Long Pauses

Tag: Director: Bergman

  • Five Spiritually Significant Films

    Five Spiritually Significant Films

    The fine folks at the Arts and Faith discussion forum have cast their votes, crunched the numbers, and released their second annual list of the Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films. I’ve been an on-again, off-again participant at the forum for several years now and was excited to check my virtual ballot. The results, I have to say, are pretty darned impressive.

    I’m especially glad that the main criterion was left intentionally vague. In the weeks leading up to the votes, there was some debate over the precise meaning of “spiritually significant,” but the only consensus reached was that there was little chance of us reaching any kind of consensus, and that that was probably for the best. It brings me great satisfaction (and even a bit of hope) to know that a group consisting largely of American evangelical Christians would include The Gospel According the Matthew, Ikiru, Stalker, and Sunrise among the Top 20.

    In honor of their fine work, I offer my own obvious and predictable Top 5 list:

    My Top Five Spiritually Significant Films

    5. Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman, 1961) — A few years ago I would have gone with the more obvious choice, Winter Light, but Through a Glass Darkly, I think, is the most potent and concentrated expression of Bergman’s agnostic horror. I still think the final scene is a bit out of tune with the rest of the film, but David’s speech to Minus isn’t what we remember, right? It’s Karin’s final lines and that image of her putting on her sunglasses. Devastating.

    4. The Son (The Dardennes, 2002) — I’ve been told that Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne are more interested in the Old Testament than the New. The Son is like a story from Genesis, like Abraham and Isaac. It makes all of those Christian catchwords like “grace” and “vengeance” and “Father” suddenly as strange and ambiguous as the world I live in.

    3. Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson, 1951) — Again, a few years ago I probably would have gone with Au Hasard Balthazar (and I might change my mind tomorrow), but for now the story of this well-intentioned priest is, for me, the more “spiritually significant” of the two. It’s the final scenes that get me. Every time.

    2. Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1969) — Any of Tarkovsky’s film would fit comfortably in this spot, but I chose Rublev because it is actually about an Orthodox icon painter, and what most moves me in his films is their icon-like mysticism. At the end of the day, Tarkovsky’s film are about artistic creation, but the truecreative act here is always committed in a spirit of idealized surrender and sacrifice.

    1. Ordet (Dreyer, 1955) — I’m a Christian by faith, not just by name or birth or culture, and faith is utterly irrational. I can’t recall at the moment who said it, but I agree that “Ordet is the only filmed miracle.”

  • Random Musings . . .

    Random Musings . . .

    On some recent viewings . . .

    Shame (Bergman, 1968) — Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow star as Eva and Jan Rosenberg, cultured musicians who escape to a rural island when their orchestra is shut down during a war. Their new, more simple life as farmers is soon interrupted when their home is invaded, and they are forced to confront the violence that they had so meticulously avoided. Shame is typically described as a psychological portrait of the dehumanizing consequences of war. The splintering of Eva and Jan’s relationship, then, becomes representative of savage self-interest and alienation, and the interruption of their careers (captured most obviously in an image of Jan’s broken violin) serves as a metaphor for war’s denial of Art, beauty, and culture.

    Shame is my least favorite of the Bergman films I’ve seen. By setting the action amid some unspecific, fairy tale-like war, Bergman (who obviously knows a thing or two about the proper uses of symbolism) invests too much “Meaning” in his characters and in their actions. Shame is an Allegory with a capital A, trapped uncomfortably somewhere between absurd, dystopian satire and the real here and now. I think I would have preferred the film had it jumped completely to one of those extremes. As with all collaborations between Bergman, Ullman, von Sydow, and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Shame is packed with remarkable performances and jaw-dropping photography, and it’s well worth seeing for those reasons alone. I was only disappointed because it fails to reach Bergman’s own ridiculously high bar.

