Film Alert 101: October 2024

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

On YouTube - Mike Retter presents his award-winning music video NIGHT RITES

This piece was first posted on Bill Mousoulis’website Pure Shit: Australian Cinema a wonderful site devoted to Australian Independent cinema. The Director of a new and award-winning music video Mike Retter asked that the piece below be republished on Filmalert101.

Adelaide band "Night Rites" have a new music video that has won best

experimental short and best director of a short at the Melbourne Underground

Film Festival. We spoke to director Mike Retter about creating this clip, his

interest in music videos while growing up and his unfinished feature film "Clair de

Lune".

Mike Retter: In my early twenties I was at a mate's house, a British guy named Stuart ..

He put on a CD with a blurry pink cover and the oval boombox started vibrating with a

harmonic noise. I felt it was a sound I had always been searching for. It was the Irish band

My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album and from that moment onwards I was a changed

person. Layered droney atmospheric rock was something I had delved into with the live

recordings of Nick Cave's early group The Birthday Party, but Loveless had an introverted

nature and sweetness in its studio perfection, where the noise was tamed for an entirely

different emotional purpose.

The pink cover of Loveless was actually a blurry hand in motion captured over the strings of

a guitar. To be specific, it's actually a hand holding the tremolo pedal while at the same

time grazing the strings on the guitar, something Kevin Shields did to physically bend the

notes of the music as he played. That pink photograph would colour every experience of the

album, it summed up the sound so perfectly, the layered and diffused image mimicked the

guitar distortion and the colour was the warmth of the record.

My Bloody Valentine's influential "Loveless" album (1991)

How did you want to visually interpret Night Rite's track "DEN"?

With "DEN", the band Night Rites are working in a similar way to My Bloody Valentine in

terms of thick atmospheric and spatial sound but it doesn't sound pink .. like their name,

It's much darker. So when interpreting this song visually, everything was darkly lit and

desaturated. But I still wanted visual layers, visual distortion and an authentic depiction of

the sound like MBV achieved with that Loveless album cover.

I have probably had to listen to DEN a thousand times while shooting and editing the clip

and I still don’t get sick of it. There's so much going on in the music production, such a

density... I challenge you to give it multiple listens and see what you get out of it each

time. So I have tried to do this justice visually. Give it as much idiosyncrasy as I can..

Create visual delays .. The track has a hum to it and so the visuals needed to reverberate ..

I shot it in such a way where grain was baked into the footage and camera movement,

sometimes shaky with stabilisation turned off, would mimic the pulsating sound. Lots of

imagery is buried underneath, some you will see, some you may not - but perhaps you will

feel it.

I also shot a series of still photos with an old Yashica Mat 124g film camera. The film stock

was Fuji Provia 100, a slide film, which means the negative is actually a positive and thus

looks like a normal full colour image when you hold it up to the light. It's also a larger film

and so I put the developed celluloid strip in front of the video camera lens (like a crude

telecine) and shot the band playing on a monitor behind the strip of film that's being

rubbed past the lens. Essentially using the developed film that had images on it like a filter

to create layered imagery. Glitchy film negative shots tend to evoke feelings of memory.

Tony Scott used hand-cranked cameras to create jerky, expressionistic visual layers in Man

On Fire (2004), which is a very modern film and that was a strong influence here with the

use of the slide film strips. Digital effects are very minimal in this music video. It’s mostly

analogue techniques such as using smoke machines, dry ice, specific lighting, camera

movement, some VHS and other archaic processing by Matthew Gray, which was a cool

collaboration. And of course the use of splashing water in the ocean as the music gets

heavier.

Music group "Night Rites" from Adelaide

Did you watch much Rage on the ABC while growing up?

Music Videos, specifically in the pre-internet ABC Rage era, are fundamental to many

Australian cultural upbringings (for better or worse). They form the background ambience

to many social gatherings but also an entry-point to experimental film before we go deeper

into things like SBS's Eat Carpet (R.I.P).

I don’t take drugs and rarely drink alcohol these days, but many years ago when I was a

teenager on magic mushrooms, I specifically remember watching Nine Inch Nails "Head

Like A Hole'' video and was struck by its use of rapid editing and overlapping of images.

