One imagines that certain Ingmar Bergman skeptics and out-and-out detractors might find cause to term his 1958 picture Ansiktet, also known as The Face, and released in the United States as The Magician, as the writer/director’s first substantive self-pity party. Because it is, for all intents and purposes, something of a parable of The Misunderstood Artist. Max von Sydow stars as Vogler, a self-proclaimed—well, not really self-proclaimed, as he pretends to be mute, but he has a spieler who extols his abilities, and loud—mesmerist who works a variety of mysterious and mind-boggling entertainment miracles in an appropriately chiaroscuro-laden 19th-century landscape, via the appropriately mystifying-by-19th-century-standards powers of “magnetism.” He and his troupe are waylaid by an impetuous petit-bourgeouis bureaucrat and a pompous, sadistic rationalist physician determined to expose Vogler as a charlatan. Vogler’s “art,” such as it is, is eventually both vindicated and revealed as “mere” trickery; and Vogler himself, stripped of all his artifices, is revealed as something of a pathetic, grasping figure, more or less reliant on the credulity and/or kindness of the strangers he bamboozles as he and his entourage shamble from one engagement to the next.
“Didn’t I do everything in my power to make you feel something?” Vogler begs of his former tormentors directly prior to the film’s final and supremely ironic reversal of fortune. Concocting this picture in the wake of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries could have struck some as an odd way to complete a hat trick, but it is in fact a splendid one—although it’s even more splendid if one forces one to see it more or less out of its context. Because in fact whatever self-referentiality it contains needs neither redemption nor justification (although Bergman’s splendid prose account of/apologia for the film, from his book Images: My Life In Film, and included in the booklet of the new Criterion Collection edition, provides ample supporting evidence for any such case); and also because, viewed without such stuff in mind, The Magician works like the devil as a fleet, witty, atmospheric entertainment, something of a Bergman genre film as it were (as The Seventh Seal also is, in a way), a sometimes faux-gloomy jest that recalls certain of the vintage Universal horrors as it does Seastrom’s The Phantom Carriage and other Nordic touchstones. Its narrative briskness and stiff spine is matched by a loose-limbed playfulness beautifully embodied in the utterly unconvincing way gorgeous Ingrid Thulin attempts to impersonate a teenage boy (she is in fact Vogler’s wife). The film feels more alive than most period pieces of the contemporary cinema.
This past July marked the third anniversary of Bergman’s death, and the continuing—as opposed to waning—fact of his stature as a cinematic master makes Jonathan Rosenbaum’s new-conventional-wisdom op-ed in the Times in the wake of the filmmaker’s death seem even more churlish than had likely been intended. With a “case closed” confidence, Rosenbaum stated,“The hard fact is, Mr. Bergman isn’t being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson — two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman’s heyday.” I’ve never quite gotten over that last bit, which seems to blame Bergman for the scorn straw man Rosenbaum erects. But the more germane self-satisfied faux-“tant pis” occurs earlier in the piece, with Rosenbaum’s oh-gee-isn’t-that-tough-luck shrug, “Like many of [Bergman’s] films, ‘The Magician’ hasn’t been widely available here for ages.” But—ooops!—here’s The Magician on DVD, on Criterion no less, in a gorgeous restoration that gives amazing solidity and depth to Gunnar Fischer’s black-and-white images—I was practically hypnotized by the steely frames of the eyeglasses worn by Naima Wifstrand’s crone and Gunnar Björnstrand’s inquisitor. And there’s a major Bergman retrospective at, which moved Mike D’Angelo in the L.A. Weekly to insist that coming to grips with Bergman is a necessary “rite of passage” for the “budding cinephile.” That doesn’t sound like much fun, mind you, but it does sound important. “Like almost any other significant, prolific artist,” D’Angelo, slightly adopting Rosenbaum’s shrug, proclaimed, early in September, “Bergman produced both towering masterpieces and self-indulgent drivel.” There’s a different kind of confidence at work in that assessment; as much as I might dislike or object to a particular work of Bergman’s or a particular aspect of a Bergman work, I’ve never been sure that I could apprehend it well enough to dismiss it, literally, as drivel; for me in this respect it’s a case of not having enough context. Is the monologue on Mozart from Hour of the Wolf, which Bille August later transposed to A Song For Martin, inspired musicological analysis or just something that sounds nice? I can’t rightly say. But someday I may learn. Until that point, I believe that we’ll continue to keep arguing about, and learning from, the great Ingmar. And, yes, actually enjoying a good deal of his work. As you should definitely do with this really great disc of The Magician.
You have to wonder if Rosenbaum is quite right in the head. I’d rank Bergman as one of the five most important filmmakers ever to walk the face of the earth. Can’t wait to pick up The Magician (wanders off to check bank account…)
Bergman has a deeper understanding of human relations and conveys them better than any other filmmaker, once he got over the God thing, of course, and did so cinematically. His black-and-white films are breathtaking, regardless of whether he’s collaborating with Fischer or Nykvist. No one other than Renoir even comes close. For me, he’s the cinematic equivalent of the Stones. Even when he’s simply repeating himself, he’s good–with the notable exception of The Touch.
John Simon once grabbed the naysayers by their short hairs and gave them a good slap: http://bergmanorama.webs.com/filmcomment72_simon.htm
Rosenbaum jumped the shark, or whatever the cinephile equivalent would be, when he admitted to reviewing his own book under a pseudonym–a female pseudonym, no less, I suppose to stick it to Sontag. (I guess he technically jumped the shark when he actually wrote the review, not when he ‘fessed up.) In recent years he’s become to me the pasty, thesaurused equivalent of Armond White, with less objectionable politics, perhaps, but the same startling self-regard.
Unlike most people here, I’m going to agree with Rosenbaum. I’ve always felt that (with notable, wonderful exception) Bergman made the same movie again and again, and it usually turned out more overblown and less genuine than when he first started doing it.
Fellini said it best: “That man, he is so depressing!”
Yeah, the same movie again and again, as in that run of “The Magic Flute,” “Face to Face,” “The Serpent’s Egg,” “Autumn Sonata,” “From The Life of Marionettes,” and “Fanny And Alexander.” Exactly.
Well boiled, they’re all stuff Ingmar had already done. (And not all of them good). If clever like only the man could be a great many times.
I dunno, I just prefer the time before his discovery for the gift of heavy-handedness.
