Las Marieposas

I hope this will become more than a ramble among thoughts and words and through the lives of others I will find out more about the person I have become and have been.

Throughout my knowledge of their lives, my aunties lit wax lights on a bed of oil, in supplication for blessings. My recollection is that they were called "marieposas" although I never knew the spelling and I believed the English translation was "light to Mary." Earlier in the evening I discovered that Las Marieposas is the Spanish for the Butterflies, and my only previous association with a place of butterflies was on a tour of Corfu, in a valley filled with Butterflies in their tens of thousands.

It was not until late last year that I caught the final part of a showing of the film, "In the time of the Butterflies," and immediately added to my list of DVD's to hire before I die. The title refers to three sisters who were murdered by former Dominican Dictator Trujillo in 1960 and who were known for their opposition activities as Las Marieposas.

The DVD arrived on Saturday and later that evening, already a little angry sad after another pathetic and contemptible performance and insult to fifty thousand loyalty stretched fans from Newcastle Football club, (we lost 2.0 at home again, despite a fit Michael Owen), I decided to view the film as a consolation and immediately regretted because of the pain and frustration experienced. (OK so I have a masochistic streak and sometimes enjoy the suffering but not in this instance).

The film is based on the book by Julia Alvarez. Her parents escaped the murderous tyranny of the three decades of Trujillo dictatorship in Dominica between 1930 and 1960. The film is a tribute to the three remarkable sisters who were murdered on his instructions after they had visited their husband in prison, in 1960 on the assumption that it would reduce the threat to his rule. It is said that this had the opposite consequence igniting the country against the man and the regime and he was assassinated six month later, but also separately alleged as a consequence of the US intervention with the provision of arms.

The film is a fictionalised account of their lives and I have no knowledge how accurate was the book, although some detailed research is likely to have occurred before the lives and the deaths of the three sisters became a United Nations symbol of the abuse against women with International recognition on the fatal day when they were beaten and strangled to death.

Why have they been singled out from the thousands who were tortured and murdered during the 30 years regime of a man originally trained as a Marine by the Americans? It is said that he slaughtered 17000 Haitians, who share the Island, over a territorial claim. At the end of the film there is a note that 30000 political opponents, and anyone who stood in his way, were killed, about one day. However, that he survived for so long indicates the US approach that whatever his domestic activities, creating one of the major personal fortunes in the world by subverting incoming funds and a personal nationalization of land and business, he was their man in the fight against communism, as he was to the church of Rome, although towards the final years, the church condemned the continuing atrocities and it appears that individual priests became associated with rebel activity.

Finding out the extent to which the film mirrored the lives of the three sisters, (the fourth was not murdered with the others, survived, and acts a custodian of the museum in their honour), led me to one official site and several internet histories.

http://www.learntoquestion.com/seevak/groups/2000/sites/mirabal/English/index.html

The family appears to have established themselves during the last years of direct American involvement before Trujillo came to power. Their father owned farming land, a shop, coffee mill, meat market and rice factory in a town of Santiago called Tambroi, The film portrays the family as living a rural existence, but having influence with the local governor, and being part of the society which attended "court" functions. The four daughters, whose births spread from 1924 to 1936 attended a Catholic boarding school, three at the same time and some went on to university education, married men who actively opposed the regime and had families.

The eldest Patria Mercedes was born 27th February 1924 and did not attend the boarding social until she was 14, (1938) so that the film view that the girls had to fight to be educated appears valid, although parental concern about their welfare away from home was understandable as they would have become aware of the growing network of spies and informants, and the repressive nature of the regime. Patria (fatherland) appeared destined to become a nun but married at the age of 17 to a farmer and had four children, one of who died before the age of one year. A mother and devout Catholic her concern is said to have been for the future of her and other children in the country.

Born two years later on March 12th Minerva Argentina was 12 years when she commenced her education, but was already home schooled and is said to have been able to recite French verse at seven years. She remained in education throughout World War II and went to the University of at Santa Domingo when she met her future husband and a political activist. Her left political interest went beyond her homeland and she is said to have been a great admirer of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. She had two children. Maria Teresa was the youngest, born in 1936, therefore attended the school after her sisters, attended the Liceo de San Francisco de Macoris where she studied Mathematics which she continuing at the university, and then marrying and engineer in 1958 and giving birth to a son a year before her murder. She appears to have thrown herself wholeheartedly into active political work during her short adult life also marrying a political activist.

Minerva Mirabal is said to have been the first of the sisters to become involved in the underground movements to overthrow the government. She made friends at the school with someone whose relatives had been arrested, tortured, and killed by Trujillo's men. Even as a young girl, Minerva was very rebellious, and based her actions on her own judgements of right versus wrong. Minerva, a patriotic liberal, understood politics and aspired to study law. In the 1940's, she met Pericles Franco Ornes, the founder of the Popular Socialist Party. He was a known anti-trujillista and had been jailed various times for his political activities. Other influences on Minerva's growing anti-Trujillo sentiments included leftist literature and the illegally intercepted radio stations from Cuba and Venezuela that objectively discussed the political situation in the Dominican Republic

The family confrontation with the dictator does not appear to have emerged until 1949 when the youngest was only 13 years. The family received an invitation delivered by the local commander to attend a social function with the President, but left before him because of the weather conditions which so angered the man that he had their father arrested and imprisoned, and two daughters were arrested and questioned about their political activities. The film suggests that the dictator had lecherous designs on Minerva and that her open opposition to him and his regime attracted and to an extent protected her from subsequent summary execution. To me the fact that the two sisters were questioned about the political activities indicates that perhaps the invitation was a set up to get them away from the area where they had influence and support.

