalizing of Bergman’s personal concerns. If Hour of the Wolf may strike one superficially as a preTrilogy throwback, it is because of the evidently close relationship between the protagonist, Johan Borg (played, as in The Seventh Seal and The Face, by Max von Sydow), and Bergman himself. Yet comparison with The Face will demonstrate, I think, that the objectifying discipline is as strongly in control in Hour of the Wolf as in Persona. The detailed objections to The Face—that it was at once too explicit and too obscure, that certain subsidiary elements were neither very interesting in themselves nor meaningfully integrated in the whole, that the overall tone was unpleasant, at once frigid and strident—add up to the primary objection that Bergman was not there sufficiently master of his material. No such objections can be raised against Hour of the Wolf. Here, all the elements are perfectly integrated; when the film becomes momentarily explicit (in Alma’s final monologue), this is both in character and justified by the overall form; the obscurities are for the most part meaningful as obscurities—the point, that is, lies partly in their remaining obscure; and the film is made with a 206

The World Without, The World Within spontaneity, a passion, and a sureness of expression that suggest, for all the blackness of the content, the work of an altogether freer human being than the one who made The Face. Much has been made of Hour of the Wolf’s references to previous Bergman films via characters’ names and certain characteristic incidents. What seems to me more interesting—and clearly related to the increased objectification—is that this is the first Bergman film to point to a wide (and non-Swedish) cinematic tradition outside his own work. In view of Bergman’s often expressed admiration for Fellini, the film’s close relationship in subject, structure, and method to Giulietta degli Spiriti ( Juliet of the Spirits [1965]) is perhaps not surprising, any more than is its complementary self-sufficiency (Bergman clearly needn’t fear accusations of plagiarism). What is surprising is Bergman’s use of the traditions of the American horror film, from James Whale and Tod Browning to Hitchcock. Not only does the Birdman (as Tom Milne has pointed out)16 bear an unmistakable resemblance to Lugosi’s Dracula, but the face of Baron von Merkens, especially when photographed from below, as at the dinner party, distinctly recalls in its contours Karloff ’s original Frankenstein creation. The miniscule but apparently human Tamino in the Birdman’s “Magic Flute” performance recalls Ernest Thesiger’s homunculi in Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935). The general framework, with an outsider being initiated into a close-knit, isolated, and highly abnormal society, and especially the ending, where in the darkness and mud its members hideously exact a communal vengeance, suggest Freaks (Browning, 1932). The old woman who peels off her face to reveal a decomposing skull and gaping eye sockets evokes at once the two Wax Museum films (Mystery of the Wax Museum [1933]; House 207

robin wood of Wax [1955]) and Mrs. Bates in Psycho. The pecking and jabbing Birdman suggests both Psycho and The Birds, and the shot of von Sydow passing through a corridor thick with sparrows and other wild birds looks like overt reference (hesitant as one is to associate such seemingly incompatible directors). There are further more generalized references: the castle interiors, for instance, especially in the later sequences, are strongly reminiscent of Hollywood Gothic, from Whale to Roger Corman; the “cannibal” family suggests vampires, particularly in the way the lips of the father figure’s huge mouth draw back, and there is a reference to their “fangs” during the nightmarishly edgy and disquieting dinner-table conversation. It is impossible to be sure how many of these references are deliberate, and they nowhere interfere with the film’s unity of tone: there is not a moment when we could be watching the work of anyone but Bergman. But by drawing on a popular tradition Bergman to a great extent depersonalizes the horrors, at the same time completely realizing the implicit relationship between the traditional horror figures and the psychological terrors for which they deputize. Göran Persson has called the film “Bergman’s Psycho,” and certainly it follows a similar progression into ever-deepening darkness and horror to the ultimate disintegration of the personality. But perhaps, if we are to compare it with Hitchcock, it has more in common thematically with Vertigo: we have, again, the hero torn between the world of daily reality and another world, a fascinating abyss, which may represent a deeper and more potent reality or may be an illusion but which leads by an inevitable process toward disintegration and death. The function of Alma (Liv Ullmann), though she is a far “deeper” personality, is analogous to that of Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) in 208

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The demons. Hour of the Wolf (1968).

Hitchcock’s film: both struggle to keep their men in the real world (see, for instance, Alma’s efforts to interest Johan in her accounts), and their failure to do so is decisive to the development of each protagonist, hence of each film. Alma has so far been comparatively neglected by the film’s interpreters: this is a pity, as she represents its most striking new development. Alma is, quite simply, the most beautiful character in Bergman’s whole work and quite distinct from the “affirmative” characters of earlier films like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. In Alma we have a positive figure who is at once mature and convincing, a figure born out of the merciless honesty of Winter Light and The Silence. She is associated throughout with the idea of fruitfulness. We first see her, big with child, at 209

robin wood a table on which lies a heap of apples, some half-peeled; among the objects she handles while unpacking Johan’s artist’s equipment from the boat is a growing plant. The symbolism of the blossoming apple tree, though quite simple and unequivocal in its meaning, emerges naturally and unobtrusively. What we register first is Alma’s spontaneous delight in it, so that the tree is a means of characterizing her as much as a symbol; when on the first “manifestation” to Alma (the appearance of the old woman) the tree is barren and bare, the symbolism is allowed to make its effect without directorial insistence. The fact of Alma’s pregnancy is talked of little in the film, apart from one key speech, but as a visual presence it assumes great and pervasive importance. Alma, as wife and mother, convincingly embodies the possibility of wholeness and health in life: Johan has praised her as having “whole thoughts and feelings”—God “made her in one piece”—and this is dramatically realized through Liv Ullmann’s performance. In a film showing ultimate disintegration, she stands for its opposite, at least as an ideal whose attainability, though questioned, is not decisively denied. Alma is Pamina. The identification is made very plainly during the puppet theater performance: at Tamino’s words “Lebt denn Pamina noch?” (“Is Pamina still alive?”), the camera settles on Alma’s face and returns to it when the Birdman discusses the significance of Mozart’s setting of the name afterward. The Magic Flute connects (indeed, virtually identifies) the perfected union of man and woman with ultimate fulfillment and enlightenment: the Birdman describes how in his setting Mozart separates the syllables of Pa-mi-na so that they become less a name than an incantation. The relationship of Bergman’s film to Mozart’s opera is complex and important, containing at once a ter210

The World Without, The World Within rible irony and a positive assertion beyond irony’s reach. The irony is implied early, in Johan’s remark (while showing Alma the sketches of his “demons”) that the Birdman, “the worst of all,” is “somehow connected with Papageno.” Mozart’s Papageno, half-bird, half-human, is an entirely gentle and amiable child of nature; Johan’s Birdman is also a “child of nature”—of a black and perverted nature, cruel, aggressive, destructive. In the extract from the opera given in the film, Tamino stands in the darkness of ignorance and confusion before the Temple of Wisdom, questioning unseen powers about his destiny. Within “the loveliest and most disturbing music ever written,” Mozart distinguishes Tamino’s restlessness and yearning (set as recitative) from the unhurried and formalized responses of the offstage chorus, accompanied by a melody of breadth and mysterious serenity previously sung by the Priest of the Temple, giving an effect of timelessness: the scene becomes a dialogue between the human world of time (hence of doubt and anxiety) and a world of achieved serenity and illumination where time’s tyranny has been overthrown. Much is made in the film of Johan’s acute awareness of time: there is the transfixing counted minute (a striking example of Bergman’s growing fondness for directly communicating emotional experience to his audiences, as well as showing it), where we share Johan’s sense of the unendurable slowness of time and, simultaneously, his fear of its passing; and this gets its visual counterpart later as he strikes matches and obsessively watches their burning. Tamino’s question, “Wann wird das Licht main Auge finden?” (“When will my eye find the light?”), receives the answer, “Bald, bald, Jungling, oder nie” (“Soon, or never”): for Tamino the answer proves to be “Soon,” for Johan “Never.” 211

robin wood The remainder of Mozart’s opera is, for Tamino and the listener, a steady progression into ever-intenser illumination; the remainder of Bergman’s film, for Johan and the spectator, a descent into ever-intenser darkness. In the latter half of Hour of the Wolf we see no daylight (with the exception of the uncanny and unnatural light of the overexposed flashback). In one scene Alma-Pamina protects with her hands a flickering candle flame in the midst of all-enveloping darkness. It is in this scene that she talks of the coming child “in all this awful darkness.” The question may be asked, Why choose the macabre Birdman to deliver, via Mozart, the film’s most affirmative statements? I think we must accept that, on one level, he speaks “out of character”: the affirmation is not felt as negated by the speaker, and one senses Bergman himself very directly behind it. At the same time, it has a valid dramatic function: one of the devil’s supreme torments is to hold up momentarily to the lost a glimpse of heaven in the midst of hell. The concept of wholeness becomes, then, through Alma and the use of Mozart, a very real presence in the film; but it is of no more efficacy against Johan’s demons than is the candle flame against the surrounding blackness. Some have seen those demons as representing the artist’s imaginative creations over which, Frankenstein-like, he loses control or as the side of his personality out of which his art develops. Nothing could be further from the truth. The point is made quite unequivocally that the demons are inimical to artistic creation—their emergence in the first stretches of the film corresponds to a decline in Johan’s art. What is more, their destruction of him as an artist is closely paralleled by their destruction of his marriage relationship. The connection is made in the film’s one entirely happy scene—the 212

The World Without, The World Within one in which Johan sketches Alma as she sits by the blossoming apple tree, which links marriage, parenthood, and creativity in an image of wholeness. It is the potential for wholeness that the demons destroy. They are the products of neurosis, embodiments of the power of the past over the present. It is a mistake to see Hour of the Wolf as essentially concerned with The Artist. Johan’s speech on the “utter unimportance of art in the world of men,” far from being central to the film, is a point where Bergman’s personal concerns of the moment rather roughly intrude: it belongs with Persona and Shame rather than with Hour of the Wolf. Bergman uses Johan’s art as a kind of shorthand for the creative side of the personality. The information the film offers relevant to Johan’s neurosis can be separated into four sections, and the sort of significance each has, the way it is to be taken, is carefully defined by formal or stylistic devices. First, Johan’s account of his childhood punishment (locked in a cupboard in which he was led to believe there lurked a little creature that would bite his toes off ) is given us as a straight statement without flashback or other illustration. We accept it as literal truth: here Johan is remembering the past as it was, not being haunted by it in distorted forms in the present. Second, by the same token, we accept the fact of Johan’s past affair with Veronica Vogler (Ingrid Thulin). Third, the flashback showing Johan’s experience of murdering the boy is given a disturbing, heightened quality by the overexposure that suggests nightmarish hallucination. Finally, there are the demons, emanations or projections from Johan’s mind, and these include Veronica Vogler herself as she appears in the film—Bergman does not distinguish her from the rest. It is possible for the spectator to relate the parts so that they add up 213

robin wood to a coherent and intelligible inner portrait; at the same time, in their presentation they are sufficiently disjunct to convey Johan’s sense of unmanageable confusion. The childhood experience is clearly formative. Two points especially emerge: an overwhelming terror of castration (the small creature biting off the toes) and the culminating emotional identification with the mother, against the father (who was responsible for the punishment), factors commonly associated in neurotic complexes with the development of fears of sexual inadequacy and with the possible formation of compensatory homosexual tendencies. The fantasy or hallucination of killing the boy combines various features relevant to this. The scene partly reenacts the childhood punishment, the “small creature” biting Johan’s foot. The most obvious interpretation of the scene is that it symbolizes an attempt to suppress homosexual tendencies. Johan is greatly disturbed by the boy’s presence. The fishing rod, in the position in which it is filmed, carries very obvious phallic overtones, and Johan’s desperate and clumsy attempts to reel in are surely symbolic of an hysterical effort to deny sexual response. The boy then lies on his back in an attitude of erotic invitation; Johan leans over him, then begins to shake him violently. Near the beginning of the film, as he shows Alma the sketches of the demons, Johan says of the one he describes as “practically harmless,” “I think he’s homosexual.” We identify him, I think, with Heerbrand (Ulf Johansson), the man who, almost immediately after Johan’s story of the boy, brings him the gun with which he tries to kill Alma. But what seems to unsettle Johan most in the boy’s behavior is the way in which he inspects, critically and perhaps contemptuously, first Johan’s sketches and then his catch of three fishes (Bergman’s favorite Freudian phal214

The World Without, The World Within lic symbol—see Prison and Waiting Women). His fears of creative and sexual inadequacy are behind the panic into which the child throws him. Finally, we tend to associate the child with the mysterious boy—presumably Johan’s son by a previous marriage or product of his affair with Veronica Vogler (the obscurity here seems unprofitable and annoying)—mentioned by Alma in her accounts (“50 kronor for your boy’s birthday”): another “ghost” from Johan’s past. What the scene enacts, in this complex way, is an attempt to destroy by violence the various half-understood pressures from the past. But they lurk on, as it were, just below the surface, like the submerged body that refuses to sink. From what we gather of the affair with Veronica Vogler (from remarks and from the fantasy reenactments) it was characterized by an exclusive and violent sensuality, suggesting that it was at once Johan’s attempt to assert his sexual adequacy and an expression of his emotional incompleteness. He passed from it to the potentially complete relationship with Alma but without having mastered all the arrested and warped aspects of his personality expressed through the affair with Veronica: so Veronica is both dead and alive, as she later appears to Johan in the castle. To reach her, he is forced to undergo a series of humiliations and trials (kissing the old Baroness’s foot, watching the old lady remove her face, seeing the Birdman’s semi-transformation, etc.), which again suggest a macabre inversion of the initiation of Tamino in The Magic Flute. At the end of it is Veronica, not Alma-Pamina, whom he has tried to kill, firing three bullets at her. But Alma is virtually unscathed. It is Veronica who is, apparently, dead; and above her (as Göran Persson has pointed out to me) hang three lights that at first, in long shot, look like apertures or bullet holes. The ambiguity beautifully suggests the 215

robin wood unresolved confusions of Johan’s psyche, the inner divisions and conflicts of conscious and subconscious. As for the demons, with their horror-film affiliations, I think it is vain to try to attach detailed significance to individuals: perverted and destructive, they typify all that lives on unmastered in Johan. We can see now, I think, why Papageno, representative of entirely natural and untrammeled sexuality, should become, seen through the distorting glass of Johan’s fragmenting psyche, the monstrous Birdman. That the demons are not susceptible to more precise categorization is important: they are an expression of all that Johan doesn’t understand within himself. Even the level of reality on which they exist is continually in question and unascertainable: we feel to the end that there may be a castle on the other side of the island with real people in it, seen through varying degrees of subjective distortion. The “reunion” with the dead-alive Veronica culminates in Johan’s ultimate sexual humiliation. His makeup, the mask of the Great Lover, mockingly applied by the Birdman, now smeared grotesquely over his face; he looks up from his lovemaking to find the demons watching, gloating with hideous laughter. What we see on the screen is an amazingly vivid and concrete depiction of mental breakdown. Johan is cruelly forced to confront his shattered inner self: “The glass is shattered,” he says. “But what do the splinters reflect? Can you tell me that?” His lips go on moving, the voice obliterated. The camera tracks in until his face, slipping out of focus, seems to decompose before our eyes, to dissolve to water—just under the surface of which floats the corpse of the boy. Johan has been driven to a partial self-understanding: he sees just enough, I think, to grasp the strength of the destructive forces within him so that all he 216

The World Without, The World Within can do is surrender to them—to surrender all that side of him that responded to Alma and to the idea of wholeness. Bergman shows us neurosis proliferating like an evil growth, developing out of the small creature biting Johan’s toes into the demons who in the end totally devour him. Perhaps the most important thing in Hour of the Wolf, and what relates it most closely to Persona, is Alma’s partial sharing of Johan’s inner experiences. In Persona Elizabeth’s horrified apprehension of reality was gradually communicated to her nurse, so that the girl’s defenses of conventional “normality” were shattered. Here, Johan’s increasing awareness of inner horrors is communicated, through the medium of her love for him,

The Birdman makes up Johan (Max von Sydow). Hour of the Wolf.

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robin wood to Alma. The sharing is only partial. The greatest obstacle to the psychoanalytical cure of neurosis is the patient’s inability to want to be cured—his tendency to cling on jealously to his neurosis as if it were his most precious possession. Hence there comes a point at which Johan refuses Alma further access to his world, and from that moment he is lost (“If only I could have been with him the whole time” are almost her last words in the film). Most disturbing of all is Alma’s final self-questioning about her failure to save him: did her acceptance of the demons in fact accelerate their domination? Or did her jealousy prevent her from entering into Johan’s inner world far enough? We are left pondering the efficacy of personal relationships, even at their most committed. Like Persona, Hour of the Wolf is a film that calls everything into question. At the beginning Alma sat outside at a table, in daylight. At the end she is indoors, surrounded by darkness. The child is still unborn. The film begins and ends with Alma. On Bergman’s own admission, the story of Johan Borg is very personal: that crucial punishment was repeatedly administered to Bergman as a child. Alma and the framework—emotional as much as formal—that she provides are the mature artist’s means of distancing, hence mastering, all those unmanageable elements whose presence has so often flawed Bergman’s work. The very fact that the film shows Johan’s destruction suggests—coming as it does from the present active, open, and assured Bergman—the completeness of the mastery. We’re quite definitely living in a twilight world. But I don’t know when the darkness will descend. —Bergman

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The World Without, The World Within At the beginning of his essay on John Galsworthy—one of the very few statements about criticism that really mean anything to me—D. H. Lawrence insists on the critic’s obligation to make explicit the standards by which he judges.17 It is time to lay one’s cards openly on the table. I can see no purpose in the individual life beyond the complete realization of one’s humanity. The most basic urge may be that of self-preservation, but if one is thinking in terms of the quality of life, the means and meager instinct to preserve oneself are insignificant beside the creative urge. By the creative urge, I mean all that drives us on toward the full expression of our human potentialities, the whole constructive, growing side of our natures, at once dynamic and responsive. And the standards by which one judges life must also be, at root, the standards by which one judges art. We live in a society whose main characteristics all tend toward the inhibiting and perverting of human creativity, and there is little sign that things are likely to improve in any foreseeable future. How to come to terms with this is the central human problem today and one that the artist, through his creative functioning, must feel in a particularly acute form. Such considerations as these determine my admiration for Bergman, especially the Bergman of the Trilogy and after. Winter Light, The Silence and Persona are the record of an artist’s struggle toward the full realization of his humanity, all his energies concentrated to that end. My appreciation of these films, and of Shame, my deep gratitude to Bergman for them, is greatly intensified by considering them in the context of cinema in the late 1960s—the world of Weekend (Godard, 1967), of Belle de Jour, of Boom (Losey, 1968), of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). These are all films of distinction (the degree 219

robin wood varying enormously), but in comparison with them, Bergman’s films are the work of a man who, whatever his disabilities and limitations, at least wants to be human. Comparison between Shame and Weekend is virtually inevitable: both are centrally concerned with the obsolescence of the civilized European sensibility. Godard’s is the more obviously extraordinary work: significantly, it is formally and stylistically adventurous where Shame (in relation not only to Godard but to Persona) is reactionary. Bergman has never (except perhaps in Prison) shown any inclination to be avant-garde, and the “advanced” aspects of Persona were determined solely by the content: they are not evidence of a desire for deliberate formal

Eva (Liv Ullmann) at the start of the film. Shame (1968).

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The World Without, The World Within experiment but purely the expression of Bergman’s sense of breakdown and disintegration. Godard’s achievement is to be above all modern—not in any self-consciously avant-garde manner but by nature. It is an equivocal achievement, and Bergman does not and cannot share it. Between Shame and Weekend exists an impassable barrier. Bergman is a great artist in the great civilized European tradition; Godard has aligned himself with the forces that have rejected that tradition and are now speeding its perhaps final disintegration. Godard’s openness toward a “brave new world” adumbrated by the guerrilla-cannibals of Weekend would be unthinkable for Bergman. Weekend moves from the ineffectual, ludicrously incongruous farmyard recital-lecture on Mozart to the percussion improvisations of the solitary, absorbed guerrilla; the essential progress of Shame is from Jan Rosenberg’s yearning dream about performing the slow movement of the 4th Brandenburg Concerto to his final withdrawal from contact at the end, irredeemably lost as a human being but equipped now for survival (if anyone is to survive). To me (and, I suppose, to Bergman), most of the more “advanced” aspects of contemporary art—action-painting, aleatory and electronic music, musique concrete, William Burroughs—are comprehensible only as evidence of disintegration. Perhaps I am wrong and the arts are, as many claim, struggling toward a new synthesis; but it is obvious that it will be a synthesis that will leave out of account all that has been of central importance in the Western cultural tradition hitherto: in a word, humanity. The values of Shame are above all human values; the values of Weekend are something else, I’m not sure what—and not sure that Godard is sure. Godard’s early

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robin wood work abounded in references to the arts, a desperate and essentially external attempt to relate himself to a tradition; Bergman has never needed to refer because he is an integral part of the cultural tradition, its product, and, at present, one of its greatest representatives. The role of Bach in Bergman’s work (there are references in every film from Through a Glass Darkly through Shame, except for Hour of the Wolf, where Mozart takes over) is far more integral than the “cultural” references in Godard, a matter of profound inner commitment rather than wouldbe alignments. Nevertheless, the cultural tradition counts for something in Godard’s work up to and including MasculinFéminin (1966), where it finds its most touching defender in the person of Paul ( Jean-Pierre Léaud). When Godard killed Paul off at the end of that film, he took perhaps the most decisive single step of his career up to that point. One recognizes, and honors, the courage of such a renunciation, even while reflecting that Godard’s ability to make it tells us something essential about his human limitations. If Weekend is the product of his peculiar genius, it is also the product of his peculiar deficiencies; and if Shame is Bergman’s Weekend, then it is Weekend made by a human being. Godard is both superhuman and subhuman, often simultaneously, but never quite human. In placing so much emphasis on the arts, and on the “cultural tradition,” I know I run the risk of being dismissed by many as an Ivory Tower aesthete, clinging to a position of hopeless insulation. Certain British journalist-critics, writing about Shame, have seemed to imply that Bergman’s alleged obsession (obsession: any serious concern you don’t happen to share) with the idea of the irrelevance of art to the great mass of mankind is invalid or at least not very interesting—a bit “old hat,” perhaps. 222

The World Without, The World Within One would like to ask these people why they are critics: art to them would appear to be no more than a kind of game, merely marginal in relation to human life. For anyone capable of making real contact with a work of art (as opposed to a casual or dilettantish pleasure or displeasure), the arts stand for very much more than themselves. They are, as I. A. Richards said of literature, our “storehouse of recorded values.”18 They are the tangible definition of the civilized tradition of which we are still more or less members, whether we like it or not: a tradition consisting not only of artists and their works but of the developing collective sensibility that, in their distinctive and particularized forms, they express. And this is precisely the spirit in which Bergman handles the theme of art and its “utter unimportance in the world of men” (Hour of the Wolf) in his recent films. The reception of Shame—one of the very few films of recent years that really matter—by the majority of reputedly “serious” British journalist-critics fills me with an emotion I can only call disgust. To use a film of such passion and intelligence, so patently central to contemporary experience, as a pretext for condescending witticisms, or simply to evade the issue, is to abdicate from all critical responsibility. The following remarks can be taken as representative, in tone as well as in actual content: “We are left at the end confirmed in our initial assumption that the husband and wife are people we know all too well from other Bergman films and do not really want to know at all” ( John Russell Taylor). “[T]he paraphernalia of this anonymous war, a cold Vietnam of the far north, seems to have been assembled as yet another frozen testing ground for artistic sensibility” (Penelope Houston). “I have not found Ingmar Bergman’s later films appealing. . . . Jan is a coward who, like most cowards, can easily 223

robin wood become a bully. For some reason beyond my understanding, Eva appears to love him” (Penelope Mortimer: it can stand as a fair enough comment on Mrs. Mortimer’s “understanding”). “I find them [Bergman’s films] adolescent, pretentious, silly, and visually undistinguished” (Richard Roud). Nice to know that Britain’s leading Godard adulator finds Bergman adolescent. Mr. Roud falls back on a quotation from a colleague who admires the film, and adds, “Just let me plead nolo contendere and slip out by the nearest exit.”19 This facile attitude of “It may be one of my blind spots” degrades criticism to a level where debate becomes impossible. I am familiar with such tactics from my experience of school pupils, but most outgrow them by the Sixth Form. Whether or not art matters any longer, these people effectively demonstrate that criticism doesn’t, as they practice it. In themselves, of course, they don’t matter, and one is tempted simply to ignore them. But insofar as any critics influence so-called educated taste, it is these, and their ignominious failure is particularly significant in relation to the kind of wider issues films like Shame and Weekend are about. One can study what the phrase “cultural disintegration” means in the total absence of serious values demonstrated in most of the reviews of Shame. As I sit writing this, there is a record of the Brandenburg Concertos on the gramophone, and I can see my children playing in the garden; men, women, and children—families like mine—are being burnt and blasted to death in Vietnam, and I have absolutely no idea what may be happening to me and the few people I love ten years, five years, two months from now. Shame is central to the experience I am living at this moment, and at most moments.