There was a head being rotated with a strobing voodoo ceremony over the top where a

man was rotating sticks. The rapid editing back and forth between the shots does such a

number on the brain it feels illegal. This cinematic technique was very effective and

probably amplified by the drugged state I was in so it always stayed with me. Later on I

would discover the origins of this style in early Soviet cinema.

The nihilistic content and point of view of Nine Inch Nails music videos is something that no

longer interests me. The argument could be made that this kind of depressing stuff, which

was soaked in heroin-use and nihilism, helped destroy a generation, continuing a decline

since the baby-boomers stopped listening to their parents, instead embracing instant

gratification and consumerism. It sort of predates or preempts the current opioid and crank

(crystal meth) epidemics in the deindustrialised American "rust belt" (Indiana, Michigan,

Pennsylvania, etc) and now many parts of Australia. But it's undeniable that this period of

alternative music videos had very clever artistic technique and aesthetic. Part of my

cinephilic journey has been finding this kind of visual experimentation and style in work

that doesn't destroy the soul. Something that can actually be found in the rich

contemporary meme video culture such as the "hyperborean" genre found on telegram.

Rapid editing is something I have used quite a bit in the 3rd act of the music video, to

evoke something in the same way 2001: A Space Odyssey uses flashing coloured lights in

its "stargate sequence".. An archetypal structure for experimental film where climax can be

created purely through expressionist film-form and technique rather than literal narrative

alone. And like 2001, you will notice a calm directly following this sequence, which creates

a kind of relief. I think a lot of filmmakers independently channel a similar structure,

regardless of how abstract things may be, because there's something true to life about it,

like a Platonic form, a statue found in a block of stone, a 3-act structure is natural and

instinctive for creators and audiences.

What sort of production and editing went into this?

We tried to create very atmospheric and evocative footage but this music video was really

made in the edit and that took a long time. Splicing, manipulating and collaging the

images. The genesis of this film clip was actually a phone call or text from Ryder Grindle,

the projectionist at the Mercury Cinema.. They had some event at the Fringe Festival where

a dozen bands and a dozen filmmaking groups made music videos within a seven day

deadline. But they were missing one filmmaking team.. I thought this would be perfect for

a screenwriter friend, Jeremy Roberts, who wanted to start making films himself, but

because I had to end up shooting and editing the clip, it was simpler if I just directed it as

well. So Jeremy did lighting and co-produced with me. Having not actually met the band,

we just rocked-up and run-and-gunned the whole thing quickly with a basic visual concept

based on the sound. Ned Bajic helped with some backlit dry ice shots in the ocean and

practical water FX.

We met that seven day deadline and what I would describe as a roughcut was shown at the

Mercury Cinema event. Feedback was quite positive, but I'm glad I was unavailable for that

screening because I was never happy with only a few days to edit the clip. The track is six

minutes long, we had an option of going with a shorter "radio edit" version (4mins), but

this removed what I felt were some of the best passages of music. Apart from more editing

time post-screening, we also went and shot one more evening with the band and did some

specific high-framerate shots with Jeremy in the ocean at night with water directly hitting

the camera lens.

The finished clip would eventually premiere at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival on

closing night where it won best experimental short and best director of a short. 2 days later

we showed it in Adelaide at the Sam Hyde Film Festival, Palace Nova Cinema. That's where

I got to see it on the big screen for the first time and we had a great crowd reaction. It's

probably my most satisfying public exhibition of work. The third act, which consists mostly

of splashing water, looked great on the big cinema screen. The song I had heard more than

a thousand times felt new because of the high fidelity sound presentation in the theatre. I

think the clip succeeds in depicting the music visually, the two things become one. We then

had another screening at Adelaide University organised by the Cinematic Cultural Research

Unit (CCRU) along with other experimental shorts and a sprawling discussion about the

future of cinema.

Sony XV-5000CE Video Colour Corrector used by Matthew Gray
to process and grade the footage along with various tape formats.

After Youth On The March, you said you were to make one more vertical film to

complete a trilogy, the erotic thriller Clair de Lune.. Where is this project at?

Clair de Lune is a feature project that was derailed by Covid and perhaps my own hubris.

It's like my own Apocalypse Now. The press wrote articles about Apocalypse Now's delayed

release entitled "Apocalypse When?" Around 90% of Clair de Lune is already shot but

there are some key scenes, which are artistically and technically challenging that I still have

to complete. With the passage of time, there is some melancholy that I haven't finished,

but strangely there is also some ecstasy ... Because as I learn new things about editing,

film form and analogue photography, they are incorporated into the vision and it will be a

better film for it.