Well, one could argue that all great artists just tell the same story over and over again. I’ve heard that one before. And I’m certainly not arguing that all the pictures in that list are “great.” “Sonata,” as Robin Wood has pointed out, has some really serious problems. And “Egg” and the little-seen “Marionettes” are extreme to the point that some disdain them as excessive. But they’re not all “the same movie” anymore than “Leave Home” is the “same album” as “Ramones.” I’ve always considered this idea that artists are obliged to “grow” according to some arbitrary critical/consumer demand to be an objectionable one in any event. I’d be interested, Matthias (and this is not a snarky question, although it might sound that way), in hearing which artist, by your lights, successfully executed a satisfactory arc or progression of growth throughout his or her career, going out on a peak, and creating works that were sufficiently different from each other to satisfy your standards. I’d guess, but that’s be presumptuous of me.
Like any nibble of criticism, my gripe is more personal than anything else. Just as mentioned before, it’s the self-seriousness that gets me. Not that I’m saying that precludes Bergman from any sort of greatness on that ground: Irrespective of what I might say here, I do believe Bergman is a great director.
Someone who I might find closer to an arc you mention might even be Fellini. (A man I have problems with myself, some of which are even similar to that of Bergman). However, what makes me more inclined to forgive Federico is that he’s got more lightness to him, more warmth. I can approach him more frequently as an entertainer than I can Ingmar.
Ultimately, though, I think it’s a resistance I have to being told something more explicitly about life. I love it when Renoir tells me when I don’t know something, but I resent it when Bergman does. It’s an ultimately childish thing (sort of like when I, oh, I dunno, pick fights on the internet against my better judgment) to dislike being told. But in a sense, that’s part of Rosenbaum’s objection to Bergman’s popularity as well (though, unlike him, I can’t say, like Rosenbaum, that he’s been overblown because of his social zeitgeist–I wasn’t into movies then–or his influence [for better or worse] on the generations after him.)
Though, I will say: I do slightly resent how he’s overshadowed Dreyer and Sjostrom. The latter was a very capable figure, but I see the former as a total giant; it (possibly erroneously) feels like Dreyer’s close ups are what Bergman wanted his to be. And at that, some of the things Dreyer address, Bergman would later expand.
All that said, I still do love Smiles of a Summer night.
I’ve never understood why “self-seriousness” or plain old “seriousness” or even, as Fellini would have it, being “depressing” are supposedly such bad things. So Bergman wasn’t a stitch – big deal. You should only try to be funny if you know for a fact that you are. Otherwise, stick to your strengths, and Bergman was really good at being depressing.
SERPENT’S EGG, HOUR OF THE WOLF, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, WINTER LIGHT, and so on and so forth…I have a hard time understanding the problem here.
Who’s fighting?
Agreed, in a sense, on the Dreyer issue, and wish that Criterion would correct its edition of “Gertrud.” But one thing about Dreyer is volume—there is, finally, less of an oeuvre to contend with than Bergman’s. And some of it—like “Gertrud”—is “difficult” in a way that certain Bergman films are not.
The issue of subjectivity is interesting here. You cite Fellini; for Buñuel, “Juliet of the Spirits” finished Fellini, and there are a lot of former fans of Federico who would cite the ornateness of the later films as being just as objectionable as the heavy-handedness of the late Bergman stuff. The issue of resentment is worth exploring too. Is it actually because of the way Bergman puts things, or because of the cultural baggage of all things “Bergmanesque,” which has a connotation and an easy-to-parody feel that you don’t necessarily get with Renoir? It’s a question worth exploring, as is the question of how time and distance can reduce or increase the cultural baggage. In the way that, say (and this is a completely arbitrary for-instance), Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” becomes a different film once you’re accustomed to the fact that its all-star cast merely appear when they appear, and that’s it, as opposed to trying to spot them and wondering whether or not their individual parts had been hugely cut, and so on.
Bill, Glenn
Perhaps Fellini came to mind because of the quote earlier, but Renoir is certain. I think for myself it’s a warmness, like what Sarris mentions in The American Cinema about Ophuls in his entry on Renoir. And it’s that sense that I get from Bergman; not quite a condescension (though, he does look down on some of his characters), but certainly variations of frustration he has with people, both in general, and in more institutional ways.
Bergman tends to be jaded, and at least for me, I find that difficult to identify with emotionally (which is why I can certainly attempt an understanding–as no great artist will ever be understood–of Bergman intellectually, but emotionally the man escapes me). However, it still astonishes me some of the warmth he’s capable of, particularly Smiles of a Summer Night, but it’s interspersed among his work. Granted he wasn’t funny, but bill, I think that he could still achieve great things when he was going against himself.
Fellini, for all his frustrating slips into self-gratifying conceits in the tail of his career (a good friend of mine called them “collage pictures”), still had a sort of curiosity about human nature that sprung more innately, I think: men like him were more interested in people qua friends or acquaintances. They liked the experience of bonding with people, making jokes, having fun, etc… Where it seems Bergman wanted more to understand them. (If it might not have already been clear, I have similar difficulty approaching Kubrick, but again, the strength of the man’s virtuosity will always trump whatever it is I have to say).
And as far as the fighting bit: it was only afterwards that I realize I had said a piece, without going into why, so I thought it easy to confuse me with the angry man in the dark.
“I’d be interested, Matthias … in hearing which artist, by your lights, successfully executed a satisfactory arc or progression of growth throughout his or her career, going out on a peak, and creating works that were sufficiently different from each other to satisfy your standards.”
I don’t think that 7 WOMEN is a peak (many others do, of course), but I’d still suggest Ford, who at once can be said to make the same film over and over, and yet, certainly progresses a great deal from STAGECOACH to LIBERTY VALANCE. Then there’s Preminger, who didn’t go out on a peak but progresses vastly from his early noirs to his Cinemascope epics on social institutions – and yet, there’s a continuity in his work, it struck me watching THE CARDINAL the other week that there’s something of the same imponderable blaknknes in Tryon, as filmed by Preminger, that there is in Simmons in ANGEL FACE, Tierney in WHIRLPOOL, or Maggie McNamara in THE MOON IS BLUE.
it’s all relative. one man’s depressing is another man’s bad-ass, penetrating, exhaustive, cinematic apogee.
“I’ve always considered this idea that artists are obliged to ‘grow’ according to some arbitrary critical/consumer demand to be an objectionable one…”
Fuck yes.
@ Asher: Yes, I thought of Ford, and of Preminger. In the arena of making the same film again and again I think of Tarkovsky, who happily (okay, maybe that’s not quite the right word) admitted as much. Biñuel is a very interesting case, as his pictures are all very different in their particulars—even the three “omnibus” ones, “Discreet Charm,” “Milky Way,” and “Phantom” all unfold to a logic that is not like that of the others’—but all undeniably Buñuelian. And then there’s Hitchcock, whose consciousness of this was such that “North by Northwest” plays like the out-bang-everything-that-came-before finale of a Macy’s 4th of July fireworks display.