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The World Without, The World Within The immediately striking fact about Shame, if one comes to it from Bergman’s previous work, is that it neatly reverses the somewhat simplified scheme of his films I took as my starting point: for a great deal of its length the leading characters are in the home that has become their permanent one (even if they are still, essentially, displaced persons); journeys in the first half of the film are abortive attempts at flight, all of which end in a return to the house, and the journey at the end is a voyage to nowhere. The film breaks new ground for Bergman in a number of obvious ways, but this fundamental reversal suggests the depth and extent of the development. The feeling for a possible human normality is stronger, and the value placed on it higher, than in any previous Bergman film; yet we find, even stronger than in Hour of the Wolf, the pessimism that sees that precious normality as at the mercy of uncontrollable forces so great that their power and extent can only be guessed at. The tragic strength of Shame arises out of the fusion of these two developments. A possible normality: Bergman certainly does not present us with ideal characters or an ideal marriage. Eva (Liv Ullmann) is perhaps as close to an ideal human being as is compatible with necessary human imperfection; even she cannot entirely preserve her personal integrity amid the messy confusion in which existence involves her. Jan (Max von Sydow) emerges as very unideal from all the situations in which we see him, though Bergman reminds us at several points that we never see him in the environment or occupation in which he lived in peacetime and in which his weaknesses would have been much less exposed. It is one of the film’s great strengths that Bergman can show

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robin wood us, in the first part, a character who is selfish, cowardly, hypochondriac, emotionally immature, and lacking in self-awareness and nonetheless convince us that his marriage to a woman of strength, tenderness, and warmth has genuine possibilities. For all Jan’s failings, one is made to feel that, under favorable circumstances, the Rosenbergs could achieve a relationship of real value. When writing about The Silence, I suggested that a concept of normality can only exist in relation to a defined social framework. In Shame normality is associated with tradition. Love, tenderness, sympathy, the sense of marriage itself, the desire for family—all are felt as dependent upon a context of civilized values. Jan feels love for Eva as he watches her buy fish from a fisherman-friend beside a quiet stream; as she completes the purchase and returns to the car, she loosens her hair. They have come from an isolated existence at their cottage where a state of constant tension apparently holds them separate; it is their contact with a seeming stability and order, in the tenuous but representative form of a solitary fisherman, that relaxes them. At Jan’s declaration that he was in love with her, Eva blossoms. On the ferry in company with Mayor Jacobi (Gunnar Björnstrand) and his wife, in the town as they deliver trays of lingonberries, at an antique shop where they drink and buy wine, we see the relationship take on meaning and value. And all the time Bergman keeps present for us the forces of social disintegration. The fisherman tells Eva of an invasion scare; there are troop transports on the ferry, and the Jacobis are on their way to visit their son, who is in the army; the streets are full of armored cars; the antique dealer has been called up and is in uniform; there are only a few bottles of wine left. 226

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Jan (Max von Sydow) and Eva after purchasing the fish. Shame.

The scene in the antique shop, the characters surrounded by varied emblems of civilization, is very beautiful, the attitude complex but defined with great exactness. Bergman’s humanity is nowhere clearer than in his presentation of the antique dealer. We see him as a man insulated from reality, politically ignorant and uncommitted, shut up amid relics of the past, hoping to convince the military authorities that his weak foot is bad enough to ensure him a safe office job or perhaps get him discharged. Yet we cannot but view him with sympathy and a certain respect: he is a civilized and gentle human being. Then there is the Meissen musical ornament, useless, artificial, unjustifiable in a 227

robin wood world where people starve to death, are tortured, persecuted, massacred, yet by virtue of its very uselessness embodying the concept of civilization in its purest form. The other objects we are shown add other aspects to this concept: the painting of a royal family group, absurdly obsolete yet indicative of a past stability; the battered but undaunted-looking figurehead from the final scenes of Persona, an emblem at once of human endurance and the ravages of time. Amid these, the three characters sip wine together, the sense of civilized communion balanced by the sense of valediction, the antique dealer’s intuition that not only his life but his way of life is nearing its end. A cultural tradition sufficiently represented by the antique dealer and his Meissen ornament would seem at best touchingly fragile, at worst merely trivial. Bergman extends the concept much further in the following scene, arguably the most beautiful in all Bergman’s films and consisting mostly of an almost static medium shot of Eva as she and Jan, having dined off the fish, drink the wine at a table under a tree. The core of the film is the human reality of Eva, our sense of her needs and her potentialities. In a scene whose naturalness suggests partial improvisation, Bergman allows the actress and the character to reveal themselves to us: the “meaning” of Shame, one might say, is Liv Ullmann herself. Under the influence of their fleeting, fragile contacts with civilized stability, the creativity of the pair begins to blossom again: Eva will resume her learning of Italian, Jan wants them to make music together once more, for half an hour every morning. This revival of creative potentialities also manifests itself in a mutual tenderness and contact: they begin to be able to say things to each other with an intimacy they

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The World Without, The World Within clearly haven’t achieved for a long time. Nature plays a crucial role in the scene: the tree, the fresh air, the gentle sunlight, the daisies decorating the table, one of which Jan removes at the end as they go into the house to make love—the entirely natural and beautiful culmination of the feeling of the whole scene. The rich complex of interrelated ideas that underlies this part of Shame is also found in Yeats: How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree.20

The author of “A Prayer for My Daughter” would surely have admired Bergman’s film deeply. The poignant sense of precariousness—the vulnerable infant “under this cradle-hood and coverlid” set against the “haystack-and roof-leveling wind”—is nearly as strong; simply in Shame we are fifty years further into the future that filled Yeats with such deep dread. The parallel is completed by Eva’s own desire for the children that will fulfill her as a woman (“Then we’ll be a family”). The defeating of her natural instincts for motherhood and family, and the consequent maiming of her potential for living, are movingly suggested during the film from her desolating decision (or realization) after the first experience of invasion that “we’ll never have any children,” through her finding the dead baby after the massacre, and her urge to “mother” the young deserter whom Jan brutally shoots, to her account of her dream in the directionless open boat as the film ends. Her need for

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robin wood motherhood, and its implicit but deeply felt association with “custom and ceremony” and nature, provides a focal point for all the film’s positive feeling for the civilized tradition. The beauty of the long take at the table is inseparable from our sense of precariousness—of the way the beauty is threat-

Eva and the dead baby. Shame.

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The World Without, The World Within ened by both external forces (the war) and internal ( Jan’s character). The depth of Eva’s humanity, her adequacy as the vessel for Bergman’s positive sense of life, is evidenced by the fact that her absolutely clear-sighted awareness of Jan’s failings so little inhibits her capacity for tenderness toward him, her natural emotional generosity. In the course of the film we watch, in Jan’s development, the external and internal forces of disintegration act upon one another and fuse. Defending Les Carabiniers (1963), Godard said that the film that needed to be made about the concentration camps, and probably never would be made, was a film about not the victims but the guards.21 Bergman has gone one better and made a film showing a possible continuity between the two roles. He mentions the camps, too, apropos of Shame: “I have wondered how I would have sustained the experience of a concentration camp, of being forced into such a damnable position.”22 In the first part of Shame, Jan’s role is equivalent to that of concentration camp victim: the emphasis is on the terrifying helplessness of human beings caught up in events they can neither evade nor control. Then, after the long central scene with Jacobi that is the film’s turning point, we see Jan develop to the stage where he would be perfectly fitted for the role of guard. The complex logic of this development is revealed by Bergman with an extraordinary acuteness of perception through what is surely Max von Sydow’s finest performance. The premise that war does terrible things to people ceases to be merely a phrase and takes on a concrete and specific reality. But it is too simple to talk just about “the pressures of war”: what happens to Jan is determined by their complex interaction with features of his character and his marriage relationship—even, and decisively, 231

robin wood by Eva herself. We see that the possibility of Jan’s achieving dignity or any human fullness is dependent on his relationship with Eva; the moment when he discovers her infidelity with Jacobi effectively deadens his human potential. The infidelity itself has intricate causes, and love for Jacobi is not among them: the unsatisfactoriness of the marriage makes it possible, weakening Eva’s instinct for final commitment to one man; with this goes the frustrating of her maternal impulses. Through Jacobi she is getting Jan the civilized comforts he needs to hold him together; for her lover himself she feels no more than a weary compassion, cradling his head on her breast like a mother. The shocking abruptness of the scene where Jan and Eva quarrel furiously as they dig potatoes—a quarrel in which Jacobi figures prominently—becomes comprehensible when one deduces what has been happening since the interrogation in the school. Bergman sees that people don’t cease to be affected by developments in their closest personal relationships because there is a war on: the film cannot be reduced to a schematic study of the direct brutalizing effects of war. Jan kills Jacobi less for the money (which at that stage appears of little use) than for revenge. Again, the motivation is complex. His own sexual uncertainties, arising from his inability to give Eva a child, are part of it; so is his sense that Jacobi has broken his last hold on his own humanity. From that point on we watch him harden into an insentient being, his human potentialities stripped down to the base, basic instinct of mere self-preservation. He withdraws totally from contact. The moment in the devastated woods when Eva falls and Jan doesn’t stop to help her up compares revealingly with the scene in Weekend where the wife is raped by a passing tramp and her husband 232

The World Without, The World Within squats apathetically by the roadside. The effect of the latter is primarily of a macabre, sardonic humor: Godard’s characters were never human, their insentience being in the data from the outset. The moment in Shame expressed with the greatest simplicity the sense of utter loss in relation to the possibilities defined in the early scenes. Godard can’t afford to allow emotion into his film, any more than he can allow a real sense of physical pain, or how could he make his cannibals acceptable? Near the end of Shame, as they wait on the stony beach for the boat, Eva asks Jan how they are to continue living if they can no longer talk to each other. He makes no answer. The study of Jan’s degeneration is obviously central to the film, but the theme is given extra dimensions through the characters of Jacobi and Filip (Sigge Fürst). We watch both attempting to preserve what they can of human values within situations they can do no more than modify, with no hope of affecting the issues radically. Jacobi is forced by his position into an assumption of apparent personal authority that in fact he has to exercise in the ways expected of him. He can commute an execution by firing squad to penal servitude for life and get Jan and Eva sent to the safety of his office; but he has had to make examples of them in a way he knows to be unjust, and he has to deal with the mass of alleged collaborators with some show of retribution in which innocent and guilty will suffer alike. Eva says she feels she is in a dream and it’s not her dream but someone else’s: we are never allowed the satisfaction of identifying the dreamer, of attributing blame. All the characters are enclosed in the “dream.” Bergman’s maturity is nowhere more evident than in his treatment of Jacobi. In imposing himself upon Eva as a lover, Jacobi uses his position and his knowledge of her situation in 233

robin wood a way that is obviously corrupt, knowing that she doesn’t love him. Yet his need for Eva cannot possibly be seen as mere lust. She is his link with civilized values, with the possibility of tenderness, integrity, and warmth: we see him, when he has sent the couple home from their interrogation, thinking about her as he sits in his cold office huddled in his overcoat, pulling the inadequate electric fire closer with his stick, completely isolated amid the dehumanizing drabness of his surroundings and his situation. Jacobi helps the Rosenbergs because he wants Eva but also as an expression of his wider need to relate himself to values the war has rendered obsolete, to the cultural tradition and the artists who ought to be its highest representatives. There is nothing heroic about him, but his failure to adjust to the demands for ruthlessness imposed on him by circumstances testifies to his humanity, thereby appearing a strength rather than a weakness. He dies because he cannot cease to be a civilized human being. The same could be said of Filip’s suicide at the end of the film, though Filip is one of the “terrible idealists” of whom Jacobi expresses such fear and the man by whose authority he is killed. Filip is the fisherman from whom Eva buys the fish at the beginning of the film. Bergman’s development of the character is very elliptical. He appears in only four scenes, but his appearances imply the complexity of his predicament. The second time we see him is when, gun slung over shoulder, he witnesses the arrest of the suspected collaborators at the village shop: a scene filmed in a single long shot without dialogue, ending with Filip walking into close-up so that we at last see his face, drawn and determined. His situation is revealed through his treatment of Jacobi during the long central scene. He likes and respects 234

The World Without, The World Within the man, is willing to involve himself in what, from the point of view of “terrible idealism,” is corrupt behavior by allowing Jacobi to buy his life. He knows Jan has the money and does all he can to force him to hand it over. In compelling Jan to carry out the execution personally, he is both making a last attempt to get him to relinquish the money and punishing him for removing the last hope of saving Jacobi. The gesture with which he leads Jacobi to execution—a restrained compassionate patting of the head—is the more moving for being unstressed by any directional “pointing.” During the same scene, however, it is Filip who unleashes the violence that destroys the Rosenbergs’ house and smashes their piano and Jan’s violin. We feel that he carries personal responsibility for the destructiveness, and for the death of Jacobi, yet that he is part of a complex of larger movements beyond his control. When, afterward, Jan justifies himself to Eva by saying that Jacobi would have been shot anyway, even if the money had been surrendered, she breaks down partly because she can’t with any conviction refute him. When Filip turns up at the end as the boatman to whom Jan pays Jacobi’s money, we accept his “opting out” as the logical outcome of what we have seen of him previously. Here, and more strikingly in his suicide, lowering himself silently over the edge of the drifting boat, he becomes a yardstick by which we can measure the degree of Jan’s dehumanization. In the world Bergman shows us, the “Shame” of which is quite simply the loss of everything that gives human life dignity and significance, suicide becomes an act of desperate affirmation, the only means left of acknowledging the value of human feeling by rejecting an existence that demands its forfeiture. Jan watches, unmoved, and turns aside to sleep. 235

robin wood Bergman’s total mastery of style is confirmed by the fact that he now feels free to allow himself and his actors a certain degree of controlled improvisation. He has reached an ideal fusion of surface detachment and profound emotional impact. It is always the spectator’s deepest responses that are touched, beyond any facile direct onslaught. Certain scenes where the issues are relatively clear-cut are filmed with great immediacy: those in which people are rushed like herds of cattle in and out of the school, to be interrogated or dispatched. But in the scenes of more complex significance—Jan’s shooting of Jacobi, his later shooting of the deserter—Bergman rejects any temptation to overwhelm us with immediate horrors, leaving us free to absorb all the implications. The “execution” of Jacobi, from the moment Jan moves toward him with the revolver, is filmed in a single take, with all the action in long shot and Jan’s back to us most of the time. Throughout it we can see the yard where the hens Jan so hilariously failed to shoot earlier have now been summarily decapitated; we can watch Eva’s reactions and register fully all that is happening to the marriage relationship; we are aware of Filip’s presence. Instead of shocking us with the details of the physical horror at the core of the scene, Bergman encourages us to see it in the context of the film’s development: beyond the physical pain, there is the horrifying sense of people—executioners, victims, bystanders—trapped in a progress of events they can’t arrest or control or extricate themselves from. Similarly, the treatment of the shooting of the young deserter—the burst of machine-gun fire heard against a long shot of Eva as she runs to stop Jan, or runs away (she clearly doesn’t know which herself )—removes us from the immediate horror, which

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The World Without, The World Within

Jan and Eva in the boat after the burning of their home. Shame.

is vivid enough in our imaginations, to keep us aware of its wider significance. Eva remains to the end the emotional heart of the film. Though not entirely untainted by a disillusionment both public and private, she retains to the end her humanity and sense of value. Bergman’s feeling for the potential beauty and value of the individual existence gives Shame a dimension and an emotional maturity that Weekend quite lacks—and which Godard’s films already lacked before his dismissal of the possibility of a “personal solution” in Masculin-Féminin. As Eva lies beside Jan in the boat, the dream she recounts—it is more a soliloquy than a communication, for Jan is beyond communication—poignantly

237

robin wood places essential human needs against a reality that denies them and recalls Jan’s dream about playing Bach, at the start of the film, thereby making us aware of the distance that has been traveled. During the early scene where the couple drink wine under the tree, Jan tells Eva that he can change his character, that he isn’t a determinist. On the word “determinist” the camera tracks in toward Eva’s face, moving for the first time in what has already been a very long take. Eva doesn’t know what a determinist is. Her sense of events as a dream in which they are helplessly swept along clearly suggests determinism, and the overall progress of the film confirms this. Yet what makes Shame so moving is the feeling that the determinism isn’t quite absolute. None of the characters can arrest the general movement of events, but within that uncontrolled progress they have a limited freedom to make, to differing degrees, their individual protests, whether by action or example. If it is a “protest” film, the protest is not against any government, or even against war, but against the nature of existence itself: a protest both metaphysical and tragic. Liv Ullmann has become the medium for this protest in Persona, in Hour of the Wolf, and above all here in Shame, Bergman’s masterpiece to date and one of the greatest films of the decade. It is Bergman’s distinction to have established himself as a great, and central, artist in an age peculiarly inimical to great art. His greatest quality is his capacity for development, which is also the drive toward the attainment of human fullness. The journey from Frenzy to Shame is an extraordinary feat of courage and intelligence.

238

Moments of Release Cries and Whispers

It was The Seventh Seal in 1957 that established Bergman’s reputation internationally. At the time, the film appeared a vividly imagined medieval fresco with contemporary overtones. In fact, it also established a basic structure that has recurred intermittently in Bergman’s films ever since. The opening of the film sets two groups in an opposition defined as much by poetic detail as by character: on the one hand, the Knight and Squire, outcasts on a barren beach, perpetually awake or tossing in disturbed sleep, the Knight confronted by a vision of Death; on the other, the traveling players, their caravan harmoniously integrated in a composition of trees and meadows, their sleep disturbed by nothing but a mosquito, the clown Jof the recipient of a vision of the Virgin and Child. But Knight and Squire are themselves opposed, the former a tormented, frustrated seeker, the latter a stoical materialist, bound to each other in perpetual, mutual resentment, never making more than transitory contact with the players. This triangular structure recurs, obviously, in The Face, where parallel roles are played by the same actor, and less obviously 239

robin wood in The Silence. Here, Knight and Squire are transmuted into the sisters Ester and Anna, and their confrontation is accordingly more naked and intense; the traveling players are condensed into Anna’s son Johan. The importance of this structure— clearly at root a psychological one—is suggested by its recurrence beneath such very different overt subject matter. Bergman described his trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence) as “Chamber Films,” pointing to their intimacy and inwardness by analogy with the “voices” of a string quartet;23 but his films have always been to varying degrees psycho-dramas with the characters deriving their intense life partly from their nature as projections of interior drives and conflicts. Many of the films (the Trilogy, Persona, Cries and Whispers) resemble a sort of internal group therapy session in which the personae within Bergman’s own skull battle with debatable degrees of success toward health or resolution. Reduced to its fundamentals, the recurrent structure has two characters, one spiritual/intellectual, the other materialist/ sensual, bound to each other by a need that is itself ambiguous (sadomasochism or a striving after wholeness?), and a third character (or group) much less clearly defined and less “inwardly” portrayed but representing a potential health. The traveling players always seemed a somewhat facile wish-fulfillment; the unformed, immature nature of this aspect of the structure is much more satisfactorily expressed in the frail, vulnerable child of The Silence. The most significant point about these characters, in psychological terms, is that they are always outside the main conflict and seem scarcely susceptible of integration. In Persona, the boy from The Silence (same actor—Jörgen Lindström) has been 240

Moments of Release pushed outside the action of the film into some strange, undefined never-never land: the effect is to insist on his symbolic status but also to reduce him to a mere rhetorical gesture. Yet here again (like Jof and Johan) he is associated with the idea of new life and resurrection. Bergman’s films since the trilogy fall into two alternating series: one (Now About These Women, Hour of the Wolf, The Rite) hermetic, very stylized, and formalist, often retrospective and arguably retrogressive; the other (Persona, Shame, A Passion [The Passion of Anna], The Touch) much more open and exploratory, with an increasing tendency to improvisation and spontaneity; contemporary in setting, more outward-looking, comparatively naturalistic in style. If one sees his work in terms of a tension between a striving toward health and wholeness and tendency to indulge neurotic traits in sterile and perverse self-torture, it is easy to associate the latter impulse with the hermetic works, the former with the exploratory. Cries and Whispers belongs, on the whole, among the hermetic films, though it is a richer work than its predecessors in the series. Stylistically, it is far removed from the spontaneous inventiveness of A Passion and The Touch: here, every composition, each effect, seems pondered and deliberate. The red interiors that, with the actresses’ white dresses, determine the film’s stylized formal beauty also emphasize its enclosedness, hence its nature as interior drama: Bergman explained that he once imagined the soul as enclosed in a red membrane.24 The recurrent structure I have noted is present in a particularly clear-cut and complete form. Of the three sisters, the dying Agnes (Harriet Andersson) is a constant reminder of the threat of death; the other two, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv 241

robin wood

Eva Vergerus (Bibi Andersson) and Andreas Winkleman (Max von Sydow). A Passion (1969).

Ullmann), recapitulate, with variations, the spiritual/materialist conflicts of The Seventh Seal, The Silence, and Persona. Set against these characters is the devoted servant girl Anna (Kari Sylwan), accepting, altruistic, Christian: a clear derivative from the traveling players, more fully realized and convincing but still outside the main psychological conflict and scarcely affecting it. The film strikes one as among Bergman’s most authoritative and assured, but the high valuation such a description implies is qualified by one’s sense that it breaks little new ground: what is most admirable and moving in Bergman’s work as a whole is presence of intense dynamic drives, the ability to develop. The 242

Moments of Release

The dying Agnes (Harriet Andersson) with her sisters (Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann) and, in the background, the servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). Cries and Whispers (1972).

Touch, much less realized and successful than Cries and Whispers, is in some respects more promising. The difficulty with the “Christian” characters in Bergman’s film is that the attempted affirmation they represent is really the denial of everything that is most vital in his art. The core of his work is the conflict of broken but complementary psyches, its life is its ambiguous (destructive or constructive?) energy. The values embodied in the servant of Cries and Whispers are essentially passive. The film’s most moving scene has nothing to do with her: it is the moment when Karin and Maria, after a fiercely 243

robin wood destructive quarrel, suddenly break through to reconciliation and passionate contact, a moment Bergman celebrates, characteristically, with the sudden irruption of a Bach cello suite on the sound track. It is the most marvelous moment of release he has ever given us, and without any equivalent, structurally, in the previous films: short-lived, but containing a powerful suggestion that the future health of his art lies in the resolution of its psychological conflicts, not in their denial.

