News and Commentary – Bergman Unleashed

The specular career of MCC favorite Ingmar Bergman stretched across seven decades; in anticipation of Bergman’s centennial (July 14), an earlier post offered a career overview and user’s guide to (almost) every one of his feature films. Here we hone in on the eight films written and directed by Bergman from 1966 to 1973: Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Shame, En Passion, The Rite, The Touch, Cries and Whispers, and Scenes from a Marriage.

We have dubbed this period “Bergman unleashed,” because these movies reflect not only a stylistic break with his previous accomplishments, but they are also radical and daring in their ambition and experimentation—characteristics not typically associated with established directors entering their sixth decade of life. For Bergman, however, the era was something of a renaissance. From the 1950s through the early 1960s the auteur, whose films were international sensations, was firmly established as one of cinema’s leading formalists and assured of a prominent place in the pantheon of the greats. By 1963, however, despite an extraordinary decade of successes, Bergman was at a crossroads—on the cusp of becoming more revered than relevant as an emerging generation of New Wave filmmakers captured the imagination of the art house crowd.

The years that followed were an unhappy way-station for our protagonist, who would later describe the period as one where he felt “a threat was hanging over my head.” Taking on increased responsibilities at the Royal Dramatic Theater and releasing one of his rare cinematic misfires (All These Women) in 1964, the unhappy, uncertain, and overworked artist was in due course overtaken by a combination of exhaustion and illness that sent him to the hospital for what would become a three-month stay. But “from this crisis, Persona was born.” That film, of course, would put Bergman back in the center of things, and usher in one of the most exciting periods of his long career, with efforts that drew on an informal stock company of players (including Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson, and Max von Sydow), and were shot by essential collaborative partner Sven Nykvist.

Persona: The landmark film was awarded Best Film and Best Director by the National Society of Film Critics, and six years after its release ranked fifth on Sight and Sound’s “greatest films of all time” poll. (In the most recent ranking, forty years later, it slipped all the way to twelve.) In David Thomson’s view, “no one should be allowed to act professionally without seeing Persona.” What’s it about? It’s about time you saw it, bub. But if you must, we have written about this one previously.

Hour of the Wolf: The first in a set of three consecutive films in which Max von Sydow (a Bergman stalwart since The Seventh Seal) serves as the director’s tormented alter ego. Wolf, which Bergman described as “a very personal picture,” is the story of a painter descending into madness, visited by demons of all forms, sleepless in titular darkest hours of the night, and increasingly beyond the help of his wife (Ullmann). We’re with Renata Adler on this one: “not one of Bergman’s great films but it is unthinkable for anyone seriously interested in movies not to see it.”

Shame: A present day Northern European republic, ravaged by Civil War. Bergman’s most pessimistic film—don’t say we didn’t warn you. In the heady days of 1968, Shame was criticized for failing to take sides (in its harrowing narrative, civilization unravels as all parties to the vaguely-specified struggle behave monstrously). But Bergman was after bigger game, seeking to explore a question that unfortunately remains all-too relevant today: “How much of a fascist are you and I harboring inside ourselves? What sort of a situation is needed to turn us from good Social Democrats into active Nazis?” How special is Shame? In the words of Pauline Kael (a Bergman skeptic), it is “a flawless work and a masterly vision.”

En Passion: Released in America as “The Passion of Anna” Ullmann (Anna) prefers the original title, which underscores the theme of passion (and its absence) more generally. The third rocky relationship in a row for von Sydow and Ullmann (at one point the preternaturally restrained Andreas (Max) swings a wild ax)—here complicated by the machinations of Eva and Elis (Bibi Andersson and Josephson), as well as by off-screen malevolent forces that suggest civilization indeed does have its discontents. Uncharacteristically, Bergman offered the actors space to improvise at times in this production, and takes the audacious step of occasionally interrupting the story to ask the performers for their thoughts about the characters they are playing.

The Rite: An intense, provocative film presented in stark black-and-white across nine fragmented movements, this one considers the intertwined fates of a small group of traveling artists and the judge tasked with investigating charges of obscenity against them. Featuring familiar faces Gunnar Björnstrand and Ingrid Thulin (their many contributions to the oeuvre include the leading roles in Winter Light), according to Bergman, this “markedly aggressive” entry channeled the fury he felt upon ending his tenure as head of the Royal Dramatic Theater.

The Touch: An American co-production, star Elliott Gould devoured the script in one sitting, “more intently than I’ve read anything in my life,” which was promptly followed by a migraine headache. Initially reluctant, Gould signed on to play David Kovac, an archeologist with a troubled past, who comes to Sweden and complicates the seemingly stable marriage of Karin and Andreas Vergerus (von Sydow and Bibi Andersson). Often dismissed as a curiosity, von Sydow’s performance is impeccable, and the second half of the movie sits especially well with these movies of Bergman’s middle period.

Cries and Whispers: Famously a movie about the color red, or as Bergman tells it, the result of a persistent image in his mind of “three women walking around in a red room in white clothes.” In Cries and Whispers, they emerge as a study-in-sibling-rivalry trio of sisters (Ullmann, Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin), who have issues to work though (or not) as one of them is slowly dying. The celebrated film pretty much swept the New York Film Critics Circle Awards and also received five Academy Award nominations, with Nykvist winning for best cinematography. One of Bergman’s personal favorites, Roger Ebert was also a fan, waxing thusly: it is “like no movie I’ve seen before, and like no movie Ingmar Bergman has made before; although we are all likely to see many films in our lives, there will be few like this one. It is hypnotic, disturbing, frightening.” Well, all of that is surely right, and the film’s brilliance is plain to see. But this one left us a little cold.

Scenes from a Marriage: Originally a six-part, 282 minute made-for-television production subsequently released theatrically in a shorter version, we recommend the long-form presentation in all its glory, which illustrates the potential of what great movies can hope to accomplish. The marriage in question, between Marianne and Johan (Ullmann and Josephson) is fictional—but what we can learn from their experiences, in the hands of Bergman and his collaborators, is real, and profound. A social-cultural touchstone, Tom Wolfe devoted a few exceptionally strong pages of his famous 1976 essay on “The Me Decade” to laud the film and its extraordinary influence on audiences of the day. And that experience is timeless. As Molly Haskell put it in her review for the Village Voice, “there are almost no words for the subtlety and the intensity and the range of Ullmann’s and Josephson’s performances.” In the closing moments of Scenes from a Marriage, Haskell observes, Marianne says to Johan “what might stand as the epigraph for the film, for marriage, and for all that Bergman has given us—“thanks for the conversation.”