Klein, Sartre and Imagination in the Films of Ingmar Bergman

Dan Williams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137471970
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137471987
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book explores connections between the diverse ideas of Melanie Klein, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ingmar Bergman. These ideas are explored in relation to their shared focus on imagination and through detailed readings of a number of Bergman's key films.

1

The Imagination: Bergman, Klein and Sartre

And every picture – every one of my pictures are dreams.

– Ingmar Bergman¹

In Fanny and Alexander (1982–1983), Helena Ekdahl reacts with dismay to her daughter-in-law’s suggestion that they should both act in August Strindberg’s A Dream Play:

Emilie Ekdahl: I’d like you to read a new play by August Strindberg.

Helena Ekdahl: That nasty misogynist!

Here, Ingmar Bergman distances himself from Strindberg, one of his great inspirations. Helena’s statement retains its force as a warning from Bergman that Strindberg was flawed in his attitude towards women. Yet, moments later, as Fanny and Alexander concludes, Helena reads to her son the following lines:

Everything can happen. Everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On a flimsy framework of reality the imagination spins and weaves new patterns. (August Strindberg)²

The final words demonstrate that Bergman extracted core ideas from Strindberg without slavishly following his representation of gender. The final lines are significant, not just as a conclusion to this film but as an expression of Bergman’s belief in the ultimate value of imagination throughout his work.

In Fanny and Alexander imagination is a unique and powerful force. Intermittently verisimilitude is punctured by Alexander’s visions of his dead father as a ghost. When Isak rescues the children from the bishop, an apparently magical agency is introduced, which allows the children to be momentarily in two places at the same time, and this agency develops as Alexander meets the mysterious Ishmael. This magical agency may or may not have a metaphysical cause, but appears to be directly related to Alexander’s capacity for seeing beyond the immediately perceptible world. Thus, Fanny and Alexander demonstrates how imagination is not only an abiding concept for Bergman but also how he can utilise this as a structural element with his narratives. Then, near the end, with the reappearance of the bishop, his stepfather, the imagination is presented as a haunting power, a disturbing image that reveals Bergman’s complex approach to the imagination.

Researching this book, I set out to explore Bergman’s belief in the power of imagination, asking initially whether he holds a belief akin to the sentiment of the Strindberg quotation in Fanny and Alexander. Although Strindberg is a key influence, it became clear to me that Bergman’s work and ideas suggest a wide range of possible interpretations. Although the library of Bergman appreciation, research and criticism already revolves around the power of his imagination as an auteur, exploration of Bergman’s ideas on imagination, in relation to other artists and thinkers, emerged as a subject for further investigation. As a consequence, I am concerned not only to explore Bergman’s ideas in relation to philosophy and psychoanalytic theory but also to focus more specifically on the way his films include elements that put particular stress on the process of imagining. The close analysis of films in this book, will attend to the structural significance of sections that represent metaphysics, dreams, nightmares and visions. It will also mean considering the way cinematic language and narrative orchestration are used at other points to signify a world beyond, which is not transparently observable to all the characters of the diegesis even though it may be accessed by an individual character such as Alexander. A good example of mise-en-scène used to this effect is the appearance of death as a figure for the knight in The Seventh Seal (1956).

Figure 1.1 Fanny and Alexander, Cinematograph/Svenska Filminstitutet/Sveriges Television 1/Sandrews/Gaumont/Personafilm/Tobis Film, Palisades Tartan Video. At the end of the film, Alexander is still gripped by his imagination.

Also central to Bergman’s focus on imagination is the creative use of off-screen elements, which cannot be directly observed by character or viewer, ranging from creative use of off-screen cues to more infamous examples such as the miracle at the end of The Virgin Spring (1960). This episode, discussed as part of Chapter 5, may signify imagination or a metaphysical intervention by God, an ambiguity to which I will return. Bergman’s need to step beyond a reality strictly dependent on observation must also recognise the significance of memory, a mental faculty that is closely associated and can overlap with imagination. Thus, I include flashbacks alongside other elements that divert us from a linear narrative anchored in observation of the present. This is particularly apparent in, for instance, Bergman’s use of a form of imaginative flashback in Wild Strawberries (1957), in which the main character enters his own memory as an observer. Simple cause and effect linear narratives are significantly diverted or interrupted at key moments in Bergman’s work, thus signifying his focus on the imagination. Because he also maintains narrative fluency, these disruptions appear less experimental than avant-garde film-making, but the appeal to imagination is very pervasive, ranging from flashbacks that represent character reflections to the way off-screen space is used to make the audience think beyond that which is immediately given.

The attention to sequences or elements foregrounding imagination will be tied in with a wider enquiry. A scholar who has already written about imagination in Bergman’s work in relation to a broader context is Marilyn Johns Blackwell, who focuses in the final chapter of her book, on a number of sequences from films, including Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, which represent characters’ imagining. In an inspiring and instructive way, Johns Blackwell considers how these sequences contribute to the representation of gender.³ For my analysis, it is equally important to recognise how Bergman relates sequences concerned with his characters’ imagining to the rest of the narrative in which they are situated. It is necessary to investigate Bergman’s approach to imagination at the level of meaning because it is often figured as a significant value in his work. That is not to say imagination is automatically seen as beneficent. After all, the figure of death in The Seventh Seal, and the final appearance of the bishop in Fanny and Alexander introduce Manichean division into the imaginary realm. Like the miracle in The Virgin Spring, these phenomena appear to be ambiguously placed on the borderline of metaphysics and imagination, carrying connotations of a power beyond human agency. However, I want to explore the idea that for Bergman the imagination does ultimately carry potential for redemption in humanist terms. Here we enter the debates about Bergman as a philosophical director and his relationship to religion. While there is an enormous range of intellectuals and artists who champion the power of the imagination, this book focuses on a specific comparison between Bergman and the work of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who are both humanistic thinkers. The comparison of Bergman’s films with ideas from these thinkers is intended as an exploratory association and an original contribution to understanding how film theory can approach his work, 68 years after his film career was launched with the script of Frenzy (1944).

