I've been playing the main plot of Skyrim for once, instead of getting sidetracked, which is kind of the main appeal of any mainline Bethesda game. But the main plot of Skyrim has Max von Sydow so it's generally worth a revisit. If only Skyrim had better writing. I got to imagining, what if Ingmar Bergman wrote Skyrim? I watched Through a Glass Darkly again last night and mulled it over.
Of course, there's no question about the existence of gods in Skyrim, though what a pantheon means in that world is different to what God means in Bergman's. The Elder Scrolls video game pantheon is basically a set of powerful administrators or, in the case of Daedra, gangsters. The underlying problems of Through a Glass Darkly are the human capacity to perceive God's existence and the absence of consequence for amoral thoughts and actions. The movie concludes with the proposition that love may be proof of God's existence, or God literally is love.
How does that square with Minus and Karin, brother and sister, sleeping with each other? They clearly love each other but in the visual and moral chaos of that literal shipwreck (unless the crew received divine punishment) their impulsive coitus is the kind of act that could ultimately undermine their love in the long term.
I saw a bit of Russell Brand this morning talking about Trump's verdict. He brought in the issue of whether or not you could have true justice in a world in which people don't believe in a loving God. Now that I think Brand is taking money from Russia, I look at everything he says in a different light. Obviously he's getting at the increasing disparity between how reality is perceived by two factions of the American public, a division that may not have been so bad if we had a unifying morality. The question implies the problem; perception of the problem may exacerbate it and thereby be in Putin's interest?
I don't see belief in a loving God as necessary for a moral system. A legal system or a set of moral guidelines within personal relationships can be governed by the imperative to prevent the maximum amount of physical and mental suffering possible, influenced by the recognition that when people suffer they're more likely to inflict suffering on others. This may produce a workable system but is it satisfying? And what if God is a spider, as Karin discovers to her horror? After all, the satisfaction of many is founded on the suffering of others.
Perhaps God, like Karin's father, is both compassionate and predatory.
In addition to reading Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation lately, I've also been reading Pauline Kael. A few weeks ago, there was a rumour Tarantino's next movie, The Movie Critic, would be about Pauline Kael and that he wanted Meryl Streep to play her (which would've been perfect casting). But Tarantino denied that the movie would be about Kael, though he is on the record many times saying what a profound influence Kael was on him.
One of the things I love about Tarantino is that he clearly respects film critics. Many filmmakers, even some of the filmmakers I love, dismiss the whole profession as a gang of impotent backbiters. But in his book, Tarantino has a lot to say about critics he loved and hated, and he has reasons to back up what he says. He dedicates a whole chapter to critic Kevin Thomas who boosted a number of Tarantino's favourite exploitation films of the '70s. And Tarantino doesn't take it personally when Thomas doesn't like a movie he likes.
As a movie critic, or essayist, Tarantino is certainly insightful but, and I'm sure he'd agree, his eloquence can't match Pauline Kael's.
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre [for a critic]; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn't all corruption. The movie doesn't have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor's scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable.
-from "Trash, Art, and the Movies" by Pauline Kael, 1969
On Monday, I read her review for Ingmar Bergman's Shame. I was surprised to find she thought it a better film than Persona, a film she mostly disliked except for the monologue about the two women naked on the beach (that is a great monologue, and one of the sexiest scenes in the history cinema). She considered most of the '60s for Bergman to be diminished by a "pall of profundity". And though I disagree with her, nonetheless the sentiment in this bit really struck a chord with me:
Shame is a masterpiece, and it is so thoroughly accessible that I'm afraid some members of the audience may consider it too obvious. They have had so many years now of grappling with puzzles that they may consider all that figuring out responding to a work of art; when they devised a theory about what was going on in a film, they took their own ingenuity as proof that the film was art. And now here is Bergman, of all people, making a direct and lucid movie; they may, in self-defense, decide it's banal.
Those words Kael wrote in '68 or '69 are so apt for discourse around art in academia, and the ancillary internet whirlpools of amateur academia, to-day. Especially as critical theories have truly graduated from being merely screeds imposed on works of art to being dogma imposed on life itself.