The nature of the regime and the man came again came to the fore in their lives, in the early 1950's, when they were arrested because it was said that their father had not bought a book about the President. It is suggested that the President, already aware that this girl was a threat to him, used the issue as an excuse to remind her and her family of his power. He is also reported to have intervened next when during Minerva's study of law at the university after she wrote a paper on basic human rights and the Dominican situation. This suggests that the teachers were required to draw the attention of the dictatorship to the views and activities of the students

(Of course this is something which all governments do. They have sympathetic supporters monitoring students, on the look out for those who can be recruited into the fold and those who are potential enemies. This is understandable. At present families of those murdered in our most recent terrorist activity are demanding explanations why two of the four bombers who had come to the attention of the authorities at one point were not then closely monitored. Personally I can understand the concern of the families and the political opportunism of others, but the route they appear to want the government to take, is to introduce the psychological screening of all children at the age of 5 years and then 11, and perhaps at 18 before entry into university education. Perhaps also before marriage and before entering any government financed employment at national or local level. Then there would have to a comprehensive surveillance system for everyone else, especially those who could be influenced against the state, such as at the present time all Muslims, and all other young people who might carry knives or become part of gun using gangs, in addition to everyone who has committed any kind of offence, or has received help for a psychological condition, or has become addicted, and with a higher level for those who have been to prison or in specialist psychiatric institution. Hang on isn't that what Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao did? Perhaps the surveillance should also be extended to any form of behaviour which deviates from a norm decided by the media from to time perhaps by a telephone/text in vote with Simon Cowell and Alan Sugar adjudicating? You think I am kidding?)

The President did try and prevent the further university education of Minerva but she was able to graduate in 1957, thus spanning the period of my own secondary education, the reading of the war crimes trials, going to work as a clerk and hating every second of the experience, although I had taken the decision to leave school and to take the position. At one level Minerva and I were already following the core approach of Rashnamurti, listening to our inner voice and Catholic originated conscience to what was right and what was wrong. Because I lacked academic and social self confidence, I knew I would be lucky to pass the five Ordinary level subjects that I had sat, and had taken the first available job which was not dependent on the results, except that passing would bring some immediate monetary improvement. I had been right because I only scrapped through. With hindsight of course my position would have been very different if the schools had understood about dyslexia, or I had lived in the era of being able to use word processes and the internet.

It was at the university she met her husband Manuel (Manolo) Aurelio Tavarez Justo already opposed to the dictator as was the husband of the younger sister. It was on June 14th 1959, that the underground opposition became known to the world, but not to me, when troops from the Dominican Liberation Movement, made up of exiled Dominicans living abroad, were sent to the northern towns of Constanza, Maimón and Estero Hondo under Commander Enrique Jimenez Moya. Dubbed the Luperion Invasion, this attempt to topple the dictatorship was halted by Trujillo's army and air force, but it did ignite the flame of rebellion in the Dominican people at large, or so it said.

Luperion was the name of a political group organized for internal resistance: The 14th of June Movement. Manolo, Minerva's husband was the president of this group. A short time after the failed Luperion Invasion, the Dominican Liberation Movement organized another conspiracy which continued into 1960. On January 10, 1960, they met on a farm in Mao, Valverde belonging to Conrado Bogart. The regime apparently knew of this meeting because all who attended were arrested. Before a year was to end the three sisters had been slaughtered. They become heroines.

Their last year has special significance for me, because it was during the space of only a few months in 1959 that having failed as a Local Government Clerk and then as an Olivetti typewriter salesman I had got myself a job sending out Christmas cards at the Houseman's bookshop attached to the Pacifist weekly Peace News and became instantly involved in the direct action civil disobedience movement.

Unlike the Mirabel sisters and their husbands, I was under no threat or persecution and lived in a liberal democratic society. Our circumstances were so different. During the period when the sisters were released from prison I was serving my six months knowing I could leave at point if I wished. With weeks of my release while debated what to do next, they died.

The reason why I did what I did have previously been given as New Testament Catholicism and the reading of the War Crimes Trials reports, the effects of becoming interested in the blues, in racist persecution and the history of slavery, in work of Father Trevor Huddleston in South Africa in addition to which there was Danilo Dolci, "the Sicilian Gandhi," who I also heard speak in London and Gandhi himself in the India struggle for independence coming across a first and limited edition of Satyagraha in second hand bookshop. Another way of looking at my involvement is to say that I was a mixed up young man, uneducated, uncertain of what he believed in, lacking self confidence and unable to get a girl friend, and therefore ripe for the first group who offered personal salvation. Would I have done any of it had a girl taken me on before?

What did the action achieve for me? The consequence were positive than negative. Did the action contribute to anything other than my own future? I have since doubted that it did.

I have also considered that if born two decades ago in similar circumstances and with similar genes would I have become a Muslim suicide bomber today? I would like to think not, but who can say? My reason is the belief that the New Testament and all the other writings about ends and means and violence begetting more violence, whatever its justification, are right. I know it as others have known it and others after me will. For the individual this means passive acceptance and self sacrifice. But when confronted with harm of one upon another and I can do something, how do I cope with doing nothing or pretending there is no such problem. And if I feel that way then what is the duty of those who govern in my name and with my consent? And what is my attitude towards those who carry out the function of the state to defend and to protect?
The Minerva sisters supported armed intervention in a situation when only armed intervention and uprising could be effective in terms of immediate toppling of a regime, and his assassination subsequently appears to confirm their conviction. I never have supported violent overthrow within a democracy, and quickly came to the Annie Besant view that leadership by many of those involved in the non violent revolutionary movements was to be even more feared than the actions of democratically elected politicians.