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Call Me Ishmael Fanny and Alexander

Bergman’s statement that Fanny and Alexander will be his last film is doubtless to be understood more rhetorically than literally: he has already completed another. Admittedly he specified that it would be his last theatrical film, and the new one, After the Rehearsal, was made for Swedish television—but so was Fanny and Alexander in its original, longer form and the new film has already been bought for theatrical distribution outside Sweden: the distinctions blur. The declaration, however, remains useful in drawing attention to Fanny and Alexander’s particular nature: that of an artistic testament and summation, the kind of work any filmmaker might wish his “last film” to be. It is also the most generally accessible film Bergman has made for many years, perhaps since Wild Strawberries, and it is in striking contrast to the immediately preceding From the Life of the Marionettes. Yet its accessibility and deserved popularity with both critics and public do not necessarily guarantee that it has been fully understood; I am struck by the fact that the majority of reviews have ignored or been very vague about precisely those aspects of the film that seem to me most interesting, aspects 245

robin wood centered on Ishmael. Our critics either don’t know what to make of Ishmael or don’t want to make anything of him (her). A long article on the film by William Wolf in Film Comment, for example, can offer no more than “The rescued Alexander . . . meets Isak’s mysterious nephew Ishmael, who introduces him to the supernatural [which, by the way, Alexander has already encountered on several occasions] with mesmerizing talk of magical powers.”25 Actually, Ishmael’s most significant communication to Alexander is that he is supposed to be very dangerous, which is why he is kept locked up; we may deduce that our critics find him very dangerous too. I shall return to Ishmael, who seems to me the culmination not only of this film but of all Bergman’s work to date. First, I want to consider the two levels on which Fanny and Alexander can be seen as a “summation.” First, on the personal level, numerous anecdotes from Bergman interviews connect him with Alexander, most notably the punishments inflicted on him in childhood by his Lutheran pastor father. Compare Hour of the Wolf, in which the male protagonist (Max von Sydow) recounts similar memories. Asked why he didn’t dramatize these in a flashback, Bergman replied that the experiences were still too close, that to do more than have the character narrate them would be unbearable.26 In Fanny and Alexander not only are they fully dramatized but the “father,” significantly distanced as stepfather, is created with understanding as a rounded character fully believing in the goodness and justice of his actions. (To understand, however, is not necessarily to forgive: there is no hint of sentimental exoneration.) Bergman’s self-identification with a male child on the verge of puberty is not new; it was anticipated in The Silence and, crucially, Persona. What is especially 246

Call Me Ishmael interesting here is the way the identification becomes divided: the film moves toward the moment when the children’s mother, Emilie, having at last exorcised her need to be dependent on a man, accepts the management of her first husband’s theater and plans to produce A Dream Play—a work with which Bergman has been particularly associated. An active, independent woman and a boy not yet indoctrinated into patriarchy but who has learned all about fathers: in the dual identification Ishmael is already implicit. Second, on the historical level the personal progression from abused child to producer of Strindberg is counterbalanced with a much wider though related progression, realized in the audacious aesthetic leaps of the film: from nineteenth-century realist novel to twentieth-century symbolic drama, Dickens to Strindberg, David Copperfield to A Dream Play. The aesthetic progression encapsulates in microcosm an essential social/sexual progression from confidence in a “reality” built upon the traditional organization of sexual difference to the collapse of that confidence, with the emergence of Ishmael as the logical—the only possible—movement toward further progress. In retrospect, it now appears that the turning point in Bergman’s career was Persona or, more precisely, the somewhat mysterious “illness” that preceded it (and out of which it grew): an illness both physical and mental. Persona, of course, is intimately concerned with the experience of breakdown. Bergman’s work has been haunted from the outset (it is quite explicit in Prison, the first film he both wrote and directed) by the notion that life on earth is already “hell”—embodied particularly in the seemingly unresolvable tensions of heterosexual relationships. Prior to Persona, the commonest tendency of the films is to move 247

robin wood toward a bleak, resigned “happy ending” in which male and female accept each other for want of anything better, making the best of a bad job (for example, Waiting Women, Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light). In the post-Persona films, the commonest movement is toward the relationship’s final, irreparable collapse (Shame, A Passion, The Touch), the experience of psychological breakdown remaining a constant threat. Yet at the same time, an alternative movement begins tentatively to manifest itself. Persona is the first Bergman film to treat bisexuality seriously, as a potentially valid human experience: indeed, the film lends itself readily to the reading that it is the denial of lesbian attraction that perverts the two women’s relationship into a vicious power struggle that reproduces, internalized and in microcosm, the brutal imperialism of the male-dominated external world of which the Vietnam and Warsaw Ghetto references stand as emblems. The film that immediately followed, Hour of the Wolf, though its essential movement is somewhat obscured by the elaborate “baroque-gothic” trappings, unmistakably attributes its male protagonist’s torments to the repression of homosexuality ( Johan’s fantasy/memory of murdering a seductive boy). Face to Face, though one of Bergman’s least successful, most sterile films, abruptly (too abruptly, as if Bergman himself were taken by surprise) produces a male protagonist who is balanced, self-accepting, and gay. But the key film in this altogether surprising line of development—among the finest, toughest, most rigorously non-evasive of all Bergman’s works—is From the Life of the Marionettes. It is also, unfortunately, one of his most neglected and inaccessible, a film totally devoid of any of the ingratiating features that have made Fanny and Alexander so popular. The point is not so much 248

Call Me Ishmael that one of its central characters is gay (though this is one of the most sympathetic and imaginatively “inward” portrayals of a certain recognizable type of homosexual the cinema has given us): the film culminates in a psychiatrist’s diagnosis that the root of the male protagonist’s psychological problems lies in his repressed homosexuality. Like his female counterpoint in Persona, the psychiatrist is neither wholly endorsed nor wholly repudiated: the film suggests that his insights are valid within certain limitations. A (real-life) Swedish psychiatrist once remarked to me succinctly that most psychiatrists are not interested in making people healthy but only in making them “adjusted,” and Bergman’s presentation (in both films) reflects this very shrewdly and precisely. The psychiatrist of Marionettes has his own stake in the patriarchal status quo to the extent of trying to seduce his patients’ wives in order to confirm his “masculinity,” and his diagnosis has the effect of categorizing the protagonist as a “special case.” The film as a whole, especially when viewed in the context of Bergman’s general development, effectively questions such categorization, presenting its hero as representative rather than exceptional. We are very close here to the theories developed by, for example, Herbert Marcuse and Gad Horowitz,27 and many feminists, out of Freud’s discovery of constitutional bisexuality: theories that see the repression of an innate bisexuality as the key to our society’s construction of hopelessly incompatible gender roles, the so-called norms of masculinity and femininity, hence as the root cause of the strains and conflicts that characterize heterosexual relations within our culture. At the climax of Fanny and Alexander, Alexander, rescued from the house of his tyrannical stepfather, and precariously in 249

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Alexander (Bertil Guve) and Fanny Ekdahl (Pernilla Allwin). Fanny and Alexander (1982).

hiding, sees for the last time the ghost of his benevolent but ineffectual real father and dismisses him, telling him he’s no longer of any use to him. This is followed almost immediately by his discovery of Ishmael who, because he is so “dangerous,” is kept permanently locked up, a secret from the world. Ishmael is a man played by a woman: in appearance, voice, and behavior, an embodiment of the principle of androgyny. He/she is also presented in a context of pervasive sexual ambiguity, the “brother” of Aaron, who physically caresses Alexander and kisses Ishmael tenderly on the lips. The brief scene in which Ishmael and Alexander join forces is given powerful erotic overtones: Ishmael encloses the boy in his/her arms, and together they will the death 250

Call Me Ishmael of the stepfather, the overthrow of patriarchal oppression (the enactment of Alexander’s secret, unspeakable wish) that makes possible not only Alexander’s freedom but Emilie’s—her independence, her acceptance of the theater management. When Ishmael invites Alexander to write his own name, the name he finds he has written is Ishmael’s. The pre-pubescent male child becomes identified with the symbolic figure of androgyny; the woman becomes active and autonomous; Bergman identifies himself with all three. At last a Bergman film has achieved a triumphant happy ending—a triumph qualified but not disqualified by the brief intrusion of the stepfather’s ghost.

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Persona Revisited

What follows is part addendum to, part correction of, the account of Persona I offered in my book on Ingmar Bergman almost thirty years ago. That account was written after my first few viewings of this inexhaustibly fascinating, disturbing, and difficult work and at the height of the widespread “Bergmania” in which I shared, leading me to gloss over aspects of the film (or, more precisely, its second half ) that I believe I always found troubling. The tendency to repress one’s own doubts about a film one admires and wishes to celebrate is not an uncommon critical failing (which does not of course excuse it). What was then, and perhaps remains today, the most influential account of Persona (1966)—Susan Sontag’s—seems to me guilty of the same fault and for similar reasons: it was written in the heat of excited discovery, with insufficient exposure to the film, a state of mind that also accounts for its demonstrable errors (never corrected in its numerous reprints and still reproduced by students in their essays), of which the most damaging is the assertion that it is Alma who sucks Elizabeth’s blood (rather than vice versa) in the hallucinatory later sequences.28 The mistake is 252

Persona Revisited damaging precisely because it violates the integrity of the women’s very clearly defined characters, which never disintegrate or merge to that extent, and in doing so undermines Sontag’s basic thesis that the film resists all traditional methods of interpretation. To claim that a film not only cannot but should not be interpreted seems to me simply another form of evasion, allowing the critic to sweep aside all possible problems and deflecting any inconvenient questions of value. I still stand by the main thrust of my previous account, the relevance of which has scarcely lessened in an age that has given us the Gulf War Massacre, the horrors of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Somalia, the rise to prominence of the serial killer, the daily revelations of the pervasiveness within our own culture of child abuse and violence against women. But I want to reopen the question of Persona from a somewhat different (but not incompatible) perspective without repudiating my earlier testimony to the film’s extraordinary first impact. I don’t think I can say now what I said then any better: I simply want to say something else. And, by way of leading to the “something else,” I want to fill in what now appears, inescapably, the gaping hole in my earlier analysis, an undertaking made possible by social developments of which I have only become aware since the early 1970s—feminism, the gay/lesbian movement, the interrogation of gender and sexuality. These have, it seems to me, necessarily changed our whole attitude toward cinema, often revolutionizing the interpretation of specific movies, revealing what was always there but not acknowledged: it now seems, for example, that the von Sternberg/ Dietrich films of the 1930s were previously incomprehensible. The “gaping hole” can be defined simply by asking: Is it possible to imagine a version of Persona in which the two leading 253

robin wood characters are men, an actor and a male nurse? (The reader is invited here to pause and make the attempt.) The answer must, I think, be no, or, at most, “only with extreme difficulty, and it would be a different film.” And it is worth considering that both Sontag and I refer to the issue of lesbianism only casually, within a single sentence. She at least used the word; I acknowledged this (as I now see it) crucial aspect of the film only in a passing reference to Alma (Bibi Andersson) wanting Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann) as “combined elder-sister-and-lover.” I am employing the term “lesbian” here in its widest sense; patriarchy likes to have it as merely indicating something “kinky” and perhaps titillating. Here it implies the bonding of women in mutual support against male dominance; the refusal to accept that a woman is defined by her relationships with men; the sufficiency of woman-to-woman relationships (which may include, but are not restricted to or necessarily defined by, sexuality). Bergman has often been accused of opportunism in his use of political actualities lifted out of their context and reduced to signifiers of an inner psychological turmoil: the Vietnam and Warsaw Ghetto images in Persona, the parallels between Vietnam and his imaginary, ideologically vague civil war in Shame. Such charges, which seemed valid at the time (and perhaps on a superficial level remain so), must also be looked at in their historical context: they belong to a period before the more profound and radical revelations of the women’s movement had received any wide dissemination and acceptance. At its deepest levels, Persona has only gradually become readable over the past few decades; like Shame (in many respects a more expository, more lucid, more conscious development of its essential themes), it exists at the confluence of “politics” and sexual politics.29 254

Persona Revisited “Natural causes,” “acts of God” aside, it seems clear that the manifold horrors of our world, which it is imperative now that we face squarely if we are to survive, must be attributed overwhelmingly to men: to men as individuals (for the issues of personal responsibility and personal guilt must not be evaded) but more fundamentally to masculinity, as it has been socially constructed, and to its political extension, “masculinism.” Every political system in the world today (and as far back as history can take us) has been male founded and continues to be male dominated; the women who slot into these systems (as opposed to rejecting and opposing them) are able to do so only at the cost of repudiating their female specificity—their integrity as women—and denying the fact of women’s oppression throughout history and continuing into the history that we are currently living. It is vitally important that “herstory” be written, but the achievements it celebrates will inevitably be, by and large, the achievements of resistance. The female guards we see emerging from the concentration camps at the end of Night and Fog (1955) (to whom the female psychiatrist of Persona bears a startling and significant resemblance) can stand as a grotesque but not inappropriate image of what women do to themselves when they lend themselves (for their own survival or for material betterment) to patriarchy and masculinism. When Elizabeth cowers, appalled, from the Vietnam newsreel and stares in horrified fascination at the Warsaw Ghetto photograph, she is expressing the sense of powerlessness that women (and sensitive males) experience in the face of horrors wrought by masculinism: the horrors that reproduce themselves in generation after generation in the names imperialism, nationalism, patriotism, organized religion, every existing system of 255

robin wood which is at every level patriarchal—founded by men, sustained by men, promoted by men, for the validation and safeguarding of male privilege. What the first (and finest) movement of Persona so magnificently and subtly dramatizes is the gradual, tentative empowerment of women through female bonding— “lesbianism” in the wider sense. The bonding, fragile from the start, disintegrates, for reasons that are to some extent inherent from the outset, for Elizabeth and Alma are incompatible not from mere differences of character but on the deepest levels, more cultural than personal. The difference is sometimes seen in terms of innocence and experience, but that is too simple; it is more profitable to describe it in terms of conformity and nonconformity, acquiescence in and resistance to social conditioning, the woman who enters into and accepts her “correct” position in the “Symbolic Order” of patriarchy and the woman who refuses. Bergman’s choice of Electra as the play during which Elizabeth (at first intuitively, later as a conscious decision) chooses not to speak gets great emphasis from the repeated images of the actress onstage and in costume. A puzzling choice at first sight: Bergman has shown little interest in Greek tragedy, either as a filmmaker or a theatrical producer. He has, however, from very early in his career shown a marked interest in Freud, and Freud’s first term for what he subsequently chose to call the “female Oedipus complex” was the “Electra complex”—the process by which the female learns to accept her patriarchally prescribed role, relinquishing the father and her own innate masculinity, identifying with the symbolically castrated mother.30 (The inappropriateness of the Electra myth, in which Electra identifies with the father and assists in the mother’s murder, to Freud’s theory 256

Persona Revisited seems screamingly obvious, and one understands why he abandoned the term. Yet it lingers on in general parlance, and I am convinced that Bergman had it in mind here.) By refusing to continue with the play (she completes that performance, then withdraws into total silence), Elizabeth is rejecting her “correct” positioning in the Symbolic Order. As Elizabeth is often perceived as a “monster,” evil and sadistic (a view of the character that the film’s second half regrettably makes partly tenable), it is important to emphasize that, initially at least, Bergman invests her with quasi-heroic qualities of intelligence, integrity, compassion, and even nobility. This is established in the privileged moment when we first see her alone, outside Alma’s point of view. Alma visits her in her room, opening the curtains to let in the sunlight, chattering to her in her cheerful, banal way, the socially sanctioned stereotype of the “good little nurse” perfect in her training, switching on the radio beside Elizabeth’s bed. A play is in progress, perhaps a fragment of a soap opera, in which a woman is begging for forgiveness. After a few seconds Elizabeth begins to laugh, silently, bitterly, scornfully. Alma interprets the reaction purely in terms of the play’s “bad acting,” not questioning its content, and when Elizabeth (in one of her abrupt changes of mood) angrily switches off the radio, treats her patient to some trite, wellintentioned, condescending remarks about the importance of art. It is clear that Alma’s interpretation of Elizabeth’s reaction is incorrect, or at least incomplete. What Elizabeth finds first funny, then infuriating, is not merely the stilted acting but the play’s stereotypical reproduction of patriarchy’s prescription for the cure and incorporation into “normality” of the transgressive woman: to ask forgiveness. Alma then finds some classical 257

robin wood music (nice and soothing, to distract a difficult patient from her psychological problems) and leaves the room. The music is the slow movement of Bach’s E Major Violin Concerto, and its potential effect is quite beyond Alma’s comprehension. I noted in my book on Bergman the importance for him of Bach: his music is already quoted in Wild Strawberries, but it takes on its full significance in the later films, from Through a Glass Darkly on. Three instances seem particularly apposite here: the moment in The Silence when Ester (Ingrid Thulin), in the desolation of her life and a stale foreign hotel room, listens briefly to the “Goldberg Variations” on a transistor radio; the moment in Cries and Whispers of passionate “lesbian” contact between the two sisters (Karin and Maria), celebrated by the sudden surging on the sound track of one of the suites for unaccompanied cello; and the performance of another of the suites in Autumn Sonata that marks the one moment of repose and togetherness, wrought by the music. On one level the use of Bach’s music is consistent through all these films: it signifies for Bergman a possible transcendent wholeness our civilization has lost, a spiritual potential yearned for but forever beyond the characters’ reach, the music’s formal conventions reflecting the sense of a confident social order within which sorrow and disturbance continue to exist but can be contained. Hence, as Tony French points out in his supple and sensitive analysis of Through a Glass Darkly,31 the specific piece chosen is not necessarily consoling, certainly not “nice and soothing” to anyone sensitive to its nuances, and this is certainly the case in Persona. Bergman’s sensitivity to Bach is eloquently embodied in the mise-en-scène, which subtly but precisely “echoes” the music’s progression. The piece, in the minor, is among Bach’s 258

Persona Revisited most somber and tragic utterances, but Alma switches it on and leaves the room just before the magical, poignant moment when the mood briefly lightens, the music crying to modulate into the major: the effect is like a glimpse of pale sunlight appealing from behind cloud. At this point Elizabeth runs directly into camera and full light. The image begins to darken at the exact moment when the minor key (in the obstinately recurring bass figure) definitively reasserts itself. Then, as if in response to the music’s shift, Elizabeth (the screen now in heavy shadow) turns away from us onto her back and covers her face with her hand in a gesture of despair. Those familiar with the work will know that the movement is contained between two of Bach’s most exuberant and celebratory, a mood and a containment for which there can be no possible equivalent in the film or the torn and strife-filled world it represents, on both the personal and cosmic levels. The rich implications of this moment (I know of no artist who, working at the peak of his/her creativity, can pack more meaning into a simple, almost “empty” scene) are developed in the second moment of intimacy we are permitted with Elizabeth, outside Alma’s consciousness—the “Vietnam” scene, which immediately follows, as if in explanation, Alma’s “I wonder what’s actually wrong with her?” I cannot agree with Hubert I. Cohen (in his meticulously researched, detailed, and perceptive Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession) in confidently asserting that this is Elizabeth’s “nightmare”:32 one has only to invoke the freedom from “realist” convention that modernism permits, and the high level of stylization Bergman has by this point established, to accept it as a representation of a waking experience. But “nightmarish” the scene certainly is. 259

robin wood Elizabeth paces her room at night, sleepless, troubled, her hands clasped and pressed to her chin in a gesture of frustration, as if she doesn’t know what to do or whether the decision she has made is any sort of answer. She moves to the door as if to open it—deciding, perhaps, to abandon her stance and make contact. Then she turns to the images on the television screen: a newsreel showing the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, his will and his belief so strong that he can maintain the gesture of an arm raised in protest even as he burns agonizingly to death. Does she empathize with his agony, even as we (surely) empathize with her appalled recoil? Or does she see him as carrying her own protest to its logical conclusion, a conclusion that obviously terrifies her? It is evident, in any case, that on some level she identifies with him—with his agony, his desperation, his protest, his readiness to go all the way—in his acknowledgment of the masculinist horrors of a world characterized overall by aggression, domination, mindless cruelty, and helpless suffering, and in the possibility of passive protest and the awareness of its probable uselessness. There follows immediately (the sequence of scenes is not arbitrary; one must search out its inner logic) the scene of the husband’s letter, read aloud to her by Alma, confronting her with her “correct” but rejected role of wife and mother, increasing at once her rage and her guilt. The husband is sympathetic but quite uncomprehending, quoting a remark of Elizabeth’s made shortly before her withdrawal as if it were entirely devoid of irony or ambiguity: “Only now I understand what marriage is about.” What he has learned from her is that they should look at each other as if they were two anxious children, full of kindness and good resolutions—including, presumably, the resolu260

Persona Revisited tion to “be a good little girl”—his inability to comprehend his wife equaled by his sentimentalization of childhood. He then asks if she “remembers saying all that,” suggesting at least the possibility that she didn’t, that he is imposing on her his own interpretation: it must strike us as somewhat incongruous that she would follow such remarks by immediately “grabbing at his belt,” presumably in a gesture of aggressive sexual desire or desperation. She crumples the letter and tears in two the enclosed photograph of their sickly-looking son. Bergman moves from this at once to the scene with the psychiatrist (Margaretha Krook), the most obvious logic of which is to follow Elizabeth’s decisive rejection of the traditional female roles with its contemporary alternative, the “strong” woman who has made her way in the man’s world, on its terms, within yet another overwhelmingly patriarchal institution whose main function has become that of restoring its patients (victims?) to “normality” rather than to health. (The former would lead to conformity, the latter the impulse toward revolution.) She understands Elizabeth about as thoroughly as the psychiatrist at the end of Psycho understands Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), with exactly the same motive of establishing her “knowledge” and “authority,” and much the same aim, that of explaining her away as an unfortunate inconvenience. At least she seems somewhat less complacent, as if the struggle to keep at bay all the human realities that lie beyond and constantly threaten the ideological concept of “normality” were a terrific strain, won only at great human cost. To understand Elizabeth would be to see that concept shattered irreparably and her whole position threatened; she therefore resorts to a brutal, bitter sarcasm, cruel, insensitive, and repressive, if necessary for her own self261

robin wood defense. (The character, who appears in the film less than five minutes, is surely among the most brilliant “cameos” in the cinema, a whole life, and the necessary judgment on it, suggested with extraordinary economy and precision.) Alma, the good little girl who clasps her hands behind her back as she attends to the instructions of her “headmistress” in a classic stance of obedience, accepts her conditioning without question. She has chosen one of the professions considered appropriate for members of the “weaker sex,” whose duty it is to serve; she identifies both with her own mother (“My mother was a nurse until she got married”) in the “correct” Oedipal fashion and with her mother figures, the retired nurses in the home she describes to Elizabeth; she automatically assumes (it

The doctor (Margaretha Krook) talks to Elizabeth. Persona.

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Persona Revisited scarcely seems a choice) that she will marry Karl-Henrik and bear his children. (“It’s nothing to worry about. It’s so safe.”) The contact with Elizabeth at once rescues her from this fate and condemns her to the desperation and torment which, at the end of the film, she may or may not be ready to transcend. The film (and Bibi Andersson) is quite extraordinary, I think, in suggesting that while on the surface Alma is fully acquiescent in the patriarchal order and the woman’s ignominious role within it, deep down she has always been aware of this falseness: Elizabeth disturbs and frightens her from their first moments of contact. Elizabeth is a deeply disturbed woman, hence a potentially dangerous one. It is greatly to the film’s credit that it fails to “explain” her in terms of personal psychology: her resistance to patriarchy, her refusal of “the dominant ideology,” is sufficient. Those who remain comfortably within it cannot understand this. I have been during my life both “Alma” and “Elizabeth,” and I understand it very well. I also understand that “Alma” will always be a part of “Elizabeth,” just as “Elizabeth” has always been a part of “Alma.” The ideology is our home—the home in which we grew up. While we remain within it, however constricted and frustrated we may feel, we have “nothing to worry about. It’s so safe”: we know the rules. As soon as we step outside, renouncing it, we are alone, we have no bearings, there are no rules anymore, we must discover new ones or construct our own. Though less abrupt, it is as frightening and disorienting as the experience of birth must be, when the infant leaves the security and warmth of the womb (even if it felt a bit uncomfortable at times) for a strange new world in which its first experience is usually to get slapped and made to scream. Like birth, it is also a 263

robin wood necessary one if our civilization is to progress and redeem itself. Hence the ambivalence of our feelings toward Elizabeth: she is dangerous, frightening, “other,” yet admirable and necessary. It is usually those who refuse to see the two women as more than “characters” to be judged on the level of personal psychology and behavior who find her a “monster.” What Bergman cannot do (because he is a man? because he is an inhabitant of a country where all the social problems are believed to have been solved by many years of quasi-socialist government, but where patriarchy and capitalism remain the dominant forces? or only because he is Bergman?) is dramatize the possibility of constructing a new “home” of solidarity and mutual supportiveness. It could never be as secure as the home we have relinquished, since it lacks the sanction of tradition; yet it makes life and further development possible, it enables us to develop our creativity, not negate it in impotent rage. It is surprising, however, how far the film goes— at least through its first half—in suggesting the possibility. Elizabeth’s rejection of her role in the patriarchal order is remarkably complete, refusing all compromises; one might see her rigor as the positive aspect of her ruthlessness, or see the ruthlessness (which all but destroys Alma) as its unfortunate consequence. Before her silence, she has rejected both marriage and motherhood, and not merely as abstract ideas. The moment when she tears the photograph of her child is deeply shocking, registering the brutality, the stilling of “natural” feeling, the psychic cost, which the rigor enforces: she cannot allow herself to get sucked back into the life she has rejected and the emotions that belong to it. (I shall return to Bergman’s attitude toward motherhood later, as it becomes a crux of the film’s later episodes.) Her silence is the logical culmination of 264

Persona Revisited this process, at once the most rigorous statement of her refusal to participate in a system she repudiates and a retreat—the silence becoming as much a protective barrier as an assertion of defiance. It also strikingly anticipates the position that certain feminists have developed out of Jacques Lacan: language itself is patriarchal, the acquisition of language being a decisive step in entry into the Symbolic Order. The quandary this produces (if language is patriarchal, how can a feminist speak?) is not only Elizabeth’s.

The Beach Orgy The chink in Alma’s armor is her memory, half-shameful, halfnostalgic, of the so-called orgy on the beach in which she and her friend Katarina had sex with two young boys, her one subversive and potentially liberating experience, though she cannot afford to let herself recognize it in those terms. Its significance lies in the thoroughness with which it breaks almost every traditional rule of sanctioned sexual contact, in which it is remarkably systematic. • Monogamy. Not only is Alma “unfaithful” to Karl-Henrik, there are two boys involved in the encounter; although she only has intercourse with one of them (twice in fairly quick succession), the other, Katarina’s partner, is in close proximity throughout. • Privacy. There appear to be no spectators, but the activity takes place on a beach, not in the seclusion of a bedroom. • Children’s sexuality. We are not told the ages of the two boys, but it is clear (from the word pojkar and the fact that they

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robin wood need encouragement and guidance) that they are “boys” in the literal sense, presumably in their early teens, just pubescent, inexperienced. • Active female sexuality. The women throughout take the active role, encouraging the boys for their own pleasure and reveling in their own sexuality outside the bounds of patriarchal containment. • Group sex. It is clear from Alma’s narration that much of the excitement and pleasure of the encounter come from sharing, watching each other, participating emotionally and sensually in each other’s enjoyment. Hence, • Lesbianism. The women do not have actual sexual contact with each other, but much of the stimulus arises from their close physical proximity.

The “orgy” bursts all the bonds of social convention that restrict the free expression of human (and especially women’s) sexuality. But more important still are the two ways in which Bergman caps Alma’s narrative. She tells Elizabeth that after she got home the same night, she and Karl-Henrik made love, and it was better than it had ever been before. Alma finds this surprising but it is perfectly logical: far from damaging the couple’s relationship, the encounter on the beach improved it by freeing the woman’s desire, releasing previously unknown sexual energies. Inevitably, social convention was restored: the fact of the encounter couldn’t be shared with her lover, and Alma, finding herself pregnant, had an abortion. It may seem incongruous to describe an abortion as the restoration of social convention, but it is clear here that the motivation was less Alma’s reluctance

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Persona Revisited to have a child than the inevitable uncertainty as to the child’s parentage—the “correct” male line must be preserved. The other way in which Bergman caps the narration is by concluding it with the two women in bed together and with the first intimations of lesbian physical contact. Alma relives her experience by recounting it to Elizabeth, and it is the act of sharing that makes this contact possible: Elizabeth, touched by Alma’s shame and confusion, comforts her by stroking her face and taking her in her arms. It is, on one level, a maternal gesture, a reminder that the source of lesbianism is in the intimate contact of mother and female child.

