Intrusive Fire

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.

Shame is available on The Criterion Channel.

Rust in Blue

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.

The Inexorable Appointed Time

The path of damnation must be one where all things held beautiful and good are each in turn deprived of significance and wholesomeness until all things signify guilt or nothing at all. The demons that plague Johan in Ingmar Bergman's 1968 film, Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) don't seem to be tempting him so much as processing him for a fate that's already been decided and are assisting him in dismantling his capacity for affection and reverence. His wife and muse, Alma, present to witness the process in horror, doesn't seem an agent assigned by God to offer him an alternative as much as someone who, through some strange chance, has ended up where she's not supposed to be. It's an eerie, frightening, and deeply sad film.

Johan (Max von Sydow) and Alma (Liv Ullmann) have taken up residence in a small house on a remote island. He's a famous painter who has fled the world due to some kind of terrible event or scandal. Alma is selflessly devoted to him and we see most of the movie from her point of view, in fact the film begins with her directly addressing the camera, recounting the events.

Bergman frequently illuminates her face more than Johan's, concealing his face in shadow and by blocking, which, together with Von Sydow's often solemn and listless performance, suggest someone who's no longer struggling against his doom. He tells Alma about the demons he encounters on the island, the eeriest among them an old woman (Naima Wifstrand) who, he says, "Is always threatening to remove her hat." The implication that something horrible will happen if she removes her hat is one of the ways the demons give the impression of an entirely superficial reality behind which there is only destruction or void.

Alma then encounters the woman with the hat and she encourages Alma to read Johan's diary. Since the diary reveals Johan's thoughts are dwelling on his former lover, Veronica (Ingrid Thulin), maybe this is one of the things that leads Alma to conclude the demons are trying to drive them apart. I never got the impression that the demons were worried Alma's love, however beautiful and compelling, would divert Johan from his path to damnation so much as they were mildly uncomfortable entertaining a guest who simply didn't belong. When Johan and Alma are invited to the demons' castle, where they're presided over by one calling himself Baron von Merkens (Erland Josephson), in their laughter and incessant mockery they seem like the catty, shallow Hollywood crowd that can't tolerate someone as sincere and ordinary as Alma.

One of the demons, Lindhorst (Georg Rydeberg), puts on a puppet show in which Bergman uses forced perspective to put a full sized actor on the tiny stage, something that reminded me of the Sultan's mechanical players in the 1940 Thief of Bagdad. In the Criterion DVD commentary for that film, Francis Ford Coppola talks about how much that image haunted him as a child and I wonder if it had the same effect on Bergman. In Hour of the Wolf, it's one of the things that make art itself seem sinister and demonic.

The demons continually endeavour to trivialise and demean art. Johan tells them he's fully aware that art isn't that important, he says the insight comes from being an artist and knowing that it's only a selfish compulsion that keeps him painting. They congratulate him on the insight and in the film's climax they go further, demeaning and mocking his reverence for the beauty of women.

A final sequence where the characters are lost in a wood is effectively horrific, as is a flashback in the middle where Johan tells Alma about an act that may have been the cause of his damnation. The former is shot in unnatural darkness and the latter with unnatural brightness, both methods stripping detail and nuance from the image, emphasising the world of hard, inflexible meaning tightening further and further around Johan.