Even though Annie Besant is said to have come to support Gandhi's viewpoint, it is not clear to me that any of his actions, directly led to Indian independence with the contribution of the sub-continent to the defence of democracy during World War II and the cost of maintaining the Empire by force the greater reasons. And what happens in every violent revolutionary, the battle for power and more bloodshed! It happened in Dominica and it is happening in Iraq.

I have also written recently about the nature of fear and courage, and the ability of the professional soldier and non combatant to overcome their fear and face the bullet. I have been in a couple of such situations in my life, although death, in all but one instance was more likely to be from a prolonged self inflicted torture of the mind. My own experiences and circumstances cannot be compared to those of Sophie Scholl and of the Mirabal sisters. What interests me next is the view of Rashnamurti on such issues as the use of violent and non violence action as a proactive measure, but also as a defence?

Bergman's The Serpent's Egg and Berlin

Preliminary sketch notes about my knowledge of Berlin, my experience of Germany, the rise of Fascism, Bergman and the Serpent's Egg, together with the Christopher Isherwood viewpoint

My knowledge of Germany developed through my childhood as my aunts prayed in our garden air raid shelter, and then looking at the crater of the demolished house after a rocket bomb fell in a nearby road. A relative who returned from a Prison camp liberated by the Russians said they were worse than the Germans. An uncle and his wife returned from serving five years as part as the allied forces reconstructing West Germany into a prosperous democracy, marvelling at the motorway net work and whispering to adults about the reality of a black market and politically and emotionally divided nation

And then I read the official reports of the war crimes tribunal on Belsen and Auschwitz and thought I understood what the whispers had been about. A couple of years later I saw Laurence Harvey, Julie Harris and Shelley Winters in a recreation of Christopher Isherwood's story "I am a Camera" from Goodbye to Berlin, made into a play and then the film released in 1955 when I was sixteen and four years away from trying to be a writer on one of the two portable Olivetti typewriters I managed to sell during my ignoble half year as the training course star pupil and subsequent failure as a sales person.

Laurence Harvey was not my idea of being a writer, but I was instantly attracted by the nightclub sleaze world in inhabited by Sally Bowles, although at the time having no idea that the central character was a homosexual like his creator. I did understand something of the juxtaposition between the existentialist lives of the central characters and the rise of Hitler and the fascists, but it was more the emotional recreation of a time than the historical factual reality. This came later

It was not until 1964 that I acquired a Pan edition of William L Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for twelve and sixpence, a good buy for a 1400 unabridged academic history. I valued everything Allan Bullock had to say and his recommendation that this was the one book to place in the hands of anyone who wanted to know what happened in Germany 1930-1945 remains even more valid today.

A year before I had travelled by train through Germany to Stockholm but my experience was travelling at night and being a little spooked by my memories of what I had read. In prison in 1961, we had been allowed to have sent in Teach Yourself German, as we had this idea of going Munich and to Berlin and committing some non violent civil disobedience action at the boarder between East and West just to make the point that we opposed the worker's and the capitalist bomb. In 1965 as part of a grand European Tour, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France in three weeks in my mini estate, my male work colleague and I camped by the Rhine and entered a large beer tent where Germans made spaces for us to sit with them a drink enormous pints of beer singing songs we did not understand. We then did not find the municipal camp in Munich and motored on until we found one in the Black Forest and then entered an Inn where we were looked at closely and we felt we were the subject of everyone's conversation as we gambled at menu items but had a good inexpensive hot meal. Later we stayed with a German young woman and her mother at their flat in Geneva, who I knew from college days, and that is the extent of my reality experience about Germany and its people for over a decade.

I went to Munich in my imagination in 1980 through Time Life and where the frontispiece is of beer tankard upon beer tankard followed by an evocative mixture of pictures and words got the measure of the city and its people. There have been few, if any, films about life in Germany before and after the two world wars that I have not seen, and since the birth of Sky TV, on its history and documentary channels.

Another dimension of early Sky was that you were able to pick up German TV channels and these were more interesting to watch late at night and sometimes during the day when they had their Parades and Festivals, but still I hankered to be a carefree artist in Berlin, especially after finding that most people took off all their clothes in the main public park and that something of the twenties night life continued. I had seen the work of Kurt Weil recreated on stage and on TV and then Lisa Minnelli and Noel Gray had brought us Cabaret to the screen, in 1972, a work which remains vivid a portrait, and which I watch on DVD at least once a year.

But only last midweek did I view Bergman's the Serpents Egg made in 1976, the most odd and disappointing of his score of films experienced over the past year. The main language of the film is English with an unconvincing David Carradine as an alcoholic Jewish Trapeze artist who drinks himself into stupor for some inexplicable reason and Liv Ullmann as a failed circus performer trying her hand at being an oversize Sally Bowles. The film follows the same path as I am a Camera, Cabaret and others, people being decadent oblivious at first and then pretending not to notice, until shortages, and mounting street violence forces then to appraise what is happening to their neighbours, I like Carradine from his TV series mystic searches for enlightenment but he and this film is a mess. The last segment attempts to knit everything together with a kind of pre Joseph Mengele experimental doctor who both Ullmann and Carradine encounter. It is perhaps the darkest and bleak portrait of the time but it added nothing to my knowledge and experience.

