In this second part I come to what I regard as the most brilliant, challenging and moving I have experienced in sixty years of experiencing film. This is the work of Ingmar Bergman between 1961 and 2003.
(11) Through a glass darkly 1961 is a moving and frightening portrayal of schizophrenia and disintegration. There are four characters in two families on one of Bergman's islands. A practical man who appears to earn his living from fishing living with his young wife who had retreated into childhood and returned from what has been a long period of hospital treatment. The film begins with the return to the island of the girl's father who unable to cope with illness ran away to another country to complete the writing of a book. He is an intellectual who tries to write the truth as he sees it, writing about the experiences which interest him. To mark his return, his daughter and his son who live in the adjacent house perform a play.
At one point the son talks of being an artist, he has written fifteen plays. He wants to be a pure artist, the original concept artist, the writer who only thinks his writing and the painter who only visualizes his work. But for me I need to produce something which has physicality and which realises the original concept.
Father, son and daughter are not able to communicate although responsibility appears to be apportioned to their mother, his wife who appears to have taken her own life.
As with Autumn Sonata which he created later, some things are better left unsaid, or in this instance unread, as the daughter reads he father's diary in which he states that her illness is incurable and that the psychiatrist has warned that a relapse is likely. She also reads that her father wants to record her disintegration, such is his apparent detachment from the reality of her experience.
The son in law criticises the father when he finds out what has happened and was written. The film also centres on the son and his fear that he is going the same way as his sister, but he is able to communicate something of his fear to the extent that the father realises that he must give priority to his son and the film ends on a more positive note as the son is thrilled by having a conversation with his father. Bergman is able to depict the heightened self awareness of the illness and for me the most memorable and haunting moment is when the daughter explains that there is nothing worse than to be aware of yourself and your illness without being able to prevent the relapse and return to institutional care. Bergman brilliant uses the camera and sound to depict the heightened self awareness and general awareness of individuals in such predicaments.
In (12) The Silence 1963, (the year of my visit to Sweden and Uppsala), two sisters are travelling by train somewhere hot in central Europe on their way home, with a young boy who becomes the focus of attention as he watches a train of tanks pass by in the build up for war. The sisters are forced to get off the train when one becomes ill with a consumptive illness. She cries out, I do not want to die here among strangers, but also I do not want to die. The mother is restless in the heat and the boy is used to being on his own. The hotel is the best in town, vast with grand rooms and a service waiter on each floor.
The ill and dying sister is an artist, a writer and a lover of words confesses that she hated the physical aspects of marriage, but also find being alone unbearable. The mother goes out leaving her son in the care of her sister and the hotel and visits a variety theatre where a troupe staying at the hotel are on stage but her attention is attracted by a couple making love in the auditorium and she goes back to a café where a waiter had taken an interest in her body and they become lovers although they do not speak the same language. This scene shocked audiences in the 1960's although I once knew a young women who had a similar experience after meeting someone in the desert in central Europe. The boy and the waiter communicate, a lonely man showing photos of his wife, his mother and tries to teach the boy some words in the language of the country. There is also communication between the boy and his aunt before she dies and the mother and son return to the life back at home both changed.
After watching the film I learn it is the third in a trilogy and that while there is no discussion about religion and spiritual beliefs it is about the two competing sides of human nature, suggesting that the two sisters each represent to sides of human nature, similar to the sisters in the Virgin Spring. The film is talked about by serious critics alongside Last year in Marianbad and L'avventura but made some money because of the controversial sexual scenes.
Bergman is alleged to have said it a film about hell on earth, his hell.
I first attempted to experience (13) Persona in 2006 but it was not until September 2007 that I was sent a copy which did not freeze midway. It is arguably one the great Bergman films. Bergman is the master of turning people in side out exposing their souls as well as their psyche, and featured his two great actresses Bibi Anderson and Liv Ulmann with Ingrid Bergman the third. Bergman argued that making the film saved his life. The film begins with flashing images which merit being slowed down and considered.
The story appears straightforward Bibi Anderson is a nurse charged with caring for Liv Ulmann an actor who has become mute during a performance and they go together to her doctor's summer house on the coast. The nurse does all the talking, about herself, and then about the patient, whose silence gets under her skin and it is the nurse who has a breakdown and ends up attacking the patient. I am immediately reminded of the psychiatrist in charge of a large institution which he admired on one hand because of the resourcefulness of everyone within in bounds but where also he admitted that his main was the staff - At least the patient understand that they are ill.
The breakdown is precipitated by the nurse finding out that the patient has been writing letters reporting what she has been saying and commenting on her work as a nurse and relationship towards her.
