The Demons of Modernity

Ingmar Bergman and European Cinema

John Orr

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857459794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Ingmar Bergman's films had a very broad and rich relationship with the rest of European cinema, contrary to the myth that Bergman was a peripheral figure, culturally and aesthetically isolated from the rest of Europe. This book contends that he should be put at the very center of European film history by chronologically comparing Bergman's relationship to key European directors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and also looks at Bergman's critical relationship to key movements in film history such as the French New Wave. In so doing, it demonstrates how Ingmar Bergman's films illustrate the demonic struggle in modernity between faith and secularity through "his intense preoccupation with the malaise of intimacy."

CHAPTER ONE
Ingmar Bergman
The Demons of Modernity

The death of Ingmar Bergman at the age of 89 in 2007 marked the end of an artist who defined the twentieth century as much as Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot or Brecht, yet who was also an artist about whose talents many critics are still ambivalent. And an artist too whose story is like no other. For not only did Bergman grow up, like many artists of his generation, during a deep crisis in European Christianity; he also grew up under the shadow of European fascism. And unlike many who turned as a result to the far Left, he made a choice at an impressionable age to run to the far Right, to embrace the monstrous apotheosis of what George Orwell later called ‘the boot in the face’. But he did so because he did not see it like that at all. What Bergman saw was the revolution of the new, idealism and salvation; not brutality and extermination. In later years his misjudgment came to haunt him and before we examine his founding role in the European film of the last century, we need to look at the context of these convulsions.

His memoir, The Magic Lantern, at times self-dramatizing, tells the story of his 1934 teenage stay in Southern Germany – an exchange visit to a Protestant clergy family living near Weimar. One day the family travelled to town where the sixteen year old saw for himself, at a mass rally addressed by Hitler, the enthusiasm that national socialism fired up in so many Germans. He presents himself as instantly sharing in that attraction, which entailed hero worship of the Leader (Bergman 1988:122–23). To the young reader of Nietzsche that he then was, this collective force would come to seem a new, exciting and delirious exoneration of the will to power. Back home this early admiration for the Nazi regime was shared by his stern clergyman father, Erik Bergman, and showed up even more strongly in the fanaticism of his older brother, Dag, who went on to promote the cause of national socialism in Swedish politics. National socialism was not only the Lost Cause of Bergman’s early life, but, after the fall of Berlin in 1945, the Extinct Cause, the Wrong Cause, the cause that ended all causes and prompted him into consciously ditching politics for good. At times he paid for it. In the 1960s his young film student Roy Andersson, Marxist and committed, lamented Bergman’s refusal to see politics as an integral part of cinema. In 1968 radical leftist students walked out of Bergman’s lectures at the Swedish Film Institute on, of all people, Eisenstein. Obsessed by Vietnam in that same era, critics and partisans refused to see the deep political implications of his war film Shame (1968). The irony was that, despite Bergman’s disclaimer and the verdict of his most vociferous critics, it was still possible to read politics into his films. Yet the readings would remain complex and oblique, the complete opposite, for example of Bo Widerberg’s 1969 film

dalen 31. Widerberg’s film was a committed eulogy to the Swedish labour movement of the early 1930s and to its struggles, which finally resulted in the triumph of a Social Democratic Party that would remain in power in Sweden for over three decades.

For Bergman, the knock-on effect of catastrophic politics and its traumas spilt into that other arena of belief that went much deeper: a faith in God so fundamental to his strict Lutheran upbringing. If faith was more profound than politics, it also, crucially, failed to outlast it to any great degree. For the young Bergman, German national socialism seemed not to contradict the Lutheran piety instilled by his pastor-father and to offer it hope of a new form of transcendence – an aggressive movement outward into collective delirium that would resolve the inner torments of faith. In this strange portfolio, a pagan national socialism acclaimed by German Protestants seemed to have been the burst of renewal that his tormented faith needed so badly. As this dubious politics imploded in 1945 – it proved after all to be a politics of death and destruction – his faith seemed destined to follow in sorry aftermath. For after the war, a double dilemma had arisen that could scarcely be resolved by any Christian believer (of which there were millions) linked to the banner of the swastika. How could the Cause in which he had believed, help to create the absolute terror of the Holocaust? And how could his Lutheran God have allowed it to happen?

