Film: Inner life expressed as art: the films of Ingmar Bergman: Part 3
Part 3 (of 3)
In the 1950's and early 1960's, Bergman used film to come to terms with his family and rigid Protestant heritage, not autobiographically, but auto-therapeutically. By 1965 he became more interested in commenting on a world that he saw as disintegrating into bestiality. Persona (1966) shows the symbolic dis-integration of a woman who views the carnage of Vietnam on television. She splits into two people, and Bergman shows this schizoid personality with two connected-yet-distinct actresses (Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann) who always appear together, sometimes eerily overlapping:
Persona appears on many director's lists of best or most influential films. While sometimes baffling, it repays repeated viewings to get inside Bergman's visual symbolism. Its his most "modern" film, responding to the French innovators like Godard (Breathless), but in a way more connected to real human experience, rather than just as technical innovation because of its coolness. In the surrealistic Hour of the Wolf (1968), humanity again dissociates in the face of violence, this time as werewolves. Even children become animals in this gloomy comment on society. I was most impressed by Shame (1968), which is among the best films of the decade, or any decade. It shows the disintegration of a family (Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow) in the face of an unnamed war that devastates the landscape. The film shows the horrors of war on a small budget, and is more devastating than any more operatic or grandly hyper-realistic treatments (Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now). See, for example, the despair of this image as the couple is marooned on a small boat, adrift in the world, at the end of the film:
Shame is very unusual in looking at war from the perspective of the populace, rather than the soldier. This is doubtless less heroic and more difficult to do than the typical war movie or novel, but the horrors experienced by this couple are far more reflective of the actual experience of war participants than what is shown in most war movies (and anti-war movies). I experienced a similar emotional response as I did to the wonderful 1983 film Testament by Carol Amen, heartbreaking in depicting what happens to a suburban family after a nuclear missile hits San Francisco. See Shame: it is a worthy companion to The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front.
By the 1970's Bergman returned to films pursuing his own demons, now ruminating on the theme of the impossibility of truly compatible relationships. Bergman was married five times, and only the fifth endured. Tortured couples (married, mother-daughter, mother-children) abound in late Bergman. In Autumn Sonata (1978), Liv and Ingrid Bergman as musician daughter and mother fence, parry, battle, and ultimately come to an ambiguous resigned acceptance of one another. Fanny and Alexander (1982) is an epic dysfunctional family drama, where a pervasively controlling and emotionally strangulating pastor dominates a family, then is consumed in a Carrie-like pyrokinetic blaze willed by young Alexander, the boy who defends his mother. A more vivid Oedipal fantasy has never been shown. The wrenching Cries and Whispers (1972), perhaps Bergman's most perfect film, spends a couple hours with 3 unhappy repressed sisters psychologically torturing one another and their husbands, within an all-red womb-like interior. All this despite the impending death of one of them and their stated desire to nurse and support her. I have never seen such raw depiction of suffering as when the ill sister almost chokes and asphyxiates. Bergman dangles the possibility of real human kindness in the person of the maid, who comforts the ill sister in this iconic Pieta-like vision:
Bergman never experienced (or showed) a warm, end-of-life softening of these hard edges. One senses that he reconciled with the world, but never admired it. I strongly recommend seeing these and other Bergman films to gain insight into our world, but also into a brilliant artist, as Bergman may be the most self-revelatory great artist ever. Just get your own depression under control before viewing this overwhelming canon of films, which has changed the way I see all theater and cinema.
In the 1950's and early 1960's, Bergman used film to come to terms with his family and rigid Protestant heritage, not autobiographically, but auto-therapeutically. By 1965 he became more interested in commenting on a world that he saw as disintegrating into bestiality. Persona (1966) shows the symbolic dis-integration of a woman who views the carnage of Vietnam on television. She splits into two people, and Bergman shows this schizoid personality with two connected-yet-distinct actresses (Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann) who always appear together, sometimes eerily overlapping:
Persona appears on many director's lists of best or most influential films. While sometimes baffling, it repays repeated viewings to get inside Bergman's visual symbolism. Its his most "modern" film, responding to the French innovators like Godard (Breathless), but in a way more connected to real human experience, rather than just as technical innovation because of its coolness. In the surrealistic Hour of the Wolf (1968), humanity again dissociates in the face of violence, this time as werewolves. Even children become animals in this gloomy comment on society. I was most impressed by Shame (1968), which is among the best films of the decade, or any decade. It shows the disintegration of a family (Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow) in the face of an unnamed war that devastates the landscape. The film shows the horrors of war on a small budget, and is more devastating than any more operatic or grandly hyper-realistic treatments (Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now). See, for example, the despair of this image as the couple is marooned on a small boat, adrift in the world, at the end of the film:
Shame is very unusual in looking at war from the perspective of the populace, rather than the soldier. This is doubtless less heroic and more difficult to do than the typical war movie or novel, but the horrors experienced by this couple are far more reflective of the actual experience of war participants than what is shown in most war movies (and anti-war movies). I experienced a similar emotional response as I did to the wonderful 1983 film Testament by Carol Amen, heartbreaking in depicting what happens to a suburban family after a nuclear missile hits San Francisco. See Shame: it is a worthy companion to The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front.
By the 1970's Bergman returned to films pursuing his own demons, now ruminating on the theme of the impossibility of truly compatible relationships. Bergman was married five times, and only the fifth endured. Tortured couples (married, mother-daughter, mother-children) abound in late Bergman. In Autumn Sonata (1978), Liv and Ingrid Bergman as musician daughter and mother fence, parry, battle, and ultimately come to an ambiguous resigned acceptance of one another. Fanny and Alexander (1982) is an epic dysfunctional family drama, where a pervasively controlling and emotionally strangulating pastor dominates a family, then is consumed in a Carrie-like pyrokinetic blaze willed by young Alexander, the boy who defends his mother. A more vivid Oedipal fantasy has never been shown. The wrenching Cries and Whispers (1972), perhaps Bergman's most perfect film, spends a couple hours with 3 unhappy repressed sisters psychologically torturing one another and their husbands, within an all-red womb-like interior. All this despite the impending death of one of them and their stated desire to nurse and support her. I have never seen such raw depiction of suffering as when the ill sister almost chokes and asphyxiates. Bergman dangles the possibility of real human kindness in the person of the maid, who comforts the ill sister in this iconic Pieta-like vision:
Bergman never experienced (or showed) a warm, end-of-life softening of these hard edges. One senses that he reconciled with the world, but never admired it. I strongly recommend seeing these and other Bergman films to gain insight into our world, but also into a brilliant artist, as Bergman may be the most self-revelatory great artist ever. Just get your own depression under control before viewing this overwhelming canon of films, which has changed the way I see all theater and cinema.
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