Before I received any social work training the course requirements demanded that I spent a summer in a practical social work placement and spent two to three months with the Manchester Family service Unit working primarily in Salford where as it happens I knew the Member of Parliament and future Chairman of the Labour Party who I had met on a bus the an Aldermaston CND march in 1961 prior to the Holy Loch demonstration. I was asked to visit a family with multiple problems in another part of the city who was famed for having been on television, living in two council houses knocked together because of the size of her family and sitting at one end of an enlarged sitting room where she held court and I listened for close on two hours while she went through all the social workers and social worker students who had been to see her and told me of her judgements about them. I concluded that the visit was a glorious test which hoped I passed learning that whatever is written and whatever we think of patients/clients, they have just as strong a view of their social workers, doctors, and officialdom, in general. Look into the abyss and the abyss looks into you.
I also experienced (14) The Hour of the Wolf released in 1968. I liked this film which also has Max Von Sydow as the husband of Liv Ulmann, a poor but known artist who spends the summer in a cottage on an island except for a castle with an aristocratic owner and guests.
The film is story of the man's disappearance told by his wife talking direct to camera, and making reference to her husband's diary which she has found. Although heavily pregnant she has remained on the island. The man did not like company and during their relationship of seven years he would spend his day walking and painting alone. He liked his wife to administer to his needs and say little. Liv poses the question which many in long relationships face. Is it better to yield to the merging of identities in a relationship, sharing each other's thoughts and nightmares, or better to live more individualistically and been less complicit. On one hand for the marriage to work and last, a bond is required which will survive their separateness, the temptations of others, and the nightmares of life. But the vary closeness can lead to a feeling of imprisonment and desire to break loose.
The husband attempts to show some drawings to his wife but she turns away nor are we the audience shown, The husband insists that they stay up all night until dawn unable to sleep afraid of the darkness. He becomes fixated on the nature and length of time of just one minute.
The wife encounters a woman who could be 216 years of age or 76 who tells her to read his secret diary and stop him destroying the sketches. Is the woman real or a figment? From the diary we learn of three encounters. He is taken back to the Castle home where one beautiful woman seduces him and a psychoanalyst who turns souls inside out tells him to slow down. The couple go to the castle for a meal and they sense they are part of some game in which while the hosts and other say they like the work of the artist they talk of him as if the was not there. They mention his earlier relationship with a woman who was married and caused notoriety.
The aristocrat then invites the artist to a party, giving him a gun saying he should kill his wife as his former lover will be at the party waiting for him. He goes to the party and he believes that not only the former lover and the aristocratic have become lovers but have found the ability to walk on walls an ceilings he knows he is going to have to watch while the two make love. The former lover is in fact dead but comes alive only to make love to him.
When he tells his wife of this experience she tries to explain that he has only been away for a matter of minute. Earlier when talking of the past relationship he describes this as a snake bite. Out the following day he sees a boy watching him and getting closer and he bludgeons the boy to death after being bit by him.
When he goes off in the night for the last time and she goes after him she meets the aristocrat. After waiting throughout the autumn and as Winter approaches she leaves the island to have her baby, How much of what we have been watching is mental and emotional madness communicated between the couple mutually experienced as real? How much has been real?
I also liked (15) Shame also released in 1968 in a post world war northern country and a couple, Max Von Sydow and Liv Ulmann are having relationship problems after their orchestra is disbanded. They become caught up in the middle of a civil war. When one side takes over there is no regard for conventions and the local leader uses his position to buy the wife for his pleasure paying the husband substantial money. When the other side gain power the man is offered his life for the money and the wife pleads to her husband to hand it over. The husband has been criticised by his wife for his sensitivity, being a coward and for failing to give her a child, and he denies knowledge of the money and this leads to the destruction of their farm. He attempts to kill the former local leader and then he does execute a military absconder who has held them hostage. He proposes to use the money for he and his wife to leave the war zone on the island but this is an illusion. Both sides ask about their political affiliations and they genuinely declare their indifference which is taken to refer to the neutrality of Sweden in the World War. The film is photographed in black and white and attempts to show that war brings out the worst and that there is never neutrality when the home becomes the battlefield. The wife is wanting her husband to grow up and sees a child as the future. The husband has a more negative but realistic approach to life, and the film shows that whatever the personality and experience if cornered people can behave in ways very different to the normal persona.
(16) Cries and Whispers 1973 is about two sisters who have married and gone their separate ways. One sister had a prior affair with a local doctor and when her husband is away she engineers a visit and gets him to say overnight with her. Her husband although outwardly successful is anxious to kill himself but does not have the courage to do so.
The second sister is married to a diplomat and is yet another wife who hates physical intimacy and mutilates her own body. These two return to the family home where their other sister has a disease similar to tuberculosis consumption and is cared for by a loyal servant with whom she has a close relationship which the other sisters resent. Their sister dies and one of the visiting sisters, played by Liv Ulmann attempts to bridge the gulf between the other, but runs away when she realises the potential implications involved.