I have one shoot coming up soon for Clair de Lune that involves a wall of TV monitors.

That's something I'm doing with the CCRU. This was not in the original script, but the

luxury of time allows you to evolve and develop things. if you think of a new idea, it can

make it into the film. But you obviously don’t want a film to remain unfinished forever.

Soon I'm going to release an experimental short, which is basically a TV show that exists in

the universe of Clair de Lune and gives a glimpse of that film in a different context. It's like

releasing something with an abstract or conceptual trailer inside it. I've taken one

supporting character of Clair de Lune, a real-life martial artist, and made an entire

magazine-style TV show revolving around him. Like going on an irrational tangent. It's

called Kolesnikov's World and will be released later this year. In real life he was actually the

bodyguard for an eastern-European head of state and so he's depicted as a solitary warrior.

I therefore consider this a stylised documentary.

Part of the reason Clair de Lune has not been completed is that I genuinely want to impact

cinema with this low-budget film and much of that will come down to an advanced film-

form and style achieved by various editing techniques and image processing. I'm not so

arrogant to say that it will impact cinema, but that is the ambition. There are some great

acting performances in this film and I look forward to how it’s all sculpted together.

I feel like my life in the interim has been spent studying cinema, both historically (the

1980s Simpson/Bruckheimer films that incorporated MTV video and commercial aesthetics)

and the absolute latest contemporary work like YouTube/memes. This has meant collecting

lots of physical media to aid my study. Like the 1980s incorporation of new forms like MTV

into cinema, I wish to also combine online filmmaking styles (particularly editing) with my

feature narrative. This project has become far more postmodern than I first intended. So

this Night Rites music video, other short work I have done like Kolesnikov's World and the

exhibition of other people's contemporary film in the Sam Hyde Film Festival all constitute

practical study in style and aesthetics. Which will in-turn inform the finished product of

Clair de Lune. It's all connected. Even when I'm not working on Clair de Lune, I'm still

really working on it.

Hebe Sayce in the upcoming feature film Clair de Lune

Will you make more music videos?

Yes, I think I will make more music videos. This was really my first one and I liked doing it.

10 years ago I made my own version of Eat Carpet or Liquid Television for Channel 44

called "Bandwidth", much of which involved image and music. But this Night Rites music

video was my first built from the ground-up to depict a band and their sound. Music videos

are a great artistic opportunity. There is no shortage of good local music to make a clip for

and I encourage people to do it. If you are out of the loop, just get in contact with 3D

Radio, Radio Adelaide, Fresh FM (or your own local community Stations) and you will be put in touch with some of the latest music to hopefully inspire making a clip. Get out of your

bubble. Make contact with some of these bands.

There is also some talk about a physical media (DVD) release of various music videos and

experimental shorts in Adelaide. If that happens, it will be packed with weird material and

lots of extra features.. There's also a proposed distribution model that is insane and would

allow the DVD to be discovered by the public in a very odd way. I think it's time to do

irrational things like that.

What do you mean exactly, where will the DVD be distributed and what will be

"odd" or "insane" about it?

I can't get into that yet. But it should be interesting.

Friday, 25 October 2024

The Current Cinema ...and the dearth of people being paid to write about it...

The Art Critic by Raoul Hausmann

A now dead old friend once said to me that really is there any need to make any new movies. There are still tens of thousands of films that you still haven't seen and you can hunt those down and look at lots of others over again. Such a turn of events would probably put film critics, at least those diminishing few who still get paid to write or talk about new movies, right out of business. The newspapers may even breathe a sigh of relief.

This little line of thought was prompted early this morning when I checked to see whom and what the Australian Financial Review had published today following its unceremonious, unwarranted and probably quite vindictive sacking of John McDonald a couple of weeks ago. Last week the AFR replaced John's film column with something from the New York Times by Beatrice Loayza, who, her website tells, is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Artforum, the Criterion Collection, the Nation, 4Columns, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Guardian, and other publications.

It seems the AFR is not moving at all to replace John, no doubt a modest cost-saving but one which does the paper's reputation no credit at all. Today it has a scathingly unfavourable review of a new film called Venom:The Last Dance reprinted from London's Daily Telegraph.