I have one other brief experience of the German people, a party of local authority bigwigs from a twin town who I took on a coach trip to the largest in door shopping centre in Europe to meet its creator Sir John Hall who tried to convince them about the merits of his development despite my alerting beforehand that right and left had united to ban such a development from their city. I then had a drink with his son and son in law while the party went off to shop. Some came back early with their purchases for a drink and it was only then that I realised that if you excluded the language difference they were just same as any group of politicians representing the extremes of opinion and interests.

I still hope to go to Berlin and sit in the sun among others without any clothes and chat up a bird in a nite club hoping she is not a male transvestite!

Almodovar's Bad Education

This is the briefest of notes on any film experienced and it is a good question to ask why.

The core subjectof Almodovar's Bad education is the corruption of the young by priests, who are prepared to go to whatever length necessary to protect themselves and the church, including murder.

The film transcends these issues because of the understanding and insights of the Director. There is nothing else I want or need to say except to recommend a judge for yourself experience. There is some humour but not the scale of Dark Habits which I found hilarious.

There are several layers of reason for the reaction and inability to write further whihc I am unable to talk about now..

I have an appropriate crayoning but I do not know how to upload yet

Antonioni's Blow Up

There cannot be many people that have not seen Antonioni's Blow Up this film on one satellite cable channel or another. I saw it in Oxford in 1966 when created media interest beyond cinema critics, It was the British response to La Dolce Vita of the sixties.

It was the film which made David Hemmings. It was meant to say something about contemporary personified by David Bailey The begins with students on a rag event which I never understood the reason for except to indicate the new anti authority we will do what we like decade. Hemmings is then seen exiting from a doss house where he has been on a secret photoshoot. He runs an open top Rolls Royce which with a radio phone and has a flat studio Chelsea news type residence. His live in girl friend ( is she) is the beautiful and hen very young Sarah Miles, there is something wistful about that smile.

After a tetchy studio shoot a couple of teenagers try to get him interested (one is Patsy Kensit). Is his artist friend John Castle. He has been told about an antiques store by phone full of statues and bric a brac. The old owner does not like this visitor. He is looking for landscapes. The owner is out so he leaves and decided to visit the park which is nearby. It is quite a big park with a tennis court and on different levels. He sees a couple go up a bank and follows them. They look young thy are not. He sort of highs behind a low fence and then tree to take photos when they kiss. This intrusive photography without permission or conscience. The man look much older than the young woman. The girl sees him and is upset tries to get the photos from him. She says they have never met and runs off. He returns to the shop

His agent has been before to try and but the premises. He buys a propeller. The London he passes is not attractive concrete and the book is about violence and he hopes to end the books with peaceful pictures from the park. There are indications of the changing fashions and population of the city.

There is a small CND demo A peaceful march with posters and he is given one which blows off and away. The girl in the park finds where he lives and asks for the photos. The phone rings he asks he girl (Vanessa Redgrave) to speak to his wife hen admits she is not his wife, they have kids, they do not have kids, she is easy to live with this why he does not live with her, he appears to have contempt for pretty girls. He asks her listen to what appears to be a Barney Kessel record. I have it. I think. He gives her a cigarettes, she takes it and laughs, perhaps it is a joint but does not look home made. She asks for water. And uses the time to try and find the film. Going off with his camera but he is waiting for her saying that he is not a fool. She offers to sleep with hi m going topless. He tells her to get dressed.

He develops the film and prints large size pictures and becomes interested in one where the girl appears to be looking distressed at something, what? You will have to see the film to find out but the mystery continues.

However we are treated to an interlude which attracted most of the media interest and controversy but his mind is on what he believes he has discovered. He blows up a section of film, hence the title and goes back to the park to at night and confirms what he suspected.

He goes to visit his female friend but she is otherwise engaged. He returns to his flat and finds that he photos have all disappeared His photo labs have been ransacked His girl friend but is she arrives in a string see through dress and it appears well what does it appear?

He goes in search of his agent booking making friend and is distracted when he thinks he sees the girl, He is distracted further goes into a cellar club where a rock band is playing with a packed still emotionless audience, until one break his guitar and throws parts in to the crowd who go hysterical, Hemmings joins in the scrum escapes with the handle which he throws away. He goes to party where the friend is, a typical sixties party with recreational drugs and his friend is too high to go back to the park. Hemmings goes there in the morning and finds nothing except the rag week students arrive in a great noise rushing around the park in a Jeep.

The Seventh Seal Bergman

The Seventh Seal is regarded by many as the best work of Ingmar Bergman I do not, but this has nothing to do with cinematic excellence or artistic achievement, but with personal interaction. The film is included as a Barry Norman 100. He praises the film for the recreation of medieval Europe and while the devices used to portray the central issues may have been original they are over done even pretentious now.

A knight returns battle weary from the Crusades, a noble endeavour which has left him questioning his motivation and faith.

But he finds part of his island homeland ravaged by plague and the moment he arrives exhausted on the island, he is greeted by death, and fortuitously there is a set up chess set and he challenges death for game where the stakes are time and potentially a reprieve. I like this aspect, although we should always have an awareness of death, our own and those we care about, who may those we know intimately and those we do not. On TV last night, or the night before there was the reported death of a family of four including a baby but the survival of their 8 year old son with his grand parents? On the same programme there was a report on a memorial service for a 14 year old who elected to enjoy her last months rather than try and prolong through further chemo, and who had launched a charity to help other young people. Now one is the horror of sudden death, did father or mother or both cry out to God to spare their children? And also the peace of that comes from knowing and preparing. We may cling to life and fight off death that is being human, but to play and gamble, I do not like that myself but do not judge others who do.