There’s a big difference between the work of an artist and the way it’s received. Unfortunately, for various reasons, a lot of people ignore that difference.
It’s almost as if today’s dedicated follower of film critical fashion is obliged to poke a hole in the Bergmanesque balloon. Why? If you ask me, it’s because of the place Bergman’s films occupied in the American cultural landscape 40 years ago, when people like Simon (sorry Michael) were using him as a club to beat Bresson or Godard, and when he was ubiquitous in first-run arthouses, on the revival circuit, on campuses, in bookstores, and in Woody Allen movies. The American idea of Bergman – quite different from the French or Swedish ideas of Bergman, very different from the reality of the films themselves – was finally pretty limiting.
It still seems to get under people’s skins that, for instance, Bergman arrived when the American art house market was at its peak, which is the one and only reason he “overshadowed” Dreyer and Sjostrom (as…what? Best Scandanavian Director of All Time?). But at this point, it’s ancient history, and there’s nothing but the films. Does Bergman have a deeper understanding of human relations than anyone else? I don’t know, but fortunately art isn’t a competitive sport. His body of work is astonishing, probing, troubling. Simon doesn’t interest me much as a writer, but I like what he says in the piece about continuity. The way Bergman built and developed from one film to another is pretty impressive.
Michael, I wonder if you’ve actually seen THE TOUCH recently. I saw it in Bologna last summer, in a newly restored version. Quite a movie.
Matthias, I could go on disagreeing about individual points or trying to figure out the difference between Fellini’s presumably “warm” curiosity about human nature vs. Bergman’s presumably “cold” desire to understand people, and I really wish that the whole question of how much or how little this or that director likes/hates his or her characters would just dry up and blow away. I will just say that my admiration for Bergman has evolved and grown over the years, and that Wim Wenders sums it all up beautifully in an essay he wrote – can’t remember the title – that was published in one of his Faber collections, either EMOTION PICTURES or THE LOGIC OF IMAGES. For my generation, understanding Bergman was like passing through the eye of a very small and thin needle: we were presented with his greatness on a platter, we rejected it, and then found him again on our own. In my case, some of it had to do with my brand of exposure to French films and filmmakers. Because modern French cinema would be unthinkable without Bergman.
First Bill C – you’re doing a real disservice to Jonathan.
“The issue of resentment is worth exploring too. Is it actually because of the way Bergman puts things, or because of the cultural baggage of all things ‘Bergmanesque,’ which has a connotation and an easy-to-parody feel that you don’t necessarily get with Renoir?”
On the day Bergman died, I wrote that while it’s easy to laugh at an allegorical Reaper, because we all have, from Garfield and Bill & Ted to Woody Allen, who would even think to laugh at an allegorical Donkey, or even get that one can? I didn’t mean that explicitly as a slam against Bresson, but if he had had the cultural impact Bergman had, Allegorical Donkey of Suffering would have become as much a punchline as has the Grim Reaper, and we’d joke about the Jansenist-zombie acting of Claude Leydu, Francois Leterrier, Nadine Nortier and Martin LaSalle as much as we do the self-analytic Angst acting of Ullmann, Von Sydow, Thulin, the Anderssons, etc.
Another comparison, on the day Bergman died, several folks in the newsroom came up to me and asked “The Film Guy” about Bergman and what I thought of him, in the same way newspapermen at work always chat about the day’s news, even though they all had seen none or just one of his movies. And while someone else wrote the obit, “Film Guy Victor” was specifically assigned to be the editor, even though I don’t work on the features desk. “You’ll give it a lot of love,” the ME said. In contrast, when Eric Rohmer died earlier this year, only one person came up to me and he had a professional question – how big a deal is this director, how big should we play it. And I had to give my honest professional judgement, which was – it belongs in the paper but only a 4–5 graf item in the News Briefs roundup.
I should have spoken up in this respect sooner, but yes, I also, like Kent, have a major disagreement with First Bill C with respect to J. Rosenbaum. Jonathan has his quirks, but his mode of argumentation and his attention to detail—not to mention his ability to actually get details right—are among the many, many, many things that distinguish him from White, and make him a critic worthy of engagement and high respect.
@Kent/Glenn: Fair enough. Death in the family, lashing out all over.
Oh I love The Magician. What good news this is.
With regard to (and great respect for) Rosenbaum, the primary problem with that article was the lack of acknowledgement that all reputations cycle, often with the needs of the current era, and by no means due solely to us being so much more clear-eyed than whoever was watching the movies before. This is something Rosenbaum himself acknowledged when his op-ed was raked over the coals at Scanners. (Incidentally, whoever headlined that piece “Scenes from an Overrated Career” has a strong claim to the hotly contested title of “Most Evil Copy Editor Now Working.”)
I expressed my problems with Mike’s Bergman piece before, and it’s similar to Glenn’s. It really does make Bergman sound like about as much fun as cramming for the SATs, which isn’t right. There is plenty of humor in Fanny and Alexander, for example; Smiles of a Summer Night is a comedy and a funny one; and even The Seventh Seal is droll at times. But in any event, I don’t understand why seriousness of theme and intent should be held against anyone.
I liked that Mike wasn’t taking the “oh Bergman’s a theatre guy” tack. But then I ran into the word drivel, like slamming into an overpass at about 90 mph. Drivel. Silly, stupid, worthless. Not describing one or two lesser or even bad Bergman movies, but apparently some chunk of Bergman’s filmography, size unspecified. Not even Rosenbaum went nearly that far.
RED-LETTER DAY: Victor about to defend Jonathan Rosenbaum.
As much as I detested Rosenbaum’s New York Times attack piece on Bergman (while the 6‑feet of dirt over him was still fresh, no less), it turns out Rosenbaum actual first submission to NYT was a very different and much-more-balanced piece. It was the kind of piece I can read and think afterward “the guy’s wrong but he’s entitled to prefer Bresson and he has some interesting things to say.”
J‑Ro later posted that first draft here: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=20786
First, the specific: when I watched THE MAGICIAN for the first time all the way through (when our store got the Criterion version), it never occurred to me it could be a “self-pity party,” which I normally run away screaming from (one of the reasons why, for example, I’ve never been able to stomach STARDUST MEMORIES, despite it being one of the most technically accomplished of Woody Allen’s films), precisely because it’s so witty and entertaining and strange (as I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere, I always imagined it what would happen if Fellini ever tried to make a Bergman film. And if Fellini did think Bergman was too depressing, that antipathy ran one way; according to everything I’ve read, Bergman was a huge fan of Fellini, despite his excesses). Maybe if I watched THE MAGICIAN again (incidentally, while I like it, I don’t put it in the same class as, say, SEVENTH SEAL, PERSONA, or FANNY AND ALEXANDER; I’d still have no trouble recommending it, though), the “self-pity” would turn me off, but I don’t see that happening.