I'm pretty sure that the overlapping interest between AFR readers and this Marvel franchise effort is likely minimal, especially if they read down to the second half of paragraph two and get an opinion of the film as 'a yammeringly moronic, teenage-boy-pandering eyesore of the old school, with little to offer any viewer whose age or counting ability exceeds the low 20s." Take that AFR reader...go no further. Those Brits know how to hurl an insult. Bob Ellis would have been impressed.

But, and you would never know it from our newspapers, there are still eight or ten or more new releases each week. So if we are going to have new films then it's time for new critics and indeed some more critics. There are plenty around. They do online publications, blogs, podcasts, broadcasts on community radio and probably much more. Their enthusiasm levels are quite overwhelming. The AFR, The Australian (which never replaced David Stratton, just reduced the number of film reviews from four to two) and any of the ailing Nine (ex-Fairfax) papers should be on the case.

It's time to get serious about film reviewing again and pay some more reviewers.

Or else people are going to be more and more like me...and only want to see old movies anyway. This week's treasures, (though as well as watching Dylan River and Tanith-Glynn Maloney's ripper eight parter Thou Shalt Not Steal streaming on SBS), included the umpteenth viewing of Adieu Philippine and another reminder of just how good is Peter Yates adaptation of George V. Higgins great novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

Tuesday, 22 October 2024

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison welcomes THE APPRENTICE (Ali Abbas, 2024)

The Apprentice is in press book jargon "Highly anticipated." This of course has nothing to do with the quality of its filmcraft. It's not the first time that a movie about a head of state up for re-election worried people to the point of wanting it suppressed. Think Maurice Elvey's laudatory The Life of David Lloyd George upsetting the PM's own party to the extent of sending Ideal Films a truck with a couple of thousand-pound notes and gathering up the materials. So now that Ali Abbas' Donald Trump film is actually in the theatres, the response has been kind of sedate – no lawsuits, no riots, not even a deluge of think-piece editorials - so far at least. There was more of a fuss over Seth Rogan's Kim Jong-Un movie The Interview. Barack Obama had to be photographed going to a neighbourhood movie house to assure the U.S. public that was safe.

The Apprentice doesn't look like a cash in quick effort or a hatchet job. US political satire TV has just about exhausted the market for those. It takes a while to work out just what it is. Kicking off with Richard Nixon is a good clue. The film has qualities. Its picture of the look, sound and mood of seventies-onward America is imposing. "New York is the greatest city in the world.". Add Ed Koch to the walk-on impersonations - Rona Barrett, Andy Warhol, Mike Wallace, Rupert Murdoch. Trump Tower emerges as a world center of bad taste. The film loses impetus when the action shifts to Atlantic City. It all comes with the obligatory raunchy moments.

We pick up Marvel Super Hero Sebastian Stan doing Donald Trump, the twenty-something son of New York slum landlord Martin Donovan (superior make up jobs all round) confronting aggro tenants as he tries to collect rents. Straight away there's a whole lot to get our attention – Stan injecting glimpses of Trump mannerisms that we recognise, his daddy issues (we watch Donovan crush other son pilot Charlie Carrick), their company's problems with race discrimination court actions and Stan homing in on Borat's glamorously blonde Maria Bakalova, as Ivana in her low cut scarlet number. To deal with all of this, he enlists the support of Jeremy (Succession) Strong's Roy Cohn, a shadowy figure in the saga of Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy and rapidly Stan/The Donald. Cohn has already shown up as Al Pacino in the 2003 Mike Nichols series Angels in America.

This movie is really more interested in him than Trump and its argument is that what we hear from the MAGA lot was already shaped up under Cohn with previous (Republican) administrations. We get a mash-up of Svengali, Citizen Kane, Faust and Falstaff. He bankrolls, styles, molds and mentors Trump. The film's most extraordinary scene has Cohn/Strong at peak repugnant, explaining how he engineered "the burning" of young mother Ethel Rosenberg, out of patriotism, while simultaneously being his most convincing and charismatic. It's a challenge writer, director and actor devour with relish. The film becomes the account of the decline of Cohn and his unshakeable vision finding a home with Donald Trump. We end on the cross-cut funeral and cosmetic surgery – and an American nocturnal vista with Old Glory fluttering grimly at its edge.