The local preacher arrives and calls on the departed sister to intercede for him as her faith was stronger than his own. The family reward the maid by giving her only a month to find somewhere else and the choice of a possession This is Bergman showing that the outwards appearance of people and their relationships is very different from the reality and even the departed sister is shown not to have the saintly figure believed by the vicar.
(17) Scenes from a marriage(1973) is the second film I acquired on DVD because it speaks with such truth and clarity about adult relationships. The film was originally a TV series of six fifty minute parts and had such an impact that a leading marriage counsellor approached Bergman for advice. The work was transformed into a stage play of two hours and then in 1983 the present film lasting 2 hours 40 minutes. The film open as photographs are taken of a couple for an article about the ideal marriage. They have a dinner party with close friends who are on the verge of divorce after twenty years of marriage. The wife, played by Liv Ulmann finds that she is pregnant and is persuaded to have an abortion which she regrets.
In the second scene we learn that the wife, Marianne, is a lawyer specialising in divorce who has a client wanting to end her marriage after twenty years. When Marianne returns home she and her husband discuss their sex life and Marianne admits she has lost interest in physical intimacy with her husband. In the third scene the husband visits his wife at the summer home to reveal that he has been having an affair and is leaving his wife. She contacts her closest friends who reveals they were aware of the situation.
In the fourth episode the couple meet again when the husband has become dissatisfied with his new relationship. The couple spend the night together although Marianne is in a new relationship. The couple meet again prior to signing the divorce papers and this time she seduces her husband just to prove that she is no longer emotionally involved, but he does not want the marriage to end and they have a physical fight and agree to sign the papers. In the last scene they come together again although both are married to others. They spend another night and reach an understanding that although there is a strong bond it is not enough and they part, perhaps never to meet again. The facts of the story as set out fail to communicate the depth and the sensitivity of the interactions between the two. I was reminded of the play and the film Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf and electric exchanges between the characters played by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor but in Scenes, the exchanges, and the truth are relentless and deeper.
(18) Saraband 2003 is the sequel thirty years later and also stars Liv Ulmann as Marianne, thirty years in real time after Scenes and separating finally from her first husband Johan, looks back at her life, pouring over photographs following the loss of her second husband who disappeared in his plane. She comes across the photo of Johan, remembers their good times and wonders what has become of him, knowing that his second marriage also failed.
She visits him living alone in the countryside with his books and only a woman from village coming to attend to him. He was a generation older than Marianne when they married so now he is significantly into old age while she is at the beginning. They look back at their relationship and admits that a priest had told him that for marriage to work there had to be a good relationship and unshakeable eroticism. Marianne admits that her problems related to her parents and the insistence of her father that she become a lawyer suppressing her wish to become an actor and that the sense of curiosity and adventure had been take from her only to be found in her subsequent relationship.
The sub plot of the film concerns the son of the first husband who had become a conductor of an orchestra and the over protective father of a daughter who he is tutoring in her career as a concert cellist. Relations between father and son have never been good and both admit to dislike bordering on hate, but grandfather does offer to help him gain a position for his grand daughter which meets with the approval of her father. However the grand daughter wants to get away from her father and chooses to study with a female friend in Germany and live with people of her own age.
Marianne has also had relationship problems with her two daughters, one who has married a lawyer and lives in Australia while lives in an institution, Marianne and her former husband and have one more night together and Bergman is brilliant shows the nature of what a an adult relationship can be in old age. However there is to be no old age happy ending for this couple and the film ends with Marianne making the effort to establish a relationship with her institutionalised daughter.
The films are important because they cover the full circle of life, how our adult relationships are formed and affected by the relationship with our parents and our childhood and how in turn the accumulation of issues affects grand children and subsequent generations. At one point the son of the first husband expresses the pain of knowing that he is like his father but this was only one of a number of moving and sometimes harrowing moments in these two films.
This brings me back to the chronology after Scenes and what for me is the most moving and terrifying of all his films as it strips the psyche and the soul to its core. (19) Autumn Sonata(1978) is about the relationship between a mother, a professional musician, played by Ingrid Bergman, and her daughter, played by another outstanding actress Liv Ulman, and who have become distant and never communicate about their earlier relationship and the cause of the gulf in understanding. The mother makes the journey to see her daughter, and her husband, because she is failing as a concert pianist. wracked with physical pain and is losing her best friend through incurable illness.
The mother has in fact two daughters, one who physically as well as emotionally disabled and was placed in an institution but removed by her sister, unknown to the mother. The able bodied daughter has lost a child of her own and her husband, a country vicar is aware that he can no long communicate with his wife at a level which will help her, and him. The daughter practices piano in the hope of one day impressing her mother and has written two books about her experience and at one point the husband reads a passage about her search for identity and the hope that through a relationship she will come to understand herself, On finding that her other daughter is also in the household, mother comments that she never had a taste for people who are unaware of their motives. There is a succession of statements made between mother daughter- daughter mother which are at times brutal" You tied me down because you needed my love"," You damaged me for life as you are damaged", "I wanted to love you but I was afraid of your demands"., " Is the daughter's unhappiness mother's triumph, " I spent my life accumulating experience", "But I was only a child."