    I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (Zahedi, 1994) — Zahedi, his father and half-brother, and a small film crew spend Christmas in Vegas, where Zahedi hopes, among other things, to heal his familial relationships and to prove the existence of God. With this film alone as evidence, I would say that he accomplishes neither, but the attempt is fascinating to watch. Caveh is a polarizing figure, to be sure, and Las Vegas shows him at his most obnoxious and manipulative, particularly during an extended sequence in which he attempts to talk his 62-year-old father and 16-year-old brother into taking Ecstasy. I’m still not sure whether or not he succeeded.

    To me, the appeal of Caveh Zahedi is his willingness to emote unapologetically, to subject those emotions to close scrutiny, and to do so all under the watchful eye of a camera in which he places an almost naive faith. In his more recent film, In the Bathtub of the World (2001), and in this interview with Film Threat, Caveh talks about his disappointment with an experience (reading a great book, attending a film festival) that failed to be “salvational,” and I think that word is the key to his project. There’s something beautiful about watching someone search so desperately for that salvational experience, particularly in a mostly Christian nation like America, where we are so comfortable with the language of grace and forgiveness. Caveh’s films remind me of a concept that I seem to come back to again and again: negative transcendence — “God appears only as the Absent One, as that which is signified only by the depth of the artfully expressed yearning.”

    Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995) and Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004) — I had planned to write up a full-length response to these films, which, when taken together, are something of a minor miracle. Sunset is my favorite film of the year so far. Told in real time, it captures an eighty minute conversation between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), a couple who spent “one magical night together in Vienna” nine years earlier, then never spoke again. When they finally reunite in Paris, they are older (their early-30s) and somewhat hardened by experience, and their reunion unravels the comfortable lies upon which their lives are founded. I can’t seem to write or talk about this film without rambling on about my wife, about how we met ten years ago, and about how our ideas of love and romance have evolved since, which is why I’m cutting this short. I’ll just say that Before Sunset is a remarkably well-crafted film that ends at precisely the right moment and that treats its characters and its audience with great tenderness and respect. Like I said: a minor miracle.

    The School of Rock (Linklater, 2003) — A film that doesn’t for a minute divert from its by-the-numbers plot but that is a hell of a lot of fun to watch anyway. In other words, I laughed when Jack Black tried to be funny and I got goose bumps when the band played their big show. Plus, any film that mentions Rick Wakeman’s keyboard solo in “Roundabout” get bonus points. The School of Rock‘s biggest surprise: Who knew Joan Cusack was so hot?

  • Hour of the Wolf (1968)

    Hour of the Wolf (1968)

    Hour of the Wolf is Ingmar Bergman’s vampire film. Let me repeat that: Hour of the Wolf (1968) is Ingmar Bergman’s vampire film. I had no idea. Watching it for the first time on Saturday was one of those revelatory experiences in which my preconceptions were proven so utterly wrong that, midway through the film, I had to stop (not literally), gather my thoughts, and (I never thought I’d use this cliche to describe Bergman) enjoy the ride.

    In many ways, Hour of the Wolf is the culmination of Bergman’s progression from the existential nightmare of Through a Glass Darkly to the absurdist imagery of The Silence and the self-conscious conceit of Persona. The story of a husband (Max von Sydow) and wife (Liv Ullman) driven to insanity amid the isolated landscape of Faro island, Hour of the Wolf is like a 90-minute version of the dream sequence in Wild Strawberries — a slow montage of ridiculously disconcerting imagery that is at once terrifying and beautiful. (Sven Nykvist did things with a camera that no one will ever match.) The “ghosts” who haunt the film are so frightening because they barely resemble ghosts at all. They simultaneously embody bourgeois banality and the sublime nothingness that, in Bergman’s formulation, will inevitably follow. Two parts 8 1/2-era Fellini, one part “Uncanny”-era Freud.