On his journey to his estate and wife the Bergman creation encounters a small band of strolling players, a couple with a young child. These appear to be good parents, skilled in the craft, a happy couple struggling for food and for paid work. The husband is something of a romantic and devout, seeing the Virgin Mary and her child but this is not first vision he has recounted to his partner.

While performing at a village the third member of the group is willingly seduced by the wife of the blacksmith and they go off for a time to enjoy each other. The blacksmith and other actor having a few drinks at the local inn, the male community, supported by those females present turn on the man holding him responsibility for the action of his colleague. Fortunately he is rescued by the knight's assistant. Returning to his family they offer hospitality to the troubled knight who thought he had a way of winning the chess match against death until death tricks me into revealing his plan. Their simple fare of fresh milk and wild strawberries and relaxed chat eases his mind and has a great bearing on the outcome of the film.
There are other events with affect the knight, his assistant and the players. A young teenage girl is to be burnt as a witch and as the leader of a religious sect who carry crosses and whips each other, urges the peasants to abandon their self interest and pleasurable ways and seek forgives and redemption before they are killed by the plague.

It is argued by Barry Norman and by others, that the plague represents an evil force, which will sweep many people away before their natural time, and therefore they need to live their lives more appropriately. Well I concur with the aspect of preparation and always seeking appropriate redemption for any sins of omission and commission.

The wronged blacksmith decides to join forces with the good player he had wronged but this reconciliation is short-lived when they encounter his wife and the errant performer. She claims she has been seduced and mislead and her husband is only too willing to believe this, while the errant player attempts to fake his death only to be cut down when he attempts to spend the night in a tree, and death comes and breaks the tree.

The knight touched by the kindness of the couple and their child devises a plan to lose the game but buys sufficient time to return to his estate, to see his wife and to takes the other key characters with him with the exception of the couple and their child. The knight and those with him perish, and this is no surprise, but they find their faith and are saved from damnation. The young couple and their child. Well one must not spoil the ending must we, which in Bergman films may or may not matter. It is the way he tells them, now which comedian said that and of whom?

This is grim dark film which according to others is authentically set in time. This was a third viewing and a second reconsideration based on my memory and the draft text. If I live long and develop the memory loss of my mother and of others, what will I remember if all I have is just the list of films experience, or the list of Bergman, the work Ingmar Bergman? It could be Wild Strawberries and this film because they are about age, death, remorse, forgiveness and redemption. I hope I summer with a Monika, but there are many layers of Bergman to unravel still, hopefully.

Bergman's Saraband

Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband is the sequel to Scenes of a Marriage and my brilliant provider sent the DVD's so that I could view them sequentially, or perhaps it was an act of coincidence.
The openings sequence of Saraband, a prologue sees Marianne, Liv Ulman aged 63 looking on her life through a table covered in black and white photographs although this film is in colour made in 1983 when he was 86 and when in the film former husband Johan of Marianne is also 86. (I liked the use of black and white photos says he who has printed a work 101 in Black and White!)
The next aspect of the film is uncanny as shortly after the couple meet again, after an absence of thirty two years, the husband says that he is undertaking a prolonged view of his life, a pre judgement day, just as I have been doing as an integral part of the work project. Marianne asks about his conclusions and he describes his life as idiotic shit (a significant difference here because I know I have made positives differences in outcomes at several times although whether this outweighs the rest, is another question, probably impossible for me to assess, or for others to judge without the cataloguing and weighing up of everything that has been, and it multiplicity and complexity of causes.
He also devalues the relationship describing their marriage as hell, stating that a priest previously told him that marriages worked if there was a good relationship and unshakeable eroticism.
They lacked the latter which she admits in Scenes from a marriage was the consequence of the relationship with her mother, and a father pushing her to become a lawyer against her wish to become an actor, (the rebelliousness, curiosity. adventure taken from her but which she finds in her next relationship)
The film discovers what has happened to the couple since they broke up and went their separate ways.
Their relationship past and present becomes secondary to that of his son and grand daughter, and we enter another familiar Bergman territory, after the mother daughter harrowing experience of "Autumn Sonata, "and "Through a glass darkly," between father daughter and son and the relationship between the aging professor and his son in "Wild Strawberries."
When father and son meet unexpectedly they both express hate and loathing in their mutual disappointment about the relationship... Father admits never to have taken to his child, while son had becomes inconsolable when he loses the love of his life to cancer and he now makes a life with his daughter something which his wife warned him not to do from the unstated fear that such a relationship would destroy them both.
The son is an associate professor, runs a chamber orchestra, and plays the organ which was the instrument of his musical degree but now concentrates on the cello which he teaches his daughter. She has potential but is locked into what her father has taught, and pushing her to the local conservatoire so she will remain living with him
The Grandfather fixes for her to go to a friend in Russia to work with an outstanding artist. At the conclusion she decides on a solution which takes her away from her father, and does not become dependent on the string pulling of her grandfather. But is this the conclusion?
An aspect which struck me is that the after remarriage and going to America the father returns to his homeland and then isolates himself away amongst beauty and a significantly larger library than my own. (I must get back to reading and rereading and to learning Spanish and to daily walks and use of the exercise bike)
The films makes me think more of biological gene cloning than cycles of behaviour repetition, and that we share experiences of thought and feelings more generally than recognised and accepted although I believe this is a more focussed occurrence among creatives of intellectual ability.
The relationship between parents and their children is more brutal in these films than others, with Marianne being disappointed with the mental illness of her daughter shut away in an institution and another daughter who has gone to live at opposite ends of the earth.
The inevitable occurs between the elderly man and his younger former wife in one of the most touching and caring scenes of the whole of film. (I must do that that play about old old age). The inevitable is also that their relationship is momentary and it is their destiny to go separate ways until the permanent physical parting of the death of one.
There is also inevitability about the ending both between his son and daughter and his former wife and her psychotic daughter.
Some people only wish to experience film and have to wish to learn how it was made. On this DVD those of us who like to understand the perspectives and something of the process will enjoy the 30 mins film in which Bergman describes something of the making of the film together with interviews from Liv Ulman and others.
"There is more of this film in his head than in the script," he says.
"The film has a life of its own after I have created it and then I cannot bear to watch it."
Ah ha, just as well I wrote about the ideas in this morning's piece on Creativity three to four years ago but still after the piece written at the end of second millennium after the birth of J .C. which I discovered only earlier in the night. The significant thing for me is that I also recalled the contents of this piece on Saraband first written last October. My memory is getting better.
It is 9.20 I awoke around 8 for the first time after going to bed at four and without a get up. I tried to return to sleep but around 8.30 was forced up by a parcel post delivery of ink cartridges which had been promised for Monday or Tuesday. The correction were made after I had made up the first two of Ikea Black boxes, which I decided was necessary before acquiring £100 worth later this morning. Someone has subscribed to my writing, so who are the other readers? Why do I need to Know? Do I need to know? No and Yes

Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage

It was not until October 14th 2006 that I encountered Scenes from a marriage Ingmar Bergman. Even by Bergman standards this film has a layered intensity and a clarity which is extraordinary. As art it is the kind of experience which makes struggling expressionist like me despair, knowing we will never create anything which will approximate.

It is also a commentary on the truth of relationships
Because my emotions were raw, I found this film too powerful to experience at one sitting, although I have since after buying my own copy.
The work was not constructed as a film for theatre but a six act 50 min TV series which won such acclaim that a leading national marriage counsellor approached Bergman for advice (just in case you think I was overstating its merits).
The work was reduced to two hours for a stage play and then in 1983 it became the present film of 2.40 mins with 16 scenes in four segments 4 x 4.
The film begins with photos being taken for an article about the ideal marriage. There are good hints that all is not what it seems, two people brought together by circumstance the wife previously married for a short period, his background I am not sure, his wife a lawyer like her father specialising in divorce, he is involved with psycho technology, they have two children they are complacent confident talk about their relationship to others.
At a dinner party they are witnesses to their best friends tearing chunks out of each other linking with a scene from Wild Strawberries.
Then we have the scene which one person in every marriage which ends unexpectedly will recall with pain, when the other makes the announcement. But can such an announcement be made which does not devastate. Is there such a thing as dissolution by mutual consent?
But worse is to come when the wife finds out that best friends knew and did not say, but from their point of view saying what they know could have precipitated what might not never have been.
However this is not the end in terms of the couple never meeting again, but it is the end of what they thought the situation had been. The brilliance of the film, its uniqueness, is that it then takes you along the journey of self discovery, growing enlightenment and maturity which is part of the continued growing up we all experience, and where some have to do it alone or with others, at least for a time, but it there ever any going back, and if there is, can it work?

In this instance Bergman answers the question in another film

Bergman's The Silence

The Silence was my 10th Bergman film experience and I gave it undivided attention on 24.10.2006. I still cling to being able to watch something, write something and think something at the same time.

It was just after my birthday in March 2007, four months after watching the Film, and I make the choice to reconsider the film in preference to watching an interesting film on TV, and writing about a non political episode of West Wing where the character Josh experiences post traumatic stress. The subject of the episode, and the film, required undivided attention, so I chose what should have been the least emotionally demanding activity.

I am still shattered from getting up early after going to bed late, then a good level of prolonged working over eight hours, an early afternoon cooked meal, a break to catch up on an F A Cup which was worthy of undivided attention, as later had been an England win against France in Rugby Union. I dozed when visiting my mother at the residential home where she was a resident, watching Hook, and then on return watched Time Team, had more to eat and dosed more until West Wing achieved my undivided attention.

In The Silence, two women, for a moment I thought one was mother, the other, her daughter, and travel in a train with a boy. They are sisters but this is not immediately apparent, perhaps it was and I did not pay the attention although I believe I did.

The film was made in 1963 and the impression is conveyed that it is hot somewhere in Europe. There is a southern feel to the travel rather than Nordic.

The boy witnesses a goods train of endless tanks passing by. War, in war, preparations for war, seems to be the message; this is not peace time produced goods on sale for use by others.

(I have spent a week going through too much paper, trying to relate the recollections of others about events four years ago, partly based on partial contemporary records, memories changed over time, the interpretations of a succession of people asked to establish facts and make judgements. I do not have the brain or memory for the task. But there is no one else and if I do not do it no one will).

The journey is interrupted as one of the women is taken ill. Looks like TB. They stay at a grand hotel to enable her to recover sufficiently to complete the journey. When I was a boy I lived a young aunt who had TB. The youngest of my mother's six sisters and four brothers, and who was the first to die. Her fiancée was studying to be a doctor at the University of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War and disappeared. She never knew what happened to him, nor had his mother and this affected her greatly; that was the kind of person she was, kind. But that is just a mixture of fleeting retained impressions and the memories of others.

The boy in the film appears to live with two women, I thought I knew him well as I was raised by three women, sharing a bed with them until I was nine or ten years of age.