Now on to Bergman in general; when I first read Rosenbaum’s dissection of Bergman (and I should add here while I have some major problems with Rosenbaum, to compare him to Armond White is definitely hitting below the belt), the part of my brain that thinks of Reductive Retorts That May Miss The Point kicked in and said, “Of course Rosenbaum would feel that way! Rosenbaum’s a Marxist. Marxists generally feel religion is the Opiate of the Masses, and any questions that deal with the philosophical and metaphysical are irrelevant to life and bourgeois. Bergman primarily dealt with the philosophical and metaphysical questions in life. Therefore, Rosenbaum is inclined to hate Bergman. Q.E.D.” After re-reading it, and reading other pieces critical of Bergman by others, I realize, of course, just how flip I was being, but I still think Rosenbaum and others are missing the point about Bergman by seeing only the “heaviosity” of his films, which, as others here and elsewhere have pointed out, is hardly the case. Only rarely in a Bergman film do I feel like I’m Being Told What To Think (as in THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, the weakest of that trilogy, and the first time I saw WILD STRAWBERRIES, though that one improves upon multiple viewings), and while I do agree his characters can be cruel, I never felt him being unnecessarily cruel to his characters, unlike some filmmakers (cough *Lars Von Trier* cough). And finally, yes, Bergman has made the occasional dud – I’m afraid I’ve never been able to get into THE SERPENT’S EGG – he still remains a master to me.
I do suspect one reason for people’s apathy towards him now, as opposed to someone who’s watched him over the years, like Rosenbaum obviously has, is seeing all the imitators who only see that “heaviosity” and miss his humor, among other things.
“…even The Seventh Seal is droll at times.”
I’ve always considered The Seventh Seal a straight up absurdist comedy. I think some people have so effectively turned Bergman’s films into homework, that his sense of humor is what is often overlooked.
The humor issue is ridiculous. Never once have I heard a single solitary soul complain about lack of humor in the collected works of Malick, Bresson, or Tarkovsky. Why? Because it’s irrelevant. Some people find their way to humor, others don’t, end of story. Insisting that Bergman is cold and clinical just doesn’t wash. If such were the case, he would have been incapable of conceiving of, let alone shooting, the final moment of SARABAND.
Victor, even in this “writer’s cut” version, I strenuously disagree with two of Jonathan’s central points: that Bergman wasn’t a modern artist and that he was uninterested in the possibilities of film as a language.
The word “drivel” was not specific to Bergman. “Like almost any other significant, prolific artist,” I said. If you work for decades at a steady clip, you’re gonna produce your share of stinkers (though of course reasonable people may vehemently disagree about any given film or album or novel or whatever). I was trying in the piece to find a middle ground between Bergman the Quintessential European Film Artist and Bergman the Ludicrously Overrated Hack, which are the two useless generalizations I most frequently encounter. In particular, I was attempting to *counteract* the layman’s likely impression of Bergman as Cinema Studies material, forbidding and dreary and dull—acknowledging that this impression exists and has at least a little basis in truth, but then looking beyond it. Evidently I failed, but hey, I produce drivel just like anyone else. (I do wish I’d had at least double the word count.)
All of that said, I confess that I don’t share the increasingly common critical viewpoint that any work by a Certified Master should be approached with great humility. Glenn’s formulation above is “as much as I might dislike or object to a particular work of Bergman’s or a particular aspect of a Bergman work, I’ve never been sure that I could apprehend it well enough to dismiss it.” I see that kind of genuflection—in a less charitable mood, I’d call it ass-covering—more and more nowadays: “This didn’t really work for me, but that’s probably my failing.” And it may well be. I’ve been rewatching a lot of films from the ’90s of late, and have in many cases been shocked by how little I recognize my opinions of 10–20 years ago. But that doesn’t incline me to append an I‑may-be-wrong qualifier to every damn review. (I did do so for Inception, largely because of how badly I whiffed The Prestige.) Eastwood is a major artist, and I may rewatch Hereafter in 2025 and wonder how I failed to apprehend its awesomeness, but for right now I’m quite comfortable calling it empty-headed…well, drivel, frankly. Bottomless cynicism does criticism no favors, but neither does constant forelock-tugging.
@Kent:
I agree with you that a sense of humor is not a necessity to be a great filmmaker, but Bergman, at least for me, DOES have a sense of humor, so I always look at parodies of Bergman’s supposed humorlessness (like SCTV’s “Scenes From An Idiot’s Marriage”, though that skit is funny) with bewilderment.
Now, when am I gonna write my essay on how Bresson is a deadpan comic filmmaker and the forerunner for Kaurismaki and Jarmusch…
Anybody who doesn’t think Persona is an ultimate masterpiece can go fuck his mother hard enough to send his dick back in time to fuck his ancestors too.
Then there’s Lang, who perhaps progresses in the opposite of Preminger’s direction, from a series of epic masterpieces that diagram cities, criminal organizations, space travel, modernity, to the early-to-mid Hollywood work, where actual characters and human desires begin to enter the Langian universe, and then his late period (WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS, BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE), which is a sort of minimalist reprise of the abstraction of his early work.
Mike:
“If you work for decades at a steady clip, you’re gonna produce your share of stinkers.”
Well, no. That doesn’t follow at all, not for movies and not for any number of other fields. It is frequently true. It is not universally true. There are those who work for decades and produce only mediocre-to-rather-good; there are those who work at a very high level consistently; there are those who oscillate between high and low. In no way it is false humility, forelock-tugging or genuflection to acknowledge that a fighting word like “drivel,” applied to some unspecified batch of a renowned director’s filmography, needs to be either supported, and supported well, or replaced. I personally wouldn’t apply the word to Sergio Leone, possibly my least favorite canonical filmmaker. And that isn’t me being Uriah Heep. It’s me acknowledging what I can reasonably expect to back up, in 1400 words or 14,000.
“there are those who work at a very high level consistently”
Can you name one? I for the life of me cannot, absent applying Auteurist Zombie glasses.
Hitchcock and Kubrick are my two absolute favorite film-makers. Each of them, in interviews, made it clear that he thought some of his work was either not worth discussing or was faintly embarrassed by or outright disowned it. I could toss in Wilder, Bergman, Welles, Kurosawa, Lubitsch, Huston, Lang – anyone whom I have ever seen give a substantive interview about his career has acknowledged some failures in it, even if he blamed it on others or the studio.