    Like Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), I would call Hour of the Wolf one of the director’s lesser films — a rare instance in which Bergman’s style trumps his substance to just too great a degree. But I have a tendency to too easily dismiss works from the horror and gothic genres. I’m surprised, actually, that I was able to see this film without having ever read a bit about it. It’s just stunning to look at. Three days later, and I still can’t push some of its images from my mind.

  • Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

    Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

    Dir. by Ingmar Bergman

    Images: As in most of Bergman’s b&w films, the interplay of darkness and light is a critical motif here, as seen most obviously in the images of Karin’s outstretched arms in the hull of the shipwreck and in her decision to wear sunglasses near the end of the film. The light motif is also realized in Bergman’s frequent shots of windows that open onto a distant horizon across the sea. My favorite instance comes after a bedroom exchange between Karin and Martin, when she turns her back to him, and the camera pans slowly to the right, fixing its gaze on the setting sun. The film is also notable for its strangely erotic subtext, created by a number of shots, among them: David’s hand on Karin’s shoulder as she drifts off to sleep; the stationary, low-angle shots of Karin alone in the wallpapered room; and, of course, the charged encounters between Karin and Minus.

    • • •

    The first of Bergman’s chamber dramas, Through a Glass Darkly concerns a family vacationing on the Baltic island of Fårö, where their alienation from one another is mirrored in the bleak landscape that surrounds them. The patriarch, David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), is a widower and best-selling novelist, whose life is marked solely by professional ambition and emotional detachment. His daughter, Karin (Harriet Andersson), is a schizophrenic plagued by rapturous voices that promise the imminent return of God. She is tended by her husband, Martin (Max Von Sydow), and by her younger brother, Minus (Lars Passgard), neither of whom is capable of offering her lasting comfort. Not surprisingly, Bergman constructs the film so as to allow his players to ruminate on his chief, career-long concerns: the struggle with inspiration in the life of an artist, the silence of God, and the potential redemption afforded by human love.

    To begin at the end . . .

    In the film’s final scene, David stands with his son before an open window, their faces mostly lost in shadow. Shaken by his sister’s most recent collapse and her subsequent evacuation by helicopter, Minus laments his loss of faith in God and man. The world has suddenly become torn open for the teenager, exposing its existential horror, and he can no longer imagine his place in it. “Give me a proof of God,” he begs of his father. David responds:

    I can only give you an indication of my own hope. It’s knowing that love exists for real in the human world. . . . The highest and lowest, the most ridiculous and the most sublime. All kinds. . . . I don’t know whether love is proof of God’s existence, or if love is God. . . . Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance, and hopelessness into life. It’s like a reprieve, Minus, from a sentence of death.

    If we are to think of Through a Glass Darkly in musical terms, as Bergman encourages us to do, then David’s speech is a coda that resolves on a picardy third — that often surprising, but seldom satisfying moment when a piece in a minor key ends on a major chord. It’s one of only a very few instances in Bergman’s films that rings hollow to me. It feels, in fact, like a near desperate attempt to mask over the more honestly realized anguish and suffering that characterize the eighty minutes preceding. That the director was able to more satisfactorily resolve the problem a decade later in Cries and Whispers is perhaps evidence that here his ideas are still gestating, not yet fully formed.

    What Bergman does get absolutely right in Through a Glass Darkly, though, is the very real horror of the existential crisis, the moment when Camus’s Sisyphus pauses, watching his stone roll once again down the mountain. In the penultimate sequence, Karin returns to the upstairs bedroom where, throughout the film, we have watched her communicate with the imagined harbingers of God’s return. Perhaps inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, Karin’s delusional conversations are mediated by the room’s tattered wallpaper and are charged (as is much of the film) with a discomforting eroticism. When David and Martin discover her, Karin is ecstatic, her glazed eyes fixed on the door through which God will soon appear. In a beautifully rendered scene, she falls to her knees and asks her stoic husband to join her. Von Sydow’s remarkable face is a conflicted mess of sorrow and love and humiliation and desire. But he kneels beside her, impotent in his attempts to calm her as she waits.