It's tempting to see this one as Hollywood picking up the glove Trump is forever flinging down for them but no one involved has a big stake in the US film capital. It's an Irish, Canadian, Swedish, Norwegian effort. I can't see the film - or any other movie - effecting the up-coming election - or any other election. Most of the time I'm sorry to observe that.

Ali Abbas has already made the disturbing 2022 Iranian serial killer movie Holy Spider. His interest is in monsters. That's likely why his Donald Trump movie ends up more like The Girl in the Kremlin (Stalin shaves girls' heads) or The Hitler Gang, than Oliver Stone's Presidential biographies, let alone F.D.R. pieces like Sunrise at Campobello or Hyde Park on the Hudson. Then there's Tim Bottoms in the South Park lot's 2001 That's My Bush where neighbors drop into George and Laura's White House to discuss gardening. Yes, that one maybe.

Monday, 21 October 2024

Streaming on Stan - Dylan River and Tanith Glynn-Maloney ace it with THOU SHALT NOT STEAL (8 eps, Australia, 2024)

Miranda Otto, Sherry-Lee Watson, Will McDonald, Noah Taylor

It's only wild surmise of course but I reckon if Dylan River and Tanith Glynn-Maloney were to go on Mastermind their specialty subject would have to be The Films of Joel & Ethan Coen. They have learned the lessons well, probably following them up with intensive scrutiny of the TV series spinoffs of Fargo.

Not to be sneezed at in a time when too many of our film-makers, often working in pairs, cant get beyond repeating (a neutral term intended) the tropes of mostly hack horror movies or the more violent moments of Quentin Tarantino.

In Thou Shalt Not Steal a runaway from 'juvie", as a naive local cop calls it, Robyn (Sherry-Lee Watson) steals a taxi and heads for her dad's home after busting him out of hospital. Dad is dying and wants to give her father, whom Robyn doesn't even know is alive, a Cup. In pursuit are the authorities and the taxi driver. ...at least for starters. They start off somewhere in the Northern Territory before the action shifts to Coober Pedy and then to Adelaide.

By about episode four it dawns on you that there has still been absolutely no explanation as to the source of the bag of money got into the boot of the taxi ...and there never will be unless you assume that prostitutes can earn such amounts in the outback and keep it in travelling bags in the boot of their car. We know it's causing Miranda Otto's taxi driver a lot of grief and to do some rather revolting things in cahoots with Robert (Noah Taylor, seedily brilliant) who's a fake preacher who otherwise spends his life sly grogging to remote blackfella communities.... and jacking off in his caravan.

Director River and his co-creator Glynn-Maloney are very good at doing some slight time shifts and some brilliant changes of perspective, a Coen brothers trope. Thus the various introductions of Robert's son Gidge (Will McDonald) almost always grab you with a start - the 'suicide attempt', the discovery in the back seat, the pissing scene around the tree and the appearance trussed up in the car boot are just ripper bits of comedy, superbly timed and staged to maximum effect. If you want an example (small spoiler alert) it occurs with the scene with shotgun in the back seat.

The series rips through its eight eps at just 27 minutes or less each.

It's the best thing done in these parts all year and I was somewhat amazed that Stan backed it until the credits reveal that Amanda Duthie is now running this part of Stan's business. Another impressive notch in her career as a commissioner and producer.

Saturday, 19 October 2024

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (33) Scandinavia - Nordic Cinemas part 1 : Bergman and Widerberg

SCANDINAVIA - Sweden Ingmar Bergman (1973) b.18 Bo Widerberg (1968) b.30 Vilgot Sjöman (1975) b.24 Mai Zetterling b.25 Jan Troell (1972) b.31 Denmark Henning Carlsen (1980) b.27 Finland Risto Jarva b.34 Jorn Donner (1972) b.33

Brackets indicate year selected as one of five International Film Guide Directors of the Year

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For a brief period after 1910, the countries of Scandinavia, despite their low population (2.5 million in Denmark in 1901; around 5 million in Sweden in 1900) and their marginal place in the western economic system, played a major role in the early evolution of the cinema, both as an art and an industry. Their influence was concentrated in two phases : the first centred on Denmark in the four year period 1910-13, which saw the international success of the production company Nordinsk Kompagni; and the second in Sweden between 1917 and 1923. And far from consisting of an isolated blossoming of local culture, Scandinavian silent cinema was extremely integrated into a wider European context. For at least ten years the aesthetic identity of Danish and Swedish films was intimately related to that of the Russian and German cinema, each evolving in symbiotic relation to the others, linked by complementary distribution strategies and exchanges of directors and technical expertise. - Paolo Cherchi Usai “The Scandinavian Style” Oxford History of World Cinema 1996