I've read reviews by Pauline Kael here and there over the years but this is the first time I've really devoted time to her work. Partly because her work is difficult to come by. Most of her reviews that are online are behind various paywalls, particularly The New Yorker's paywall. I got a month's trial subscription to The New Yorker just to read their archives, which I swiftly regretted when I tried to cancel my subscription. I was put into an endless log-in loop--If you'd like to cancel your subscription, log in and click on Manage Subscription. Welcome to Manage Subscription, please log-in. If you'd like to cancel your subscription, log in and click on Manage Subscription . . . I had a New Yorker subscription a few years ago and should have known not to go back to them. That time, what I thought I was signing up for was to pay a few bucks a month for the digital subscription but I was surprised to find I was immediately charged a hundred dollars for a year. But it was my fault, of course, for not paying careful enough attention to the wording on the subscription page. Still, it's funny they have these little fissures in their plumbing to suck up money at the same time the quality of their journalism has nosedived. This time, I was finally able to unsubscribe by waking up early and calling their helpline. At least, the lady on the phone said I was unsubscribed . . .
A good percentage of their archive I looked at was ridiculously useless. Many articles from the '60s are just low resolution scans that are impossible to read. I did enjoy some of the pieces by Kael I was able to read, particularly a complicated take she had on John Boorman's Excalibur. She wrote a four page review which, remarkably, was normal in those days.
There are also just big gaps in the New Yorker archive so I realised the only way to get at most of her reviews was to buy her books, so I bought two. I'm still waiting for one to be delivered next week which I'm hoping has her review of Vertigo. I know she didn't like Vertigo but I'm really curious to read her reasons. It's especially difficult to find negative reviews she wrote for movies that have become highly regarded in the decades since. I guess someone thinks they're protecting her legacy.
Another reason I'd not read much of Kael was the first time I heard of her, I think from my high school film teacher, Martin Johnson, I'd heard she didn't like Stanley Kubrick. So I thought, how much could her opinion on film really be worth? But now that I've read so much of Kael that I respect, I find myself fascinated by her dislike of Kubrick. And Tarantino's--Tarantino is also not a fan of Kubrick. Though I wonder how much of that is due to his love of Pauline Kael and Brian De Palma, whom Kael preferred over Kubrick.
Using my temporary New Yorker subscription, I read a 2003 interview with Tarantino in which he said of A Clockwork Orange,
That first twenty minutes is pretty fucking perfect. The whole non-stop parade of Alex and the druids or whatever they were called: they beat up a bum, they have a gang fight, they go to the milk bar, they rape a girl, they break into the house, and they’re driving and playing the Beethoven, and Malcolm McDowell’s fantastic narration is going on, and it’s about as poppy and visceral and perfect a piece of cinematic moviemaking as I think had ever been done up until that time. It’s like that long opening sentence of Jack Kerouac’s ‘The Subterraneans,’ all right, that great run-on sentence that goes on for almost a page and a half. I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite, because his party line was, I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence. And it’s just, like, Get the fuck off. I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first twenty minutes, you couldn’t keep it in your pants the entire time you were editing it and scoring it. You liked the rest of the movie, but you put up with the rest of the movie. You did it for those first twenty minutes. And if you don’t say you did you’re a fucking liar.
Kubrick may indeed have been dishonest about his intentions with the film. I don't know if I'd put that down to a lack of self-awareness but to a fear of being shut down by institutions or influential individuals, a fear that Tarantino has been remarkable for lacking. I watched A Clockwork Orange again last night and it seems clear to me, not just in the first twenty minutes but in the entire film, that Kubrick is talking about a natural human love for violence and how people who deny that love are truly destructive hypocrites. Who can watch this counselor who visits Alex and not suspect he's more turned on by hurting Alex than by the prospect of helping him?
In Pauline Kael's review of A Clockwork Orange, she derides the film for making Alex the only charismatic character, and making him very charismatic. I would say this is because Alex is the only honest character. The point Kubrick is making about the dangers of social engineering isn't just in how it might malfunction but in how the instigators of such projects may not be honest about their own motives, probably even to themselves. Which would certainly pertain to social engineers to-day.