    What follows is one of film’s most terrifying moments: God’s arrival in the form of the ambulatory helicopter, greeted by a grotesque dance of fits and shrieks from Karin. She throws her body into a corner, howling in agony and recoiling at the advances of her family, who look on, hopeless. If the finale of Carl Dreyer’s Ordet is a cinematic document of genuine Christian faith, then Karin’s rapture is its funhouse mirror reflection: a hopeless portrait of abject nihilism. Once calmed and quieted, Karin describes what she saw:

    The door opened, but the god was a spider. He came up to me and I saw his face. It was a terrible, stony face. He scrambled up and tried to penetrate me, but I defended myself. All along I saw his eyes. They were cold and calm. When he couldn’t penetrate me, he continued up my chest, up into my face and onto the wall. I have seen God.

    Camus demands that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” — that in his very recognition of life’s absurdity Sisyphus has made a heroic gesture toward freedom — but Bergman, except in the aforementioned coda, refuses to offer even that promise. Karin puts on her sunglasses, shutting out the light that she has quite literally and so desperately sought throughout the film, and willingly surrenders herself to the medics. Despite David’s closing words, and the apparent reconciliation with Minus that they engender, I experience little catharsis from the film, knowing that Karin’s surrender is complete and, ultimately, fatal.

    Strangely, it’s Karin’s plight, and that of so many like her in Bergman’s films, that draws me again and again to his work. There is, in that dramatization of the existential crisis, something of what Christian aesthetician Frank Burch Brown calls “negative transcendence”: “God appears only as the Absent One, as that which is signified only by the depth of the artfully expressed yearning.” I’ve become quite fond of that concept, applying it repeatedly to Bergman and sharing it often with friends who are struggling to make sense of their admiration for supposedly Godless films like Magnolia. In Through a Glass Darkly, I think, Bergman stages that crisis more brutally than anywhere in his canon, and the film is better for it.

  • Cries and Whispers (1972)

    Cries and Whispers (1972)

    Dir. by Ingmar Bergman

    Images: Striking contrast between lush, sun-drenched exteriors and the claustrophobic interior of the manor. Bergman has said that red represents, for him, the color of the soul, which he puts to extensive use here, most memorably in the film’s constant fades-to-red (rather than black) and in the side-lit close-ups that mark the beginning and end of each “dream” sequence. Favorite images: Anna holding Agnes in the pieta; Agnes gasping for breath; Karin recoiling at Marie’s touch; Agnes swinging in the final scene.

    • • •

    Cries and Whispers is built from the simplest of premises: two wealthy women, both trapped in loveless marriages, return home to the family estate to comfort their dying sister. Agnes (Harriet Andersson), a beautiful artist in early middle-age, is ravaged by a cancer that sends her into fits of agony. For Bergman, the approach of death is a terror. His camera lingers uncomfortably on Agnes, forcing us to watch her body convulse and her lungs gasp for breath. In the final throes of excruciating pain, she screams out for comfort: “Can’t anyone! Can’t anyone help me?”

    She receives little solace, though, from her sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Marie (Liv Ullman). Both characters are archetypal: the former is cold, distant, and intellectual; the latter childlike, irresponsible, and sensual. Neither is capable of the empathy and selflessness necessary to truly comfort their sister or to find earthly salvation in Bergman’s world. The director establishes their personalities visually in early shots. When we first see Marie, she is asleep in her childhood bed, her face framed by the dolls of her youth. She is an adult in arrested development — a slave to her spontaneous desires, incapable of (and uninterested in) offering herself wholly to another. In her “dream” sequence — the first of three in the film — we see Marie seducing the family doctor (Erland Josephson), a betrayal that leads her husband to attempt suicide. The psychological significance of the act is obvious: too self-absorbed to consider the consequences of her behavior, Marie has destroyed any possibility of discovering meaningful human contact and has only hurt those closest to her in the process.