The nature of the exchanges between daughter and her mother drives the mother away, leaving her to come to terms with her life as it has become. The daughter writes in the hope of undoing the consequences of speaking out but it is too late. I believe Bergman was making the point, whether intentional or not, that it sometimes better to live with uncertainty, with a relationship as it has become however fragile and however difficult and painful especially when we encounter others whose relationships appear so much better, than press the truth and go beyond the point of no return, yet for others for their own survival and development they may need to confront their demons whatever the consequences for existing relationships.
(20) The life of the Marionettes 1980 has a colourful prologue and is a reflection on the murder of a young girl by the patient of psychiatrist who has discussed his urge to kill his wife in graphic terms. The psychiatrist believes what is said to him and warns the man's wife. The film switches back and forth so that we learn something of the young man and his relationship with his mother, with his wife and the wife's relationship with a homosexual friend.
Bergman explains that he has been haunted by situations where couples are united but also try to break from what they have come to regard as bondage, We have met this couple before as they are from the opening scene of Scenes from a marriage. The film was made in Germany and Bergman believed that although the sophisticated German people had always indulged in exploring sexuality and doing so in a public way it had become crude commercial exhibitionism losing its subtly. It evident he has been influenced by Brecht. What affected me was the conduct of the psychiatrist and his part this tragedy with horrific its conclusion.
(21) Fanny and Alexander 1982 also won the Oscar for best foreign language film and three other Academy awards and was the last of his films I saw in theatre, on TV and more recently on DVD. The theatre version lasts 188 minutes and the TV edition 312 mins.
Alexander and his sister live as part of a middle to upper class family in Uppsala where their parents who part of the theatrical company at a theatre owned by his mother. Every tear there is a Christmas Pageant at the theatre which is the social event of the community after which there is a grand dinner party as the family home where there is much eating, drinking and sharing of presents as well as goings on associated with such a family.
The first crucial moment in the film is when we see the relationship between the creative, imaginative and insightful father and his son, although unaware of how this relationship is going to affect the future of Alexander and his sister.
The boys father then dies and the widow quickly succumbs top the advances of the Bishop. In order to make this important component of the film plausible it is necessary for Bergman to paint the Bishop into more of a monster than he really is and the widow to be more of a victim than she is. In truth she sacrifices the future welfare of her children for her own gratifications and needs and refuses to understand the situation she is placing herself and her children. The Bishop is a fundamentalist Christian no different from your average fundamentalist Jew or Muslim with exacting standards and who believes that his faith should govern every aspect of his life as diocesan leader and of his family. This has three components which will set Bishop in conflict with his step son. Fundamental Christian, Jews and Muslims believe that their duty is to serve a human form of interventionist God and where what happens during earthly life is not only secondary but subordinate. If you have such faith everything else is clear if you have not you are lost and everything is justified if its enables you to be saved. Secondly in order to establish the required state of grace it is fundamental to deny earthly pleasures and earthly wealth and possessions, especially as so many in the world are starving, diseased and without the basic of living. The Bishop of all people should set the example and its being unchristian, unjewish and unMuslim when church leaders behave and indulge to the contrary. Thirdly it is the duty of the fundamentalist to protect others from temptation and this means limiting their access to those who do not have the same beliefs and standards. It is also the duty of the religious teacher and the good Muslim, Jewish and Christian parent to ensure that their children are brought up in the true faith.
It is understandable that Alexander, full of his father's spirit, individuality and liberating creativity should hate the Bishop's way of life and rebel at every opportunity especially as he has his father spirit to lead him, and that in turn the Bishop should lock horn in a determined effort to break the boy's will. The boy has dreams -visions, in which he wills the death of the Bishop. Fortunately someone outside their immediate situation realises the danger this put's Alexander in and fortunately the mother, although pregnant comes to recognise the mistake she has made, Arrangements are made for the children to escape and then for the mother to leave, and she drugs the man to do so. A fire breaks out and the Bishop is burnt to death and although they have escaped and are able to go back to their former life with all its privileges, comforts and freedoms. Alexander becomes haunted by the knowledge that what he wished for and imagined has come to pass. The reflects the panoply of Bergman's beliefs and interests.
Ingmar Bergmann was in my judgement the most important filmmaker there has been, because of his consistency in making films in imaginative ways which function as stories, and some likely to be accepted as popular entertainments, and as vehicles for dealing with the fundamental issues of life. When he creates films about human relationship, parents and children, hetro sexual adults and relationships within nuclear and extended families his work is almost faultless and at times both painful and breath taking. When he moves on to religious issues, the spiritual and supernatural his films reflects his own contradictions and uncertainties. When he creates work about the behaviour of human beings he enlightens, but on other matters he has interesting points of view but they are no more important that that.