Bergman publicly voiced his anguish as late as the mid 1970s in interviews with Jörn Donner and on Swedish television, claiming that in learning about the camps after 1945 it was ‘as if I had discovered that God and the Devil are two sides of the same coin’ (Elsaesser 2008:176). Here, the lingering doubt around Bergman is the lingering one about those who lose faith because of the world’s evil, in which they feel implicated. Ridden with guilt, does one lose faith in a God that exists, or does one lose faith in the existence of God? His 1963 film The Silence refers, in Bergman’s words, to ‘God’s silence’. But it does not refer to God’s nonexistence, or to Nietzsche’s notorious ‘death of God’. The issue, in a way, is never resolved. In Bergman the very act of filming seems increasingly at times to have been a tormented act of distancing himself from a diminished faith, in which, nonetheless, he remains entranced by occasional angels and tormented as ever by a multitude of demons. Yet, as he would be the first to admit, angels and demons in his visionary world were never too far from one another. In escaping from faith, then, he carried its torments with him. Its residues never quite evaporate: they linger in unsuspecting ways. As late as the 1970s, he had produced a detailed treatment at the request of Italian television for a Life of Jesus, to be shot in Bergman’s scenario on his favoured Swedish location, the remote Baltic island of Fårö – much too austere and Nordic, one suspects, for his Mediterranean backers who then went elsewhere.

Bergman’s third persona, beyond faith and politics, lay, of course, in that ‘secular’ alternative that absorbs the energies of both in the twentieth century – the innovations of modern art. In wartime, neutral (and hence unoccupied) Sweden he had left home after quarrelling with his father and become driven and bohemian, living frugally, writing plays and screenplays, starting to direct onstage and modelling himself on the famous predecessor to whom he owed so much: August Strindberg. When Bergman visited Paris in the postwar years and lived out briefly the attractions he found in Marcel Carné’s ‘poetic realism’, his bohemian adventure had a self-conscious precedent. Strindberg had done his time in Paris as a bohemian artist, but also as one who went mad and thought himself the world’s greatest scientist: an egocentric delusion that wafts through the pages of his Parisian memoir Inferno. Bergman may have had breakdowns in his workaholic life but he was never truly insane like his famous mentor. Yet he aspired to like greatness and he now means as much to world cinema as Strindberg had meant to world theatre by the end of his life. Bergman may not have gone mad but his cinematic visions of madness are at times controlled and terrifying statements of human extremity. From Strindberg he took much, and more so because he came to direct his mentor’s work so triumphantly onstage in Stockholm, giving flesh and blood to those key motifs that link the two so tightly in their artwork: the fractious woe that is marriage, the aesthetics of chamber intimacy, and the bold expansions of the dream journey in Strindberg’s later plays. Not only did he realize these motifs onstage in memorable productions for the Royal Dramatic Theatre, but he also transformed them into cinema, his cinema, where they became something quite different, extraordinary and unique.

Let us go back to Bergman’s Weimar visit. It also produced, he recalls, a brief antidote to infatuation with Nazi rallies – a visit in town to friends of his aunt, a Jewish family who played ‘decadent’ jazz and songs from the banned music of The Threepenny Opera on their gramophone. The Brecht/Weill lyrics moved the Swedish teenager in unexpected ways and he committed them to memory: the anti-Nazi family was, understandably, soon to emigrate (Bergman 1988:126–27). In the following years, the young devotee of Strindberg was loath perhaps to acknowledge the growing quandary this embryonic episode implies. The new politics he embraced with such enthusiasm had taken away from Germany the very liberties he still had in Sweden to pursue his love of innovation and modern art. In wartime he had a freedom to write for stage and screen not enjoyed by writers and directors elsewhere in Northern Europe. Norway, Finland and Denmark were, after all, occupied nations. As for Germany, a whole swathe of art forms had been decimated, including its newest form: the cinema. Billy Wilder whose Sunset Boulevard (1950) Bergman admired so much, and Fritz Lang to whom Bergman later paid homage in The Serpent’s Egg (1977), had both headed west to freer climes. Hence Bergman was strangely privileged and contradictory, much like those British and French writers of the 1930s who applauded Stalin from afar during the period of the Great Purges, and were prone to the same double standards. Yet the Nazi occupation of Europe made things more poignant and also, in Sweden, much stranger. Europe’s first true social democracy, which sided so strongly with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, became and remained neutral, probably with an eye to the fate of neighbouring Finland, which suffered the horror of a double invasion – first from the Soviets, which it repulsed, and then from the Nazis when it was brutally occupied. Thus Sweden, which might have been a sure-fire target, remained strangely excluded from Hitler’s tyranny (though not from his political pressure); and in the absence of an occupying army, Bergman’s career started to thrive.