There is suddenly menace as a solitary tank which rumbles around deserted streets near the hotel. Towards the end of World War II the rocket bombs came, over 140 falling in the area close to our home. I have a vivid memory of watching one flying over while making way to the Anderson shelter, praying its engine would not stop. It did but fell somewhere else. Sometimes we would go and look at the crater in streets nearby. Now children only know about this if their parents watch old films. It is black and white history.

The sisters and the boy do not speak the language of the place where they stay, but that it is an international hotel helps. The ill sister cries out once, perhaps twice: “I do not want to die here among strangers! Most people cry out that they do not want to die, to end, whatever their spiritual beliefs, and expectations, so this cry is interesting! Her sister, the boy, is they strangers? At least she will not die alone.

The boy is bored, uncomfortable and used to being on his own. I have never been bored in that sense because I grew up being on my own among others.

The hotel where they choose to stay is evidently the best in town and in most places. The corridors and rooms are vast, but there is an absence of other people. There is a service waiter on their floor and he is to play an important role as the film unfolds. The sisters seem to have money and the length of their stay does not appear to be a problem. As in all Bergman films, viewed so far, one of the characters, the sister who is ill, is an artist, a writer and lover of words. It is evident she can communicate through words but finds it difficult to communicate directly with people.

The boy has his own punch and Judy puppets and there is a troupe of midgets staying at the hotel and performing at a variety theatre. To-day we say height challenged. Significantly below average height is a mouthful. I am not sympathetic to this constant seeking to find neutral public expressions for what is the reality of everyday behaviour. You do not change prejudice by changing terminology that is why I liked In Bruges so much, because it spoke as people do and the midget made the most of being a midget.

In the film I should have watched tonight, I noted from an advance clip the statement to the effect that we all have secrets, guilty secrets. In Bergman films the secrets are shared between characters and with the audience. We learn something of the attitude of the sister, imprisoned by illness in the hotel, towards the physical aspect of marriage but who finds being physically alone unbearable. The younger sister, the boy's mother, has a different kind of problem and goes out leaving the boy in the care of the other sister and in effect the care of the hotel. That the boy is used to being on his own in this way is no defence.

His mother goes to a show where the troupe is performing. There is also a separate scene where the boy encounters the troupe in their room and is entertained by them. As with Fellini who makes a point of including abnormal physical forms I fail to understand the significance except to drive home the point that no one is in fact normal although with most the abnormalities are internal and in how they relate to the world.

A young woman told me that she encountered a stranger in the midst of a desert in central Europe and they made physical love and then went on their separate ways without communicating in words. In this film there is a similar situation because the man and the woman speak different languages. It was this aspect of the film which shocked 1960 audiences. The aspect, which had interested me, of the real event, is that it had taken place when the woman had been a fearless young backpacker in the sixties. I also knew someone who went on her own to India for six months before university. Now a days having one night stands with strangers who speak in different tongues has become common place for young people in a thousand holiday hotels in the Costa’s but justifiably think a boy or girl was crazy to go backpacking alone, anywhere. The nature of freedom to have changed. We are being asked to surrender some freedoms from.

The boy goes on walkabouts in the hotel and I am reminded of Jenny Agutter's film although in this instance the aborigine is the lonely floor waiter. It is not the performing troupe. The man is kind, especially to the sick sister and finds a way to communicate without language. The sick sister also appears able to communicate to the boy and writes him a message, which is similar concept to that of the History Boys, the passing on to a new generation. But beware the price of being a ring bearer, which for me is the main message of the magnificent Lords of the Ring. The Silence ends leaving you to speculate if the sick sister has died or has been left alone. Mother and boy continue the journey north.

There are film notes with the DVD and in this instance I read them afterwards and then replayed the film. I find this is the way to experience a film, theatre, sporting: go and take an emotional journey and then think, and then if inclined, watch again which I did in this instance because I needed to separate myself from the film and what its creator had intended.