(11) Through a glass darkly 1961 is a moving and frightening portrayal of schizophrenia and disintegration. There are four characters in two families on one of Bergman's islands. A practical man who appears to earn his living from fishing living with his young wife who had retreated into childhood and returned from what has been a long period of hospital treatment. The film begins with the return to the island of the girl's father who unable to cope with illness ran away to another country to complete the writing of a book. He is an intellectual who tries to write the truth as he sees it, writing about the experiences which interest him. To mark his return, his daughter and his son who live in the adjacent house perform a play.
At one point the son talks of being an artist, he has written fifteen plays. He wants to be a pure artist, the original concept artist, the writer who only thinks his writing and the painter who only visualizes his work. But for me I need to produce something which has physicality and which realises the original concept.
Father, son and daughter are not able to communicate although responsibility appears to be apportioned to their mother, his wife who appears to have taken her own life.
As with Autumn Sonata which he created later, some things are better left unsaid, or in this instance unread, as the daughter reads he father's diary in which he states that her illness is incurable and that the psychiatrist has warned that a relapse is likely. She also reads that her father wants to record her disintegration, such is his apparent detachment from the reality of her experience.
The son in law criticises the father when he finds out what has happened and was written. The film also centres on the son and his fear that he is going the same way as his sister, but he is able to communicate something of his fear to the extent that the father realises that he must give priority to his son and the film ends on a more positive note as the son is thrilled by having a conversation with his father. Bergman is able to depict the heightened self awareness of the illness and for me the most memorable and haunting moment is when the daughter explains that there is nothing worse than to be aware of yourself and your illness without being able to prevent the relapse and return to institutional care. Bergman brilliant uses the camera and sound to depict the heightened self awareness and general awareness of individuals in such predicaments.
In (12) The Silence 1963, (the year of my visit to Sweden and Uppsala), two sisters are travelling by train somewhere hot in central Europe on their way home, with a young boy who becomes the focus of attention as he watches a train of tanks pass by in the build up for war. The sisters are forced to get off the train when one becomes ill with a consumptive illness. She cries out, I do not want to die here among strangers, but also I do not want to die. The mother is restless in the heat and the boy is used to being on his own. The hotel is the best in town, vast with grand rooms and a service waiter on each floor.
The ill and dying sister is an artist, a writer and a lover of words confesses that she hated the physical aspects of marriage, but also find being alone unbearable. The mother goes out leaving her son in the care of her sister and the hotel and visits a variety theatre where a troupe staying at the hotel are on stage but her attention is attracted by a couple making love in the auditorium and she goes back to a café where a waiter had taken an interest in her body and they become lovers although they do not speak the same language. This scene shocked audiences in the 1960's although I once knew a young women who had a similar experience after meeting someone in the desert in central Europe. The boy and the waiter communicate, a lonely man showing photos of his wife, his mother and tries to teach the boy some words in the language of the country. There is also communication between the boy and his aunt before she dies and the mother and son return to the life back at home both changed.
After watching the film I learn it is the third in a trilogy and that while there is no discussion about religion and spiritual beliefs it is about the two competing sides of human nature, suggesting that the two sisters each represent to sides of human nature, similar to the sisters in the Virgin Spring. The film is talked about by serious critics alongside Last year in Marianbad and L'avventura but made some money because of the controversial sexual scenes.
Bergman is alleged to have said it a film about hell on earth, his hell.
I first attempted to experience (13) Persona in 2006 but it was not until September 2007 that I was sent a copy which did not freeze midway. It is arguably one the great Bergman films. Bergman is the master of turning people in side out exposing their souls as well as their psyche, and featured his two great actresses Bibi Anderson and Liv Ulmann with Ingrid Bergman the third. Bergman argued that making the film saved his life. The film begins with flashing images which merit being slowed down and considered.
The story appears straightforward Bibi Anderson is a nurse charged with caring for Liv Ulmann an actor who has become mute during a performance and they go together to her doctor's summer house on the coast. The nurse does all the talking, about herself, and then about the patient, whose silence gets under her skin and it is the nurse who has a breakdown and ends up attacking the patient. I am immediately reminded of the psychiatrist in charge of a large institution which he admired on one hand because of the resourcefulness of everyone within in bounds but where also he admitted that his main was the staff - At least the patient understand that they are ill.
The breakdown is precipitated by the nurse finding out that the patient has been writing letters reporting what she has been saying and commenting on her work as a nurse and relationship towards her.