Faith, politics, art – this was an exhausting agenda, and at times for Bergman a deadly triangle. Yet politics has been crucial for many great directors – Eisenstein, Welles, Godard and Fassbinder among them; faith has been embedded in the films of many others. One thinks immediately of Dreyer, Bresson, Hitchcock and Tarkovsky. Bergman was no different: and yet he was different. Those who embrace politics may alter over time but usually they have a continuous line of engagement. With him it cut his life in two. Those who engage faith so deeply never wholly reject it. Yet Bergman went very close. It is wrong to see the frightening God-spider of Karin’s vision in Through a Glass Darkly (1961) as Bergman’s personal nightmare fantasy, or as the opposite, the clinical sign of his final denial of a spent faith and its substitution by a self-conscious endorsement of profane art. He is, after all, exploring the terrors of a young woman’s schizophrenic mind with all the aesthetic distance that entails. And here all pure idealism in politics or religion, you feel, has been gutted of its powers by Bergman’s vision of a perfidious modernity. You sense that Bergman is filming the effects of volcanic eruption after the event, exploring in close detail the cratered earth, the void left behind, the void in which human compassion smoulders like the embers of a dying fire; and all the while demons continue to haunt him. Love in spite of hate, care in spite of cruelty. Is this modernity then, the afterlife of the demonic after God has vanished? Are these the final residues of modernity still haunted by evil? Are they stacked up as the barest props on an empty stage? Or do they too disappear in a world of isolation and invisible terror?

There is a balance of sorts to all this. Now and again Bergman finds a riposte and a welcome refuge in laughter. After the dark and drab postwar years, he applies the fast pace of Hollywood comedy to 1950s Sweden in Waiting Women (1952) and A Lesson in Love (1954) where the sensibility is close to that of the great German émigrés Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Later he goes back to the decade just preceding his own birth – one thinks of the delicate memory-scenes in Wild Strawberries (1957), or the sprawling tableaux of Fanny and Alexander (1982) that incorporated elements of his own childhood. Here the figure of the young Alexander reminds us of that childish immunity to the deadly triangle of Bergman’s adult life and its agonizing choices. Immune to the weary cares of art, faith and politics, Alexander can retreat into a world of pure magic, of coloured slides and puppet shows, goblins and fairies that exist in the shadow play of the everyday world and precede the magic world of the moving image. It is a kind of innocence trembling on the verge of experience, but still serenely immune. For Bergman there is always a fallback position too, beyond the failure of hope in the art of performing, so that his motley entertainment troupes in Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and The Face (1958) can elicit a fair share of our ribald laughter and echo our sense of hope in human buoyancy and invention. Through laughter too, Bergman often sought affirmation of life in a past age. As a consequence his turn-of-century Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), which so influenced Woody Allen, remains one of his most uplifting comedies because it works as an observed period piece where life and laughter finally triumph over doubt and darkness. Even in his two most sombre decades, the 1960s and the 1970s, there are flashes of farce, with mixed results. In 1960 the Don Juan parody of The Devil’s Eye would precede the darkness of Through a Glass Darkly and, in 1964, the forbidding bleakness of The Silence (1963) is followed by the whimsical All these Women, for many critics a piece of fluff despite its comic touches and sharp self-mockery. And in 1975, after the intense, sombre intimacies of Cries and Whispers (1972) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Bergman filmed his flowing and lyrical tribute to Mozart’s The Magic Flute which many rate as one of his finest achievements.

By the end of the 1950s, the tone and direction of his filming had, however, changed. From Through a Glass Darkly right through to Autumn Sonata (1978), it is mainly the contemporary world – bourgeois and prosperous but full of risk and sorrow and steeped in the climate of the Cold War – that brings forth the most tragic and disturbing of his films. Here Bergman’s political nightmare does not really go away but abruptly changes course, and during these two decades pervades his cinematic vision. The Cold War had become a form of cool apocalypse, a menacing and ever-present backdrop, while Swedish social democracy seemed the epitome of a concerned, caring society whose professionalism could not finally deliver happiness, even among its own professionals. Here the purveyors of care are of course as much the victims of sorrow and desolation in Bergman’s cinema as their disturbed clients. One thinks of Jenny Isaakson (Liv Ullmann) the psychiatrist suffering total breakdown in the claustrophobic Face to Face (1976). But his professionals can also be sinister and malevolent: discursive Dr Caligaris in a post-expressionist world. And while Bergman’s bourgeois characters of this period may be rational autonomous beings, now surrounded by the good things of life, they are still strangled by the conflict between their polyvalent needs and the imprecise obligations of their faltering intimacies. And strangled means asphyxiated. Metaphorically speaking, all breath seems to expel itself from their bodies. It is not only marriage that can suffocate – Bergman’s legacy from Strindberg – in these films it is intimacy as such, where in any relationship each troubled subject can in turn be perpetrator and victim, tormentor and tormented. At times, in Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata, this becomes a living hell. Here Swedish social democracy as an Enlightenment project seems a world away, refracted at best as a mixed blessing. At best the mockery is tongue in cheek. At worst it seems that Bergman sees its rational malaise as deeply rooted in the curse of modernity. For modernity’s varied rationales and technologies are real, irresistible temptations: they give you open access to knowledge and material progress, which, in spite of everything, you really do want. But from this the question of human happiness is abruptly severed and promptly subtracted. Bergman stands on the threshold of the new consumer age, which is destructive of all value. Prophetically he saw it as a wager in which few gain and most stand to lose.

