Bergman: Early Works
When Ingmar Bergman died on July 30, it was of course a great loss for the world of cinema. It was also a time to reflect on my own experience viewing his films. I have seen most of his major works, but I haven't seen them in a long time, and when one considers he made over 60 films, I haven't scratched the surface of his entire body of work.
So I loaded up my Netflix queue with all of the Bergman films available (except for
Fanny and Alexander, which I rented last year).
First up was a collection, put out by Eclipse, of five early Bergman films, before he was an international sensation. He directed four of them, writing the screenplay for the other. All of them are tense little melodramas, full of anguished characters that would mark his later work, but they also owe a lot to the style of Hollywood films at the time. That being said, he was much freer than any Hollywood director, who was under the yoke of the production code. These films are remarkably frank in discussing topics such as promiscuity and abortion, and there's even a bit of nudity in one of them.
The first film is Torment, which was directed by Alf Sjoberg with a screenplay by Bergman. It is the story of a student who is bedeviled by a sadistic Latin teacher. When the student becomes involved with a tobacco shop girl who might be termed "easy," his world gets even more complicated, and then when he realizes the girl and the Latin teacher are intimate, well, let's just say this situation makes my high school years seem placid in comparison. It's a fine film, with the teacher occupying a long line of brutal educators like Dickens' Squeers.
Bergman's directorial debut came in Crisis, which on the surface seems deceptively benign. An eighteen-year-old girl lives in a very small town with her adoptive mother and an older man who pines for her. Her real mother, who runs a beauty salon in Stockholm, comes to claim her. The girl, much to her adoptive mother's heartbreak, goes with her real mother, and gets involved with the new mother's self-loathing stepson. The realities of big-city living corrupt the young girl. One might think that Bergman is saying small-town living is better than the big city, but life in the small town is depicted with warts as well, as if spirits are crushed by existing in a place where nothing happens. There are some well-done scenes here, especially when the stepson crashes the small town's shindig and arranges for some boogie-woogie to be played while a boring old soloist sings a moldy oldie.
Thirst is a strange picture. A married couple are returning from their holiday in Italy by train, passing through post-war Germany. Flashbacks reveal their somewhat sordid pasts. The woman is a ballerina, who at one time was the mistress of a military officer. When she gets pregnant he dumps her, and the abortion she undergoes makes her unable to have children. He was involved with an emotionally unstable woman who gets tuberculosis, and there is an unsettling scene in which she is examined inappropriately by a psychoanalyst. This same woman then has a bizarre encounter with one of the wife's old ballerina colleagues, in a surprisingly frank depiction of lesbianism. This film contains some inklings of what Bergman would do with shifting narrative focus in films like Persona and Cries and Whispers.
Port of Call is more conventional, but another very frank film. A sailor has been at sea for many years, and he decides to stay put for a while and gets a job on the docks. He meets a girl and falls in love, but boy does she have a troubled past. She was put away in a reformatory for her loose behavior, but is out on a work furlough. Her mother figures out that she's sleeping with men again and threatens to have her put away again. Meanwhile, she tells the dockworker about her past and he struggles to deal with it. Also, the girl's friend gets a back-alley abortion and suffers the medical consequences. I thought this was a very good film, and ends rather hopefully.
Finally, To Joy is the story of two violinists in an orchestra who meet, fall in love, and marry. The title, which might seem strange for Bergman, refers to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and the film begins and ends with this piece of music (for my money, the greatest piece of music ever written). The fellow in this film is a real pill, and it's difficult to garner any sympathy for him. Early on he says that one must be unhappy to create great art, and he prefers to be unhappy, which I think Bergman agreed with. So his long suffering wife puts up with his immature behavior, and he outwears his welcome pretty quickly.
Taken as a whole these films are instructive not only in providing a glimpse at the genius that was to come, but also, for an American like me, to see the films from a country like Sweden that one wouldn't normally see. Most films in languages other than English from the old days that are regularly circulated are out-and-out classics, so it's interesting to see the kind of mid-level output that wouldn't otherwise get any play here.