Twitter Sonnet #1685
The castle stones exude a winter's cold.
To-night, the kitchen fire's green and blue.
The seven dogs await the call of old.
But quiet spirits hide a deadly clue.
Assembled guests were numbered only three.
The sun had set an hour 'fore the game.
But summoned sure, the trio came to see
What pagan sport their wicked host would name.
A purple person put a pin to work.
Reflexive grins aggrieved the sexy nurse.
Assorted games defeat the broken Turk.
A final world expands her tiny purse.
Comparing crimes could wreck a rotten hulk.
So silence kept the evil iron bulk.
Inflexible moral authority proves a treacherous tool for a judge interrogating actors about their profane performances. Ingmar Bergman's 1969 film The Rite feels like a followup to his 1958 film The Magician, once more exploring the tormented lives of artists versus the destructive ignorance of those who try to regulate them. The Rite is a quiet, simple character study that becomes progressively, fascinatingly nightmarish.
Much of the film consists of Judge Abrahamson (Erik Hell) interviewing the three actors, first together and then separately. His interest in their crimes and the nature of their performances often detours into their personal lives and, at times, it's difficult to distinguish his interest in their potential malevolence from his prurient interest in celebrity gossip.
The actors are two men and a woman. Ingrid Thulin plays Thea, an extremely nervous, thin skinned woman whose psychological vulnerability and compulsive sexual appetite meet with Abrahamson's simultaneous condemnation and lust, of course. Anders Ek plays Sebastian Fisher, one of the actors, and Thea's lover. He's irresponsible with his money and petulantly tries to throw Abrahamson's ignorance back in his face only for Abrahamson to cunningly reverse Fisher's presumptions. Gunnar Bjornstrand plays Hans Winkelmann, Thea's husband and the other actor, whose detachment and confessed lack of sympathy for his wife and comrade are balanced by a real understanding of them and effort to work with and compensate for their personal failings.
Abrahamson seems satisfied with the inferiority of the actors and secure in his moral right and imperative to abuse them and yet, when finally witnessing their performance, the hints of self-loathing seen throughout the film are finally drawn out of him in painful fullness. It's an emotionally raw film altogether, not quite as subtle or as strong as The Magician, but still pretty great.
The Rite is available on The Criterion Channel.
Twitter Sonnet #1674
A glowing rock condemned a metal dog.
Binoculars embraced suspicious eyes.
To wander east, the box collects a fog.
Important babies reach impressive size.
In time the pork could cover island peat.
Removing tags condemned the god to ice.
A funky kid requires frozen meat.
Disturbing keys could open shutters twice.
A single flying spoon could bomb a coat.
Bewitching nails report a ghostly chalk.
Remember gods are never singling boats.
But who recalls that tiny wigs can walk?
The turning shell dispatched its escargot.
Refurbished dawn expressed a burning crow.
Breaking out of the traditional mould of romantic relationships may be liberating and healthy but there's some weight in the opposing argument, too. Arguments about the drawbacks are artfully illustrated in Ingmar Bergman's 1949 film Thirst (Törst). Obviously more conservative than his later films, which are really too complex to be tethered to any political ideology, it's of course still way too daring for American audiences of the time. Even at this stage, though, Bergman was too interested in real human behaviour to allow his work to become simplistic propaganda.
I was watching an episode of The Boys last night but I had to stop because sometimes that show just turns into really cynical, mean-spirited propaganda. The show isn't bad when it just focuses on characters, but gets unbearable when someone working on the show gets nervous that we might not be thinking of American conservatives as secret Nazis. When I've had too much of that kind of thing, Bergman is one of the sources I turn to as respite. I'm fortunate there's still a few Bergman movies I haven't seen. I didn't expect Thirst to have any ideological influence.
But Bergman has a much surer hand, even in 1949, so when a woman is nearly seduced by a lesbian in one scene, you'd have to really force an interpretation of the lesbian as a negative character. Valburg (Mimi Nelson) is almost sympathetic, certainly she's beautifully shot.