The closest I could come would be Dreyer, but only because he disowned TWO PEOPLE (and he could hardly be said to have worked “at a steady clip”). I’ve seen it; it’s not a terrible film (and frankly I disagree with Dreyer’s stated reasons for disowning it – the male lead was WAY less mannered than the female lead). But while it IS must-viewing for Dreyer completists, if it were to disappear from the world tomorrow, it would not be a great loss (except to us Dreyer completists). If it was all Dreyer had ever made, or as good as he got, nobody today outside Denmark would know who he is.
If anything, it seems like JR is not exactly contributing something he, among other things, finds deficient in Bergman: “a desire or capacity to change the language of cinema in order to say something new.” If anything, his piece reads like a re-hash of certain trends in film criticism around the late 50’s/early 60’s – up to and including ye olde “oh, Bergman’s a theater guy,” Siren! Naturally, during that period, we really are starting to see the break cinema struggled – still struggles – to achieve with the proscenium stage experience, and the standard desires to consign that past into the dustbin of history. Bresson’s NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPHER articulates this distinction so unforgettably via bracing, poetic aphorisms, where Tarkovsky repeated himself a few times where he felt the limitations of Stanislavski on Russian acting generally obtained. Only after PERSONA do serious critics like Sontag start to admit there is something other than Strindberg-love and sync sound behind Herr Bergman – and here’s JR, laying the Brakhage-influenced credit-sequence at the feet of Bergman’s theater background!
I mean…Glenn’s mentioned a few ringers like FROM THE LIFE, an incredibly under-discussed late-period uncompromising fireball, to which I’d add SHAME, surely one of the most indelible anti-war films ever made, and FACE TO FACE and AUTUMN SONATA, two Ullman-driven TKOs whose devastating psychological intensity really are contraindicated for the suicidal. If “the theater” aided him in any way (the way it could not for Sven Nykvist, for example) in creating – with no small prolificity, thank you – some of the most unforgettable, accomplished CINEMA of the last century, here’s to the m‑f theater!
I hold Mr. Rosenbaum in great esteem – I can think of no other critic in the English language, except perhaps his pal and once co-author Mr. Hoberman, who has written with as much erudition and insight on such directors as Paradjanov, Tarr, or his beloved Rivette. But it’s not at all clear to me why he wrote this for-the-birds-if-not-THE-BIRDS piece, much less wrote it now – the upcoming election, maybe? Carl Paladino’s known favoring of CRIES AND WHISPERS over MOUCHETTE? A point-for-point rebuttal, perhaps occasioning a new re-assessment of Bergman’s oeuvre, seems especially called for.
Oh, and Hollis – The summa of Bergman’s parodies has to be SCTV’s “Whispers of the Wolf”, not to take anything away from Marty and the prop guy who got them the seltzer bottle for “Scenes from an Idiot’s Marriage”. Over the top, but does nail some of the agon that could harden into the leaden ponderousness that could befall even some of Bergman’s finest work. Here’s that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knEOourigcw . And, here’s “Scenes”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A5OfaMlIto .
“Carl Paladino’s known favoring of CRIES AND WHISPERS over MOUCHETTE?”
(vjm sheepily picks his hand off Mussolini fan magazine to raise it into the air in response)
“Hitchcock and Kubrick are my two absolute favorite film-makers. Each of them, in interviews, made it clear that he thought some of his work was either not worth discussing or was faintly embarrassed by or outright disowned it.”
But Hitchcock was wrong. UNDER CAPRICORN, which he and critics dismissed at the time, is nowadays viewed by many as a masterpiece. SABOTEUR’s so much more interesting than the throwaway dry run for NORTH BY NORTHWEST it’s made out to be. TOPAZ cries out for reassessment (and an American DVD that actually shows the theatrical version, not the uncut mess that got slated by preview audiences). TORN CURTAIN suffers from disastrous casting and is famously disengaged, but to me its chilliness is a virtue.
“Hitchcock was wrong… [ALL his films are masterpieces!]”
Is this the cinephile equivalent of, “If God is omnipotent, can He create a rock so big He can’t lift it?”
James, the Rosenbaum piece does date from 2007; “by new-conventional-wisdom” I meant latest revision of conventional wisdom, not a new piece. Sorry for the confusion!
Victor: Jeez. “Auteurist zombie glasses,” there’s a nice gratuitous insult. And yet Don R. Lewis has never called you “bitter.” Some guys have all the luck.
Oliver – the point that some of us are missing is that filmmakers and other artists aren’t always the best judges of their own work.
As I have revisited Bergman’s work inconsistently – I like some of what I’ve seen, but with a finite lifetime I’d rather see or re-see the works of dozens of other filmmakers, and yes, as the Euro-Arthouse Circus of Terror goes, I much prefer Bresson and Rohmer. Bresson is funner, and funnier, than Bergman – wrap your head around that!
Mike is right that Bergman is neither of the extremes of “all-time infallible god” or “ludicrously overrated hack.” But, concerning what he calls ass-covering and what I would call humility, my experience of fellow critics is a photo negative of his. From where I sit, I’m so fed up with 98% of what passes for film criticism these days precisely because negative notices suggest an image of an infant spitting up his formula because it doesn’t suit his palette.
A controversial filmmaker who can both (a) take care of himself and (b) use a rescue: Griffith. His career is usually reduced to BIRTH OF A NATION and INTOLERANCE (and maybe 3–4 others), and, in all fairness, they’re the elephants in the room. But an acquaintance of mine, who has written brilliantly and lovingly of Griffith’s work in the past, also pointed out several of his films that I wasn’t aware of – nor was I, needless to say, aware they were candidates for the canon before BIRTH/INTOLERANCE. And with with his help, I’ve worked to arrange his films in tiers for my site.
“FACE TO FACE”
Boy do I wish this was available in this country. I’ve heard nothing but good things, and it’s never been available on tape or DVD (there was a rumor Criterion or somebody was putting it out, but that hasn’t happened yet). If I go to Kim’s and see this for sale in region 2, well, I might just have to break down and get that region-free player right now (have considered it for a while, but the cost thing always gets in the way).
I sort of remember “Scenes from an Idiot’s Marriage”; although that wasn’t my favorite SCTV parody of a foreign film (that would be the one they did of DAS BOOT), I do recall it being pretty funny. Those guys sure knew how to poke fun at the whole range of popular culture.
“Euro-Arthouse Circus of Terror.” There is the name of Glenn’s next band, right there.