The other feature of Bergman’s ambivalence towards the modern is the life of the city. In the films after 1955 the Swedish city is largely conspicuous by its absence. Not consciously so, but there is a gradual leaving, a departure and a not coming back. During his early films, the city – Malmö, Gothenburg, Stockholm – was a constant factor in his narratives: detailed and heavily stylized by studio interiors, at worst a Nordic pastiche of Carné’s poetic realism, the French idiom that became one of Bergman’s early loves in the cinema. In his hands, sadly, the poetry often evaporated. Working with tight budgets, mise en scène could be drab, dreary and leaden. There were scintillating exceptions – the Paris in the middle episode of Waiting Women or the Gothenburg of Dreams (1955). But often his city exteriors seemed functional, unadventurous, a tendency echoed many years later in his Stockholm-based television film shot on 16 mm, Scenes from a Marriage. In Bergman there is nothing resembling the southern architectural visions of Fellini or Antonioni, or the natural city curiosity that powered the French New Wave through their inspired explorations of 1960s Paris. For all the time Bergman spent in it as a stage director, Stockholm is nowhere much in his cinema as a living presence. He himself complained that it was unnaturally placed in the country, too northern, too bleak, and like an elaborate extended village surrounded by water and by forests.

With the early films, the spectator almost craves for a topographical escape, and early on this was something that Bergman increasingly found in Stockholm’s summer archipelago. Brief sequences in To Joy (1950) and Three Strange Loves (1949) escalate into long triumphant passages among the islands in Summer Interlude (1951) and Summer with Monika (1953). Both films, the latter with its impulsive performance from Harriet Andersson, then became, as we shall see, the model for adventure and free spirit among the French New Wave. At one level Bergman created virtue (or art) out of necessity. Stage directing for three seasons allowed him the fourth, summer, for shooting feature films. And where is better than on the islands, to make use of natural light, of northern light, of midsummer light? Even though, as he insisted, Nordic summer light could have the quality of nightmare, and, for Isak Borg’s celebrated coffin-dream in Wild Strawberries, most certainly does. Yet Summer Interlude, released in 1951, remains Bergman’s purest and most romantic archipelago film. It starts with the recovery by Marie, a thirty-year-old ballerina, of a notebook belonging to her first lover Henrik during her distant teenage years. Koskinen has noted that the Henrik notebook that triggers Marie’s memories of her island romance had a reflexive source in Bergman’s rediscovery of a missing notebook containing the fictionalized story of his teenage love affair before the war (with a girl who then contracted polio) on which his island screenplay, co-written by Herbert Grevenius, is roughly based (Koskinen 2002:23). The film had been planned during Bergman’s early postwar years as a flashback film about the pre-war period, but took several years to reach fruition. When it came, it was a triumphant breakthrough out of his postwar blues, a film about an idyllic pre-war age that was now over; a film that would briefly reinstate enchantment over disenchantment, love over cynicism and innocence over experience, without ever toppling the balance between them. For the film contains both, though succinctly unstated: the age of innocence before September 1939 and the age of experience after May 1945. Translated into the chronology of Bergman’s career, they form the brief moment of romanticism, followed by the long period of modernism.

In the new chamber intimacies of his modernist period from 1960 onwards, the island setting continues as the archipelago is replaced by Fårö and the Swedish city is eliminated almost entirely. That is why his great American admirer, Woody Allen, is so unlike the Swede. Much of Allen’s work is set in that one central borough of New York City: Manhattan. Where Allen lived, he filmed. The same had been true for Bergman, but with a difference. In 1960 with Through a Glass Darkly he came to film where he later built his home, on the remote Baltic island of Fårö, a militarized farming island north-west of Gotland; and in Stockholm hardly at all. Indeed, when he chose to make his most conventional, bourgeois and Americanized feature, The Touch with Elliot Gould in 1971, he set it in the town of Visby on Gotland, not on the mainland. When he returned to Stockholm as a location, it was in Scenes from a Marriage – a television film that was mainly interior and where residential areas of the city are shot without inspiration. Yet in a way it detracts not. For often Bergman abstracts and isolates his characters from their urban habitat, or entraps them so much within its interior spaces that we begin to question, through their lives, the nature of modernity itself. These are bourgeois lives in comfortable homes, yet bereft of cityscape, surrounded instead by landscape and seascape that is often barren and pitiless. There are no suburbs either. As such, ‘transplanted’, his subjects appear vulnerable and exposed.

Transplanting Equals Abstracting: Bergman’s Transition to Modernism

The transplanted ensemble, the micro-group, the dyad or triad often linked by family and marriage, are freed from the detail of normal surr...