And one suspects Viola (Birgit Tengroth, who wrote the short story the film is based on) would have been a lot better off if she'd accepted Valborg's invitation to dance.
But the film primarily focuses on Rut (Eva Henning), to whom we're introduced in the first scene, impatiently pacing a hot hotel room while her lover, Bertil (Birger Malmsten), sleeps.
Flashbacks start to appear as though we're witnessing memories that haunt her. She used to be a ballerina before her first lover, Raoul (Bengt Eklund), forced her to get an abortion that permanently damaged her health.
In the early days of her romance with Raoul, Rut is an innocent young virgin. In the present, as Bertil's lover, she's prone to erratic mood swings, to being strangely clingy with a child who peeks in on their train car--all but forcing chocolate on the child--to suddenly screaming in the middle of the night because Bertil won't wake up to have sex with her. Maybe the idea here is that this is what happens when a young person is corrupted by loose living. But Bergman's direction and the performances from the actors make it real enough for this person that it's pleasantly easy to forget about any political motive.
Governments and revolutionary groups spend a lot of time convincing citizens that the ideological motivations behind war are deeply personal. And yet, it often seems that to the people whose lives are affected by mass armed conflict, such phenomena are invariably, violently alien. Ingmar Bergman's 1968 film Shame (Skammen) presents the lives of a young married couple suddenly caught in the gears of war. Bergman's normally quiet and desolate Faro is quite plausibly transformed into a war ravaged hellscape. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann find the physical and psychological threads of their existence upended and violated by bombs, soldiers, and officers whose motives seem surreal or arbitrary but always terribly human.
Von Sydow and Ullmann play a couple of musicians, Jan and Eva, who have been exiled from the world of concert symphonies for reasons that are never divulged. They dwell in a poor little home on Bergman's desolate island, growing bored and dissatisfied with each other.
Bergman establishes their relationship very effectively in the first scene as they wake up one morning. Beautiful Eva walks around topless and Jan doesn't seem to care and neither does she. He tells her about a dream he had that brought him to tears and she responds only by coldly asking if he plans to shave to-day.
A friend in town talks about his panic at the idea of being drafted and says he knows no-one will miss him if he dies. Jan and Eva's reactions confirm this is probably true and that they only feel faintly sorry about it. They awkwardly excuse themselves from the house.
Troops move about the streets and crowd the ferries. Jan and Eva run into Bergman regular Gunnar Bjornstand, in this movie a wealthy man to whom they sell fruit. Their acquaintance proves lucky when he manages to save them from execution later in the film. But it comes with a price as human psychology is wedded uneasily to the responsibilities retained by military officers in a conflict.
Paratroopers from the enemy faction force Eva to make statements on camera which are later used for propaganda. Even when it's obviously faked and coerced, it seems interrogators think she ought to be executed anyway. Everyone in a uniform seems dead certain but it's never really clear what's happening or for what reason. All that's clear is that people who used to have lives and dignity are robbed of both as they're hustled en masse into small rooms or confronted by random murder and destruction.
Violence subtly encroaches on a quiet Baltic island. Four people have a subtly desperate, superficially warm, relationship in 1969's The Passion of Anna (En passion). The English title draws attention to Liv Ullmann's character but this brilliant Ingmar Bergman film also stars three of his other regulars--Erland Josephson, Bibi Andersson, and Max von Sydow.
Andreas (von Sydow) is the point of view character for most of the film. He lives alone, nursing emotional scars from his failed marriage. One day, Anna (Ullmann) turns up to use his phone. She accidentally leaves her purse behind and, inside, Andreas finds notes from her husband about her violent behaviour.
She's living with two friends--a photographer named Elis (Josephson) and his wife, Eva (Andersson). Andreas finds himself at dinner with the three of them and the human contact turns out to be something he desperately needs.
The film features interviews with the actors talking about their characters and von Sydow discusses how he found it difficult to play a man whose experiences have made him naturally reticent to express himself in even the slightest way. Of course, having that interview thrown in does make von Sydow's job a little easier, and I wonder if that's what Bergman had in mind, and if von Sydow was at all insulted. Anyway, he does a perfectly good job. I'm not sure I think the interviews help the film a lot.