“Bresson is funner, and funnier, than Bergman – wrap your head around that!”
No no no. More fun??? Madness. I have an enormous amount of what I guess you would have to call respect for Bresson, but I can’t see where “fun” even enters into any conversation about his work. That may just be me, but there’s a craziness to many Bergman films which, for those who enjoy such things, make them more conventionally entertaining than most people are willing to give him credit for.
As for who’s funnier, that’s sort of like saying the 400 pound guy weighs less than the 401 pound guy. True enough, I guess, but who could possibly notice?
“UNDER CAPRICORN, which he and critics dismissed at the time, is nowadays viewed by many as a masterpiece.”
Only a few self-consciously contrarian critics.
One of the problems of criticism is that people who love a movie always have more to say about it, because they’ve invested so much of themselves into that film. I’m aware there’s a few brave souls (Robin Wood) who buck the consensus on UNDER CAPRICORN, but … well … I *did* find it to be boring and over-talky. Call that The CW, but conventional wisdom becomes such because it’s wise and can be widely seen as that and thus “conventional.” I don’t see any reason to doubt the consensus of the time and Hitch’s own criticisms (primarily that the long takes worked against his own theories of cutting and montage, and their importance to subjectivity in cinema; he wrote off ROPE on similar grounds).
Obviously artists can be wrong about their own work and audiences don’t always have the best tastes, but why are those facts (undeniable though they are in themselves) ONLY relevant if arguing for films-maudit. They just as cogently provide grounds to dismiss an artist’s popular successes and/or the works he felt his best. (Something especially absurd for an artist like Hitchcock, who was nothing if not a populist and a showman). Or to be concrete, why not dismiss PSYCHO, REAR WINDOW and NOTORIOUS on the inverse grounds?
“SABOTEUR’s so much more interesting than the throwaway dry run for NORTH BY NORTHWEST it’s made out to be.”
I like the film quite a bit too. But two things keep it from greatness: Robert. Cummings.
“TOPAZ cries out for reassessment (and an American DVD that actually shows the theatrical version, not the uncut mess that got slated by preview audiences).”
I tweeted the following last year: “TOPAZ (Hitchcock, USA, 1969) – 5 (formerly 3) – Surprised how much of this movie, often called Hitch’s worst, had stayed with me – the Copenhagen defection, the shooting in Cuba, Roscoe Lee Browne in Harlem, the Che Guevara parody, the unapologetic anti-Communism. If every director’s worst film could be this good, it’d be near-Heaven. Maybe it’s all the overplotted, overtalky spy thrillers that have come since.”
So yes, I agree, TOPAZ is better than its reputation. It’s still fundamentally a John LeCarre plotfest-movie.
“TORN CURTAIN suffers from disastrous casting and is famously disengaged, but to me its chilliness is a virtue.”
Well … I like TORN CURTAIN more than most people (it only fell off my Top 10 for 1966 when I saw DeSica’s hilariously fruity AFTER THE FOX a couple of years ago). But I don’t think it’s a great dishonor to the greatest artist of the 20th century to say it could have been better, especially with performers better suited to Hitchcockian acting.
“Victor: Jeez. “Auteurist zombie glasses,” there’s a nice gratuitous insult.”
You never struck me as one of the AZs, Mr. Kenny.
But what I was trying to do was, in an en-passant way, bracket the theoretical-hardcore La Politique des Auteurs stance. Sure, no great artist can ever make drivel if (1) his apparently bad films automatically acquire at-least interest because they can be enlightening in terms of the director’s career and the contrast with the consensus masterworks, or (2) must produce an unsurety in the critic’s judgment in case he doesn’t “get it.”
If La Politique is true, then sure … Siren is correct, Gemko is wrong and no great artist ever made drivel.
But Mike’s approach (and mine) is to consider the question in a more empirically-based way. And at that level, I’m pretty sure how it shakes out. And has always been understood. As the second great critic of antiquity put it, even Homer nods.
Glenn – Of course, nothing prevents the cinephile from reading an essay’s publish date. Sorrier still for my confusion.
The Allegorical Donkey of Suffering is my new totem animal.
So what’s the problem with the Criterion version of Gertrud?
I’d also like to see someone defend The Paradine Case as anything other than a snoozer.
@ Jeff McM: Aspect ratio controversy. The disc is 1.66, certain Dreyer mavens insist it ought to be 1.33. Not fatal, but contentious. Hard to solve.
I did not say that no great artist has ever made drivel.
I said that drivel is an extreme term, a fighting word. Which it is.
I said that it is no by no means universally true that an artist (and I was careful not to confine myself to movies, as Mike did not in his original sentence) must have some “stinkers” in a body of work. That, for the record, is another loaded and extreme word.
I am not arguing a hard-core auteurist position. People who read my blog, as opposed to amusing themselves by caricaturing my statements in other venues for reasons that remain opaque to me, would laugh themselves into coughing fits at the very idea. I’m not saying Mike’s opinion on Bergman needs to be qualified with some sort of bow toward Bergman’s rep,
I am saying that “drivel” is a bad word choice because Mike cannot back it up. It is too much. Mike, I am sure, could show me a Bergman that is messy, annoying, a misfire, muddled, an overall failure. But really, show me the Bergman film that is so bad, so wretched, so visually and intellectually barren that it can be fairly compared to saliva sliding down someone’s chin. And MIke implied there’s more than one.
I am arguing for the notion that words should be chosen carefully, not a particularly radical or partisan notion in a forum that attracts writers, or so I should have thought. And I was trying to do so politely, as I like Mike personally and respect his talent professionally.
@Jeff, The Paradine Case is messy, muddled and a misfire, but I do find things to like about it, not least of which is Alida Valli.
And I have never much cared for Persona, and so to bed, to cringe from the fate Castle Bravo would have in store for me if I had, er, the requisite equipment.
Ah, Siren. You and MLW just rock my world. How did I get so lucky, to know such women as you two?
(Amusing thing that happened this morning: I come into the house at about 8:30 a.m., having returned from my morning errands, and see Billy Bush yammering energetically on the idiot box, looking like he’s discussing something very important. I ask MLW, “What’s he on about? Somebody die?” “No,” MLW sez from the bathroom, where she’s putting on her makeup. “Mariah Carey is pregnant.” She pauses, gravely. “And so our innocence is gone.”)
Yeah, “Paradine Case” was on TCM recently, I looked at it on the treadmill at the gym. It isn’t very good at all, but even with the sound off it had more visual interest than anything else on any of the other monitors in the cardio room.