In 1985, subsequent to completion of Fanny and Alexander, Bergman declared that this was his last film.⁴ The retrospective decision to conclude his career with a film partly inspired by his own childhood testifies to Bergman’s understanding of himself as a director dealing with personal material. By this stage in his career the discipline of film studies had fully emerged in higher education. The evolution of the subject involved enormous appreciation of the work of directors due partly to the publication of Cahiers du Cinéma, a significant agent in the development of Bergman’s international reputation. However, the development of film studies as an academic discipline also gave rise to a reaction against the auteur theory through the emergence of semiotics, structuralism and post-structuralism, as theories applied to cinema. The questioning of authorship itself was already apparent in the 1960s, and coincided with a relative decline in Bergman’s reputation as a groundbreaking director. And yet, critical work on Bergman has rarely strayed away from an emphasis on his authorship. Indeed, as Bergman made various returns to film-making after his self-declared retirement, including Saraband (2003), authorship had recovered some of its credibility in the discipline, and this is reflected in more recent work on Bergman. For example, the collection of essays Ingmar Bergman Revisited, published in 2008, introduced many new ideas into Bergman research, but did not seek to challenge the very concept of authorship. Instead, this was deployed in a wide-ranging and discursive fashion across the essays.⁵

In this introductory chapter I am concerned to set out general points that provide the context for specific analyses of Klein, Sartre and individual Bergman films. I will begin by showing how three auteurist responses to Bergman’s work, from the 1950s onwards, challenge a view of Bergman restricted to a thematic world view full of angst and metaphysics. Instead, we find that critics as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Cowie and Thomas Elsaesser move beyond this stereotype to highlight Bergman’s cinematic qualities, and indicate an interest in relating his films to a broader context. This context varies, including references to other film-makers, culture in general, philosophy and psychology. These responses are admittedly not indicative of research on Bergman’s relationship to Swedish and Scandinavian culture, but do give an indication of the way Bergman relates to a more generalised European intellectual context. Following consideration of points from these critics, I will provide an introductory overview of the careers of Klein, Sartre and Bergman to convey the correspondences and differences between them. After giving overviews of their work I will sketch in a political and intellectual context that suggests a degree of convergence in their ideas about society and culture, which I describe as ‘humanistic’. I will go on to consider how the work of Jacques Lacan, in particular, but also structuralism and post-structuralism, in general, involved a strong turn away from the humanistic philosophy of imagination found across the work of Klein, Sartre and Bergman. In order to sharpen this contrast I will briefly resume the work of two critics of ‘the structuralist turn’, Arthur Marwick, and José Guilherme Merquior.

In Chapter 2 I will concentrate on the development of Klein’s ideas, with some further application to a Bergman work that has been considered of great interest for psychoanalysis and psychology: Wild Strawberries. The following chapter will concentrate on Sartre and conclude with analysis of a Bergman film that shows a strong awareness of the tension between the individual and external reality: The Seventh Seal. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are devoted to extended analysis of three Bergman films. The aim here is to explore the relevance of Kleinian and Sartrean ideas whilst focusing more intensively on film style and narrative form.

Culture, existentialism and psychoanalysis in Bergman criticism

Bergman criticism has rarely focused extensively on social and political factors, but a need to relate his work to ideas of culture, history, psychology and philosophy is frequently apparent. No one, to my knowledge, has explored more than a passing affinity between Bergman’s and Klein’s work. Nevertheless, there is a significant history of psychoanalytical responses to Bergman’s work including elements in Robin Wood’s book in 1969, a key auteurist reading of the director’s films, and Frank Gado’s Freudian study of the director’s entire filmic output.⁶ Existentialism, like psychoanalysis, figures frequently as a reference in Bergman’s reception, but sustained book-length application of this theory is relatively uncommon. Examples of the discussion of existentialist ideas in relation to Bergman include Birgitta Steene’s analysis of The Seventh Seal, and Jesse Kalin’s argument for the significance of Martin Heidegger (as opposed to Sartre) in understanding selected Bergman films.⁷ Passing references to Sartre can be found across writing about Bergman, including, for instance, his interviews, but this is frequently a shorthand for evoking an idea of Bergman’s world view rather than a sustained analysis of the applicability of Sartre’s ideas. Nevertheless, the concern to reference society and culture found in the work of critics and theorists focused on Bergman’s authorship suggests the potential for further analysis of cultural influences, including existentialism and psychoanalysis. Three examples, the criticism of Godard, Cowie and Elsaesser, suggest the potential of placi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Imagination: Bergman, Klein and Sartre
• 2  From Freud to Klein, and Wild Strawberries
• 3  Sartre’s Theory of Imagination and The Seventh Seal
• 4  From Three Early Bergman Films to an Analysis of Summer with Monika
• 5  Revenge and Reparation in The Virgin Spring
• 6  The Destruction of the Artist: Hour of the Wolf
• 7  Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index