The Lesbian “Fantasy” The scene in which Alma, waking in the night, sees Elizabeth coming into her room and they caress in front of a mirror is marked as a privileged moment in the film. It is the first sequence (if we leave aside the pre-credit and credit sequences) whose status in relation to the narrative’s “reality” is uncertain, and this uncertainty is underlined by a stylistic break: instead of the clear high-definition images that have characterized the visual style up to that point, it has a misty, hallucinatory, dreamlike quality. But its status as dream or hallucination is not clear either: Alma first gets up for nothing more unusual than to get herself a drink of water, and the mistiness is rationally accounted for by the sound of a distant foghorn. It anticipates the notion of fusion that will become so prominent later (and to which it seems to me undue significance has been attached, by critics and by Bergman himself ): but it does so in a strongly

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robin wood positive way, the intermingling of the two women in a gesture of great tenderness and intimacy suggesting the mutual identification from which Alma will later recoil violently in rage and horror, yet remaining here less a matter of “fusion” than of intimate togetherness. Most important, it represents the one positive memory that Alma retains at the end of the film, reliving it as she looks for the last time in a mirror before leaving the beach house, and reacting with an expression of regret and loss. If the film leaves us with any hope for Alma’s future, it is surely in this retained image of female togetherness. Is it offered as a “real” experience or as Alma’s fantasy? We cannot, I think, be sure. If we incline to the latter it is largely because when Alma asks her if she visited her in the night Elizabeth shakes her head and looks puzzled, and she has no immediately apparent reason to lie. And it is Alma who has so much to gain from achieving identity with a strong, independent, emancipated woman. Yet the film implies, through the specifics of cinematic progression from image to image, that Elizabeth has also benefited from an experience that may have been another woman’s fantasy. The shot that immediately follows the nocturnal lesbian encounter shows her in close-up, on the rocks by the sea the next morning, taking a photograph directly into camera: photographing the spectator, perhaps, but also, more immediately, the cameraman and, by implication, the directorscreenwriter, the males who presume to control her both as the character Elizabeth Vogler and as the actress Liv Ullmann. Never has the male gaze been returned more pointedly, empowered directly (if we respect the progress of the editing) by lesbian togetherness.

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Persona Revisited Given the radical breach of that moment—the look straight into camera at the persons controlling and viewing the film—it seems possible to question the authority of Elizabeth’s subsequent denial of the nocturnal encounter. I have tried (with the help of videotape) the experiment of watching twice in quick succession the moment of denial (Elizabeth/Ullmann shaking her head), the first time assuming that she is telling the truth, the second assuming that she is lying because she can’t cope with the implications—the responsibilities—of a close relationship with Alma. The image works perfectly both ways (a perfect validation of the “Kuleshov” experiment?). One has to ask, then, whether the ambiguity of the nocturnal union represents a fully achieved artistic effect (that is to say, of realized significance in the film’s total context) or a hesitation, perhaps a fear, on the part of Bergman. For the ambiguity makes possible the film’s subsequent perverse choice of narrative route, its descent into types of material that are disturbing in the wrong way—disturbing, that is, not because they confront us with an awareness of the horrors of our civilization but because they draw us into unproductive and essentially morbid personal obsessions, at the same time—and as necessary corollary—rejecting any possible alternative movement toward health. If Bergman’s “breakdown” enabled him, in the first part of Persona, to move into completely new, potentially both rich and radical, areas, the remainder of the film can be read as a hysterical retreat back into the ambiguous comfort of neurosis. When I wrote the book containing the earlier account of Persona, I failed sufficiently to acknowledge the ways in which Bergman’s astonishing creativity is repeatedly thwarted in the later films by neurotic blockage. In certain films

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robin wood this takes a very precise form: the blockage is literally enacted in the film’s structure. There is a strong positive movement toward health, abruptly halted by either a hiatus (Shame, A Passion) or by the unprepared and arbitrary introduction of new plot development (The Touch), followed in turn by the revelation that “everything has gone wrong”—the “going wrong” produced not by any sort of narrative logic but by the arbitrary intervention of the author (literally, in A Passion, where Bergman’s own voice tells us that “six months have gone by and . . .”). Persona is a slightly different case because here the shift in tone is not entirely unmotivated: whether the nocturnal visit took place or not, Alma has clearly misread the degree of Elizabeth’s involvement with her; and the fateful letter (especially if we are to take Elizabeth’s failure to seal it as an unconscious wish that Alma read it) is Elizabeth’s way of distancing herself from a relationship that is getting out of hand and beginning to threaten her. All this, and Alma’s response to her illicit reading of the letter, is plausible enough. One may ask, however, whether it is not altogether too flimsy a pretext to bear the symbolic and emotional weight of all that follows. Elizabeth’s self-imposed silence may be theoretically admirable and heroic (though useless) as a response to the horrors of a masculinist-dominated world, but when it prohibits all explanation and discussion with another equally distressed woman it becomes perverse cruelty, its original motivation pointless in such a context. And one is forced to ask whether Bergman himself is not unhealthily complicit in the cruelties and the anguish that overwhelm the film’s last third— whether the combination of sadism and masochism belongs less to the fictional characters than to their (male) creator. Repeated viewings (I have found) do nothing to clarify the obscurity of 270

Persona Revisited the “five episodes” where the film moves into a dimension of psychic fantasy. My own experience has been that the film’s first half retains its fascination and its resonance, while the sections following Elizabeth’s perusal of the Warsaw Ghetto photograph becomes increasingly difficult to sit through, not because they are disturbing but because they yield so little, are merely unpleasant in the worst sense, as representations not of the horrors of contemporary human existence but of the artist’s own sickness, in which he permits his authentic creativity to drown. Particularly obtrusive and (in the bad sense) disturbing— and, I might add, on repetition boring—is the episode of the twice-told story. It is surely the passage in the film that most taxes the viewer’s patience, its insistent and reiterated morbidity far exceeding any meaning one may legitimately extract from it. The meaning, however, such as it is, constitutes a significant part of the problem: the horror of Elizabeth that the film communicates here (negating all the character’s positive and heroic aspects) is motivated solely by the accusation that she was a bad mother, and the sequence culminates in Alma’s appalled awareness (and hysterical rejection) of the notion that she and Elizabeth have somehow merged, become identical, the only possible basis for which is that she, Alma, had an abortion. Worse, one cannot help wondering whether, on some (perhaps unconscious) level, Bergman equates what Elizabeth is alleged to have done with the fate of the young boy in the Warsaw Ghetto. All sense of the admirable aspects of Elizabeth and her protest is here submerged in Bergman’s animus against a woman who rejected the role of nurturer. That something damagingly personal (in the narrow sense) here throws the film askew seems confirmed some years later 271

robin wood by one of the worst films of Bergman’s maturity, Autumn Sonata (1978). Bergman’s initial project seems to have been to balance, while pitting against each other, two embittered women (mother and daughter) and two great actresses (Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann); and for its first half the film seems to be attempting to maintain a corresponding balance of sympathies (which it also makes a feeble attempt to restore in the crosscutting of its conclusion). Progressively, the balance collapses, and the film degenerates into what amounts to a hysterical diatribe against a woman who neglected her children for her career as a great concert pianist. The parallel with Elizabeth is obvious—the Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) of Autumn Sonata is virtually an elaboration of the “twice-told story.” The worst that one can reasonably say of Charlotte is that she should never have married and had children in the first place: presumably, like Elizabeth, she allowed herself to be propelled into an inappropriate role by conventional societal expectations of the “womanly.” Yet by the film’s climax every evil has been heaped upon her, culminating in the ludicrously irrational charge (which she, equally irrationally, is made to accept) that she was solely responsible for her younger daughter’s incurable, and surely physiological, degenerative disease. Ullmann’s summation of her mother’s evil (which the film doesn’t explicitly endorse but certainly doesn’t contradict) has to be heard to be believed: “People like you are a menace. You should be locked away so you can’t do any harm.” It is common knowledge that Ingrid Bergman tried to rebel against the burdens of guilt and wickedness heaped upon her character; her own personal history might suggest that on some level (conscious or unconscious) Bergman was using the actress herself in a particularly cruel and malicious way. (One might 272

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Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) and Eva (Liv Ullmann). Autumn Sonata (1978).

compare—very favorably—Rossellini’s complex and sympathetic ways of building on that same personal history, especially in Europa 51 [1952].) With a naïveté quite astounding for an artist of such proven intelligence, Bergman insisted in an interview that he does not have an ideology (one might as well say, “I don’t have a nervous system”).33 One must assume that he mistakes the ideology that has consistently circumscribed his achievement throughout his career—what one might define as “the ideology of the Human Condition”—for “truth”: human relations are simply like that; it has little (if anything) to do with social organization (let alone the “economic base”) or with the construction of the individual psyche within a specific and analyzable cultural formation, and there is really nothing much anyone can do about it. Such a posi273

robin wood tion was established very early in his career and fully elaborated in the first film he both wrote and directed, Fängelse (“Prison,” though released in the United States as The Devil’s Wanton). In the first half of Persona (a film conceived, significantly, in the immediate wake of a severe illness and breakdown), he comes perilously close to challenging this ideological position; the last third (formally the most “progressive” work he has ever done, if one equates progressiveness with avant-gardism) mercilessly reimposes it. Note: Readers wishing for an antidote to the above account of Persona might find it in the article by the distinguished Swedish psychiatrist Göran Persson, published in CineAction.34 The article was written as a direct response to my own account of the film and differs from it in almost every detail. Written from a strictly psychoanalytic (and not at all political) viewpoint, it offers probably the fullest and most convincing account of what were probably Bergman’s intentions when he made the film. While I admire it, I don’t feel that my own reading, coming from so fundamentally different a perspective, is threatened by it.

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From the Life of the Marionettes: Bergman, Sweden, and Me

Bergman and Me Bergman’s films are, before everything else, personal. The most fully characteristic are intense psychodramas in which one feels one is watching an internal battle being played out—a battle among human individuals but also among warring and often murderous impulses within a single mind or personality. The battle sometimes ends in explicit defeat (Shame, A Passion), sometimes (but mainly in earlier films) in less-than-entirelyconvincing affirmation (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries), sometimes in patently ridiculous wish-fulfillment (Through a Glass Darkly), sometimes in what looks like utter exhaustion but might just pass for “making the best of a bad job” (Winter Light). In any case, the films seem to wish to provoke a correspondingly personal response: we feel we are invited to “compare and contrast” our own experiences with those shown on the screen and use our reactions and inferences however we may. The films seem to be addressed, as it were, from one suffering human being to other suffering human beings. Their central (and crucial) ambiguity is whether they are intended to make us seek answers

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robin wood or whether they are incitements to a shared despair and a sense of the hopelessness of it all. I wrote a book on Bergman’s films a long time ago, when I was still extremely young, not even forty, when (as a very late developer) I began to grow up. As far as I know, it has never been translated into Swedish. (Why, after all, would it be? In England, people found Bergman’s films “very Swedish,” but that is because at that time they hardly ever talked about sex except in lewd jokes.) At the time, I thought the book was wonderful and amazing and revelatory, but now there is much in it that I am ashamed of. To Swedish readers, if there were any, it probably seemed terribly naive. However, my sense that Bergman, in his films, was talking to me personally, whether challenging me to live or urging me to suicide, remains quite strong. I write today as a somewhat different person, yet my response is still “personal.” How can it not be, given the ways in which the films address the viewer? There will be readers who believe that criticism should be “objective,” “rational,” “scientific” (possibly it “should” be, in some perfect world, but if they think it ever is in this one they are even bigger idiots than I am). If they are patient, they will (eventually) come across a partial analysis of From the Life of the Marionettes, which I hope will make (partial) sense to them. But I cannot write about Bergman without constantly acknowledging my ongoing personal debate with his films and the changes in my perspective since I wrote my book, and the first part of this chapter will necessarily be an account of why, early, I committed myself to his films so unequivocally and why, since, I have found it inevitable that I must distance myself from them, while never losing my respect for the astonishing honesty and integrity with which he has exposed himself 276

From the Life of the Marionettes to audiences all over the world. In the interests of communicating one human being’s experiences of what it means to be alive, intelligent, honest, and fearless, he has stripped himself naked before the gaze of anyone who dares to look. This chapter will be, perhaps inevitably, to some degree an attack on an artist who has been a crucial formative influence on my life but an influence I have found it necessary (to my very continued existence perhaps) subsequently to disown, at least in part. It is not intended to dishonor or, least of all, dismiss him. Bergman’s films are as essential a part of our heritage as the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of Dostoyevsky. And, after all, wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all went naked (physically, perhaps, in warm enough weather, but certainly emotionally and psychically)? And if the artist dares expose himself so honestly, shouldn’t (in fairness and justice) the critic—who is not, necessarily, the Jarl Kulle of Now About These Women? When I wrote my book on Bergman I was (officially, that is) a happily married heterosexual family man with a respectable job (school teaching), a family of three young children, and a small house in an outer suburb of outer London. Unofficially, I was a gay man in a culture where there were no gay rights or gay liberation (an almost unimaginable concept back then!), who didn’t even know that there existed (underground and illegally) a gay culture of some kind, and who wouldn’t have dared attempt to enter it if anyone had told him about it. One of the few things in which I can now feel any satisfaction whatever is that at least I had told my wife all about myself—the downside of which was that I had asked her to “cure” me, a task which, as she was and remains today a deeply caring, compassionate, and loving individual, she was all too willing to undertake, never 277

robin wood recognizing its impossibility until much too late. I swallowed intact the whole myth (and my wife subscribed to it also) that my condition was “sick,” “disgusting,” and “evil,” hence fully deserving the ten years imprisonment that in Britain, until 1960 (the year of my marriage), was the legally prescribed punishment for anyone caught enjoying sexual pleasure with a person of the same gender. (Isn’t it amazing how preposterous this all seems today, a mere forty years later?) It is scarcely necessary to add that, as a result of this, I lived a life of superficial (but never entirely unreal) happiness and perpetual inner torment— ripe, in fact, to succumb to “Bergmania,” as it was often called at that time. It never occurred to me for a moment (as it never seems to occur to Bergman or his characters) that my existence was largely determined by social/cultural/political realities that were not “eternal” or an aspect of something called “the human condition,” but could either evolve or be changed by protest and campaigning, or (more realistically) a combination of the two. Today I feel deeply ashamed of my cowardice: I should have done all the things I wanted to do and gone to prison if necessary. The idea never even occurred to me, which shows how deeply internalized cowardice can be. When he read my book on Bergman, an unusually perceptive friend told me that it was really my autobiography. I certainly hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but as soon as he spoke it aloud, I knew it was true. The book is about Bergman, certainly: it contains fairly detailed analyses of his films, now and then quite accurate, I think. But it is also a book about me. I attached myself to Bergman’s films because they enacted on the screen my inner life at the time (my outer life was generally quite innocuous and even placid, my marriage was no more 278

From the Life of the Marionettes unhappy than any other “traditional” one I have encountered, with its socially prescribed gender roles). I became Bergman’s idolater and in a sense his (very willing) victim, succumbing readily to the pervasive sense in his films that human existence and human relationships are necessarily arenas of pain, cruelty, torment, preceded by brief preludes of apparent but illusory happiness.

Bergman’s “Swedishness” Is Bergman “typically Swedish”? One may answer at once that a great artist is not “typically” anything; he/she transcends “typicality.” But in England people said his films were “typically Swedish,” and this is really very odd because the dominant myth of Sweden was as far removed from them as possible. The components of that myth were (perhaps still are): Sweden is the country where all social problems have been solved; all Swedes are “liberated” (unlike poor us!); all Swedes indulge in joyous, happy, uninhibited sex and cavort about in the nude at every opportunity; homosexuality and lesbianism are not only legal in Sweden but are fully accepted by everyone. So, if we really believed these things, how could we possibly see Bergman’s films as typically Swedish? Perhaps we wanted to: why, after all, should the Swedes have it all while we were so miserable? It was kind of comforting to discover that they were just as fucked up as we were. And, of course, there was Bergman’s honesty, his nakedness: very unBritish indeed, the British priding themselves on being so inhibited (it was called “good taste” or “decency” or something) even while superficially deploring it. No one in Britain goes 279

robin wood naked, or didn’t back then. And here it was, all up there on the screen, in a land whose greatest cinematic audacities had been the Ealing comedies! The British fear of nakedness (both literal and metaphorical) is a dominant national characteristic. Literal: I showed Summer with Monika to my high school film society in 1968, and the next day parents phoned the headmaster to protest that their children (fifteen-year-olds and up) had been forced to watch a NAKED WOMAN (back view only) walk down a beach into the water. Metaphorical: if British people tore each other apart (more likely a case of wife beating, in which case she “probably deserved it”), we were not accustomed to seeing such unheard-of practices paraded before our eyes on the screen. Perhaps many British people, like me, saw their secret inner lives revealed to the public gaze in Bergman’s characters, the superficial national differences offering a certain safeguard: we could still say, “Of course, that’s how foreigners behave. We are not like that.” There was also another myth about Sweden, whether complementary or contradictory is unclear: the myth of the “cold Swede.” Interestingly, it is a myth I have found ambiguously endorsed by Swedes, who have occasionally in my presence accused themselves of being “reserved” or “closed” (especially compared to Danes, who are apparently the opposite). It also receives some endorsement from Bergman’s films, in which the figure of the “cold” male (especially) recurs: he is often played by Gunnar Björnstrand (crucially in Through a Glass Darkly, where the father’s analytical detachment is offered as one of the major causes of his daughter’s schizophrenia), and Wild Strawberries in particular is single-mindedly about this coldness, incarnated in father and son, though traced back also to the grandmother. 280

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“Social Construction” vs. “The Human Condition” I lived in Sweden for two years, teaching “English as a foreign language” for the British Centre (1957–88, 1959–60, with a year in France in between), spending the first year in Mjölby (a town whose chief claim to fame seems to be that a train stops there in A Lesson in Love), the second in Lund. It was through this that I met my wife, a fellow teacher for the same organization, and we were married in Lund in 1960 before returning to Britain to “settle down.” It was during my first year that I discovered Bergman’s films (The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, both totally incomprehensible without subtitles); by the time I returned in 1959 my Bergmania had taken me over completely (I saw Wild Strawberries eight times, in England and France, during the intervening year). During my second year, I met Göran Persson, a fellow resident of Lund’s International Student House, who became one of my closest friends (and best man at my wedding). He subsequently became a psychiatrist. It was through Göran that I began (without knowing it) my career as a film critic: we saw The Virgin Spring together many times, he explained all the dialogue, and we collaborated on an essay published in the British Centre’s newsletter. Back in England, I saw the film again and produced a greatly expanded version, published in an obscure (and long defunct) British film journal. Göran, who died in 1996, was a man of extraordinarily penetrating, even intimidating, intelligence whose fascination with Bergman’s films seemed to border on identification but was always qualified by his probing critical objectivity; I published a distinguished article on Persona by him, written shortly before his death, in CineAction.35 My book on Bergman, written in the 281

robin wood period of his strongest influence on me, of course is deeply indebted to him. This apparent slice of merely personal history is in fact the preamble to what has become, for me today, the central crux and problem of Bergman’s films. Since the 1960s, the explosion into art theory of semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and theories of ideology has produced what is (or certainly ought to be) the great debate of our age: the question of the degree to which we are socially constructed, hence of the degree to which human existence is susceptible to change. Göran was clearly a remarkable psychiatrist, and to him psychiatry provided the only possible answers to human problems, their solutions being, therefore, always at the level of the individual. During our correspondence, I tried repeatedly to challenge him on this, but the challenge was never accepted, just ignored: it was as if what I tried to assert had no meaning for him. Perhaps the refusal was his defense against a threat: he had devoted all his life and thought to psychiatry, and implicit in what I was saying was the suggestion that curing individuals is really of only very limited (though valid) usefulness while the culture within which they have been constructed remains unchanged. The relevance of this to Bergman’s films should be immediately apparent. His attitude toward psychiatry seems far more pessimistic than Göran’s: the psychiatrist of From the Life of the Marionettes is as monstrous and as unprofessional as the psychiatrist of Persona, sharing her bitterness and cynicism, and like her proving quite useless in rescuing his patients from their personal calamities. Yet nowhere in Bergman do I find any clear interest in or consideration of other possible solutions to human problems. Marionettes is quite clear about his position, from its very title: 282

From the Life of the Marionettes

Professor Mogens Jensen (Martin Benrath) and Peter Egermann (Robert Atzorn). From the Life of the Marionettes (1980).

we are “marionettes” because we are constantly at the mercy of mysterious drives and impulses, which we can neither control nor even understand beyond a certain point: that’s the way things are, always have been, always will be. I cannot help wondering (and I say this very tentatively, with some fear of giving possible offense to a Swedish readership) whether the myth that “all social problems have been solved” does in fact carry some weight in Sweden, a country far in advance of my own in solving the more obvious ones. Perhaps it is easier to perceive, say, poverty or homelessness as a social problem than to consider that male-female problems might be at least partly the result of our ideological commitment to the institution of marriage 283

robin wood and family, monogamy, and the privileging of heterosexuality. The question that still faces psychiatry is one that Freud himself raised only to sidestep: should the aim of psychiatry be to help people adjust to their situation within the existing social framework, or should it be to turn them into revolutionaries? My chief objection, today, to Bergman’s films is that I scent in them no whiff of revolution, despite all the human pain and misery they so brilliantly and insightfully catalogue.

Bergman’s Women . . . and His Men If the myth of Swedish “emancipation” has any grounding in Swedish reality, it is surely embodied in what (in my country of origin) we used to call “the weaker sex,” or sometimes “the gentle sex” (actually the title—only partly ironic—of a British film about the women’s army in World War II, in which the gentle sex learned to be less gentle, for the duration), phrases one would never dare utter in Sweden. Within my own limited experience of forty years ago, I had the impression that women had greater freedom to make choices than was the case then in England, where the wife/mother ideology continued to exercise a very strong, all but irresistible, pull: I led several “housewives groups” in conversation sessions over morning coffee or afternoon tea (which they usually insisted on making for me in deference to my Britishness), but it seemed to me that they were housewives because that was what they wanted to be and not from ideological coercion. One of the first things the outsider notices about Bergman’s films is the remarkable strength, energy, and forcefulness of the women—both the characters and the actresses who play them: if there is a “weaker sex” in the 284

From the Life of the Marionettes films, it is clearly not the female. The implied attitude toward them, however, is not exactly (or only very rarely—Liv Ullmann in Shame perhaps) celebratory. The chief conclusion one might draw is that if this is emancipation, it doesn’t appear to have done anyone much good, the films giving the overall impression that it has devastated the men and left the women frustrated, embittered, and frequently destructive. Emancipation is not presented as absolute: the unemancipated women are typically played by Bibi Andersson (Persona, A Passion, The Touch). But the unemancipated are just as unhappy as the emancipated, Persona being especially interesting in its locking of the two into a mutually destructive relationship. At times one feels that the men’s weakness is being presented as the direct corollary and consequence of the women’s strength (Hour of the Wolf, Shame, Marionettes); when, in Shame, Jan (Max von Sydow) becomes strong, it is through a process of total dehumanization, whereas Eva (Ullmann), even rendered helpless and passive, retains her integrity. I do not wish to oversimplify, Bergman’s attitude seeming often bewilderingly complex, so that anything one says cries out for instant qualification: the attitude toward women’s strength in these films seems compacted simultaneously of admiration and fear. The women, too, are often presented as split or incomplete. The nearest to a “complete” personality is perhaps the Ullmann character (it is virtually the same in both films) of Hour of the Wolf and Shame. The recurring “split” is that between the intellectual woman and the sensual, most clearly and directly dramatized in the sisters of The Silence and Cries and Whispers, in which the intellectual sister (in both cases, Ingrid Thulin) seems at once the more desolate yet the more admired (by her author/director), her con285

robin wood dition being attributed to her identification with the father, an identification refused by the younger, sensual daughter. If the men generally come off worse (unless, like the ancient waiter of The Silence, they are so old as to be essentially asexual), this does not at all prevent a feeling that Bergman identifies with them at least as much as with the women. The crux, whether explicitly or not, seems always to be sexuality, with the shadow of male impotence hanging over the films as constant threat. The key Bergman word, cropping up repeatedly in his films and his interviews, is clearly “humiliation.” I sent him a copy of my book when it was published (after some hesitation—I was terrified of what his reaction, if any, might be, and even to send it seemed presumptuous) and received a brief letter back, among my treasured possessions. He told me it was a pleasure to read a book about him that was intelligent without being “humiliating.”