FTR – Maybe I was unclear, but I did not ascribe a hardcore auteurist position to Siren. What I said was that a hardcore-auteurist position would make the apparent claim (no great artist has ever made drivel) true, but would only do so by uninteresting (and false) a priori definition. If Siren is not a hardcore auteurist – great.
But then I revert back to my original question – can you name an artist who never made a bad work (which is really all “stinkers” and “drivel” mean in this context). I cannot.
Isn’t GERTRUD supposed to be in some ‘tweeny, rarely used AR?
Well two points. Or three. First, about SABOTEUR, I don’t think Robert Cummings is what’s holding it back from greatness, I think that Cummings’s coming off as an unlikeable, blundering idiot is what makes the film what it is. Cooper, who Hitchock wanted, would have pulled off the ridiculous speech about the good guys and the bad guys; through Cummings’s hilariously awful reading, we get the sense that Hitchcock thinks it’s a lot more complicated than that. Ultimately the center of sympathy in the film becomes Norman Lloyd, the actual saboteur, who I think Hitchcock wants us to see not as a villain (that’s Kruger), but as a pathetic, incorrigible pervert, and I think the ending’s meant to say, “if America’s greatness lies in its being a pluralist society of circus freaks (and bearded ladies who suspiciously resemble Abraham Lincoln), then mustn’t we extend our sympathies to this freak?” If anyone but Cummings played the lead, our sympathies would be with the lead, and the ending would be robbed of its force – as would the indescribably poignant image where Cummings, ineffectual as always, is left holding Lloyd’s sleeve. As for TOPAZ, I think it’s much more than a plotfest movie. I’ve written about it somewhere, but this piece is much better:
http://parallax-view.org/2009/07/30/hitchcock%E2%80%99s-topaz-revisited/
And on UNDER CAPRICORN, I’ll cite you Dave Kehr, who isn’t, I don’t think, too far-off: Easily one of Alfred Hitchcock’s half dozen greatest films, Under Capricorn has been senselessly neglected for years … the film follows an Irish noblewoman and her lower-class husband through a hellish milieu of guilt and repression. Never has Hitchcock’s obsession with death and sexuality seemed so Lawrentian (the comparison, if anything, sometimes seems unfavorable to D.H.). Shot in astonishingly elaborate long takes, this is the kind of film that finds the most brilliant poetry in the slightest movement of the camera—a paradigm of cinematic expression.
Second, I think Hitchcock did make some so-so films, just not the ones that are often cited. I think THE PARADINE CASE is very near to being a complete failure. The only thing I like in it is Laughton. Everything else is just Hitchcock trying to overdirect something out of utter vacuums of performances and a very bad script. REBECCA on the whole is a pretty conventional and impersonal work. ROPE’s an interesting failure but a failure nonetheless; the script is like listening to a really bad college dorm conversation between two lummoxes whose sole acquaintance with Nietzsche is his Wikipedia entry, Stewart’s wrong for the part, Granger’s annoying, etc. FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT is interesting solely for its setpieces. And there are others. But many of the supposed failures are vital works, in my view.
Heaven bless the Siren.
I concur with Victor that the Siren is taking my use of “drivel” a bit too literally. But it’s true that while there are a number of Bergman films I strongly dislike, I can’t think of one I find atrociously bad. So I probably should have worded that sentence less strongly.
To show that one person’s wheat is another one’s chaff – or am I throwing in too many metaphors in order to avoid using the wrong ones – I actually consider FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT to be among the better Hitchcocks. Not just the set pieces, but also a good hero (always been a Joel McCrea fan), good main relationship, good villain (Herbert Marshall), henchman (though admittedly, being that I watch the original MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET every year, it still is a bit shocking to see Edmund Gwenn as a bad guy), and George Sanders (in a rare performance, outside of his Falcon movies, as a good guy). Plus, the rah-rah stuff is understandable in context, and doesn’t stereotype its villains for the most part.
“But then I revert back to my original question – can you name an artist who never made a bad work (which is really all “stinkers” and “drivel” mean in this context). I cannot.”
Phew! One less paper tiger roaming the lands.
What Kent Jones describes actually sounds a lot like the way a lot of Swedes see Bergman. You start out being told he is the greatest and most important film director in the world (and often see his films on television at a much too young age, when you don’t get them), rebel against this by thinking he’s overrated and boring, and then start discovering his films again realizing that his best stuff is as good as anything in world cinema.
I like his films from the 50s best, and at that time there was another Swedish director, Hasse Ekman, who was almost as good. They were generally seen as competitors, their films being matched against each other, and especially Ekman, who was a fiercely competitive man, really took this seriously – so seriously that with Bergman’s rising fame he simply threw in the towel (I think he even sent Bergman a telegram saying he was beaten) and stopped doing anything ambitious. Only three of Ekman’s films are available on DVD, none of them with English subtitles, but you could make a wonderful Eclipse box by collecting his best work.
Speaking of Bergman and Bresson as laugh riots, is Bergman alluding to Mouchette with the girl’s tumble down the hill in Saraband?
Since no one has mentioned it, I give you De Duva: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2QmLWWxq4
Kent: Haven’t seen The Touch since its release and am willing to be wrong. Meanwhile, I’m not embarrassed to say I enjoy almost everything about Paradine Case but would never dare strive to make an intellectual case for it. Lifeboat, Under Capricorn, I Confess, and Topaz are the only Hitchcocks I can find little to admire in. Even Torn Curtain has that one terrific scene.
Michael, in the restored version of THE TOUCH, everyone is speaking the language they’re supposed to be speaking. A different kind of experience.
As for TOPAZ, what about the sequence where Roscoe Lee Browne talks his way into the hotel, shot with a long lens and observed from the POV of his fellow agent? But…little to admire in I CONFESS?!?
Johan, I think a lot of people all around the world had similar experiences with Bergman. The peculiarly American side of it was the strange and slowly developing idea of Bergman as a kind of humdrum masterpiece manufacturer, ticking off all the appropriately grand themes in movie after movie. Which never squared with the actual movies.
What are Robin Wood’s issues with AUTUMN SONANTA and where can I read about them? I’m curious. It’s always been one of my favorites.
Stephen, it’s in “PERSONA Revisited,” which is collected in SEXUAL POLITICS AND NARRATIVE FILM: HOLLYWOOD AND BEYOND, and the specific complaint is that Bergman condemns the mother for abandoning the role of nurturer and thus destroying her daughter’s life.
Thanks, Kent. That book was already on my mental queue. I’ll bump it up.
It’s always struck me as one of his most compassionate works. You mentioned the end of SARABAND. I think the final moments of AS rival it for sheer emotional power. That letter is something.