The departure of two great Swedish directors, Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller, and actors Lars Hanson and Greta Garbo for Hollywood in1923-5 marked a turning point for Swedish cinema. Although directors of not negligible talent remained, instead of renewal “they were obliged to adapt the characteristics of their own national cinema to ape Hollywood genres and narrative models and Swedish cinema went into steep decline.” After successfully directing several films in Hollywood Sjostrom returned to Europe, making one film in Sweden and one in England, before renewing his acting career in 19 films (he had been a stage actor before turning to directing) including playing the lead role in Wild Strawberries for Bergman.

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Ingmar Bergman with Sven Nykvist, Erland Josephson, Liv Ullmann

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) fully found his own voice in Swedish cinema with Summer Interlude (1951), his tenth feature as a director, “an elegiac account of a doomed teenage love affair, made more poignant by the lyrical feeling for landscape.” In Summer with Monika (1953), a film with similar qualities, Harriet Andersson was the first of many actors whose careers Bergman would foster. International festival success followed by the international art house release of Smiles of a SummerNight (1955) then in fairly quick succession, The Seventh Seal (1956), Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1959) generating a wave of 'Bergmania' which prompted the release of earlier works such as Summer with Monika and Sawdust and Tinsel/The Naked Night (1953), simultaneously with Wild Strawberries. This provided little opportunity for critical awareness of Bergman's chronological development. What was more apparent was his virtuosity rather than the formal continuity of his work. This resulted in him being pigeon-holed as an intellectual, a “cinematic Kierkegaard,” tackling metaphysical problems. The thematic unity of his films was acknowledged partly as a pervasive pessimism – a recurrent questioning by Bergman/ Everyman, in assorted disguises, of “the social, spiritual and psychological sources of his suffering here on earth” (Jan Dawson, Roud ed. 111).

The Seventh Seal

The shift to comic domestic realism combined with “a kind of theatrical baroque hell” in The Devil's Eye (1960) was disconcerting to the many admirers of the high seriousness and austere beauty of his breakthrough films. Bergman entered the 60s - his modernist phase - with Through a Glass Darkly (1961) the first of his uncompromisingly bleak trilogy in contemporary, more realistic, settings with Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1962) which “remonstrate against the emptiness of the heavens by exploring the chill emptiness of the human soul” (ibid 114). Bergman said of these three films that they are “concerned with regression [in sequence] : certainty overcome - certainty laid bare - the silence of God marks its denial.” Kovacs notes that Bergman’s use of close-ups consistently increases as if to compensate “for the inexpressive effect of extreme reduction of other elements such as characters and landscape”(162).

This in turn marks a change in visual style still more dramatic, from theatrical to minimalist while continuing to use, as Kovacs further notes, expressionist lighting effects (as in The Face and Hour of the Wolf) combined with “an extremely dramatic acting style.” The 60s also marked Bergman with Antonioni as creators of “the modern era’s emblematic bare landscapes” furthering the former’s radical shift from the romantic approach to the natural world in the acclaimed 50s works.

Bergman replied to his critics with his first film in colour, Now About These Women (1963), a satiric comedy with his favourite actresses often in ornate décor, critics being projected as parasitic, predatory, and insensitive. To his biographer, Peter Cowie (1969), it was the earlier sardonic comedy, The Face/The Magician (1958), a parable about the artist as charlatan, together with the trilogy in which the sign is given that Bergman is “heading inward rather than outward, to the cellar of the subconscious” (quoted Kemp).