Ullmann's is more interesting. She talks about Anna's passion, which is for truth, and her deranged response to a world that contradicts what she sees as truth. The film is wonderfully subtle about it and it feels like you discover the horrifying aspect of Anna's personality by accident. Little things that happen quite naturally, or big things that don't seem connected, slowly take shape. A little dog Andreas rescues from a noose, a bird that Anna mourns after it's crashed into a door, Anna's and Eva's warnings to Andreas about each other.
Andreas has a brief affair with Eva which is really sweet. She gives the impression of being very open and at the same time very distant. Like she has no serious regard for the powerful feelings she has around Andreas.
There's a beautiful rust and powder blue palette throughout the film, except for a few scenes lit by a fiery glow.
The Passion of Anna is available on The Criterion Channel.
Twitter Sonnet #1565
Robotic arms could clutch reactor stars.
The safety glow reminds the brain to sleep.
I'll meet the woman late behind the bars.
But spirit pumps could never step too deep.
The sky's a doom, a blue contained in rust.
Replacing brains with mouths the plan evolved.
A northern speech invites a southern bust.
It's easy now to heighten screen rescolve.
The party crossed a bridge of wicked vines.
Another loading screen awaits beyond.
The ivy crushed a shiny bunch of lines.
A hundred fish explode the tiny pond.
A quiet day appeared amid the ice.
A tiny hat dispersed among the mice.
A brilliant cellist called Felix invites a biographer to his estate packed with beautiful women in 1964's All These Women. Roger Ebert called it Ingmar Bergman's worst film and, yeah, I guess I can buy that. Though he shouldn't shoulder all the blame since the screenplay was co-written by actor Erland Josephson, who does not appear in the film. Unlike Bergman's other comedies, the humour in All These Women relies on postmodernist, fourth wall breaking. Yeah, it was tired decades before everyone thought Deadpool invented it.
I'm not having good luck picking movies lately. I really want to see something good I'd never seen before. Normally, I can always rely on Bergman but the only part of this movie that made me laugh was when I misread the credit for makeup assistant Britt Falkemo as "Butt Volcano". That's what you get for putting your credits in decorative script.
It is Bergman's first colour film and it is beautiful. I just wish these images were in service of something besides dumb slapstick.
Look how eerie that image is. Let's pretend it's not for a scene with a tone akin to Yosemite Sam chasing a varmint.
There are several beautiful women--Bibi Andersson, Harriet Anderson, Eva Dahlbeck, and Mona Malm all look great. Sadly, most of the movie follows Jarl Kulle as the biographer, mugging for the camera and knocking over statues.
All These Women is available on The Criterion Channel.
Twitter Sonnet #1533
The phantom mail was waiting hours late.
The cheesy shield was weak against a witch.
To bring a wrench would change the screwy fate.
We called the hazard trench a quaky ditch.
The pixels died beneath the waves of light.
A play of green and black and gold commenced.
Against the boat, the surface picked a fight.
You'll never squash what foam and wash foments.
The cherry syrup masks the legal dream.
Escaping stars convened to map the gold.
Approaching trees are what they always seem.
The wooden posts a chilly ceiling hold.
A perfect cake cannot conceal the pie.
Another buzzing pixel swelled the lie.
Last night I finished Scenes from a Marriage, Ingmar Bergman's 1973 miniseries. It was good from the beginning but by the end it achieves a stranger power as the title becomes an increasingly bold statement.
The latter half of the series might have been better titled Dissolution and Remnants of a Marriage as we watch Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullman) first separate, go through a lengthy divorce process, and finally are married to other people.
Yet each episode features the two coming together and having long conversations in each others' arms, even having sex. They shift back and forth from angry rebukes to passionate pleas. One minute Johan claims he has always hated Marianne, and has had this thought every time he's had sex with her--the next minute, he's pleading with her to take him back. Marianne casually mentions never having had an orgasm until she had sex with a man named Henrik, after she'd divorced Johan. And yet it's with Johan she sneaks away to a summer house while Henrik's out of town.