Bergman and Homosexuality Although its laws were obviously more humane, I did not get the impression, during my stay in Sweden, that the general social attitude toward gayness was very different from that in England. (Did I perhaps, on some unconscious level, choose to go there in the hope that I might be “liberated”? If so, it is deeply ironic that in fact I ended up married instead.) In fact, I can’t remember ever hearing it mentioned. I only met one man during my two years whom I knew to be gay (because people “warned” me about him): a photographer in Mjölby, a middle-aged man who seemed to live in total isolation apart from his work. I met him when he saw me and asked if he might photograph me, and visited him a couple of times for awkward evenings in his apart286

From the Life of the Marionettes ment when he played me Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” symphony (known in Britain at that time as “the homosexual tragedy”) on the gramophone. I saw in him a distorted mirror-reflection of myself: not so much what I was but what I assumed I was supposed to be, the mold in which society has formed so many gay men in the past, lonely, alienated, ostracized by the “healthy,” filled with self-disgust. Something of his image lingers in the superficially more integrated Tim (Walter Schmidinger) of Marionettes. He remains, forty years later, very much on my conscience. But how could I have befriended (let alone touched) the person who embodied for me everything I loathed in myself ? A recent all-too-brief visit to Lund as an openly gay critic showed me that attitudes have changed as much there as here in Canada: what was in 1960 a dirty secret, never spoken, was now openly discussed without fear or awkwardness. Explicit references to homosexuality are rare in Bergman’s films (and, no, I am not about to out him!). My choice of Marionettes was partly motivated by the film’s general neglect (in English-speaking countries at least, it seems to be regarded as little more than a footnote to his major work) but also because it contains the only major gay character in all his films. I note here three other instances. Hour of the Wolf provides by far the most interesting and suggestive. I think of the scene (which may or may not represent a dream, in a film that constantly undermines any distinction between reality and fantasy) where Johan (Max von Sydow), fishing, watches a naked boy cavort tauntingly on the rocks and feels compelled to murder him, pushing the body down under the water, where it remains dimly visible, “below the surface.” Johan’s rod, in the “erect” position, is bent as by some irresist287

robin wood ible pull. In the film’s climactic sequences, he experiences the ultimate humiliation: being made up as a woman. It seems clear that the various “demons” who populate the film (and swim up out of the protagonist’s unconscious to destroy him) are essentially and fundamentally sexual, and that homosexuality and fears of feminization are prominent among them. What seems central to Hour of the Wolf is elsewhere marginalized, tagged on at the last minute almost like an afterthought. The more abrupt and arbitrary (“ludicrous” is the word that comes to mind) is the decision by Johan (Erland Josephson) at the end of Scenes from a Marriage to go to a West Indian beach and have lots of gay sex: apparently, like Cary Grant in Bringing up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), he “just went gay all of a sudden,”

Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson). Scenes from a Marriage (1973).

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From the Life of the Marionettes presumably because of his problems with his wife. Nothing anywhere in the film prepares for this moment. It is not uncommon for men to be impotent with women because they are gay; it is (as far as I know) unheard of for a man to become gay because he is impotent with women. The third instance is in Marionettes, again at the very end, but has no clear narrative connection with the film’s gay character (though his presence in the same film can hardly be coincidental) and seems almost as arbitrary. I shall return to it in my discussion of the film.

From the Life of the Marionettes Though made in Germany during Bergman’s brief exile, the film is apparently set in Sweden (unlike his other “German” film, The Serpent’s Egg): although they speak German (and are played by German actors), all the characters have Swedish names, and (again unlike its predecessor) it seems fully consistent thematically and stylistically with the “chamber dramas” of Bergman’s later period. Its even more extreme harshness, bitterness, and pessimism were doubtless influenced by Bergman’s situation at the time, surely a low point in his life and career. Its opening sequences (following the succinct prologue: the introductions of three of the four leading characters) establish it firmly in direct line of descent from the succession of films that began with Through a Glass Darkly, the three characters being immediately recognizable as variations on their predecessors. The “cold” man: Mogens Jensen, psychiatrist. Jensen (played by Martin Benrath but who, earlier in Sweden, would surely have been played by Gunnar Björnstrand) is first shown 289

robin wood giving his testimony to the police, filmed in medium shot against a blank white background—we feel that he is addressing us. His coldness is felt as something deliberately imposed upon himself, half-concealing an underlying uneasiness, a knowledge of his own inauthenticity. He is also covering up for himself, as he must feel some responsibility for the catastrophe. He tells the police (and the audience) that “as far as I know” Peter (Robert Atzorn) was happily married. Subsequent revelations (during the flashback to Peter’s visit to him two weeks before the murder) reveal that he knew Peter’s marriage was mutually destructive and that he had been for some time having fantasies about murdering his wife, Katarina (Christine Buchegger); Jensen’s method of dealing with this was, first, to trivialize it (“Why have you come here? You don’t believe your own pain. People like you don’t believe in a psyche”), and then, disturbed by Peter’s intensity, to attempt to dissuade him from killing by describing the amount of blood that would pour from a slit throat. Peter is not, of course, literally his patient but a friend of long standing; he has, however, come for help, casting Jensen clearly in the role of psychiatrist. After Peter leaves, he calls Katarina and asks her to come round, ostensibly to warn her but in fact to seduce her, suggesting that she accompany him on a trip to Tunisia while Peter gets over his little difficulty. Whether we should more admire his sense of psychiatric responsibility or his attitude toward friendship is a difficult question. The “tormented” man: Peter Egermann. Peter is the most sympathetic (or least unsympathetic?) of the three characters, but rather because of his situation than from any particular positive qualities: he strikes us as essentially helpless, driven by urges beyond his control, a victim “more sinned against than sinning” even though, paradoxically, he is the perpetrator of the 290

From the Life of the Marionettes film’s most obviously vicious action, the brutal murderer of an innocent woman whose only “crime” was to agree to have sex with him. He resembles a number of von Sydow’s characters (Though a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, Hour of the Wolf, Shame, A Passion) who are vulnerable because either weak or disturbed or both. When he describes to Jensen the realities of the marriage Jensen earlier characterized to the police as “happy,” we are deep into late Bergman territory: “How often does one say one hates? Or wishes the other dead? Or beats them? Or abuses, challenges, threatens them? We spit on each other, scream, a bit of blood, one triumphs, the other, destroyed, stands at the bathroom door and begs forgiveness.” He describes this as habitual, a ritual the couple share, like a play (“a game of repeated text”): the sense of a relationship built and dependent upon mutual torment, which has become habitual, an unbreakable pattern, has never been more devastatingly expressed. Like Jensen, Peter lies to conceal his weaknesses: his insistence to his friend-cum-analyst that he and Katarina have a wonderful sex life is thoroughly undermined later in the film when his dread of the ultimate humiliation, impotence, is revealed. We see Peter at peace (the drained peace of a man who has given up) only briefly, after he has murdered the woman who presumably stands in for his wife: in the brief scene (described by Jensen) in the dead woman’s performance room, with her corpse before him on the bed/stage, he has switched on a tape of pop music (there was no music playing during the murder) while he waits passively, having spoken to Jensen calmly on the phone. The murder is Peter’s revenge for his humiliation. The “destructive” woman. In general, women come off very well in Bergman’s films. They are not merely stronger than 291

robin wood the men are; they are more understanding, more intelligent, more compassionate. If, in the films prior to The Silence, they undermine the male characters, this is scarcely their fault: the men feel humiliated by their strength or can’t cope with their apparent demands (not only, or even primarily, sexual). The delightful Dahlbeck-Björnstrand comedies of the 1950s are essentially about “the chastisement of male presumption.” (Andrew Britton’s felicitous phrase for certain Hollywood comedies of the 1930s, to which I assume Bergman was indebted—aren’t Dahlbeck and Björnstrand in their episode of Waiting Women based upon Hepburn and Grant, even down to the crushed top hat?)36 And if Monika’s young lover is left somewhat devastated after his summer with her, that is because she was simply too much for him and quite sensibly cherished her freedom. The “destructive” woman—the woman who appears to take a certain perverse vindictive pleasure in hurting and humiliating—is a comparative latecomer in the Bergman oeuvre, adumbrated perhaps by the Gunnel Lindblom of The Virgin Spring (though, as an oppressed member of a lower class, she has plenty of provocation). The first clear instance seems to be Lindblom’s Anna in The Silence. Some of us may find her tremendous sexual drive and demand for sexual freedom attractive, but such a view is clearly not shared by Bergman, whose sympathies are with Ester (Ingrid Thulin). Anna is the kind of woman who would terrify and annihilate any of the more typical Bergman men (the waiter who becomes her equally uninhibited stud is extremely untypical). When she finally turns on her strongly disapproving sister (who is not exactly the most exhilarating companion with whom to be stranded in a very grim hotel in a foreign country), it is certainly Ester with whom we are meant to sympathize, 292

From the Life of the Marionettes and it is the sexually repressed, father-oriented, quasi-lesbian Ester who feels humiliated. But it is with Persona that the figure reaches full expression. Ullmann’s Elizabeth strikes us at first as an admirable character, and one of the rare characters in Bergman with a strong social/political consciousness (and conscience): her silence is a protest against the horrors wrought in a world controlled by men. Perhaps in no other Bergman film does a character undergo so complete a metamorphosis: in the film’s latter half Elizabeth’s silence ceases to have the slightest validity or use as protest and becomes a weapon with which to dominate, madden, and virtually destroy a younger woman she knows to be extremely vulnerable. When we arrive at Autumn Sonata, the pattern becomes clarified: Charlotte, the Ingrid Bergman character against whom the film betrays such unreasonable animus, is not so much aggressively destructive as simply negligent: she is in fact, like Anna, like Elizabeth, a Bad Mother. It is illuminating at this point to look back at some earlier mothers (or mothers-to-be) in Bergman’s films. The very moving, and unusually upbeat, ending of So Close to Life (in my view, one of Bergman’s best and most underrated films—it always makes me regret that he didn’t work more often from other people’s screenplays and move a little outside his own personal obsessions)—is posited on the acceptance by Hjöordis (Bibi Andersson) of her unborn child and forthcoming motherhood; and is the redemption of Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom) at the end of the other admirable Ulla Isaksson–scripted work, The Virgin Spring, attributable to her acceptance of her pregnancy as much as to the purgation through which she has passed? Ester, at the end of The Silence, has become the surrogate mother of Johan ( Jör293

robin wood gen Lindström), Bergman’s rejection of the hopelessly sensual Anna being climactically enacted in the boy’s turning away from her (but isn’t he, in a sense, Bergman-as-child?). When Bergman casts Liv Ullmann (very beautifully) in positive roles (Hour of the Wolf, Shame), it is her nurturing aspect that is emphasized (she is motherly toward Johan, pregnant at the end of the first film), and she wants (but can’t, during the turbulence of civil war, have) a child in the second. In the subsequent A Passion (one of Bergman’s most remarkable, distinguished, and fully achieved works) she is once again childless, far from nurturing, and (with her lies) at least ambiguously destructive. (Her Anna Fromm is also an unusually complex character, and Bergman certainly doesn’t suggest that she deserves to be attacked with a hatchet.) The first mention of Katarina in Marionettes occurs in Jensen’s interview with the unseen police inspector: he describes her as a “career woman,” seeing this as a decided plus in the alleged “happy marriage”—an instant black mark against both of them. We should register at once that a woman who has had the effrontery to choose not to be a mother cannot expect much sympathy from her creator-director. We may be surprised, therefore, that in her first scene she makes quite a positive impression, more honest than Jensen, more in control of herself than Peter. Not, of course, strongly positive: she seems very close to succumbing to Jensen’s attempts at seduction, and, while we already know that she and Peter have (surely sensibly) decided upon an “open” relationship, we surely cannot help wondering why she would even consider going to bed with such an obviously odious and unattractive person. (Can she really be that desperate? She doesn’t give the impression of being desperate in the least.) But when she declines his offer (very perceptively— 294

From the Life of the Marionettes she recognizes that he’s “trying to come between Peter and me” because “That’s the kind of person you are”), then talks about Peter and their relationship, our view of her changes: she becomes more serious, more committed, intelligent, caring. Warning bells, however, are immediately rung: “Peter is a part of me. . . . Now we’re each other’s child. . . . Neither of us wants to mature. That’s the reason we fight and torment each other and cry. . . . But we share one bloodstream. Our nervous systems are connected.” The jaundiced viewer, who has perhaps seen too many Bergman movies, may well want to scream out at her, “Then why the hell don’t you just separate? Can’t either of you see what a mutually destructive, and also deeply stupid, relationship you’re in?” But then perhaps we may also realize that there are people locked in similar sadomasochistic relationships in which each partner feels that the other “is a part of me,” which is to say is unable to accept and respect otherness and love the other person for being by no means “a part of me” or any other such nonsense but precisely for his or her difference: we have, after all, been taught by ideology to feel in such ways, and even to believe they are somehow “right,” what a relationship is all about. Bergman, however, saves the full revelation of Katarina’s destructiveness for the central segment of the film. Peter, either genuinely intending suicide or sending a message of his desperate need for help, hesitates at the very edge of the roof then allows himself to be “talked down” by a male friend. Katarina (not perhaps out of calculated malice but driven by one of those uncontrollable and ultimately inexplicable Bergmanian impulses) uses his distraught state to torment and humiliate him in front of the friend with his impotence. The impulse 295

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Peter and Katarina Egermann (Christine Buchegger). From the Life of the Marionettes.

is perhaps as much suicidal as murderous: it’s almost as if she is goading her husband into killing her, and in its context we are clearly meant to see it as directly responsible for the actual murder that Peter commits. We must do Bergman the justice of acknowledging that he allows his characters and their mutually destructive behavior to be understood, at least on the level of personal psychology, the only level he allows. Yet it is clear that we are to view Katarina’s cruelty (in the immediate context of the attempted suicide) as especially heinous: the woman who has rejected motherhood is incapable of assuming a nurturing role toward her desperate husband-child and instead forces him on to (self-)destruction. 296

From the Life of the Marionettes Not, of course, that Katarina derives any lasting satisfaction from her cruelty. Prior to the attempted suicide scene we have had her lengthy conversation (though, as usual with Bergman, it is less a conversation than an exchange of soliloquies) with Tim in his apartment. Her response to Tim’s account of his relationship with his ex-lover elides his misery with her own, hence generalizes it to an account of all human relations: “It’s a constant mourning. Maybe not mourning but frenzy. People like me never worry about their psyche, and then it gets sick and we’re stuck”—the typical Bergman explanation (if one can dignify it with such a word) of human despair? As a postscript to this, we should note here the presentation of Peter’s mother (Lola Müthel). Her role in the film is brief (another interview, her responses again delivered into camera as if the interviewer were the spectator). She can be seen as a variation on Elizabeth in Persona, of whom she is at once the echo and the opposite. Where Elizabeth neglected her child to pursue her career as an actress, Mrs. Egermann (clearly at her husband’s instigation) has abandoned her stage career in the interests of motherhood and overcompensated for her repressed resentment by pampering and sheltering her son. She is another self-deceiver, talking of Peter’s “good childhood”—“He was a lovechild”; “We were so happy”—when in fact she reveals that Peter was from an early stage deeply neurotic, afraid of the dark, afraid of “everything—dogs, horses, big birds. Peter chewed his fingernails . . . clung to his younger sister, played with dolls and puppets”: the link to Bergman’s own childhood, hence of his identification with Peter, is plain. The mother was herself always neurotic, suffering from “asthma and allergies,” and has been quite unable to move outside the prison of her 297

robin wood own condition (“I love my old house”—which Peter sees as a “ruin”—“and will never move out”). For Bergman, Peter’s fate has been determined by his individual “bad mothers,” not by the ideological forces within whose determinations they are all trapped and helpless because they, like their creator, remain obstinately unaware of their existence. Tim. Without Tim (the homosexual character), the film would be essentially redundant, simply resuming territory already covered (often somewhat less hysterically and schematically) in earlier Bergman films. In certain respects he is a novelty in the Bergman oeuvre, and one even feels for a while that he represents at last a way out of the Bergmanian impasse. That possibility is, unfortunately, swiftly negated: Bergman instead enlists him as yet another (highly explicit) spokesperson for essentialist anguish. He remains, for all that, of great interest. Of all the film’s characters (and perhaps almost unique in Bergman’s world), Tim is the most honest, the most self-aware and self-accepting (albeit with a kind of stoical pessimism), the most open toward and understanding of other people and their problems, hence a character able to offer advice and an authentic, non-self-serving sympathy (he asks for nothing in return but to be listened to in turn). This has become a common depiction of gay characters in recent Hollywood films (of whom Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding [1997] offers the most complete and impressive instance): the heroine’s confidant and best friend, able to advise her precisely because he is isolated from the cultural norm by his sexual orientation and can view heterosexual problems as an outsider, impartially. He takes Katarina home, immediately aware that she needs comfort and reassurance, and talks about himself and his unhappy relationship with 298

From the Life of the Marionettes his ex-lover Martin—but, at first, for reasons of delicacy rather than self-absorption, in the hope that his problems might help her discuss hers. He tells her first that no one is really “faithful” (which might, but of course doesn’t, lead to an interrogation of the ideological force and exact meaning of the term “fidelity”) and that homosexuals never are, then attributes this, very interestingly, to the fact that homosexuals can’t adopt children. (He thinks he would have made a wonderful mother—is this why Bergman likes him so much?) The statement came as something of a shock to my own ideology of Swedish progressiveness: was it really true that in 1980 gay couples couldn’t adopt children legally? Martin fell in love with a “schoolboy” (which in North America suggests a minor but in Sweden might be any male up to the age of twenty-one) who was a “demon” (echoes of the gay sequence in Hour of the Wolf). Tim continued to be supportive, listened sympathetically, let Martin cry: his generosity is admirable and touching. When Katarina cries and seems embarrassed, he “takes it as a sign of trust,” telling her that “Most gays like women. Not because we’re feminine ourselves, but because we’re more in touch with our feelings.” It was at this point that I began to love the film—but stopped loving it a few seconds later. Tim’s reflections lead him (or Bergman) almost immediately into areas that cannot possibly help either Katarina or himself: Bergman has him, in fact, appear to lose all sense of Katarina’s presence and drift into a self-pitying monologue whose function is to reiterate and reinforce the Bergman credo about life and sexuality. (There is some minimal justification: we see that Katarina hasn’t really been listening to him but is locked into her own self-preoccupation.) The turning point is Tim’s confession that “I need intimacy terribly. Where does one find it? 299

robin wood Always the same torment.” We may concede, perhaps, that most people need intimacy, but doesn’t it depend on how you define it? To Bergman it always seems to mean a mutually suffocating desire for annexation. Tim passes from this (presumably by way of explaining why intimacy is lacking in his life) to a prolonged dissertation on his own physical ugliness. (“The ugliness torments me. The skin, so dry and raw even though I moisturize every night . . . liver spots, veins, horrible wrinkles.”) The Tim we actually see (in close-up, emphasizing the status of the speech as monologue) is a rather attractive man with amazingly clear skin and no visible wrinkles, but there is no hint that Bergman intends irony here: the tone is too familiar. As Tim studies his smooth, pleasant face in the mirror, he comments, “Roughness and filth,” from which he proceeds into a version of promiscuous gay sex surely calculated to raise any healthy gay man’s eyebrows in dazed bewilderment: “I crash with the worst kind. Pleasure and crazy lust, brutishness and filth, all in one wild mess. That’s your childish old man’s love life. . . . You get an orgasm with your nose so deep in shit you almost suffocate.” (No, I have not lapsed into parody—that line is in the film.) The film’s most mature and intelligent character has suddenly become a “childish old man.” But perhaps I am being unfair: that is very much the kind of self-oppression with which I might have viewed gay sex back in the 1960s, beleaguered in ignorant and repressive middle-class England. But Tim works in the fashion business in progressive and liberal Sweden, and the year is 1980: surely by then gay men had discovered the delights of sexual freedom, its sense of fun and adventure, the pleasures of physical contact, however transient, the feeling of relaxed contentment after the kind of night 300

From the Life of the Marionettes Tim describes in such horrific terms? This in turn leads to yet another restatement of the ultimate Bergmanian last resort: “I’m driven by forces I can’t control. . . . Secret forces, what are they called? I don’t know.” What, then, are we to make, within this context, of Dr. Jensen’s abrupt diagnosis of Peter’s problems at the film’s end— that he was troubled by the fear that he might be homosexual? It seems to come out of the blue, and we have of course been taught not to trust Jensen anyway: we might interpret it merely as another of his evasions of guilt, exculpating himself by giving Peter a further hang-up to emphasize his confusion. The only (somewhat ambiguous) earlier hint seems to be the mother’s revelation that Peter bonded with girls and played with dolls, surely by 1980 a somewhat shopworn cliché as an explanation of homosexuality, suggesting that neither Dr. Jensen nor Bergman had done much research into the complexities of gender construction. If, however, we take Jensen’s diagnosis at face value and Peter’s homosexuality as a (rather belated) given, we have an explanation of Tim’s necessity in a film to which he doesn’t otherwise obviously belong: Bergman needs him to suggest why Peter could not have taken the obvious alternative route, accepting and acknowledging his gayness. Though we barely see Peter and Tim together (and then only in the fashion salon, with many others present and Tim at work), we are told that Tim has been the couple’s friend for many years and can therefore be taken as exemplifying for Peter what it means to be gay. This in turn explains Bergman’s presentation of Tim and the abrupt switch in tone between the Tim who tries to help Katarina and the Tim of the ensuing monologue: if gay life is so depressing and repulsive, what can Peter do but struggle 301

robin wood on within his own miserable existence? One finds here again, in fact, the perverse and arbitrary dismissal of options so frequent in Bergman’s work: those “terrible forces” must always win out.

Bergman’s Ideology Bergman once denied in an interview that he had an ideology, which is comparable to saying, “I don’t have a nervous system.”37 In fairness, I should admit that forty years ago I might have said the same thing; today, such a statement sounds incredibly naive. The following, then, is an attempt (which others may want to improve upon, modify, or expand) at listing the interlocking components of the ideology implicit in Bergman’s films. i. Our lives and behavior are ultimately governed by terrible destructive forces that we can neither understand nor control. ii. The relationship between mind and body is complicated but never harmonious; typically, there is an irreparable split. iii. Men and women need each other desperately but can never become compatible; in general, men are weak, women strong, and both the weakness and the strength are easily at the mercy of the “terrible forces,” which can work with either. iv. The nearest approach to gender compatibility occurs when women’s strength is channeled into a nurturing role, and the highest vocation of Woman is literal motherhood. Men, however, have difficulty accepting the wife/lover as mother figure, and the result is the eruption of the terrible

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From the Life of the Marionettes

v.

vi. vii.

viii.

forces. The corollary of this is that when women reject their destiny as mother their strength becomes destructive and sterile. Sexuality is a central and unavoidable drive but is always associated with pain and conflict; the sex act itself is a basic need but is also ugly and unpleasant. “Fidelity” (understood in purely sexual terms) is always longed for but never possible. The end product of existence, as a result of the above conditions, is almost invariably humiliation, but especially for the male. If there were a way beyond this impasse it could lie only in self-awareness through some form of psychoanalysis, at the level of the individual. Yet actual analysts are human beings with their own drives and preoccupations, like everyone else at the mercy of the terrible forces, and are consequently unable to fulfill their proposed function.

Ideology—the set of values, beliefs, and assumptions with which we attempt to make sense of our world and our lives— always masquerades as “truth,” “the natural,” “reality.” It includes, obviously, all religious beliefs. Facts, on the other hand, are not ideology (though we should be careful here—so many “facts” of the past have proven not to be after all, and ideology is always selective about the facts it chooses to discover and promote); ideology is how we interpret facts and how we choose to use them. Necessarily there must always be a relationship between the dominant ideology of the culture and the version of ideology constructed by the individual, but that relationship can take many forms, the extremes being exemplified by the 303

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Peter fantasizes about slitting his wife’s throat. From the Life of the Marionettes.

conformist and the revolutionary. The difference is basic: the revolutionary, in order to formulate an oppositional ideology, must necessarily have examined the tenets of the dominant ideology thoroughly in order to reject them; the conformist, on the other hand, need not have examined them at all but passively absorbed them as the accepted wisdom of the culture. The revolutionary, it follows, sees the ideology for what it is, a set of assumptions; the conformist experiences it as “truth,” never penetrating its disguise. What makes Bergman so endlessly fascinating a “case” is that it is difficult to classify him neatly as either conformist or revolutionary. I cannot believe that the ideology implicit in his 304

From the Life of the Marionettes films corresponds closely to the dominant ideology of his culture or is accepted as such by most Swedes: it is too eccentric and appears to have been formed (or deformed?) by personal psychological factors of great power and lasting influence. But he consistently appears to mistake it for “truth,” which no ideology, by definition, can ever claim to represent. “Truth” (about life, about reality, about the universe) is, again by definition, inaccessible to us and seems likely to remain so. It is by ideology that we must steer our lives, and our greatest asset is precisely the ability to choose. We may note here Bergman’s fondness for isolating his characters, whether on small islands or in foreign countries, or visually, by presenting them in close-up against blank walls or unobtrusive decor so that they seem to speak directly to the audience, in monologue or interview, deprived of all social context. It’s as if he is denying his characters their existence as social beings, reducing each to his or her individual psychology. In this he might be termed the poet of the incomplete. A complete vision of human life—even of a human life—would take into account, at least by implication, individual character and psychology, beyond that the culture within which the individual exists, exerting its pressures and its priorities, beyond that the past, the larger pressure of human history, of the race—and these not as separate or separable components but as interacting and interlocking: the individual within ideology, in all its complexities. I seem to glimpse something of this in, for example, the paintings and etchings of Rembrandt, the operas of Mozart (which Bergman loves so much), and the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien—none of whom betrays those signs of personal animus toward his characters that Bergman repeatedly does, especially toward his 305

robin wood unmotherly women, whose cruelty has no context—it is simply their fault. Because Bergman habitually mistakes ideology for truth, his characters have no possible means of escape from their predicament, which they can see with agonizing clarity but can do nothing to modify, let alone transform. It is no accident that the entry (a veritable flood, in fact) of ideological analysis into intellectual discourse coincided with the sudden explosions of the radical feminist movement, the gay movement, the black power and antiracist movements: all the great progressive forces of our time owe if not their origins then their impetus to ideological awareness. Is it possible that the dominant ideology of Sweden—that social problems have been solved—has reduced those movements to merely theoretical interest (“foreign affairs”) and left Bergman stranded on his own island with his demons?