    When we first see Karin alone, she is sitting rigidly at a table, examining financial records. She seems to have also abandoned the quest for love or connection in her life, focusing her energies, instead, on the pursuit of superficial success. Her marriage to a vindictive ambassador has traumatized Karin in unspoken ways. In her dream we see her performing the loathsome rituals of their marriage: the two sit down to dinner, where she (and we) are subjected to the annoying tedium of his bites and swallows. When the two retire to bed, she takes drastic measures in order to escape the inevitable. In a brutally graphic scene, Karin inserts a shard of glass into her vagina, then rubs the blood on her face. Again, by treating the marriage and Karin’s past in a dream, Bergman is allowed a vocabulary of archetypal and psychological imagery. Marriage, “love,” and sex — or at least the rigid, institutionalized versions of them — seem to bring fallen man only greater pain and isolation.

    Organized religion, as personified by the bishop who administers last rites, is utterly irrelevant. After we have witnessed Agnes’s brutal struggle with death, the bishop’s familiar words sound inhuman: “God, our Father, in His infinite wisdom, has called you home to Him still in the bloom of your youth. In your life He found you worthy of bearing a long and tortuous agony.” He is not far-removed from Tomas, the minister whose crisis of faith is portrayed in Bergman’s Winter Light. Like Tomas, he is tormented by his own human doubts in the presence of his more faithful parishioners. As he addresses the family, he becomes deeply moved, not by the loss of his friend, but by the meaninglessness of it all. “Pray for us who have been left behind on this miserable earth,” he begs of Agnes. “Plead with Him that He may make sense and meaning of our lives.” Then, turning to Marie and Karin: “Her faith was stronger than mine.”

    Only the fourth woman in Bergman’s drama, the servant Anna (Kari Sylwan), is able to genuinely comfort Agnes. Their relationship is represented visually in what is perhaps the film’s most memorable image. When Agnes calls out to Anna in the middle of the night, shaking from cold, Anna comes to her, then lifts the dying woman’s head and places it on her bare breasts. The image returns in Anna’s dream, now filmed in a long shot, making Bergman’s allusion to the pieta unmistakable. It’s interesting to me that Bergman, the atheist, returns to Christian imagery for this most important moment of human contact. Perhaps it can be explained away as Anna’s fantasy — the fulfillment of her motherly duties after her child’s death — but, regardless, the image resonates beautifully.

    After Agnes’s death, the two remaining sisters discover a need for human contact. Marie comes to Karin and asks her why they never speak, why two people who have shared so many memories are so distant from one another. It’s a complicated scene. Karin is, at first, almost violently resistant to Marie’s approaches. “No. Don’t come near me. Don’t touch me,” she demands. “I don’t want you to be kind to me.” But her defenses slowly erode, as Marie caresses Karin’s face.The two collapse on a bench, sharing themselves for the first time since childhood. The reconciliation, however, is short lived. When they part company at the end of the film, Marie turns cold toward her sister, reproaching her for her sentimentality and returning to the comfortable routine of her life.

    Despite the devastating farewell between Karin and Marie and the total failure of the church to bring solace, Cries and Whispers does have a happy ending, or at least by Bergman’s standards. In the coda, we watch and listen as Anna takes Agnes’s diary delicately from a drawer, unwraps it, and begins to read. The entry initiates a flashback to a beautiful day when the three sisters and Anna gathered together in high spirits, enjoying each other’s company on an outdoor swing. As Bergman’s camera tracks forward into a close-up of Agnes’s lovely face, we hear the voice of her diary: “I received the most wonderful gift anyone can receive in this life, a gift that is called many things: togetherness, companionship, relatedness, affection. I think this is what is called ‘grace.’”