Bergman's Autumn Sonata

Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata is a challenging and disturbing film with it core subject of the relationship between children with their parents and parents with their children. Sometimes, as in this film it is better if parents and children are separated by their different worlds of experience. The time is not always right for an exchange of truth, one or both may not be able to listen, digest, understand, or accept, and yet without communication there can be no progress, development and resolution.
There is always the risk of irreparable damage and in this film we are left with the likelihood that this is what happens. It is both the fault of mother and daughter, but paradoxically, it is also not their fault. Hegel and Marx were simplistic in the proposition of the juxtaposition of opposites from which there can develop a synthesis. Black White Grey co-exists on a shifting spectrum of emphasis according to internal and external forces. Everything has a casual relationship and connection, predestined, predetermined but is also random and chaotic. Everything is controllable and uncontrollable, well, so it seems to me
In this film the parent is a concert pianist, past her best, wracked with back pain and losing her best friend. She only has the piano to give her life meaning and this is now failing her or at least the recognition of her peers and public regarding her professional ability. She is like the footballer and all those whose time upon the stage has to be limited by age and fashion.
She cannot cope with one daughter who is severely disabled and ill and by the other because a gulf in understanding has widened over years of unresolved issues about which the mother appears to be unaware.
The daughter is married having lost a child of her own, but the marriage from the outset was a compromise. Her husband is a country vicar living in a beautiful location and part of a local community, accepting the knowledge that he cannot convince his wife that he loves her unconditionally. He does not know how to reach that part of her which has been locked away.
He reads from one of his wife's two books about the search for identity and her hope that through a relationship she will come to understand herself. (Never a promising basis for a long term relationship)
The daughter writes to the mother inviting her to visit, and there is genuine joy and expectation at her arrival and a longing to be understood and accepted. The first problem is that daughter is looking after the disabled sister who the mother had placed in an institution.
This leads to the first of several great lines, "I have never had a taste for people who are unaware of their motives," says the mother when she finds that her daughter has failed to disclose in advance the presence of her sister in the household, when she is aware that her mother cannot cope with sickness in general and her disabled daughter in the particular.
The daughter is unable to communicate her feelings, and what she really wants, and what she is thinking. Fortunately, the husband understands, having become integrated with his own childhood and life as it had developed, but he also despairs of being able to make his wife understand and accept his unconditional devotion to her. He also understands his wife's pent up anger with her mother.
In an attempt to impress and bridge the gulf between words, the daughter plays the piano for mother and presses her to be honest in her appraisal. Mother cannot be anything other than honest, something which in reality the daughter finds humiliating. "Human beings cannot stand too much reality," but even as this point the film gives not hint of the ferocious interaction to come.
The daughter has partially resolved the death of her child through the belief that the child continues to exist in parallel life within a reality which is beyond our capacities to understand.
The mother is a woman who understands her own needs, and has the funds to pander to them. She has a clear view of her own childhood, and the person she has become has become and of her mother. She believes she understood her daughter during childhood and has little awareness that all her perceptions are challenged by the daughter.
Look into the abyss etc and once you step through certain doorways, into some portals, there is no return
The truth as the daughter sees it emerges. "Once you said I should have been a boy," so I hated how I looked.
"I wanted you to stay, to be a proper mother but I also could not cope with you as you were."
"You had taken care of all the words in our house."
"At fourteen you took over everything when you stayed home you put all your energy into me.” "It was horrendous I still shake horror/ terror about those years." The mother tries to explain how she felt about herself, why she could not stay or return what she tried to do and was not equipped to do.
"What scared me more I thought I was going insane."
"You damaged me for life just as you are damaged."
"You tied me down because you needed my love."
"And it all took place in the name of love."
"A mother and her daughter what a terrible combination."
"The daughter shall inherit the mother's injuries."
In the daughter's unhappiness mother's triumph
I remember very little from my childhood, says mother
"Only through music did I get the chance to reveal my emotions."
"I wondered if I had ever lived at all."
"Do some people ever live?"
"I see an ugly picture of myself"
"I spent my life accumulating experience."
"I cannot remember faces even my own"
"I remember the pain of the births but not the taste of it the details"
I wanted to love you but I was afraid of your demands
You can't put all the blame on me
You always wanted excuses there can be no exceptions
I wanted you to take care of me
But I was only a child
It is one of the most excruciating honest exchanges witnessed in the cinema alongside who's afraid of Virginia Wolf and Look back in Anger.
There is a necessity and inevitability about what happens although it would have been better that it had not.
There are several levels of revelation in this film. One is the performance of Ingrid Bergman in her last role before she died of cancer five years later. Her performance is no less remarkable than that of the disabled daughter while the other daughter is played by Liv Ulman being Liv Ulman at her best. The husband's role is expertly crafted. This film is such great truth as to be unbearable. I thought this was the best of all Ingmar Bergman's until Scenes from a Marriage and Saraband. There are others which inhabit separate dimensions which are also brilliant and painfully challenging.

Bergman's Summer with Monika

My knowledge of Sweden as a country comprised a two week college trip in between a Diploma in Public and Social Administration and Professional Training in Child Care. The journey was made by train through Germany and Denmark and after a few days in the capital we stayed at a Folkhighschool on the east coast near Forsa. There was also a memorable day at the University of Uppsala. My memory is of an endless countryside of forest and lakes, of a small town where the young people drove around in cars, picking each other up to party in the hills, and of news about President Kennedy, I think "I am a Berliner" rather than the day of his assignation. Until the trip my knowledge of the Scandinavian soul was based on the plays of Ibsen and music of Grieg(Norway), and the music of Sibelius (Finland). Abba was yet to come. and of one film Summer with Monika.

The attraction of the film, seen soon after I left school in 1955, was the promised sight of an unclothed girl going for a swim, which planted the idea of abandoning a boring office job and going off, pre hippy style, living rough, for love and sex. At the time I understood aspects of the reality of the tragedy which the film unfolds, but the lingering image was of the original summer of love.

I have seen a few Bergman films during the fifty years it has taken to grasp the significance of a film maker who has said all there is to say of value about the human condition and human relationships. It was logical to commence with Summer with Monika.

The story has been covered in many different ways before, and since. A nice young man of a good home, (although the boy has lost his mother at 8 and has a well intentioned protective aunt, and a father providing a good home and small boat, but sick and sad, but appears a good father), is picked up by an attractive young girl from a poor working class background with ineffectual mother, worn out by the struggle of a large family and drunken bulling and at times violent father.

The girl lives in a dream world of the cinema, wanting romance, a wealthy husband, so she does not have to work and can spend her time having fun and buying clothes. She is experienced and has a reputation to an extent that she known to the employers of the young man, and her brothers, as Mucky Monika! We learn that she has had an affair with one of the older men at work and an aggressive younger man from her environment. This young man encounters the couple during their summer among the southern islands and tries to destroy their boat but it is not his intervention which defeats the couple. They return to everyday reality after she becomes pregnant stealing food after she becomes pregnant, marries and live in a small flat where he works by day and studies nor a better life by night. They return, are married live in a small flat. We all know what to expect next and it does. He is left to bring up the child, and remember his taste of honey. There is great emphasis on the cinematography, which communicates the emotions experienced. This is not a great Bergman film but it remains an important part of my past experience and it introduced to the greatest film maker to-date.