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notes

1. Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima, “Interview with Ingmar Bergman,” Movie 16 (Winter 1968–69): 4. 2. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1976), 333. 3. Björkman, Manns, and Sima, “Interview with Ingmar Bergman,” 3. 4. Jörn Donner, The Films of Ingmar Bergman (New York: Dover, 1972), 185–86. 5. William Butler Yeats, “A Coat,” from Responsibilities (1914), in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 125. 6. T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets,” in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 118. 7. Göran Persson, “Through a Glass Darkly,” Movie 6 ( January 1963): 30–31. 8. Edward Thomas, “The Glory,” Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1979), 64. 9. Ingmar Bergman, A Film Trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, The Communicants (Winter Light), The Silence (New York: Orion Press), 115–16. 10. Donner, The Films of Ingmar Bergman, 233. 11. Bergman, A Film Trilogy, 137. 12. Ian Cameron, “Now About These Women,” Movie 13 (Summer 1965): 6–9. 13. Björkman, Manns, and Sima, “Interview with Ingmar Bergman,” 4. 14. T. S. Eliot, “Animula,” in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909– 1950, 71. 15. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief ” (#65), in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th ed.,

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notes ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 100. 16. Tom Milne, “Hour of the Wolf,” in Time Out Film Guide, ed. John Pym, 19th ed. (London: Time Out Guides Ltd., 2011), 484. 17. D. H. Lawrence, “John Galsworthy,” in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York: Viking, 1972), 539. 18. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2001), 27. 19. John Russell Taylor, “Bergman’s First War Film,” The Times (February 20, 1969): 15; Penelope Houston, “Shame,” The Spectator (February 21, 1969); Penelope Mortimer, “On Not Taking Sides,” The Observer (February 23, 1969): 24; Richard Roud, “Charity for Some, Malice to None,” The Guardian (February 21, 1969): 8. 20. Yeats, “A Prayer for My Daughter,” from Michael Robartes and The Dancer (1921), in Collected Poems, 185–87. 21. Jean-Luc Godard, “Les Carabiniers under Fire,” in Godard on Godard, ed. Tom Milne (New York: Viking, 1972), 198. 22. Ingmar Bergman, “Moment of Agony: Interview by Lars-Olof Lothwell,” Films and Filming 15, no. 5 (February 1969): 5. 23. Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman, trans. Paul Britten Austin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 168. 24. Ingmar Bergman, “Cries and Whispers,” New Yorker (October 21, 1972): 38. 25. William Wolf, “God, Sex, and Ingmar Bergman,” Film Comment 19, no. 3 (May–June 1983): 14. 26. Björkman, Manns, and Sima, Bergman on Bergman, 215–16. 27. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), and Gad Horowitz, Repression: Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 28. Susan Sontag, “Bergman’s Persona,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Delta, 1969), 123–45. The mistake about bloodsucking is on p. 142.

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notes 29. In the original chapter 11 in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film, the paragraph ends with the sentence “Hence it allows me to take up, and bring into sharper focus, the concerns of chapter 2 (‘Fascism/ Cinema’).” 30. Sigmund Freud, “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 20 vols., trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), 14:173–79. See also “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” 14:223–434. Carl Jung discusses the Elektra complex in Freud and Psychoanalysis, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, 20 vols., trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), vol. 4. 31. Tony French, “Suffering into Ideology: Bergman’s Sasom I en Spegel (Through a Glass Darkly),” CineAction 34 (1994): 68–72. 32. Hubert I. Cohen, Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession (New York: Twayne, 1993), 227–49. 33. Björkman, Manns, and Sima, Bergman on Bergman, 215–16. 34. Göran Persson, “Persona Psychoanalyzed,” CineAction 40 (May 1996): 21–31. 35. Ibid. 36. Andrew Britton, “Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire,” in Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 5. 37. “French, Suffering into Ideology.”

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filmography

1944: Hets—Frenzy, Torment Dir: Alf Sjöberg. Asst. Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Harald Moldander, Victor Sjöström. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Martin Brodin. PD: Arne Åkermark. Mus: Hilding Rosenberg. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 101 min. Swedish première: October 2, 1944. Principal Cast: Stig Järrel (Caligula), Alf Kjellin ( Jan-Erik Widgren), Mai Zetterling (Bertha Olsson), Olof Winnerstrand (school principal), Gösta Cederlund (Pippi), Stig Olin (Sandman), Jan Molander (Pettersson), Olav Riego (Widgren), Märta Arbiin (Mrs. Widgren), Hugo Björne (doctor), Gunnar Björnstrand (teacher) 1945: Kris—Crisis Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Harald Molander, Victor Sjöström. Scr: Ingmar Bergman from the play Moderhjertet by Leck Fischer. Ph: Gösta Roosling. PD: Arne Åkermark. Mus: Erland von Koch. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 93 min. Swedish première: February 25, 1945. Principal Cast: Inga Landgré (Nelly), Stig Olin ( Jack), Marianne Löfgren ( Jenny), Dagny Lind (Ingeborg), Allan Bohlin (Ulf ), Ernst Eklund (Uncle Edvard), Signe Wirff (Aunt Jessie) 1946: Det regnar på vår kårlek—It Rains on Our Love Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Folkbiografer. Prod: Lorens Marmstedt. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, Herbert Grevenius, from the

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filmography play Bra mennesker by Oskar Braaten. Ph: Hilding Bladh, Göran Strindberg. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Erland von Kock [von Koch]. Ed: Tage Holmberg. 95 min. Swedish première: November 9, 1946. Principal Cast: Barbro Kollberg (Maggi), Birger Malmsten (David), Gösta Cederlund (man with umbrella), Ludde Gentzel (Per Håkansson), Douglas Håge (Andersson), Hjördis Pettersson (Mrs. Andersson), Julia Caesar (Hanna Ledin), Gunnar Björnstrand (Purman), Magnus Kesster (Folke Törnberg), Åke Fridell (the pastor), Benkt-Åke Benktsson (the prosecutor), Erik Rosén (the judge), Sture Ericsson (Kängsnöret), Ulf Johansson (Stålvispen) 1947: Kvinna utan ansikte—Woman without a Face Dir: Gustaf Molander. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Harald Molander. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, Gustaf Molander. Ph: Ake Dahlqvist. PD: Nils Svendwall, Arne Åkermark. Mus: Julius Jacobsen, Erik Nordgren. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 102 min. Swedish première: September 16, 1947. Principal Cast: Alf Kjellin (Martin Grande), Gunn Wållgren (Rut Köhler), Anita Björk (Frida Grande), Stig Olin (Ragnar Ekberg), Olof Winnerstrand (Mr. Grande), Marianne Löfgren (Charlotte Köhler), Georg Funkquist (Victor), Åke Grönberg (Sam Svensson), Linnea Hillberg (Mrs. Grande), Calle Reinholdz ( Johansson), Sif Ruud (Magda Svensson) 1947: Skepp till Indialand—A Ship to India, A Ship Bound for India, The Land of Desire Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Folkbiografer. Prod: Lorens Marmstedt. Scr: Ingmar Bergman from the play Skepp till Indialand by Martin Söderhjelm. Ph: Göran Strindberg. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Erland von Kock. Ed: Tage Holmberg. 98 min. Swedish première: September 22, 1947. Principal Cast: Holger Löwenadler (Captain Alexander Blom), Birger Malmsten ( Johannes Blom), Gertrud Fridh (Sally), Anna Lindahl

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filmography (Alice Blom), Lasse Krantz (Hans), Jan Molander (Bertil), Erik Hell (Pekka), Naemi Briese (Selma), Hjördis Pettersson (Sofie), Åke Fridell (manager of music hall), Douglas Håge (customs officer) 1948: Musik i mörker—Night Is My Future, Music in Darkness Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Terrafilm. Prod: Lorens Marmstedt. Scr: Dagmar Edqvist from her own novel. Ph: Göran Strindberg. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Erland von Kock. Ed: Lennart Wallén. 90 min. Swedish première: January 17, 1948. Principal Cast: Mai Zetterling (Ingrid Olofsdotter), Birger Malmsten (Bengt Vildeke), Bengt Eklund (Ebbe), Olof Winnerstrand (the vicar), Naima Wifstrand (Mrs. Schröder), Bibi Skoglund (Agneta), Hilda Borgström (Lovisa), Douglas Håge (Kruge), Gunnar Björnstrand (Klasson), Åke Claesson (Auguston Schröder), John Elfström (Otto Clemens), Sven Lindberg (Hedström), Bengt Logardt (Einer Born), Marianne Gyllenhammar (Blanche), Barbro Flodquist (Hjördis), Rune Andréasson (Evert) 1948: Hamnstad—Port of Call Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Harald Molander. Scr: Ingmar Bergman from the novel Guldet och murarna by Olle Länsberg. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: Nils Svenwall. Mus: Erland von Kock. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 100 min. Swedish première: October 18, 1948. Principal Cast: Nine-Christine Jönsson (Berit), Bengt Eklund (Gösta), Mimi Nelson (Gertrud), Berta Hall (Berit’s mother), Birgitta Valberg (Mrs. Vilander), Erik Hell (Berit’s father), Nils Dahlgren (Gertrud’s father), Stig Olin (Thomas), Sif Ruud (Mrs. Krona), Hans Strååt (Mr. Vilander), Harry Ahlin (Skåningen), Nils Hallberg (Gustav), Sven-Eric Gamble (Eken), Yngve Nordwall (Supervisor) 1948: Eva Dir: Gustaf Molander. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Harald Molander. Scr: Gustave Molander, Ingmar Bergman, from the

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filmography short story “Trumpetaren och Vår Herre” by Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Åke Dahlqvist. PD: Nils Svenwall. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 98 min. Swedish première: December 26, 1948. Principal Cast: Birger Malmsten (Bo), Eva Stiberg (Eva), Eva Dahlbeck (Susanne), Stig Olin (Göran), Åke Claesson (Fredriksson), Wanda Rothgardt (Mrs. Fredriksson), Inga Landgré (Frida), Hilda Borgström (Maria), Lasse Sarri (Bo, age twelve), Olof Sandborg (Bergland), Carl Ström ( Johansson), Sture Eriksson ( Josef Friedel), Anne Carlsson (Martha) 1949: Fängelse—Prison, The Devil’s Wanton Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Terrafilm. Prod: Lorens Marmstedt. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Göran Strindberg. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Erland von Koch. Ed: Lennart Wallén. 98 min. Swedish première: March 19, 1949. Principal Cast: Doris Svedlund (Birgitta-Carolina Soederberg), Birger Malmsten (Tomas), Eva Henning (Sofi), Hasse Ekman (Martin Grande), Stig Olin (Peter), Irma Christenson (Linnea), Anders Henrikson (Paul), Marianne Löfgren (Mrs. Bohlin), Curt Masreliez (Alf ), Åke Fridell (Magnus), Bibi Lindquist (Anna) 1949: Törst—Thirst, Three Strange Loves Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Helge Hagerman. Scr: Herbert Grevenius. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: Nils Svenwall. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 83 min. Swedish première: October 17, 1949. Principal Cast: Eva Henning (Rut), Birger Malmsten (Bertil), Birgit Tengroth (Viola), Hasse Ekman (Doctor Rosengren), Mimi Nelson (Valborg), Bengt Eklund (Raoul), Gaby Stenberg (Astrid, his wife), Naima Wifstrand (Miss Henriksson) 1950: Till glädje—To Joy Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD:

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filmography Nils Svenwall. Mus: Mozart, Mendelssohn, Smetana, Beethoven (Egmont overture, 1st and 9th Symphonies). Ed: Oscar Rosander. 98 min. Swedish première: February 20, 1950. Principal Cast: Mai-Britt Nilsson (Martha), Stig Olin (Stig Eriksson), Victor Sjöström (Sönderby), Birger Malmsten (Marcel), John Ekman (Mikael Bro), Margit Carlquist (Nelly Bro), Sif Ruud (Stina), Erland Josephson (Bertil) 1950: Medan staden sover—While the City Sleeps Dir: Lars-Eric Kjellgren. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod Mgr: Helge Hagerman. Scr: Lars-Eric Kjellgren from the novel by P. A. Fogelström based on a synopsis by Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Martin Brodin. PD: Nils Svenwall. Mus: Stig Rybrant. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 102 min. Swedish première: September 8, 1950. Principal Cast: Sven-Erik Gamble ( Jompa), Inga Landgré (Iris Lindström), Adolf Jahr (Iris’s father), Elof Ahrle (Basen), Ulf Palme (Kalle Lund), Hilding Gavle (Hälaren), John Elfström ( Jompa’s father), Barbro Hiort af Ornäs (Rutan), Carl Ström (Hansson), Märta Dorff (Iris’s mother), Ilse-Nore Tromm ( Jompa’s mother), Arne Ragneborn (Richard “Sune” Sundberg), Hans Sundberg (Knatten Gustafsson), Lennart Lundh (Gunnar “Slampen” Lindström), Ulla Smidje (Asta), Ake Hylén (Per “Pekå” Knutsson), Harriet Andersson (young girl) 1950: Sånt händer inte här—This Can’t Happen Here, High Tension Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Helge Hagerman. Scr: Herbert Grevenius. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: Nils Svenwall. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Lennart Wallén. 84 min. Swedish première: October 23, 1950. Principal Cast: Signe Hasso (Vera), Alf Kjellin (Almkvist), Ulf Palme (Atkä Natas), Gösta Cederlund (the doctor), Yngve Nordwall (Lindell), Stig Olin (the young man), Hanno Kompus (the priest), Sylvia Täl (Vanja), Els Vårman (refugee), Edmar Kuus (Leino), Rudolf Lipp (Skuggan), Helena Kuus (woman at wedding)

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filmography 1951: Sommarlek—Summer Interlude, Illicit Interlude Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, Herbert Grevenius, from a story by Bergman. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: Nils Svenwall. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 96 min. Swedish première: October 1, 1951. Principal Cast: Mai-Britt Nilsson (Marie), Birger Malmsten (Henrik), Alf Kjellin (David Nyström), Georg Funkquist (Uncle Erland), Renée Björling (Aunt Elisabeth), Mimmi Pollak (Mrs. Calwagen, Henrik’s aunt), Annalisa Ericson (Kaj, ballerina), Stig Olin (ballet master), Gunnar Olsson (pastor), Carl Ström (Sandell) 1951: Frånskild—Divorced Dir: Gustaf Molander. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod Mgr: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, Herbert Grevenius, from a synopsis by Bergman. Ph: Åke Dahlqvist. PD: Nils Svenwall. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 103 min. Swedish première: December 26, 1951. Principal Cast: Inga Tidblad (Gertrud Holmgren), Alf Kjellin (Dr. Bertil Nordelius), Doris Svedlund (Marianne Berg), Hjördis Pettersson (Mrs. Nordelius), Håkan Westergren (P. A. Beckman), Irma Christensen (Dr. Cecilia Lindeman), Holger Löwenadler (Tore Holmgren), Marianne Löfgren (Mrs. Ingeborg), Stig Olin (Hans), Elsa Prawitz (Elsie), Birgitta Valberg (Eva Möllar), Sif Ruud (Rut Boman), Carl Ström (Öhman), Ingrid Borthen (dinner guest), Yvonne Lombard (the young wife) 1952: Kvinnors väntan—Waiting Women, Secrets of Women Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: Nils Svenwall. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 107 min. Swedish première: November 3, 1952. Principal Cast: Anita Björk (Rakel), Mai-Britt Nilsson (Märta), Eva Dahlbeck (Karin), Gunnar Björnstrand (Fredrik Lobelius), Birger

316

filmography Malsten (Martin Lobelius), Jarl Kulle (Kaj), Karl-Arne Holmsten (Eugen Lobelius), Gerd Andersson (Maj), Björn Bjelvenstam (Henrik Lobelius), Aino Taube (Anita), Häkan Westergren (Paul Lobelius) 1953: Sommaren med Monika—Summer with Monika, Monika Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, P. A. Fogelström, from the novel by Fogelström. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: P. A. Lundgren, Nils Svenwall. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Tage Holmberg, Gösta Lewin. 96 min. Swedish première: February 9, 1953. Principal Cast: Harriet Andersson (Monika), Lars Ekborg (Harry), John Harryson (Lelle), Dagmar Ebbeson (Harry’s aunt), Naemi Briese (Monika’s mother), Åke Fridell (Monika’s father), Sigge Fürst (porcelain warehouse worker) 1953: Gycklarnas afton—Sawdust and Tinsel, The Naked Night, Night of the Clowns Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sandrews. Prod: Rune Waldekranz. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Hilding Bladh, Sven Nykvist. PD: Bibi Lindström. Mus: Karl-Birger Blomdahl. Ed: Carl-Olov Skeppstedt. 93 min. Swedish première: September 14, 1953. Principal Cast: Harriet Andersson (Anne), Åke Grönberg (Albert Johansson), Hasse Ekman (Frans), Anders Ek (Frost), Gudrun Brost (Alma), Annika Tretow (Agda Johansson), Gunnar Björnstrand (Mr. Sjuberg), Kiki (the dwarf ), Curt Lövgren (Blom) 1954: En Lektion i kärlek—A Lesson in Love Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Martin Bodin. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Dag Wirén. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 96 min. Swedish première: October 4, 1954. Principal Cast: Eva Dahlbeck (Marianne Erneman), Gunnar Björnstrand (Dr. David Erneman), Yvonne Lombard (Suzanne Verin),

317

filmography Harriet Andersson (Nix), Åke Grönberg (Carl-Adam), Olof Winnerstrand (Professor Henrik Erneman), Renée Björling (Svea Erneman), Birgitte Reimer (Lise), John Elfström (Sam), Dagmar Ebbeson (Nurse Lisa), Helge Hagerman (traveling salesman), Sigge Fürst (vicar), Carl Ström (Uncle Axel), Ingmar Bergman (narrator) 1955: Kvinnodröm—Journey into Autumn, Dreams Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sandrews. Prod: Rune Waldekranz. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Hilding Bladh. PD: Gittan Gustafson. Mus: Hilding Bladh. Ed: Carl-Olov Skeppstedt. 87 min. Swedish première: August 22, 1955. Principal Cast: Eva Dahlbeck (Susanne), Harriet Andersson (Doris), Gunnar Björnstrand (Otto Sonderby), Ulf Palme (Henrik Lobelius), Inga Landgré (Mrs. Lobelius), Sven Lindberg (Palle), Naima Wifstrand (Mrs. Arén), Benkt-Åke Benktsson (Mr. Magnus), Kerstin Hedeby (Marianne) 1955: Sommarnattens leende—Smiles of a Summer Night Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 108 min. Swedish première: December 26, 1955. Principal Cast: Eva Dahlbeck (Desirée Armfeldt), Ulla Jacobsson (Anne Egerman), Harriet Andersson (Petra), Margit Carlquist (Charlotte Malcolm), Gunnar Björnstrand (Fredrik Egerman), Jarl Kulle (Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm), Åke Fridell (Frid), Björn Bjelvenstam (Henrik Egerman), Naima Wifstrand (Mrs. Armfeldt), Jullan Kindahl (Beata, the cook), Gull Natorp (Malla), Bibi Andersson (actress) 1956: Sista paret ut—Last Couple Out, Last Pair Out Dir: Alf Sjöberg. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, Alf Sjöberg from a story by Bergman. Ph:

318

filmography Martin Brodin. PD: Harald Garmlund. Mus: Bengt Hallberg, Erik Nordgren, Charles Redland. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 103 min. Swedish première: November 12, 1956. Principal Cast: Olof Widgren (Hans Dahlin), Eva Dahlbeck (Susanne Dahlin), Harriet Andersson (Anita), Björn Bjelvenstam (Bo Dahlin), Märta Arbin (Grandmother), Jullan Kindahl (Alma), Jarl Kulle (Dr. Farell), Bibi Andersson (Kerstin), Aino Taube (Kerstin’s mother), Jan-Olof Strandberg (Claes Berg), Hugo Björne (Professor Jacobi) 1957: Det sjunde inseglet—The Seventh Seal Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Lennart Wallén. 96 min. Swedish première: February 16, 1957. Principal Cast: Max von Sydow (Knight), Gunnar Björnstrand (Squire), Bengt Ekerot (Death), Nils Poppe ( Jof ), Bibi Andersson (Mia), Åke Fridell (Blacksmith Plog), Inga Gill (Lisa, Plog’s wife), Maud Hansson (witch), Inga Landgré (Karin, Knight’s wife), Gunnel Lindblom (the girl), Bertil Anderberg (Raval), Anders Ek (the monk), Gunnar Olsson (painter), Erik Strandmark (Skat) 1957: Herr Sleeman Kommer—Mr. Sleeman Is Coming (TV) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Radio. Prod: Henrik Dyvferman. Playwright: Hjalmar Bergman. PD: Martin Ahlbom. 43 min. Swedish première: April 18, 1957. Cast: Bibi Andersson (Anne-Marie), Julian Kindahl (Mrs. Mina), Yngve Nordwall (Mr. Sleeman), Max von Sydow (the hunter), Naima Wifstrand (Mrs. Gina) 1957: Nattens ijus—Night Light Dir: Lars-Eric Kjellgren. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod Mgr: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, Lars-Eric Kjellgren. Ph: Åke Dahlqvist. AD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Bengt Hallberg, Lars-Erik

319

filmography Larsson. Ed: Oscar Rosander. Swedish première: October 14, 1957. Principal Cast: Marianne Bengtsson (Maria Pettersson), Lars Ekborg (Peter), Gunnar Björnstrand (Mr. Purman), Birger Malmsten (Mikael Sjöberg), Gösta Cederlund (Alfred Björk), Erik Strandmark (Nice Ruffian), Georg Rydeberg (Director), Gaby Stenberg (Ka), Helge Hagerman (Andersson), Gösta Prüzelius (Pettersson), Torsten Lilliecrona (policeman), Renée Björling (Mrs. Wilhelmsson), Hanny Schedin (Mrs. Nilsson), Sven-Eric Gamble (photographer), Sten Ardenstam (Lindström) 1957: Smultronstället—Wild Strawberries Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: Gittan Gustafsson. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 91 min. Swedish première: December 26, 1957. Principal Cast: Victor Sjöström (Professor Isak Borg), Bibi Andersson (Sara), Ingrid Thulin (Marianne Borg), Gunnar Björnstrand (Dr. Evald Borg), Folke Sundquist (Anders), Björn Bjelvenstam (Viktor), Naima Wifstrand (Mrs. Borg, Isak’s mother), Jullan Kindahl (Agda), Gunnar Sjöberg (Alman, an engineer), Gunnel Broström (Mrs. Alman), Gertrud Fridh (Karin Borg), Åke Fridell (her lover), Max von Sydow (Åkerman), Sif Ruud (Aunt Olga), Yngve Nordwall (Uncle Aron), Gunnel Lindblom (Charlotta) 1957: Bakomfilm Smultronstället—Behind the Scenes of Wild Strawberries Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Ingmar Bergman. 14 min. Swedish première: 1957 With Bibi Andersson, Victor Sjöström, Naima Wifstrand 1958: Venetianskan—The Venetian (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Television. Prod: Henrik Dyfverman. Scr: based on text by unknown sixteenth-century Italian author, translated and revised by Giacomo Reglia and Bertil

320

filmography Bodén. PD: Härje Ekman. 56 min. Swedish première: February 21, 1958. Principal Cast: Folke Sundquist ( Julio), Gunnel Lindblom (Valeria), Eva Stiberg (Angela), Helena Reuterblad (Oria, Valeria’s maid), Maud Hansson (Nena, Angela’s maid), Sture Lagerwall (Bernardo) 1958: Nära Livet—So Close to Life, Brink of Life Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Nordisk Tonefilm. Prod Mgr: Gösta Hammarback. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, Ulla Isaksson from short story “Det vänliga värdiga” in her book Dödens faster. Ph: Max Wilén. PD: Bibi Lindstrom. Ed: Carl-Olov Skeppstedt. 84 min. Swedish première: March 31, 1958. Principal Cast: Eva Dahlbeck (Stina Andersson), Ingrid Thulin (Cecilia Ellius), Bibi Andersson (Hjördis Petterson), Barbro Hiort af Ornäs (Sister Brita), Erland Josephson (Anders Ellius), Max von Sydow (Harry Andersson), Gunnar Sjöberg (Dr. Nordlander), Anne-Marie Gyllenspetz (Counsellor Gran), Inga Landgré (Greta Ellius) 1958: Rabies-Scener Ur Människolivet—Rabies-Scenes from Human Life (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Television. Prod: Henrik Dyfverman. Scr: Olle Hedberg. PD: Birgitta Morales. 89 min. Swedish première: November 7, 1958. Principal Cast: Max von Sydow (Bo Stensson Sveningsson), Gunnel Lindblom ( Jenny), Åke Fridell (Sixten Garberg), Bibi Andersson (Eivor), Folke Sundquist (Erik), Dagny Lind (the Aunt), Tor Isedal (Knut Mosterson), Axel Düberg (Corp. Sven), Nils Nygren (Cronswärd), Toiwo Pawlo (wholesaler), Åke Jörnfalk (Rolf ), Marianne Stjernqvist (Mrs. Svensson) 1958: Ansiktet—The Face, The Magician Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: P. A.