    In God, Death, Art and Love: The Philosophical Vision of Ingmar Bergman, Robert Lauder writes:

    The human journey is toward death. As God’s presence dissolved, the human person had to look elsewhere for some meaning in human existence, some hope to cling to in the face of death. Art offers hints of explanations, but without God’s animating presence and the superstructure of meaning that religion once provided for the artist, art’s “answers” can never be adequate. The only hope we have, according to Bergman, is human love. There is no heavenly hope. To make loving contact with one other human being or perhaps with many others is the only salvation available to us.

    It’s a refreshingly succinct and useful summary from what is, otherwise, a very disappointing book. It’s also, in a sense, a perfect synopsis of Cries and Whispers, the first Bergman film to knock me flat. I watched it again the other night, still mesmerized by it all, and still unable to adequately explain its power. The greatest compliment I can give Cries and Whispers is that it is a profoundly religious film, by which I mean that it is deeply concerned, first and foremost, with the struggles of the human condition in light of the presence — or, in Bergman’s case, the absence — of God. That it approaches this subject with such grace and honesty makes it a masterpiece.

  • Winter Light (1963)

    Winter Light (1963)

    Dir. by Ingmar Bergman

    Images: Majority of dialogue is shot in tight close-ups, isolating characters from one another, as the small town and small church seem to also isolate them from the world. Discovery and removal of Jonas’ body is filmed in long shots: we see his body manipulated like lifeless flesh, exposed to the harsh elements of the snow storm. The bleak, cold exteriors reflects the inner state of the characters.

    • • •

    Critic Dave Kehr has written of Winter Light: “Routine stuff from Ingmar Bergman, the metaphysician of the middle class. . . . Much suffering, none of it very illuminating.” At the heart of Kehr’s criticism, it seems, is the assumption that for a work of art to be illuminating it must not only pose difficult questions, but provide universally satisfying answers as well. A crisis of faith, however, is a process, an on-going debate that can often seem frustratingly one-sided. Reducing such a debate to a simple question and an even simpler answer — as often happens both in the movies and the Church — only trivializes it. I’m relieved to find a film like Winter Light, which understands that at the very root of faith are those same unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions. Despite its existential bleakness, watching Winter Light was, in fact, a faith-affirming experience for me.

    Tomas (Gunnar Bjornstrand) is a pastor in a small town church. We see him, in the film’s opening scene, performing mass, an act that we later learn has become a loathsome ritual for him. With the death of his wife four years earlier, Tomas became cold, both to his congregation and to God. In what is perhaps the film’s most stunning image, we see him alone in his chambers, his face framed in a close-up and backlit by the sunlight pouring in through a window. In complete silence, he whispers Christ’s words, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” As Bergman tracks slowly forward, the fill light on Tomas’ face dims and the sunlight behind him brightens. This motif — darkened faces against brighter backgrounds — recurs throughout as a visual representation of the spiritual crisis being played out.

    Also suffering are Marta (Ingrid Thulin) and Jonas (Max von Sydow). Marta is Tomas’ some time lover, a woman who was raised without the church, but who seems to have found something resembling faith in her selfless love for the pastor. She makes her love known to him in a letter that contains one of the most devastating lines any Christian could hear. “Most of all,” she tells Tomas, “I was struck by your extraordinary indifference to your Jesus Christ.” Jonas is a father and farmer who suffers anxiety over the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. When he visits Tomas for counsel, the pastor is of little help, able only to speak from his own personal disillusion.

    What little change occurs in Tomas throughout the film, however, is not the result of Jonas’ suicide. He seems, finally, to be moved by the words of the church sexton, a crippled man of great faith, who talks to the pastor of Christ’s suffering — not the physical suffering of the cross, but the frustration and loneliness he must have felt when the disciples slept at Gethsemene, and the doubt and pain he must have suffered when God “forsook” him just before his death. Tomas appears to finally relate to Christ as a man who also felt God’s “silence.” I say “appears” because the film’s final image is appropriately ambiguous: Tomas returns to the empty sanctuary to perform another rite, perhaps changed by the events of the day, perhaps hopelessly resigned to simply playing his role.