I actually dislike I CONFESS myself. But I could watch TOPAZ on a loop for weeks.
I’ve always loved Bergman (though I still have a few gaps to fill, including THE MAGICIAN, THE TOUCH, THE SERPENT’S EGG, SARABAND, etc.). I so love Fellini’s films up through 8 1/2 that I can’t even bring myself to watch his subsequent work, of which I’ve seen only AMARCORD (which wasn’t bad, and I’m sure I’ll see the others some day – but I’m in no rush to witness his presumed decline).
A propos of nothing, really, but fun: When I saw a screening of 8 1/2 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater a few years ago, my right-hand seatmate was Norman Lloyd.
A propos of even less: I met Roscoe Lee Browne in 1996 in a Burbank karaōke bar.
@ J. Bryant: And apropos of even less than that, I met Roscoe Lee Browne in 1993 at a John Hiatt show at Iriving Plaza in New York. And yeah, we DID talk about “Topaz.”
@ Johan A.: Thanks for the observation and information. Most American viewers know Ekman, if at all, via the original Swedish “Intermezzo,” directed by and starring his father Gosta, back in the ’30s. This was remade as the Hollywood debut vehicle for its leading lady, Ingrid Bergman. Ekman also plays a substantial role in Ingmar’s 1949 “Thirst,” which is in that Eclipse “Early Bergman” box. This sort of thing constitutes a part of the context I spoke of earlier, of which I largely lack.
Glenn: Wow, Roscoe Lee Browne was a John Hiatt fan? Who’da thunk? Very cool. My conversation with him was mostly about his ties to my Kentucky hometown. His aunt, whom he visited there frequently, was a bit of a local celeb (she wrote a long-running column in our newspaper). Not having seen TOPAZ, I didn’t bring it up, but I told him how much I loved him in THE COWBOYS. We had a nice chat for several minutes, but I didn’t bend his ear too much. He was alone, killing time before a flight out of the Burbank airport – as far as I know, he didn’t participate in the karaōke. Would’ve loved to hear him tackle “Have a Little Faith in Me,” or maybe something off of “Two Bit Monsters.” 🙂
Good news, JBryant: Fellini did not decline.
For what it’s worth, “Fanny and Alexander” and “Cries and Whispers” are my two favorite Bergman films. “Nights of Cabiria” is the one Fellini film I admire without reservation, but I prefer “Casanova” and “The Ship Sails on” to the rest of his later work.
Kent, I’m sure that Malick, Bresson and Tarkovsky have been criticized for not having a sense of humor. I admire all three, but it’s not as if criticism of them was rare. About the question of parody, many classic foreign directors are not really in the public ey, a tendency only exaggerated in the past three decades. I’m reminded of several Monty Python skits, such as a Pier Paolo Pasolini cricket match, the Ken Russell gardening club, a generic foreign film involving cabbage, rubbish dumps and explosions most obviously reminiscent of “Zabriskie Point,” a skit where a Japanese director tries to pass himself as Luchino Visconti without making the slightest attempt to resemble him at all (“I’m telling you straight, mate. I don’t think you’re Luchino Visconti at all.”) and, of course, Sam Peckinpah’s “Salad Days.”
I’m especially fond of the above-mentioned “Whispers of the Wolf” from SCTV. And I’m reminded of the THIRTYSOMETHING episode where one of the characters goes to a Bergman festival at a local art theater and the film we see is…ORDET. Back in those days, Dreyer was PD and Scandanavian enough to stand in for “Bergman.”
GK and jbryant, I saw the original production of TWO TRAINS RUNNING on Broadway. There’s a beautiful speech in that play, given by a character whose name I forget – the kind of speech that’s a grabber no matter who gives it. But Roscoe Lee Browne was playing the role, and his delivery was so thrilling that he got a round of applause in the middle of the show. A transporting moment.
Stephen Cone, I took another look at AUTUMN SONATA. First of all, I don’t like Wood’s later writing very much. His insistence on the ideological above every other aspect of art invariably drew him to focus on plot and the dialogue, something he would never have done when he was younger. In the case of this movie, I understand his point, because the bulk of the movie really is Liv Ullmann hammering away at Ingrid Bergman for not being a good mother and ruining her life and her sister’s, and she really does tell her mother that her sister’s illness (she suffers from what looks like MS) is her fault. I think that where Wood falters is in assuming that the daughter speaks for the film and has the last word. This is not ‘NIGHT MOTHER. Ullmann’s character is an adult, and she’s stuck in her own brutal resentment, which makes her a monster. And the mother is played not by some harridan, but by a great, beautiful and absolutely riveting artist who really does seem like a grown woman who is still trying to satisfy the needs of a little girl. The mother is not condemned. As always when people have unresolved issues, they speak in words of finality, and then go on. The film ends with Ullmann writing her mother a letter of apology, and the sense that several years down the road they’ll see each other again and repeat the exercise. I don’t think AUTUMN SONATA is one of his greatest films – it’s one of the messy ones, one too many elements piled on (the sister upstairs, the drowned child), where he explores extreme states and sees where it takes him (FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES and FACE TO FACE would be two other examples – the tax exile period). But he created something remarkable with Ullmann and Bergman.
I haven’t read Robin Wood’s essay, but it sounds like he’s vary unfair to AUTUMN SONATA (which I think is good, but not one of Bergman’s best). I think what you see in the mother is a kind of despair – unsympathetic but still human, where you also sense a strong anxiety (very familiar territory for the famously absent parent Ingmar Bergman).
I think of AUTUMN SONATA as a tragedy about someone who places art above everything else in life.
Johan, I sort of agree, but I’m not sure how unsympathetic she is. I think the problem lies in reaching a certain point, labeling her “inattentive mother” and “narcissist,” and seeing everything in that light. But as always with Bergman, he goes deeper and deeper into specifics as he goes along.
And surely the tragedy belongs to mother and daughter together – the mother who doesn’t have enough emotional room for her children, the daughter who will not let go of the past and destroys the present. In this case, it happens to be art that draws the mother away from her children, but I think it could be pretty much anything (although the scene at the piano with the two renditions of the Chopin prelude is staggering). That’s why the end of SARABAND is so powerful: a mother, Ullmann this time, who finally “sees” her own child.
It’s a long time since a saw AUTUMN SONATA, but the mother/daughter versions of the Chopin prelude is something you don’t forget. If I remember correctly both versions are actually played by Bergman’s former wife Käbi Laretei.
D: I hope I’ll agree when I finally catch up with post‑8 1/2 Fellini.
Glenn, Kent, Farran, and all–Thank you for all this great reading.