With all these extreme contradictions, one might expect the quality of writing to be on the level of a silly soap opera. Bergman's genius, though, makes all of this completely credible, the confusion and contradiction always real. We watch Johan slowly transform from a content, confident, and respected professor to a man whom the world has taken down several pegs. One woman, as kindly as possible, informs him how bad his poetry is. A prestigious job in America quietly evaporates. At first Johan bitterly complains to Marianne about campus politics and conspiracies before finally accepting he was just never as amazing as he thought he was.
Marianne has learned to be more confident, more in touch with her own feelings (and not just when it comes to orgasms). Arguably, their separation and separate marriages have made Johan and Marianne a better couple by the end of the series. And yet Marianne fearfully clings to Johan and, with genuine desperation, asks why she's never loved him. Are the two of them, in the end, simply friends, comrades who know each other better than anyone else, or are they something more? Which is the more comforting answer?
Scenes from a Marriage is available on The Criterion Channel.
Even a couple married for ten years can start to question the nature of love and whether or not they ever had it. Ingmar Bergman's 1973 miniseries, Scenes from a Marriage, follows such a couple as suspicions about their own contentment start to erode their marital bliss. I'm three episodes in on the six episode series and, as expected from Ingmar Bergman, the dialogue is captivating.
Bergman regulars Erland Josephson and Liv Ullman play Johan and Marianne who start the first episode giving an interview where they discuss the happiness of their marriage. Over the course of the first three episodes, we see the two in situations that slowly and subtly highlight uncertainties they actually have about their relationship.
There are a big things, like an abortion they don't really argue about but reach muddled, vague agreements about until the irrevocable thing actually occurs. And then Marianne is heartbroken. And there are little things, like when Marianne, a divorce lawyer, speaks with a client whose grounds for divorce amount simply to not feeling in love anymore.
Bergman's dialogue flows without ever getting caught in predictable currents. As the characters pace a room or curl up broodingly in bed, they think aloud, diving at first for one certain conclusion before finding fault in and questioning that conclusion. The third episode, in which Johan confesses to Marianne he's having an affair and plans to leave for Paris with his mistress, doesn't have anything like the standard portrayal of such a situation. Marianne is by far the more sympathetic in the scene, but Johan's strangely strident and then indecisive proclamations about his dissatisfaction with, yet strangely strengthened affections for, Marianne are terribly human.
Both Ullman and Josephson give great performances. Ullman comes off as a slightly neurotic sweetheart while Josephson comes off as a man finally trapped by his own mild nature, provoking himself to become a cornered, frightened animal.
Scenes from a Marriage is available on The Criterion Channel.
Three women are confined to a hospital room together, each one dealing with pregnancy, in Ingmar Bergman's 1958 film Brink of Life (Nära livet). Performances are centre stage in this movie which takes place entirely inside a few bland hospital rooms. Eva Dahlbeck, in particular, brings something absolutely devastating to the screen. The whole film is unrelentingly fascinating, though.
The film begins with Cecilia (Ingrid Thulin) who's been brought to the hospital because she's been bleeding. Of the three women, she comes off as the wisest, possibly because of a delirious monologue she has on being brought to the room. She strings together pieces of dialogue from the two or three previous scenes and weaves a perfectly sensible, entirely disoriented, impression of how things stand. The tiniest suggestions of indecision and insecurity have now become the certain omens that predicted her miscarriage, the hints of incompatibility in her marriage now become the undeniable sin for which she must surely now be punished.
There's something religious about it, like a Puritan's or Calvinist's compulsive thoughts on predestination.
Meanwhile, the youngest of the three women, Hjordis (Bibi Andersson), was unhappy with her pregnancy. She's not married to her boyfriend and sees her new child only as a sign of trouble. Her story feels oddly conventional compared to the other two women and she works best just as someone for them to react to.
Stina (Dahlbeck) meanwhile exhibits and extreme, very charming eagerness to have her child. Dahlbeck giggles and speaks rapidly, doing things that might have seemed more at home in a lighthearted comedy. But her performance does a horrific 180 degree turn that is all the more effective for these earlier scenes. I wasn't surprised to find out one of her scenes was censored in Italy.