Before I received any social work training the course requirements demanded that I spent a summer in a practical social work placement and spent two to three months with the Manchester Family service Unit working primarily in Salford where as it happens I knew the Member of Parliament and future Chairman of the Labour Party who I had met on a bus the an Aldermaston CND march in 1961 prior to the Holy Loch demonstration. I was asked to visit a family with multiple problems in another part of the city who was famed for having been on television, living in two council houses knocked together because of the size of her family and sitting at one end of an enlarged sitting room where she held court and I listened for close on two hours while she went through all the social workers and social worker students who had been to see her and told me of her judgements about them. I concluded that the visit was a glorious test which hoped I passed learning that whatever is written and whatever we think of patients/clients, they have just as strong a view of their social workers, doctors, and officialdom, in general. Look into the abyss and the abyss looks into you.
I also experienced (14) The Hour of the Wolf released in 1968. I liked this film which also has Max Von Sydow as the husband of Liv Ulmann, a poor but known artist who spends the summer in a cottage on an island except for a castle with an aristocratic owner and guests.
The film is story of the man's disappearance told by his wife talking direct to camera, and making reference to her husband's diary which she has found. Although heavily pregnant she has remained on the island. The man did not like company and during their relationship of seven years he would spend his day walking and painting alone. He liked his wife to administer to his needs and say little. Liv poses the question which many in long relationships face. Is it better to yield to the merging of identities in a relationship, sharing each other's thoughts and nightmares, or better to live more individualistically and been less complicit. On one hand for the marriage to work and last, a bond is required which will survive their separateness, the temptations of others, and the nightmares of life. But the vary closeness can lead to a feeling of imprisonment and desire to break loose.
The husband attempts to show some drawings to his wife but she turns away nor are we the audience shown, The husband insists that they stay up all night until dawn unable to sleep afraid of the darkness. He becomes fixated on the nature and length of time of just one minute.
The wife encounters a woman who could be 216 years of age or 76 who tells her to read his secret diary and stop him destroying the sketches. Is the woman real or a figment? From the diary we learn of three encounters. He is taken back to the Castle home where one beautiful woman seduces him and a psychoanalyst who turns souls inside out tells him to slow down. The couple go to the castle for a meal and they sense they are part of some game in which while the hosts and other say they like the work of the artist they talk of him as if the was not there. They mention his earlier relationship with a woman who was married and caused notoriety.
The aristocrat then invites the artist to a party, giving him a gun saying he should kill his wife as his former lover will be at the party waiting for him. He goes to the party and he believes that not only the former lover and the aristocratic have become lovers but have found the ability to walk on walls an ceilings he knows he is going to have to watch while the two make love. The former lover is in fact dead but comes alive only to make love to him.
When he tells his wife of this experience she tries to explain that he has only been away for a matter of minute. Earlier when talking of the past relationship he describes this as a snake bite. Out the following day he sees a boy watching him and getting closer and he bludgeons the boy to death after being bit by him.
When he goes off in the night for the last time and she goes after him she meets the aristocrat. After waiting throughout the autumn and as Winter approaches she leaves the island to have her baby, How much of what we have been watching is mental and emotional madness communicated between the couple mutually experienced as real? How much has been real?
I also liked (15) Shame also released in 1968 in a post world war northern country and a couple, Max Von Sydow and Liv Ulmann are having relationship problems after their orchestra is disbanded. They become caught up in the middle of a civil war. When one side takes over there is no regard for conventions and the local leader uses his position to buy the wife for his pleasure paying the husband substantial money. When the other side gain power the man is offered his life for the money and the wife pleads to her husband to hand it over. The husband has been criticised by his wife for his sensitivity, being a coward and for failing to give her a child, and he denies knowledge of the money and this leads to the destruction of their farm. He attempts to kill the former local leader and then he does execute a military absconder who has held them hostage. He proposes to use the money for he and his wife to leave the war zone on the island but this is an illusion. Both sides ask about their political affiliations and they genuinely declare their indifference which is taken to refer to the neutrality of Sweden in the World War. The film is photographed in black and white and attempts to show that war brings out the worst and that there is never neutrality when the home becomes the battlefield. The wife is wanting her husband to grow up and sees a child as the future. The husband has a more negative but realistic approach to life, and the film shows that whatever the personality and experience if cornered people can behave in ways very different to the normal persona.
(16) Cries and Whispers 1973 is about two sisters who have married and gone their separate ways. One sister had a prior affair with a local doctor and when her husband is away she engineers a visit and gets him to say overnight with her. Her husband although outwardly successful is anxious to kill himself but does not have the courage to do so.
The second sister is married to a diplomat and is yet another wife who hates physical intimacy and mutilates her own body. These two return to the family home where their other sister has a disease similar to tuberculosis consumption and is cared for by a loyal servant with whom she has a close relationship which the other sisters resent. Their sister dies and one of the visiting sisters, played by Liv Ulmann attempts to bridge the gulf between the other, but runs away when she realises the potential implications involved.
The local preacher arrives and calls on the departed sister to intercede for him as her faith was stronger than his own. The family reward the maid by giving her only a month to find somewhere else and the choice of a possession This is Bergman showing that the outwards appearance of people and their relationships is very different from the reality and even the departed sister is shown not to have the saintly figure believed by the vicar.