321

filmography Lundgren. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 100 min. Swedish première: December 26, 1958. Principal Cast: Max von Sydow (Albert Emanuel Vogler), Ingrid Thulin (Manda Vogler), Åke Fridell (Tubal, Vogler’s assistant), Naima Wifstrand (Vogler’s grandmother), Gunnar Björnstrand (Dr. Vergerus, medical officer), Bengt Ekerot ( Johan Spegel), Bibi Andersson (Sara Lindqvist), Gertrud Fridh (Ottilia Egerman), Lars Ekborg (Simson, Vogler’s coachman), Toivd Pawlo (Police Superintendent Starbeck), Erland Josephson (Counsel Egerman), Sif Ruud (Sofia Garp), Oscar Ljung (Antonsson), Ulla Sjöblom (Henrietta Starbeck), Axel Düberg (Rustan, butler) 1960: Oväder—Storm Weather (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Television (SVT). Prod: Henrik Dyfverman. Playwright: August Strindberg. Ph: Egon Blank, Sven-Eric Larson, Måns Reuterswärd, Lars Swahn. AD: Birgitta Morales. 91 min. Swedish première: January 22, 1960. Principal Cast: Uno Henning (the Gentleman), Gunnel Broström (Gerda), Curt Masreliez (Fischer), Ingvar Kjellson (brother), John Elfström (Starck), Birgitta Grönwall (Agnes, his daughter), Mona Malm (Louise), Axel Düberg (the Iceman), Axel Högel (the postman), Erik “Bullen” Berglund (the lamplighter), Heinz Hopf (a farmhand) 1960: Jungfrukällan—The Virgin Spring Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Ingmar Bergman, Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ulla Isaksson from fourteenthcentury ballad “Töres dotter i Vänge.” Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 89 min. Swedish première: February 8, 1960. Principal Cast: Max von Sydow (Töre), Birgitta Valberg (Märeta), Gunnel Lindblom (Ingeri), Birgitta Pettersson (Karin), Axel Düberg (thin herdsman), Tor Isedal (mute herdsman), Allan Edwall

322

filmography (beggar), Ove Porath (boy), Axel Slangus (bridge keeper), Gudrun Brost (Frida), Oscar Ljung (Simon) 1960: Djävulens öga—The Devil’s Eye Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, freely adapted from Danish radio play Don Juan vender tillbage by Oluf Bang. Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Domenico Scarlatti. Ed: Oscar Rosander. 87 min. Swedish première: October 17, 1960. Principal Cast: Jarl Kulle (Don Juan), Bibi Andersson (Britt-Marie), Axel Düberg (her fiancé), Nils Poppe (the vicar), Gertrud Fridh (Renata), Sture Lagerwall (Pablo), Stig Järrel (Satan), Gunnar Björnstrand (the actor), Georg Funkquist (Count Armand de Rochefoucauld), Gunnar Sjöberg (Marquis Giuseppe de Macopanza), Torsten Winge (old man), Allan Edwall (ear demon), Kristina Adolphson (woman in veil), Ragner Arvedson (guardian demon) 1961: Såsom i en spegel—Through a Glass Darkly Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Ulla Ryghe. 89 min. Swedish première: October 16, 1961. Principal Cast: Harriet Andersson (Karin), Max von Sydow (Martin), Gunnar Björnstrand (David), Lars Passgård (Minus) 1961: Lustgården—The Pleasure Garden Dir: Alf Kjellin. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod Mgr: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Buntel Ericsson (joint pseudonym of Ingmar Bergman and Erland Josephson). Ph: Gunnar Fischer. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Ulla Ryghe. 93 min. Swedish première: December 26, 1961. Principal Cast: Gunnar Björnstrand (David Samuel Franzén), Sickan Carlsson (Fanny), Bibi Andersson (Anna), Per Myrberg (Emil),

323

filmography Kristina Adolphson (Astrid), Stig Järrel (Ludvig Lundberg), Gösta Cederlund (Liljedahl), Torsten Winge (Wibom) 1962: Staden (TV movie) Dir: Tom Segerberg. ProdCo: Suomen Televisio. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. AD: Jorma Lindfors. 70 min. Swedish première: March 30, 1962. Principal Cast: Leif Wager ( Joakim), Ivar Rosenblad (Kyparen), Stig Törnroos (Pastorn), Algot Böstman (Arbetaren), Chris Paischeff (Maria), Nils Brandt (Oliver Mortis), Hélène Hagelstam (Anna Schalter), Lasse Pöysti (Pumpan), Gustav Wicklund (Poeten), Nanny Westerlund (Mormor), Göran Cederberg (Baloo) 1963: Nattvardsgästerna—Winter Light, The Communicants Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Ed: Ulla Ryghe. 81 min. Swedish première: February 11, 1963. Principal Cast: Gunnar Björnstrand (Tomas Ericsson), Ingrid Thulin (Märta Lundberg), Max von Sydow ( Jonas Persson), Gunnel Lindblom (Karin Persson), Allan Edwall (Algot Frövik), Olof Thunberg (Fredrik Blom), Elsa Ebbeson (Magdelena Ledfors), Kolbjörn Knudsen (Knut Aronsson) 1963: Trämålning—Wood Painting, Painting-on-Wood (TV movie) Dir: Lennart Olsson. ProdCo: Sveriges Television. Prod: Henrik Dyfverman. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. PD: Lennart Olofsson. 50 min. Swedish première: April 22, 1963. Principal Cast: Marianne Wesén (the Girl), Olof Bergström ( Jöns), Oscar Ljung (the Knight), Margareta Bergfelt (Karin, Knight’s wife), Ulla Akselson (the witch), Åke Lindström (the blacksmith), Marianne Hedengrahn (Lisa, his wife), Georg Årlin (the actor), Folke Sundquist (narrator)

324

filmography 1963: Ett Drömspel—A Dream Play (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Television. Prod: Karé Santesson. Scr: from A Dream Play by August Strindberg. PD: Cloffe. Mus: Sven-Erik Back. 115 min. Swedish première: May 2, 1963. Principal Cast: Ingrid Thulin (Agnes), Uno Henning (Alfred), Allan Edwall (Axel), Olof Widgren (writer), John Elfström (glazier) 1963: Tystnaden—The Silence Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Ivan Renliden. Ed: Ulla Ryghe. 96 min. Swedish première: September 23, 1963. Principal Cast: Ingrid Thulin (Ester), Gunnel Lindblom (Anna), Jörgen Lindström ( Johan), Håkan Jahnberg (maître d’hôtel), Birger Malmsten (barman) 1964: För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor—Now About These Women, All These Women Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Production manager: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Buntel Ericsson (joint pseudonym of Ingmar Bergman and Erland Josephson). Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Erik Nordgren. Ed: Ulla Ryghe. 80 min. Swedish première: October 5, 1964. Principal Cast: Jarl Kulle (Cornelius), Eva Dahlbeck (Adelaide), Bibi Andersson (Humlan—Bumble Bee), Harriet Andersson (Isolde), Gertrud Fridh (Traviata), Mona Malm (Cecilia), Barbro Hiort af Ornäs (Beatrice), Karin Kavli (Madame Tussaud), Georg Funkquist (Tristan), Allan Edwall ( Jillker), Carl Billquist (young man) 1966: Persona Dir: Ingmar Bergman, ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Ingmar Bergman. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Bibi

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filmography Lindström. Mus: Lars-Johan Werle. Ed: Ulla Ryghe. 85 min. Swedish première: October 18, 1966. Cast: Bibi Andersson (Alma), Liv Ullmann (Elisabeth Vogler), Margaretha Krook (the doctor), Gunnar Björnstrand (Herr Vogler), Jörgen Lindström (the boy) 1967: Stimulantia Episode: “Daniel” dir. and ph. Ingmar Bergman, with music played by Käbi Laretei. Other episodes directed by Hans Abramson, Lars Görling, Arne Arnbom, Jörn Donner, Tage Danielson and Hans Alfredson, Gustaf Molander, Vilgot Sjöman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Olle Nordemar. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Bo Nilsson, Georg Riedel. Ed: Ulla Ryghe. 105 min. Swedish première: March 28, 1967. Principal Cast: Hans Abramson (interviewer and narrator), Hans Alfredson ( Jacob Landelius), Harriet Andersson (woman in hotel room), Daniel Bergman (himself ), Ingrid Bergman (Mathilde Hartman), Gunnar Björnstrand (Paul Hartman), Gunnel Broström ( Jeanette Ribbing), Lars Ekborg (Mr. Svensk), Glenna ForsterJones (the naked girl), Lena Granhagen (Sofi Lundblad), Inga Landgré (Margareta Svensk), Käbi Laretei (herself ), Birgit Nilsson (herself ), Hans Olivecrona ( Jeanette Ribbing’s son), Sven-Bertil Taube (man in hotel room) 1968: Vargtimmen—Hour of the Wolf Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Lars-Owe Carlberg. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Marik Vos-Lundh. Mus: Lars-Johan Werle. Ed: Ulla Ryghe. 90 min. Swedish première: February 19, 1968. Principal Cast: Liv Ullmann (Alma Borg), Max von Sydow ( Johan Borg), Erland Josephson (Baron von Merkens), Gertrud Fridh (Corinne von Merkens), Bertil Anderberg (Ernst von Merkens), Georg Rydeberg (Archivist Lindhorst), Ulf Johanson

326

filmography (Heerbrand), Naima Wifstrand (old lady), Ingrid Thulin (Veronica Vogler) 1968: Skammen—Shame, The Shame Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: LarsOwe Carlberg. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Ed: Ulla Ryghe. 103 min. Simultaneous premières in Sorrento and Stockholm, September 29, 1968. Principal Cast: Liv Ullmann (Eva Rosenberg), Max von Sydow ( Jan Rosenberg), Gunnar Björnstrand (Colonel Jacobi), Sigge Fürst (Filip), Barbro Hiort af Ornäs (Mrs. Jacobi), Birgitta Valberg (Mrs. Jacobi), Ingvar Kjellson (Oswald), Willy Peters (elder officer), Ulf Johansson (the doctor), Hans Alfredson (Lobelius), Frank Sundström (chief interrogator), Vilgot Sjöman (interviewer), Bengt Eklund (guard), Gösta Prüzelius (the vicar), Agda Helin (merchant’s wife) 1969: Riten—The Rite (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph AB. Prod: Lars-Owe Carlberg. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Mago. Ed: Siv Kanälv. 72 min. Swedish première: March 25, 1969. Principal Cast: Ingrid Thulin (Thea Winkelmann), Gunnar Björnstrand (Hans Winkelmann), Anders Ek (Sebastian Fisher), Erik Hell ( Judge Abrahamsson), Ingmar Bergman (a priest) 1969: En Passion—A Passion, The Passion of Anna Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri/Cinematograph. Prod: Lars-Owe Carlberg. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Ed: P. A. Lundgren. 101 min. Swedish première: November 10, 1969. Principal Cast: Max von Sydow (Andreas Winkelman), Liv Ullmann (Anna Fromm), Bibi Andersson (Eva Vergerus), Erland Josephson (Elis Vergerus), Erik Hell ( Johan Andersson), Sigge Fürst (Verner)

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filmography 1970: Fårö Dokument—Fårödokument 1969, Fårö Document (TV documentary) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph. Prod: Lars-Owe Carlberg. Ph: Sven Nykvist. Ed: Siv Lundgren-Kanälv. 78 min. Swedish première: January 1, 1970. With: Ingmar Bergman (reporter/narrator), Liv Ullmann, local people on the island of Fårö 1970: Slinki na drvo (TV movie) Dir: Arsa Milosevic. ProdCo: Televizija Skopje. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. 68 min. Première: January 12, 1970. Principal Cast: Meri Boskova, Ljupka Dzundev, Dbetanka Jakimovska, Ilija Milcin, Petar Prlicko, Risto Šiškov 1970: Reservatet—The Lie (TV movie) Dir: Jan Molander. ProdCo: Sveriges Radio AB. Prod: Bernt Callenbo, Hans Sackemark. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Jan Wictorinus, Per Olof Nordmark, Willy Thoresen. PD: Lars Dahlman, Gunnar Bredevik. Ed: Ronnie Årland. 95 min. Swedish première: October 28, 1970. Principal Cast: Börje Ahlstedt (Feldt), Gun Andersson (Petra Ahlman), Gun Arvidsson (Magda Farman), Catherine Berg (Elis’s wife), Olof Bergström (Dr. Farman), Helena Brodin (Nurse Ester), Margareta Byström (Karin Albrekt), Irma Christenson (Inger Sernelius), Georg Funkquist (the Father), Elna Gistedt (Berta), Göran Graffman (Bauer), Erik Hell (the Executive), Erland Josephson (Elis), Barbro Larsson (Karin), Leif Liljeroth (Sten Ahlman), Gunnel Lindblom (Anna) 1971: Beröringen—The Touch Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph/ABC Pictures. Prod: Ingmar Bergman, Lars-Owe Carlberg. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: P. A. Lundgren. Mus: Carl Michael Bellman, Peter Covent, Jan Johansson. Ed: Siv Kanälv-Lundgren. 115 min. Swedish première: August 30, 1971.

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filmography Principal Cast: Bibi Andersson (Karin Vergerus), Max von Sydow (Dr. Andreas Vergerus), Staffan Hallerstam (Anders Vergerus, son), Elliott Gould (David Kovac), Barbro Hiort af Ornäs (Karin’s dead mother), Sheila Reid (Sara Kovac) 1972: Viskningar och rop—Cries and Whispers Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph/Svenska Filminstitutet. Prod: Lars-Owe Carlberg. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Marik Vos-Lundh. Ed: Siv Lundgren. 91 min. Swedish première: March 5, 1973. Principal Cast: Harriet Andersson (Agnes), Kari Sylwan (Anna), Ingrid Thulin (Karin), Liv Ullmann (Maria and the mother), Henning Moritzen ( Joakim, Maria’s husband), Erland Josephson (David, the doctor), Georg Årlin (Fredrik, Karin’s husband), Anders Ek (Isak, the pastor), Inga Gill (storyteller in Agnes’s flashback), Ingmar Bergman (narrator) 1973: The Lie (TV movie) Dir: Alex Segal. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Prod: Lewis Freedman. Ph: Bill Klages. AD: Jan Scott. Principal Cast: Victor Buono, Robert Culp, Bobby Eilbacher, Crane Jackson, Dean Jagger, Shirley Knight, Louise Lasser, Mary Ann Mobley, George Segal, Milton Selzer, Elizabeth Wilson 1973: Scener ur ett äktensap—Scenes from a Marriage (TV miniseries/ film) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph AB. Prod: Lars-Owe Carlberg. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Björn Thulin. Ed: Siv Lundgren. TV version: 282 min.; film version 167 min. Swedish première: October 28, 1974. Principal Cast: Liv Ullmann (Marianne), Erland Josephson ( Johan), Anita Wall (Mrs. Palm, journalist), Jan Malmsjö (Peter), Bibi Andersson (Katarina), Gunnel Lindblom (Eva), Barbro Hiort

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filmography af Ornäs (Mrs. Jacobi), Ingmar Bergman (voiceover as a press photographer) 1974: Misantropen—The Misanthrope (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Danmarks Radio/Det Kongelige Teater (Denmark). Prod: Kjeld Larsen. Scr: Peter Hansen, based on the play Le misanthrope by Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin). PD: Kerstin Hedeby. 115 min. Swedish première: May 10, 1974. Principal Cast: Hanne Borchsenius (Éliante), Benny Hansen (Dubois), Holger Juul Hansen (Philinte), Paul Hüttel (Basque), Henning Moritzen (Alceste), Erik Mørk (Acaste), Ghita Nørby (Célimène), Lise Ringheim (Arsinoë), Ebbe Rode (Oronte), Peter Steen (Clitandre), Olaf Ussing (messenger) 1975: Trollflöjten—The Magic Flute (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph/Sveriges Television (SVT, channel 2). Prod: Måns Reuterswärd. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, after a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Henny Noremark. Mus: W. A. Mozart, Die Zauberflöte. Ed: Siv Lundgren. 136 min. Swedish première: January 1, 1975. Principal Cast: Josef Köstlinger (Tamino), Irma Urrila (Pamina), Håkan Hagegård (Papageno), Elisabeth Erikson (Papagena), BrittMarie Aruhn (first lady), Kirsten Vaupel (second lady), Birgitta Smiding (third lady), Ulrik Cold (Sarastro), Birgit Nordin (Nattens Drottning), Ragnar Ulfung (Monostatos), Erik Sædén (Talaren), Gösta Prüzelius (first priest), Ulf Johansson (second priest), Hans Johansson (guard), Jerker Arvidson (guard) 1976: Ansikte mot ansikte—Face to Face Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph. Prod: Lars-Owe Carlberg. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Anne Terselius-Hagegård, Peter Kropénin. Ed: Siv Lundgren. 114 min. U.S. première: April 5, 1976.

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filmography Principal Cast: Liv Ullmann (Dr. Jenny Isaksson), Erland Josephson (Dr. Tomas Jacobi), Gunnar Björnstrand (Grandpa), Aino Taube (Grandma), Sif Ruud (Elisabeth Wankel), Sven Lindberg (Erik, Jenny’s husband), Helene Friberg (Anna), Ulf Johansson (Dr. Helmuth Wankel), Kristina Adolphson (Veronica, nurse), Gösta Ekman (Mikael Strömberg), Marianne Aminoff ( Jenny’s mother), Jan-Eric Lindqvist ( Jenny’s father), Birger Malmsten (rapist), Gorän Stangertz (rapist) 1976: De Fördömda Kvinnornas Dans—The Dance of the Damned Women (short) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph AB, Sveriges Radio, Sveriges Television. Prod: Måns Reuterswärd. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Anne Terselius-Hagegård. Mus: Claudio Monteverdi. Choreography: Donya Feuer. Ed: Siv Lundgren. 24 min. Swedish première: December 15, 1976 Principal Cast: Helene Friberg, Nina Harte, Lena Wennergren, Lisbeth Zachrisson 1977: Paradistorg Dir: Gunnel Lindblom. ProdCo: Cinematograph AB, Svensk Filmindustri, Svenska Filminstitutet. Prod: Ingmar Bergman. Scr: Gunnel Lindblom, based on the novel by Ulla Isaksson. Ph: Tony Forsberg. AD: Anna Asp. Mus: George Riedel. Ed: Siv Lundgren. 113 min. Swedish première: February 2, 1977. Cast: Marianne Aminoff (Christina), Maria Blomkvist (Eva), Anna Borg (Kajsa), Margareta Byström (Annika), Agneta Ekmanner (Sassa), Pontus Gustafsson (Tomas), Mats Helander (Andreas), Inga Landgré (Saga), Dagny Lind (Alma), Oscar Ljung (Arthur), Holger Löwenadler (Wilhelm), Toni Magnusson (King), Per Myrberg (Ture), Gösta Prüzelius (Carl-Henrik), Sif Ruud (Emma)

331

filmography 1977: Das Schlangenei—Ormens ägg, The Serpent’s Egg Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Rialto Film (Berlin)/Dino de Laurentiis Corp. (L.A.). Producer: Dino de Laurentiis. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Rolf Zehetbauer. Mus: Rolf A. Wilhelm. Ed: Peter von Oelffen. 120 min. Swedish première: October 28, 1977. Principal Cast: Liv Ullmann (Manuela Rosenberg), David Carradine (Abel Rosenberg), Gert Fröbe (Inspector Bauer), Heintz Bennent (Hans Vergerus), Georg Hartmann (Hollinger), Edith Heerdegen (Frau Holle), Kyra Mladeck (Miss Dorst), Fritz Strassner (Dr. Soltermann), Hans Quest (Dr. Silbermann), Wolfgang Weiser (a civil servant), Paula Braend (Frau Hemse), Walter Schmidinger (Solomon), Lis Mangold (Mikaela), Grischa Huber (Stella), Paul Bürks (cabaret comedian) 1977: A Little Night Music Dir: Harold Prince. ProdCo: S&T-Film Berlin, Sascha Verleih. Prod: Elliott Kastner. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, Hugh Wheeler. Ph: Arthur Ibbetson. AD: Herta Pisching. Mus: Stephen Sondheim. Ed: John Jympson. 124 min. American première: December, 1977. Principal Cast: Elizabeth Taylor (Desiree Armfeldt), Diana Rigg (Charlotte Mittelheim), Len Cariou (Frederick Egerman), LesleyAnne Down (Anne Egerman), Hermione Gingold (Mme. Armfeldt), Laurence Guittard (Carl-Magnus Mittelheim), Christopher Guard (Erich Egerman), Lesley Dunlop (Petra), Chloe Franks (Fredericka Armfeldt), Heinz Maracek (Frid), Jonathan Tunick (conductor), Hubert Tscheppe (Franz), Rudolph Schrympf (band conductor), Franz Schussler (the mayor), Johanna Schussler (the mayoress) 1978: Herbstsonat—Höstsonaten, Autumn Sonata Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Svensk Filmindustri. Prod: Katinka (Katherina) Faragó, Richard Bick (English-language version). Scr:

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filmography Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Anna Asp. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 99 min. Swedish première: October 8, 1978. Principal Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Charlotte), Liv Ullmann (Eva), Lena Nyman (Helena), Halvar Björk (Victor), Georg Lökkeberg (Leonardo), Linn Ullmann (Eva as a child), Erland Josephson ( Josef ), Gunnar Björnstrand (Paul, Charlotte’s agent), Marianne Aminoff (Charlotte’s secretary), Mimi Pollak (piano teacher), Arne BangHansen (Uncle Otto) 1979: Min älskade—My Beloved Dir: Kjell Grede. ProdCo: Cinematograph AB, Svensk Filmindustri, Svenska Filminstitutet. Prod: Ingmar Bergman. Scr: Kjell Grede. Ph: Tony Forsberg. Ed: Lars Hagström. 108 min. Swedish première: March 12, 1979. Principal Cast: Bjørn Skagestad ( John), Lena Nyman (Sonja), Agenta Ekmanner (Disa), Keve Hjelm (Bernard), Grynet Molvig (Linda), Sif Ruud (Magda), Kristina Karlin (Vera), Björn Gustafson (glazier), Helena Brodin (nurse), Stig Ossian Ericson (car salesman), Axel Düberg (car salesman), Barbro Skarp (girl), Jenny Viström (girl), Charlie Elvegård (construction worker), Jan Nielsen (arrested young man) 1979: Fårödokument 1979 (TV documentary) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph, SR/TV 2. Prod: Lars-Owe Carlberg. Ph: Arne Carlsson. Mus: Svante Pettersson, Sigvard Huldt. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 103 min. Swedish première: December 25, 1979. With: Ingmar Bergman (narrator) 1980: Aus Dem Leben Der Marionetten—From the Life of the Marionettes (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Personafilm. Prod: Ingmar Bergman. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Rolf Zehet-

333

filmography bauer. Mus: Rolf Wilhelm. Ed: Petra von Oelffen. 104 min. Swedish première: January 24, 1981. Principal Cast: Robert Atzorn (Peter Egermann), Christine Buchegger (Katarina Egermann), Martin Benrath (Professor Mogens Jensen), Rita Russek (Katarina Kraft), Lola Müthel (Cordelia Egerman), Walter Schmidinger (Tim Mandelbaum), Heintz Bennent (Arthur Brenner), Ruth Olafs (nurse), Gaby Dohm (Frau Anders, secretary), Karl-Heintz Pelser (interrogator), Toni Berger (guard) 1981: Sally och friheten—Sally and Freedom Dir: Gunnel Lindblom. ProdCo: Cinematograph AB, Sandrews, Svenska Filminstitutet. Prod: Ingmar Bergman. Scr: Margareta Garpe. Ph: Tony Forsberg. AD: Inga Pehrsson. Mus: Stefan Nilsson. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 108 min. Swedish première: November 21, 1981. Principal Cast: Ewa Fröling (Sally), Hans Wigren (Simon), Leif Ahrle ( Jonas), Gunn Wållgren (Sally’s mother), Oscar Ljung (Sally’s father), Svea Holst (Sally’s grandma), Gunnel Lindblom (Nora), Kim Anderzon (Inger), Susanne Lundqvist (Mia), Lise-Lotte Nilsson (Yvonne) 1982: Fanny och Alexander—Fanny and Alexander Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph/Svenska Filminstitutet/Sveriges Television 1/Sandrews/Gaumont/Personafilm/ Tobis film. Prod: Jörn Donner. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. AD: Anna Asp. Mus: Daniel Bell. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 188 min. Swedish première: December 17, 1982. Principal Cast: Bertil Guve (Alexander Ekdahl), Pernilla Allwin (Fanny Ekdahl), Ewa Fröling (Emelie Ekdahl), Jan Malmsjö (Bishop Edvard Vergerus), Gunn Wållgren (Helena Ekdahl), Allan Edwall (Oscar Ekdahl), Jarl Kulle (Gustav Adolf Ekdahl), Erland Josephson (Isak Jacobi), Börje Ahlstedt (Carl Ekdahl), Christina Schollin (Lydia Ekdahl), Kerstin Tidelius (Henrietta Vergerus), Harriet Andersson ( Justina), Marianne Aminoff

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filmography (Blenda Vergerus), Emelie Werkö ( Jenny Ekdahl), Svea Holt (Miss Ester) 1983: Hustruskolan—School for Wives (TV movie) Dir: Alf Sjöberg, Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Television (SVT). Prod: Gerd Edwards. Scr: Molière, Ecole des Femmes, translated by Lars Forssell. Ph: Jan Wictorinus, Per-Olof Runa, Lennart Söderberg. PD: John Virke, Göran Wassberg. Ed: Jan Askelöf. 108 min. Swedish première: December 25, 1983. Principal Cast: Allan Edwall (Arnolphe), Lena Nyman (Agnes), Björn Gustafson (Alain), Ulla Sjöblom (Georgette), Lasse Pöysti (Chrysalde), Olle Hilding (Oronte), Oscar Ljung (Enrique), Nils Eklund (lawyer), Stellan Skarsgård (Horace) 1984: Efter repetitionen—After the Rehearsal Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph for Personafilm Gmbh (Munich). Prod: Jörn Donner. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. AD: Anna Asp. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 70 min. Swedish première: April 9, 1984. Cast: Erland Josephson (Henrik Vogler), Lena Olin (Anna Egerman), Ingrid Thulin (Rakel Egerman), Nadja Palmstierna-Weiss (Anna as twelve-year-old), Bertil Guve (Henrik as twelve-year-old) 1984: Karins Ansikte—Karin’s Face (documentary short) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Arne Carlsson. Mus: Käbi Laretei. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 14 min. Swedish première: September 29, 1986. Cast: Ingmar Bergman, Karin Bergman 1985: Dom Juan/Don Juan, ou Le Festin de Pierre (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. Prod: Heribert Wenk. Scr: Molière. 105 min. Première: April 23, 1985. Principal Cast: Michael Degen (Dom Juan), Hilmar Thate (Sganarelle), Birgit Doll (Ein Gespenst), Erwin Faber (Gusman),

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filmography Erich Hallhuber (Dom Carlos), Klaus Guth (Dom Alonse), Franz Kutschera (Standbild des Kommandeurs), Gundi Ellert (Charlotte), Olivia Grigolli (La Violette), Gerd Anthoff (Pierrot), Franz Kollasch (Herr Dimanche), Hans Quest (Bettler) 1986: De Två Saliga—The Blessed Ones (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Television, TV 1/Channel 4 (UK), DR (Denmark), ORF (Austria), RAI 2 (Italy), VPRO (Netherlands), ZDF (Germany), YLE (Finland). Prod: Pia Ehrnvall, Katinka Faragó. Scr: Ulla Isaksson, after her 1962 novel. Ph: Per Norén. PD: Birgitta Brensén. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 81 min. Swedish première: February 19, 1986. Principal Cast: Harriet Andersson (Viveka Burman), Kristina Adolphson (nurse), Per Myrberg (Sune Burman), Christina Schollin (Annika), Lasse Pöysti (Dr. Dettow), Irma Christenson (Mrs. Storm), Björn Gustafson (Olsson), Majlis Granlund (cleaning woman) 1986: Dokument Fanny och Alexander—The Making of Fanny and Alexander Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Cinematograph AB, Svenska Filminstitutet. Prod: Allan Ekelund. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Arne Carlsson. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 110 min. Swedish première: December 26, 1986. Cast: Daniel Bergman, Ingmar Bergman, Gunnar Björnstrand, Allan Edwall, Ewa Fröling, Erland Josephson, Lars Karlsson, Sven Nykvist, Ulf Pramfors, Peter Schildt, Gunn Wållgren 1987: Gotska Sandön (Documentary) Dir: Arne Carlsson. ProdCo: Cinematograph AB, Stiftelsen Svenska Filminstitutet. Prod: Lisbet Gabrielsson, Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Arne Carlsson. Mus: Dag Franzén, Lena Franzén. Ed: Ingmar Bergman, Sylvia Ingemarsson. 53 min. Swedish première: June 27, 1987.