Brink of Life is available on The Criterion Channel.
What begins as simple tale of a gynecologist having an affair with a client becomes an unrelentingly destabilising sequence of events in 1954's A Lesson in Love (En lektion i kärlek). A comedy from Ingmar Bergman, it's a little odd seeing one of the great director's beautifully shot films accompanied by a goofy soundtrack replete with silly tuba sounds and slide whistles. But the film doesn't fail to be intriguingly intelligent and sexy.
Susanne (Yvonne Lombard), a dark haired beauty, petulantly argues David (Gunnar Bjornstrand) into cheating on his wife of many years. So the two go out on a little boat and are cuddling when Susanne complains about another boat that passes too close to them. She reveals the owner of this other boat is her husband.
This starts off a pattern in the film of characters interacting whose previously established relationship isn't made clear until some time later. In a brilliant scene on a train, David finds himself in a train car with a man and a woman. He takes bets with the man to see who can kiss the woman first. When we find out the woman is in fact married to one of the men, this sets up another ambiguity as David comes up with a new bet.
The effect is to make us contemplate the true nature of the characters' motives at the same time they're questioning the authenticity of their feelings for one another. It works brilliantly to create tension between the possibility that all feelings may be arbitrarily labelled differently from moment to moment and the reality of truly consistent affection.
A Lesson in Love is available on The Criterion Channel.
Awareness of one's own inadequacy is not sufficient to transcend it. Ingmar Bergman's 1953 film Sawdust and Tinsel (Gycklarnas afton "Evening of the Jesters") is about Hell on earth but not really a strange Hell. This accentuates its cruelty but also elevates it above exploitation. Still, its argument about the dissolute lives of circus performers omits the value their work has for the people they entertain and in this way The Magician, a later Bergman film ruminating on some of the same ideas, is superior. But Sawdust and Tinsel is memorable in its own right for the piece of life's cruel puzzle it so successfully portrays.
The premise kind of reminded me of Ozu's Floating Weeds, enough to make me wonder if Bergman had seen the silent version of that film. Ozu's story about a kabuki performer who has a wife in his troupe and another one in a small town with his child leaves its characters much more dignity and solace. Bergman's film about a travelling circus gives us a ringmaster, Albert (Åke Grönberg), and his girlfriend, Anne (Harriet Anderson), who both want to escape the crushing spiritual void of their livelihood but tragically lack the personal qualities necessary to do so.
To show this, Bergman takes the story to the point of grotesque, beginning with a sort of prologue, a vignette about a clown (Anders Ek) who finds his wife (Gudrun Brost) swimming naked with a regiment of soldiers. Described by a heartless narrator--the story is told by a bored low level performer at the circus to a dozing Albert--as beautiful but a little past her prime, the clown's wife had been delighted enough by the soldier's attentions to strip for them only to find their appreciation was less lustful and more sadistic once her husband's shown up. Then follows the sad spectacle of the clown ineffectually trying to carry his naked wife back to the circus.
This provides a sort of thumbnail for the main drama. The circus loses a lot of costumes in a storm and Albert decides to ask a local theatre troupe to lend them some wardrobe. The theatre director (Gunnar Björnstrand) undisguisedly mocks the circus performers, fully aware that his is the higher artform despite the fact that both groups are more or less equally derided by the authorities and general populace. Anne finds herself attracted to the effeminate star of the theatre troupe, Frans (Hasse Ekman), and goes to visit him when she figures out Albert has a wife in town (Annika Tretow). Each one comes face to face with the fact that their preferred lovers see in them only brief, disposable value.
The fantasy ending would be to show Albert and Anne having some kind of quiet moral or professional victory over Frans or Albert's wife but Bergman never gives us that respite, instead piling humiliation on humiliation while Albert and Anne are shown as intelligent enough to have real awareness of their nightmare but lacking the capacity to reason past their wounded pride. The only consolation they have is each other but considering part of their problem is the desire to escape each other it's a somewhat sickly solace. Personally, I'd be happy to be saddled with Harriet Andersson any day.