Over the next month I'll post more on Bergman's films, with my next post covering the films of the 1950s that made him an international superstar.
So I loaded up my Netflix queue with all of the Bergman films available (except for
Fanny and Alexander, which I rented last year).
First up was a collection, put out by Eclipse, of five early Bergman films, before he was an international sensation. He directed four of them, writing the screenplay for the other. All of them are tense little melodramas, full of anguished characters that would mark his later work, but they also owe a lot to the style of Hollywood films at the time. That being said, he was much freer than any Hollywood director, who was under the yoke of the production code. These films are remarkably frank in discussing topics such as promiscuity and abortion, and there's even a bit of nudity in one of them.
The first film is Torment, which was directed by Alf Sjoberg with a screenplay by Bergman. It is the story of a student who is bedeviled by a sadistic Latin teacher. When the student becomes involved with a tobacco shop girl who might be termed "easy," his world gets even more complicated, and then when he realizes the girl and the Latin teacher are intimate, well, let's just say this situation makes my high school years seem placid in comparison. It's a fine film, with the teacher occupying a long line of brutal educators like Dickens' Squeers.
Bergman's directorial debut came in Crisis, which on the surface seems deceptively benign. An eighteen-year-old girl lives in a very small town with her adoptive mother and an older man who pines for her. Her real mother, who runs a beauty salon in Stockholm, comes to claim her. The girl, much to her adoptive mother's heartbreak, goes with her real mother, and gets involved with the new mother's self-loathing stepson. The realities of big-city living corrupt the young girl. One might think that Bergman is saying small-town living is better than the big city, but life in the small town is depicted with warts as well, as if spirits are crushed by existing in a place where nothing happens. There are some well-done scenes here, especially when the stepson crashes the small town's shindig and arranges for some boogie-woogie to be played while a boring old soloist sings a moldy oldie.
Thirst is a strange picture. A married couple are returning from their holiday in Italy by train, passing through post-war Germany. Flashbacks reveal their somewhat sordid pasts. The woman is a ballerina, who at one time was the mistress of a military officer. When she gets pregnant he dumps her, and the abortion she undergoes makes her unable to have children. He was involved with an emotionally unstable woman who gets tuberculosis, and there is an unsettling scene in which she is examined inappropriately by a psychoanalyst. This same woman then has a bizarre encounter with one of the wife's old ballerina colleagues, in a surprisingly frank depiction of lesbianism. This film contains some inklings of what Bergman would do with shifting narrative focus in films like Persona and Cries and Whispers.
Port of Call is more conventional, but another very frank film. A sailor has been at sea for many years, and he decides to stay put for a while and gets a job on the docks. He meets a girl and falls in love, but boy does she have a troubled past. She was put away in a reformatory for her loose behavior, but is out on a work furlough. Her mother figures out that she's sleeping with men again and threatens to have her put away again. Meanwhile, she tells the dockworker about her past and he struggles to deal with it. Also, the girl's friend gets a back-alley abortion and suffers the medical consequences. I thought this was a very good film, and ends rather hopefully.
Finally, To Joy is the story of two violinists in an orchestra who meet, fall in love, and marry. The title, which might seem strange for Bergman, refers to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and the film begins and ends with this piece of music (for my money, the greatest piece of music ever written). The fellow in this film is a real pill, and it's difficult to garner any sympathy for him. Early on he says that one must be unhappy to create great art, and he prefers to be unhappy, which I think Bergman agreed with. So his long suffering wife puts up with his immature behavior, and he outwears his welcome pretty quickly.
Taken as a whole these films are instructive not only in providing a glimpse at the genius that was to come, but also, for an American like me, to see the films from a country like Sweden that one wouldn't normally see. Most films in languages other than English from the old days that are regularly circulated are out-and-out classics, so it's interesting to see the kind of mid-level output that wouldn't otherwise get any play here.
Over the next month I'll post more on Bergman's films, with my next post covering the films of the 1950s that made him an international superstar.
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