(17) Scenes from a marriage(1973) is the second film I acquired on DVD because it speaks with such truth and clarity about adult relationships. The film was originally a TV series of six fifty minute parts and had such an impact that a leading marriage counsellor approached Bergman for advice. The work was transformed into a stage play of two hours and then in 1983 the present film lasting 2 hours 40 minutes. The film open as photographs are taken of a couple for an article about the ideal marriage. They have a dinner party with close friends who are on the verge of divorce after twenty years of marriage. The wife, played by Liv Ulmann finds that she is pregnant and is persuaded to have an abortion which she regrets.
In the second scene we learn that the wife, Marianne, is a lawyer specialising in divorce who has a client wanting to end her marriage after twenty years. When Marianne returns home she and her husband discuss their sex life and Marianne admits she has lost interest in physical intimacy with her husband. In the third scene the husband visits his wife at the summer home to reveal that he has been having an affair and is leaving his wife. She contacts her closest friends who reveals they were aware of the situation.
In the fourth episode the couple meet again when the husband has become dissatisfied with his new relationship. The couple spend the night together although Marianne is in a new relationship. The couple meet again prior to signing the divorce papers and this time she seduces her husband just to prove that she is no longer emotionally involved, but he does not want the marriage to end and they have a physical fight and agree to sign the papers. In the last scene they come together again although both are married to others. They spend another night and reach an understanding that although there is a strong bond it is not enough and they part, perhaps never to meet again. The facts of the story as set out fail to communicate the depth and the sensitivity of the interactions between the two. I was reminded of the play and the film Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf and electric exchanges between the characters played by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor but in Scenes, the exchanges, and the truth are relentless and deeper.
(18) Saraband 2003 is the sequel thirty years later and also stars Liv Ulmann as Marianne, thirty years in real time after Scenes and separating finally from her first husband Johan, looks back at her life, pouring over photographs following the loss of her second husband who disappeared in his plane. She comes across the photo of Johan, remembers their good times and wonders what has become of him, knowing that his second marriage also failed.
She visits him living alone in the countryside with his books and only a woman from village coming to attend to him. He was a generation older than Marianne when they married so now he is significantly into old age while she is at the beginning. They look back at their relationship and admits that a priest had told him that for marriage to work there had to be a good relationship and unshakeable eroticism. Marianne admits that her problems related to her parents and the insistence of her father that she become a lawyer suppressing her wish to become an actor and that the sense of curiosity and adventure had been take from her only to be found in her subsequent relationship.
The sub plot of the film concerns the son of the first husband who had become a conductor of an orchestra and the over protective father of a daughter who he is tutoring in her career as a concert cellist. Relations between father and son have never been good and both admit to dislike bordering on hate, but grandfather does offer to help him gain a position for his grand daughter which meets with the approval of her father. However the grand daughter wants to get away from her father and chooses to study with a female friend in Germany and live with people of her own age.
Marianne has also had relationship problems with her two daughters, one who has married a lawyer and lives in Australia while lives in an institution, Marianne and her former husband and have one more night together and Bergman is brilliant shows the nature of what a an adult relationship can be in old age. However there is to be no old age happy ending for this couple and the film ends with Marianne making the effort to establish a relationship with her institutionalised daughter.
The films are important because they cover the full circle of life, how our adult relationships are formed and affected by the relationship with our parents and our childhood and how in turn the accumulation of issues affects grand children and subsequent generations. At one point the son of the first husband expresses the pain of knowing that he is like his father but this was only one of a number of moving and sometimes harrowing moments in these two films.
This brings me back to the chronology after Scenes and what for me is the most moving and terrifying of all his films as it strips the psyche and the soul to its core. (19) Autumn Sonata(1978) is about the relationship between a mother, a professional musician, played by Ingrid Bergman, and her daughter, played by another outstanding actress Liv Ulman, and who have become distant and never communicate about their earlier relationship and the cause of the gulf in understanding. The mother makes the journey to see her daughter, and her husband, because she is failing as a concert pianist. wracked with physical pain and is losing her best friend through incurable illness.
The mother has in fact two daughters, one who physically as well as emotionally disabled and was placed in an institution but removed by her sister, unknown to the mother. The able bodied daughter has lost a child of her own and her husband, a country vicar is aware that he can no long communicate with his wife at a level which will help her, and him. The daughter practices piano in the hope of one day impressing her mother and has written two books about her experience and at one point the husband reads a passage about her search for identity and the hope that through a relationship she will come to understand herself, On finding that her other daughter is also in the household, mother comments that she never had a taste for people who are unaware of their motives. There is a succession of statements made between mother daughter- daughter mother which are at times brutal" You tied me down because you needed my love"," You damaged me for life as you are damaged", "I wanted to love you but I was afraid of your demands"., " Is the daughter's unhappiness mother's triumph, " I spent my life accumulating experience", "But I was only a child."