Sawdust and Tinsel is available on The Criterion Channel.
Twitter Sonnet #1451
The ancient tomb is waiting past the trees.
With time, we walked again among the bugs.
The heat precedes a fleet of drowsy bees.
The grass would braid itself to make the rugs.
The varied tea awaits in gauzy bags.
The faces crack on dusty clocks at home.
The rusty iron hand of ev'ning sags.
Between the seconds hours slowly roam.
The sand was soft beneath the fire blue.
A weapon's glow was dimmed beside the cuff.
To amber light the crimson paint was due.
The scales of screens display its visions rough.
Invested grain produced a crop of sand.
The ear of corn resembled Vader's hand.
To learn the secrets behind another's experience and perception is to become aware of the endless mystery of existence. It says something about Ingmar Bergman that one of his earlier, lesser films, 1952's Waiting Women (Kvinnors väntan), is so fascinating and profound.
The premise is pretty simple. It's an anthology film in which a group of women start to share stories of loneliness and epiphany. The first is told by Rakel (Anita Bjork) who tells a story about her affair with her childhood friend, Kaj (Jarl Kulle), and how it nearly destroyed her husband (Eugen).
I love how it begins, with a very long, single, unmoving shot of Rakel looking into a mirror. The scene plays out with Kaj appearing in the doorway reflected in the mirror, then Rakel standing up and going back to him, before she returns to her seat and Kaj sits beside her. The usual function of the mirror as symbolism for self-reflection deftly shows the place Kaj occupies in Rakel's heart and their movements relative to the mirror punctuate the dialogue and each stage of their evolving affair.
There are no cliches in this movie and the resolution of the first tale is deeply pathetic, yet it's one that seems to confer on Rakel some sense of serenity.
My favourite story is the second and it has very little dialogue, reminding me of Bergman's aptly titled later film, The Silence. Marta (Maj-Britt Nilsson) begins by talking about loneliness in the days leading up to the birth of her first child. Her husband is away, we don't learn why right away, all we know is this sweet young woman is drifting through the complex shadows of her home in a kind of drowsy anxiety.
There's a kitten, her only companion, and when she starts to feel contractions, she absently puts the kitten in her bag and heads to the hospital. One of the orderlies takes her kitten--something that visibly disconcerts her--and then she's left lying alone on the table, watching the erratic shadows of some foliage outside. This dissolves into a memory, an extraordinary sequence of cancan dancers, vigorously marching about a stage while topless women serenely stride about amongst them.
And then we see Marta at a table, looking slightly bored with a cigarette her mouth. She wins a contest by "holding two francs between her thighs"--Bergman doesn't show exactly how--and perhaps this sweet, innocent young woman isn't so inexperienced as we might have thought. She runs from her incensed boyfriend, back to her apartment, and then there follows a magnificently eerie sequence as another man flirts with her, unseen, asking her to open her door "just a crack".
The final story seems oddly trivial after the first two--Karin (Eva Dahlbeck) and her husband, Fredrik (Gunnar Bjornstrand), get trapped in an elevator after a party. They find the situation leads to some abnormally frank discussion. Again, it's fascinating how strangely their discussion of sex transpires, and yet how natural it also seems for her to laugh at and tease him about an affair she's known about. The scene also features a brilliantly sexy bit of business where she massages his sore leg and possibly something else.
Waiting Women is available on The Criterion Channel.
Twitter Sonnet #1445
The phantom hero saved a cage of birds.
The message beasts were sent by accident.
We built a castle waiting years for words.
The time elapsed with little incident.
The rainy pond obscures the speaking frog.
The hidden conf'rence chose a student's path.
Depending branches bloomed in violet fog.
Nocturnal floods erode a quiet bath.
The shaking stone adopts a sacred face.
Resounding chatter drifts from dying leaves.
The ancient snow remains in patterned lace.
The urgent ghost of evening rarely grieves.
In dusty halls a drum was nightly played.
Below the road, in soil, castles stayed.