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filmography 1990: A Little Night Music (TV movie) Dir: Scott Ellis. ProdCo: PBS. Prod: John Goberman, based on Bergman’s Sommarnattens leende, musical by Hugh Wheeler. Ph: Jörgen Persson. PD: Michael. Mus: Stephen Sondheim. Ed: Janus Billeskov Jensen. 178 min. Première: November 7, 1990. Principal Cast: Sally Ann Howes (Desiree), George Lee Andrews (Fredrick Egerman), Michael Maguire (Count Carl Magnus), Beverly Lambert (Anne), Kevin Anderson (Henrik Egerman), Ron Baker (Mr. Lindquist), David Comstock (Frid), Michael Rees Davis (Mr. Erlanson), Danielle Ferland (Fredrika Arnfeldt), Michael Cornell (serving gentleman), Kent Heacock (serving gentleman), Ronald Kelley (serving gentleman), Ian Klapper (serving gentleman), Susanne Marsee (Mrs. Sergstrom) 1991: Den goda viljan—The Best Intentions (TV miniseries) Dir: Bille August. ProdCo: Sveriges Television (SVT). Prod: Ingrid Dahlberg. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Jörgen Persson. PD: Anna Asp. Mus: Stefan Nilsson. Ed: Janus Billeskov Jensen. 323 min. Swedish première: December 25, 1991. Principal Cast: Börje Ahlstedt (Carl Åkerblom), Hans Alfredson (Rev. Gransjö), Sara Arnia (Mrs. Johansson), Pernilla Östergren-August (Anna Åkerblom), Anita Björk (Queen Victoria), Tomas Bolme ( Jansson), Lina Brogren (Mrs. Lisen), Inga Lill-Ellung (Mejan), Lena Endra (Frida Strandberg), Samuel Fröler (Henrik Bergman), Björn Granath (Oscar Åkerblom), Eva Gröndahl (Martha Åkerblom), Björn Gustafson ( Jesper Jakabsson), Marie Göranzon (Elin Nordenson), Ernest Günther Jr. (Freddy Paulin), Max von Sydow ( Johan Åkerblom) 1992: Markissinnan De Sade—Madame de Sade (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: SVT Drama. Prod: Katarina Sjöberg, Måns Reuterswärd. Scr: Per Erik Wahlund, Gunilla LindbergWada, based on the play by Yukio Mishima, Sado koshaku fujin. Ph: Pelle Norén, Bo Johansson, Raymond Wemmenlöw. PD: Mette

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filmography Möller, Charles Koroly. Mus: Ingrid Yoda. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 104 min. Première: April 17, 1992. Principal Cast: Sina Ekblad (Renée, Madame de Sade), Anita Björk (Madame de Monteuil), Margaretha Byström (Baroness de Simiane), Marie Richardson (Anne), Helena Brodin (Charlotte), Agneta Ekmanner (Countess de Saint-Fond) 1992: Söndagsbarn—Sunday’s Children Dir: Daniel Bergman. ProdCo: Sandrew Film & Theater, SVT Drama, Metronome Productions A/S (Denmark), Finland Film Foundation, Iceland Filmfon, Norsk Film A/S, Sweetland Films. Prod: Katinka Faragó. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Tony Forsberg. PD: Sven Wichman. Mus: Rune Gustafsson, Zoltan Kódaly. Ed: Darek Hodor. 118 min. Swedish première: August 28, 1992. Principal Cast: Thommy Berggren (Erik Bergman), Lena Endre (Karin Bergman), Henrik Linnros (Pu Bergman), Jakob Leygraf (Dag), Malin Ek (Märta), Marie Richardson (Marianne), Anna Linnros (Lillian), Irma Christenson (Aunt Emma), Birgitta Valberg (Grandma), Börje Ahlstedt (Uncle Carl), Maria Bolme (Maj), Majlis Granlund (Lalle), Birgitta Ulfson (Lalla), Carl Magnus Dellow (the watchmaker), Melinda Kinnaman (blind girl) 1993: Backanterna—The Bacchae (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Television (SVT). Prod: Måns Reuterswärd. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, libretto by Göran O. Eriksson and Jan Stolpe, based on Euripides, The Bacchae. Ph: Per Norén, Raymond Wemmenlöv, Sven-Åke Visén, Wulf Meseke. PD: Mette Möller, Lennart Mörk. Mus: Daniel Börtz. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson, Jan Askelöf. 131 min. Swedish première: April 9, 1993. Principal Cast: Sylvia Lindenstrand (Dionysos), Peter Mattei (Pentheus), Sten Wahlund (Kadmos), Anita Soldh (Agaue), Laila Andersson-Palme (Tiresias), Berit Lindholm (Alfa), Camilla Staern (Gamma), Anne-Marie Mühle (Zeta) Eva Österberg (Lambda),

338

filmography Ellen Andreasson Jensen (Delta), Carina Morling (Xi), Lena Hoel (Sigma), Kristina Hammerström (Eta) 1995: Sista Skriket-en Lätt Tintad Moralitet—The Last Gasp (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: SVT Drama. Prod: Måns Reuterswärd. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, based on his play. Ph: Per Norén. PD: Mette Möller. Mus: Matti Bye. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 60 min. Swedish première: January 6, 1995. Cast: Björn Granath (Georg af Klercker), Ingvar Kjellson (Charles Magnusson), Anna von Rosen (Miss Holm, Magnusson’s secretary), Ingmar Bergman (narrator) 1996: Harald & Harald (short) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Television, Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern. Prod: Måns Reuterswärd. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, from an official government report on cultural policy. Ph: PärOlof Rekola, Arne Halvarsson. PD: Göran Wassberg. Ed: Louise Brattberg. 10 min. Swedish première: January 14, 1996 Principal Cast: Björn Granath (Harald), Johan Rabaeus (Harald), Benny Haag (the white clown) 1996: Enskilda samtal—Private Confessions (TV movie) Dir: Liv Ullmann. ProdCo: SVT Drama. Prod: Ingrid Dahlberg. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Sven Nykvist. PD: Mette Möller. Ed: Michal Leszcylowski. 200 min. Swedish première: December 25, 1996. Principal Cast: Pernilla August (Anna Bergman), Max von Sydow ( Jacob), Kristina Adolphson (Maria), Gunnel Fred (Märta Gärdsjö), Samuel Fröler (Henrik Bergman), Hans Alfredson (Bishop Agrell), Thomas Hanzon (Tomas Egerman), Vibeke Falk (Ms. Nylander), Anita Björk (Karin Åkerblom), Bengt Schött (Stille) 1997: Larmar och gör sig till—In the Presence of a Clown (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Danmarks Radio (DR), Nordisk Film & TV Fond, Nordiska TV-Samarbetsfonden. Prod: Pia Ehrnvall,

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filmography Måns Reuterswärd. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Tony Forsberg, Irene Wiklund. PD: Göran Wassberg. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 119 min. Swedish première: November 1, 1997. Principal Cast: Börje Ahlstedt (Carl Åkerblom), Marie Richardson (Pauline Thibault), Erland Josephson (Osvald Vogler), Pernilla August (Karin Bergman), Peter Stormare (Petrus Landahl), Anita Björk (Märta Lundberg), Agneta Ekmanner (Kloven Rigmor), Gunnel Fred (Emma Vogler), Lena Endre (Märta Lundberg), Johan Lindell ( Johan Egerman), Gerthie Kulle (Sister Stella), Anna Björk (Mia Falk), Inga Landgré (Alma Berglund), Ingmar Bergman (inmate at the asylum) 2000: Trolösa—Faithless Dir: Liv Ullmann. ProdCo: Classic, Nordisk Film & TV Fond, Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK). Prod: Maria Curman. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Jörgen Persson. AD: Göran Wassberg. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 152 min. Danish and Swedish première: December 15, 2000. Principal Cast: Erland Josephson (Bergman), Lena Endre (Marianne Vogler), Thomas Hanzon (Markus), Krister Henriksson (David), Michelle Gylemo (Isabelle), Juni Dahr (Margareta), Philip Zandén (Martin Goldman), Thérèe Brunnander (Petra Holst), Marie Richardson (Anna Berg), Stina Ekblad (Eva), Johan Rabæus ( Johan), Jan-Olof Strandberg (Axel), Björn Granath (Gustav), Gertrud Stenung (Martha) 2000: Bildmakarna—The Image Makers (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Sveriges Television (SVT). Prod: Pia Ehrnvall. Playwright: Per Olov Enquist. Ph: Sofi Stridh, Sven-Åke Visén, Raymond Wemmenlöv. PD: Göran Wassberg. 100 min. Swedish première: November 14, 2000. Principal Cast: Anita Björk (Selma Lagerlöf ), Elin Klinga (Tora Teje), Lennart Hjulström (Victor Sjöström), Carl-Magnus Dellow ( Julius Jænzon), Henry “Nypan” Nyberg (projectionist)

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filmography 2002: Persona Dir: Iva Semencic. Scr: Ingmar Bergman, translated by Aida Bukvic and adapted by Zrinka Cvitesic, Olga Pakalovic, Iva Semencic. Ph: Jure Cernec, Mario Olijaca, Valentina Toth. Ed: Vlado Gojun, Iva Semencic. Cast: Olga Pakalovic, Zrinka Cvetisec 2003: Saraband (TV movie) Dir: Ingmar Bergman. ProdCo: Danmarks Radio (DR), Nordisk Film & TV Fund, Network Movie Film-und Fernsehproduktion. Prod: Pia Ehrnvall. Scr: Ingmar Bergman. Ph: Raymond Wemmenlöv, Per-Olof Lantto, Sofi Stridh, Jesper Holmström, Stefan Eriksson. PD: Göran Wassberg. Ed: Sylvia Ingemarsson. 120 min. Première: December 1, 2003. Principal Cast: Liv Ullmann (Marianne), Erland Josephson ( Johan), Börje Ahlstedt (Henrik), Julia Dufvenius (Karin), Gunnel Fred (Marta) 2005: Bergmonova Sonata Dir: Milan Kundakovic. ProdCo: Radiotelevizija Beograd (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). Scr: based on the screenplay of Autumn Sonata by Ingmar Bergman, adaptation by Milan Kundakovic, translated by Dobrila Stojnic. Ph: Miroslav Avramovic. PD: Milena Niceva. Mus: Igor Gostuski. Ed: Predrag Jeremic. 90 min. Cast: Ruzica Sokic (Sarlota), Dobrila Stojnic (Eva), Vjera Mujovic (Helena), Nebojsa Kundacina (Viktor)

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index

Boldface page numbers indicate images. After the Rehearsal, 245 Age d’Or, L’, 170 Allwin, Pernilla, 250 Andersson, Bibi, 15–16, 19–20, 22, 78, 85, 89, 97, 102, 110, 115, 120, 123, 125, 134, 182, 193, 196, 202, 242, 263, 285 Andersson, Gerd, 50 Andersson, Harriet, 13, 14–15, 17–19, 20, 44–45, 46, 48, 66, 67, 68–69, 73, 77, 78, 84, 138, 182, 243 Anterberg, Bertil, 107 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 11–12 Atzorn, Robert, 283, 284, 296, 304 Autumn Sonata, 258, 272–73, 293 Avventura, L’, 11

Bjelvenstam, Björn, 77, 84 Björk, Anita, 50–51 Björnstrand, Gunnar, 13, 21, 52, 53, 54, 68–69, 77, 79, 80, 82, 87, 109, 121, 136, 138, 149, 280, 289, 292 Blow-Up, 11 Boom, 219 Brandenburg Concertos, 224 Brecht, Bertolt, 120, 188 Bride of Frankenstein, 207 Bringing up Baby, 288 Britton, Andrew, 292 Brost, Gudrun, 62 Browning, Tod, 207 Buchegger, Christine, 296, 304 Buñuel, Luis, 170 Burroughs, William, 221

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 85, 135–36, 222, 224, 238, 244, 258–59 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 55 Belle de Jour, 178, 219 Benrath, Martin, 283, 289 Bergman, Ingrid, 272–73, 293 Birds, The, 204, 208

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The, 26 Cameron, Ian, 181, 184 Carabiniers, Les, 231 Carlquist, Margit, 79 Charulata, 86 “ci darem la mano, La,” 80 CineAction, 274, 281

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index Cohen, Hubert I., 259 Corman, Roger, 208 Cries and Whispers, 240–44, 243, 258, 285 Crisis, 16 Cukor, George, 12–13 Dahlbeck, Eva, 15, 17, 18–19, 20, 21, 50, 52, 53, 67, 70, 73, 78, 81, 82, 125, 181–82, 183, 292 Degas, Edgar, 39 Deserto Rosso Il, 12 Devil’s Eye, The, 6, 13, 14, 15, 19, 51, 79, 112, 113, 116–17, 120, 137 Devil’s Wanton, The. See Prison Dickens, Charles, 247 Dietrich, Marlene, 253 Donner, Jörn, 117, 169 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 277 Dracula (1931), 208 Edwall, Allan, 116 Eisenstein, Sergei, 169 Ek, Anders, 64 Ekborg, Lars, 20 Ekerot, Bengt, 101, 107, 114 El Dorado, 188 Eliot, T. S., 135, 187, 193 Ericsson, Annalisa, 39 Europa 51, 273 Everett, Rupert, 298 Face, The, 1, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113–15, 114, 119, 133, 134, 137, 151, 205, 206–7, 239 Face to Face, 248

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Fanny and Alexander, 245–51, 250 Far from Vietnam, 187–88 Fellini, Federico, 207 Frankenstein (1931), 207 Freaks, 207 Frenzy, 16, 17, 24–28, 27, 29, 238 Freud, Sigmund, 249, 256–57, 284 From the Life of the Marionettes, 245, 248–49, 276, 282–83, 285, 287, 289–302, 296, 304 Funkquist, Georg, 18, 183 Galsworthy, John, 219 Geddes, Barbara Bel, 208 Gill, Inga, 106 Giulietta degli Spiriti ( Juliet of the Spirits), 207 Godard, Jean-Luc, 187, 188–89, 220–22, 224, 231, 233, 237 Grant, Cary, 52, 288, 292 Grido, Il, 11 Grönberg, Åke, 13 Guve, Bertil, 250 Hawks, Howard, 103, 188 Henning, Eva, 17, 19 Hepburn, Katharine, 52, 292 Hitchcock, Alfred, 7–8, 103, 204, 207–9 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 205 Horowitz, Gad, 249 Hou Hsiao-hsien, 305 Hour of the Wolf, 6, 10, 13, 15, 22, 23, 24, 81, 112, 134, 183, 184, 205–18, 209, 217, 222, 223, 225, 238, 241, 246, 248, 285, 287, 288, 291, 294, 299

index House of Wax, 207–8 Houston, Penelope, 223

Losey, Joseph, 120 Lugosi, Bela, 207

Ionesco, Eugene, 140 Isaksson, Ulla, 10, 113, 119–32, 293 It’s Raining on Our Love, 16

Made in U.S.A., 187 Magic Flute, The, 80–81 Makavejev, Dusan, 179 Malmsten, Birger, 36, 51, 175 Marcuse, Herbert, 249 Masculin-Féminin, 222, 237 Milne, Tom, 207 Mortimer, Penelope, 223–24 Mozart, 80–85, 86, 184, 210–12, 215, 221, 222, 305 My Best Friend’s Wedding, 298 Mystery of the Wax Museum, 207

Jacobsson, Ulla, 77, 78, 79 Järrel, Stig, 25, 27, 28 Johansson, Ulf, 288 Jönsson, Nine-Christine, 17, 19 Josephson, Erland, 121, 288 Journey into Autumn, 1, 2, 10, 13, 15, 18, 55, 66–71, 68, 70, 84 Karloff, Boris, 207 Keaton, Buster, 181 Keats, John, 36 Kjellin, Alf, 27, 43 Klein, William, 187 Köstlinger, Josef, 80 Kulle, Jarl, 13–14, 51, 79, 82, 116, 117, 277 Lacan, Jacques, 265, 282 Lansberg, Olle, 32 Laretei, Käbi, 133 Laurel and Hardy, 181 Lawrence, D. H., 56–57, 87, 122, 219 Lear, Edward, 30 Leavis, F. R., 186 Lesson in Love, A, 1, 5, 6–7, 9–10, 11, 15, 18, 52, 55–56, 67, 72–77, 75, 112, 178, 181 Lindblom, Gunnel, 125, 129, 159, 175, 292, 293 Lindström, Jörgen, 163, 167, 240

Night and Fog, 255 Night Is My Future, 16 Nilsson, Mai-Britt, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 33, 35, 40, 50, 51, 78 Nosferatu (1922), 26 Notte, La, 11, 178 Now About These Women, 2–3, 8, 15, 78, 134, 180–85, 183, 241, 277 Olin, Stig, 40 Ozu, Yasujiro, 117 Partie de Campagne, Une, 39 Passion, A, 241, 242, 248, 270, 275, 285, 291, 294 Penn, Arthur, 57 Persona, 5, 6, 13, 15, 20, 22, 23, 31, 32, 98, 111, 121, 135, 136, 137, 145, 146, 152, 160, 163–64, 168, 178, 181, 188–205, 189, 195, 196, 206, 213, 217–18, 219, 220, 228,

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index Persona (continued) 238, 240–41, 242, 246, 247–48, 249, 252–74, 262, 281, 282, 285, 293, 297 Persson, Göran, 136, 208, 215, 274, 281–82 Pettersson, Birgitta, 125 Poppe, Nils, 102, 110 Port of Call, 16, 17, 25, 32–33 Prison, 2, 3, 16, 17, 25, 28–32, 30, 33, 34, 35, 59, 113, 153, 180, 215, 220, 247, 274 Psycho (1960), 8, 189, 208, 261 Ray, Satyajit, 86 Règle du Jeu, La, 84–85 Rembrandt, 305 Renoir, Jean, 39, 84 Richards, I. A., 223 Rio Bravo, 188 Rite, The, 241 Rosemary’s Baby, 219 Rossellini, Roberto, 273 Roud, Richard, 224 Sawdust and Tinsel, 1, 2, 6, 9, 10, 13, 18, 30, 31, 38, 47, 50, 55–67, 60, 62, 64, 73, 84, 181, 205 Scarlatti, Domenico, 117 Scenes from a Marriage, 288 Serpent’s Egg, The, 289 Servant, The, 178 Seventh Seal, The, 1, 4, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15, 19, 21, 31, 35, 73, 96, 99–112, 101, 102, 105, 107, 110, 115, 119, 127, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 144, 151,

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153, 168, 205, 206, 209, 239–42, 275, 281 Shakespeare, William, 5, 115, 186–87, 277 Shame, 5, 13, 23, 135, 137, 163, 168, 177, 178, 213, 219, 220–38, 227, 230, 237, 241, 248, 254, 270, 275, 285, 291, 294 Ship to India, A, 16 Sibelius, Jean, 157 Silence, The, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 41, 58, 65, 86, 88, 103, 110, 121, 135, 136, 137, 152, 157–79, 159, 164, 167, 175, 180, 181, 203, 204, 209, 219, 226, 240, 242, 246, 258, 285, 286, 292–93 Sjöberg, Alf, 16, 24 Sjöström, Victor, 8, 13, 14, 22, 33, 51, 89, 94, 97 Smiles of a Summer Night, 1, 2, 5, 8, 15, 18–19, 21, 33, 51, 52, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77–85, 82, 84, 112, 248 So Close to Life, 6, 10, 13, 15–16, 20, 21, 78, 113, 119–26, 123, 293 Sontag, Susan, 252–53, 254 Sophocles, 191, 256 Strandmark, Erik, 102 Strindberg, August, 247 Summer Interlude, 2, 3, 5, 9–10, 13, 17, 18, 33, 34–44, 36, 38, 40, 43, 45–46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 78, 87, 104, 178, 205 Summer with Monika, 6, 13, 17, 20, 44–49, 46, 48, 178, 280, 292 Svedlund, Doris, 16, 17–18, 19, 28, 30, 32

index Switchboard Operator (Love Affair; or, The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator), 178–79 Sylwan, Kari, 243 Tati, Jacques, 181 Taube, Aino, 50 Taylor, John Russell, 223 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilich, 39, 287 Thirst, 9, 13, 33 Thomas, Edward, 160 Through a Glass Darkly, 4, 6, 10, 12, 14, 15, 27, 77, 78, 110, 118, 126, 133, 134, 135, 136–39, 138, 148, 180, 222, 240, 258, 275, 280, 289 Thulin, Ingrid, 7, 8, 14, 15, 16, 20–22, 23, 35, 87, 119, 121, 123, 149, 159, 167, 175, 243, 258, 285 To Joy, 16, 17, 33 Touch, The, 241, 242–43, 248, 270, 285 Ullmann, Liv, 15, 16, 22–23, 160, 189, 195, 202, 210, 220, 227, 228, 230, 237, 238, 243, 262, 268, 269, 272, 273, 285, 288, 293, 294 Urrila, Irma, 80

Virgin Spring, The, 4, 6, 10, 57, 104, 113, 119–21, 122, 125–32, 129, 281, 292, 293 Vitti, Monica, 12 Von Sternberg, Josef, 253 von Sydow, Max, 7, 13, 101, 107, 109, 110, 111, 114, 206, 208, 217, 227, 231, 237, 242, 291 Waiting Women, 2, 5–6, 13, 15, 17, 49–54, 50, 53, 61, 78, 79, 215, 248, 292 Weekend, 219–22, 224, 232–33, 237 Whale, James, 207, 208 Wild Strawberries, 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9–10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 34–35, 54, 72, 76, 85–98, 89, 94, 97, 108, 109, 112, 113, 119, 121, 126, 134, 135, 137, 156, 209, 245, 248, 258, 275, 280, 281 Winter Light, 2, 6–9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 41, 103, 104, 109, 110, 121, 126–27, 131, 139–57, 141, 149, 163, 172, 176, 178, 204, 209, 219, 240, 248, 275, 291 Wolf, William, 246 Yeats, William Butler, 134, 229

vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Les, 181 Vertigo, 189, 208–9

Zetterling, Mai, 17, 26, 28, 32

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