The nature of the exchanges between daughter and her mother drives the mother away, leaving her to come to terms with her life as it has become. The daughter writes in the hope of undoing the consequences of speaking out but it is too late. I believe Bergman was making the point, whether intentional or not, that it sometimes better to live with uncertainty, with a relationship as it has become however fragile and however difficult and painful especially when we encounter others whose relationships appear so much better, than press the truth and go beyond the point of no return, yet for others for their own survival and development they may need to confront their demons whatever the consequences for existing relationships.
(20) The life of the Marionettes 1980 has a colourful prologue and is a reflection on the murder of a young girl by the patient of psychiatrist who has discussed his urge to kill his wife in graphic terms. The psychiatrist believes what is said to him and warns the man's wife. The film switches back and forth so that we learn something of the young man and his relationship with his mother, with his wife and the wife's relationship with a homosexual friend.
Bergman explains that he has been haunted by situations where couples are united but also try to break from what they have come to regard as bondage, We have met this couple before as they are from the opening scene of Scenes from a marriage. The film was made in Germany and Bergman believed that although the sophisticated German people had always indulged in exploring sexuality and doing so in a public way it had become crude commercial exhibitionism losing its subtly. It evident he has been influenced by Brecht. What affected me was the conduct of the psychiatrist and his part this tragedy with horrific its conclusion.
(21) Fanny and Alexander 1982 also won the Oscar for best foreign language film and three other Academy awards and was the last of his films I saw in theatre, on TV and more recently on DVD. The theatre version lasts 188 minutes and the TV edition 312 mins.
Alexander and his sister live as part of a middle to upper class family in Uppsala where their parents who part of the theatrical company at a theatre owned by his mother. Every tear there is a Christmas Pageant at the theatre which is the social event of the community after which there is a grand dinner party as the family home where there is much eating, drinking and sharing of presents as well as goings on associated with such a family.
The first crucial moment in the film is when we see the relationship between the creative, imaginative and insightful father and his son, although unaware of how this relationship is going to affect the future of Alexander and his sister.
The boys father then dies and the widow quickly succumbs top the advances of the Bishop. In order to make this important component of the film plausible it is necessary for Bergman to paint the Bishop into more of a monster than he really is and the widow to be more of a victim than she is. In truth she sacrifices the future welfare of her children for her own gratifications and needs and refuses to understand the situation she is placing herself and her children. The Bishop is a fundamentalist Christian no different from your average fundamentalist Jew or Muslim with exacting standards and who believes that his faith should govern every aspect of his life as diocesan leader and of his family. This has three components which will set Bishop in conflict with his step son. Fundamental Christian, Jews and Muslims believe that their duty is to serve a human form of interventionist God and where what happens during earthly life is not only secondary but subordinate. If you have such faith everything else is clear if you have not you are lost and everything is justified if its enables you to be saved. Secondly in order to establish the required state of grace it is fundamental to deny earthly pleasures and earthly wealth and possessions, especially as so many in the world are starving, diseased and without the basic of living. The Bishop of all people should set the example and its being unchristian, unjewish and unMuslim when church leaders behave and indulge to the contrary. Thirdly it is the duty of the fundamentalist to protect others from temptation and this means limiting their access to those who do not have the same beliefs and standards. It is also the duty of the religious teacher and the good Muslim, Jewish and Christian parent to ensure that their children are brought up in the true faith.
It is understandable that Alexander, full of his father's spirit, individuality and liberating creativity should hate the Bishop's way of life and rebel at every opportunity especially as he has his father spirit to lead him, and that in turn the Bishop should lock horn in a determined effort to break the boy's will. The boy has dreams -visions, in which he wills the death of the Bishop. Fortunately someone outside their immediate situation realises the danger this put's Alexander in and fortunately the mother, although pregnant comes to recognise the mistake she has made, Arrangements are made for the children to escape and then for the mother to leave, and she drugs the man to do so. A fire breaks out and the Bishop is burnt to death and although they have escaped and are able to go back to their former life with all its privileges, comforts and freedoms. Alexander becomes haunted by the knowledge that what he wished for and imagined has come to pass. The reflects the panoply of Bergman's beliefs and interests.
Ingmar Bergmann was in my judgement the most important filmmaker there has been, because of his consistency in making films in imaginative ways which function as stories, and some likely to be accepted as popular entertainments, and as vehicles for dealing with the fundamental issues of life. When he creates films about human relationship, parents and children, hetro sexual adults and relationships within nuclear and extended families his work is almost faultless and at times both painful and breath taking. When he moves on to religious issues, the spiritual and supernatural his films reflects his own contradictions and uncertainties. When he creates work about the behaviour of human beings he enlightens, but on other matters he has interesting points of view but they are no more important that that.
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