Bergman: Post-Modernism

After completing the Faith Trilogy, Ingmar Bergman was hospitalized for a time. It would seem to have been some kind of nervous breakdown. It was during this time of illness that Bergman conceived Persona, which was released in 1966, and kicked off a string of four films that took yet another course in his remarkable career. It's difficult to come up with a word or phrase that blankets all four films, but I think post-modernism, or deconstructionism, works well. Or perhaps the disintegration of the personality.

Persona also was the first time Bergman used the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, who would go on to make a dozen films with him, as well as living with him for a time and bearing him a daughter. In my opinion she's one of the great film actresses of all time, and certainly one of the great screen beauties, and her work in these four films is an unparalelled streak of brilliance.

I'm not a Bergman scholar, but what I've gleaned from watching these four films, each an MGM DVD, with commentary by a Bergman scholar named Marc Gervais, I would imagine they are influenced by the work of existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and playwright Samuel Beckett. The films are quite experimental, certainly a by-product of the time period, the late sixties, when art forms of all sorts were being stood on their head.

Persona begins by announcing that it is a film. We see an arclight, celluloid threading through a projector, an old cartoon, bits of a silent film comedy. Then we are in what looks like a morgue, looking at a boy spread out on a slab under a sheet. He comes awake, puts on a pair of glasses, and looks at a screen, where a woman's face is projected. Is the film the dream of a dead child? Who knows?

Then the story itself begins: Bibi Andersson is a nurse, and she is assigned to care for an actress (Ullmann) who refuses to speak. Over the course of the film, while staying at a summer home (all four of these films were shot on the island of Fårö) Andersson talks while Ullmann listens, and eventually the two woman seem to meld identities. By the end of the film Bergman uses a split screen to combine the two woman's faces, perhaps suggesting that they are the same person.

The interpretations of this film are legion and completely open-ended. There is an element of vampirism to the story, particularly in a scene where Ullmann comes to Andersson in the night, through a veil of mist, and the two look into a mirror together. Is Ullmann siphoning Andersson's identity? And why does Ullmann refuse to speak? There is a vivid scene where she watches a television set as a Buddhist monk self-immolates in protest to the Vietnam War. Is she unable to face the horrors of modern life? She speaks only once in the film, at the very end, and the only word she utters is "nothing."

Bergman continues the theme of vampirism more overtly in his next film, The Hour of the Wolf, which uses the horror genre. An artist and his wife (Max Von Sydow and Ullmann) live on a remote island. Ullmann, talking directly into the camera (is the talking to us, or to Bergman?) tells us the story in flashback. Von Sydow is suffering from depression. He is full of self-contempt as an artist (this is also a recurring theme--the self-hatred of the artist). He refers to himself as a "five-legged calf, a monster," but there are other monsters on the island. The owner, a baron (eerily played by Erland Josephson) invites the two over to his castle for dinner. There they meet a menagerie of strange characters. Are they demons? One of them is a man who I'm sure not coincidently resembles Bela Lugosi. Eventually Von Sydow is seduced by them and disappears.

The title refers to the time of night, sometime after midnight and before dawn, where people tend to die, babies tend to be born, and people sometimes wake up from disturbing dreams. This whole film is like a bad dream. There is a very strange scene where Von Sydow is fishing and is approached by a young boy, who ends up attacking him, biting him. Von Sydow is forced to defend himself and kills the boy and throws him in the sea. The scene is filmed in jagged cuts and sped up film, giving it a surreal feel. Then there's the climax, when Von Sydow is reunited with an old lover. The ghoulish denizens of the island paint his face and then humiliate him as he makes love to her.

If The Hour of the Wolf is a horror film, Shame is a war picture. Von Sydow and Ullmann live in their little cottage on an unnamed island. Their nation has been at war for a few years, but no one seems to know what the issues are. Then the island is invaded, and the two deal with both the enemy and their own people, who seem remarkably interchangeable. Von Sydow, who at the beginning of the picture can't even kill a chicken, becomes murderous by the end. The title is quite apt, as everyone in this picture behaves shamedly at some point or another, and Ullmann says at one point that she feels as if she is participant in someone else's dream, and what will happen when that person wakes up and is ashamed to realize what they dreamed? It is one of the more effective anti-war films I've ever seen.

A sequence of Shame appears in the final film of this period, The Passion of Anna (called simply The Passion in the original Swedish title). The Passion of Anna is filmed in color (the commentator said it was the second Bergman film did in color, I'm not sure what the first one was). Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist key on the color red in this film, whether it be the blood of sheep, or sunlight coming in at dusk, making a room look like a photographer's developing room (this during a seduction scene).

The story concerns a loner, Von Sydow, who gets involved with a couple (Andersson and Josephson) who are friends with Ullmann. She is lame, crippled in a car accident that killed her husband and son. Eventually she and Von Sydow become a couple, but Von Sydow is slowly losing himself, and Ullmann, who says she believes in truth, is concealing information about herself.

Interspersed throughout the film are scenes in which the actors, as themselves, talk briefly about their characters, another instance in which Bergman highlights the artificiality of film (Bergman is also the narrator of the film). This distancing effect had a tendency to take me out of the picture, which is what he may have intended, but it was hard for me to wrap my mind around what the characters were going through.

There are some remarkable sequences, though. Bergman, well-known for using close-ups, does so exquisitely here, especially in a scene where Ullmann, in tight close-up, tells Von Sydow about the car accident. The last image is also quite a grabber, when Ullmann drives away from Von Sydow in what begins in a very long shot, and then Bergman zooms in until the image of Von Sydow literally disintegrates, leaving nothing but a screen of snowy images.

Each of these DVDs has a short featurette, which includes interviews with Ullmann, Andersson and Josephson. Ullmann is very frank about her relationship with Bergman. There is also segments from an interview Bergman did in 1970 (in English). My favorite moment comes when the interviewer asks him if art is useful, which is a good question, considering Bergman frequently has characters who are artists of self-loathing. "It has to be!" Bergman answers, "because otherwise we would all go to hell!"