A dual gaze of enquiry takes place whereby the onscreen subject’s gaze of self conscious crisis meets the viewer’s implicated looking upon - in participation in- that image. Both face and viewer seem to feel the intermixing and breaking down of diegetic space and intensities of looking. This is sparked and enforced by Bergman’s tight use of a 1.33:1 frame which often excludes any clear glimpses of the world beyond a face which finds no up, down, left, or right. - Hamish Ford on Persona, Senses of Cinema Dec 2002

Persona

In the realisation of his cumulatively acknowledged masterwork, Bergman remarkably crossed the threshold as a ‘creator of form’ with Persona (1966) “venturing at least as much beyond The Silence as the distance separating that film, by its emotional power and subtlety, from Bergman’s entire previous work” (Sontag 186). “A traumatised actress and her nurse psychologically devour each other,” marking “a new departure - away from metaphysics into the killing fields of personal relationships” with an hypnotic intensity (Kemp). At the same time there is a central ambiguity in Persona as to the reality status of the two figures. The relationship between the two women can be interpreted realistically until disrupted by the 'terrifying caesura' of the two faces merging into one close-up then fracturing mid-narrative. From this point on the viewer is unable to categorise the nature of what is being viewed: the fictional characters of Elizabeth the actress who refuses to speak and Alma her garrulous nurse? The two actresses, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman, playing them? Or images cast on the screen by projected light passing through a moving strip of film,

More than this, the [mid narrative] breakdown constitutes Bergman’s admission that he can’t resolve the problems the film has raised. The last third gives us a series of scenes of uncertain reality and uncertain chronology; all are closely related, thematically, to the concerns established earlier in the film, and all carry us deeper into the sensation of a breakdown due to full exposure to the unreasonable and the unendurable for a single instance. They come across as a series of tentative sketches, which are far from tentative in realisation, of possibilities offered by the director who, because of his own uncertainties, denies himself the narrative artist’s right to dogmatise, to say ‘This is what happened next’…It is not a question of vagueness nor artistic abdication, but of extreme and rigorous honesty; each sequence is realised with the same intensity and precision that characterised the straight narrative of the first half. - Robin Wood (157-8)

Pauline Kael contended that Bergman was not alone in the movies in imposing a “false order on his chamber dramas, a forced “abstract” surface concealing conceptual chaos - the movie looks formally strict but “the ideas and emotions [can] remain ambiguously disturbed.” In Persona Kael holds Bergman to account for giving us a movie within a movie “but he seems to hardly have made the enclosing movie, and then he throws away the inner movie…a pity because [it] had begun to involve us in marvellous possibilities…It is just because of the expressiveness and fascination of what we are given that the movie is so frustrating.” As it is Kael thinks “that treating Persona as pieces of a puzzle and trying to put them together will not do much more than demonstrate ingenuity at guesswork.” That might be true if the objective is to try to fit Persona within the straitjacket of the linear cause and effect storytelling structure that fits the aesthetics of traditional classical narrative.

Kael can be strategically adept in her criticism (as ahe is here) but overly reductive in mobilising a single insight - which here she recognises as Bergman’s “capacity to create images that set off reverberations.” As a single observation it is not without weight but its limitation as the core criterion is apparent in the way examples of the croquet game in Smiles of a Summer Night and Alma’s ‘fierce reverie’ of the beach orgy in Persona, are presented by Kael as isolated markers by which to measure the claim for Bergman’s greatness. Such limitations in coming to terms with the direction in his work from The Silence as entree to Persona and also Shame doesn’t go near tackling the films that Bergman actually made based on his own admission referred to above and as critically contextualised by Susan Sontag (“any account which leaves out or dismisses as incidental the way Persona begins and ends hasn’t been talking about the film that Bergman has made”), and historically defined by Kovács, in terms of the ‘new’ narrative.

The Silence

Fellini was the first auteur to broach the subject of overt reflexivity in 8 1/2 (1963). Kovács notes that “the loneliness of the filmmaker-auteur appears as the central topic in three major films produced in 1966 [ Bergman’s Persona, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, and Antonioni’s Blow-Up proving] more than anything that [….] the renewal or the reestablishment of modernism was on the agenda [….] with regard to the role of nothingness in modern existentialist philosophy in modern cinema” (340-1).

“Historically speaking, the appearance of these films in the same year “may be a coincidence, but regarding the evolution of modern cinema this coincidence is more than symptomatic.” The fact that the films so appeared and focused on the same problem “regarding the modern artist’s relationship to society, and had very similar answers to this problem, are incontestable signs that reflexivity as one of the distinctive features of modern art became the focus of modern cinema. All three films have become canonized as masterpieces in their respective auteur’s careers which is further evidence that we have an important phenomenon here: modern cinema had reached a point where asking questions about its own status and its relationship to society and the rest of the art world became a precondition of its development (ibid).”

With the economy she often effectively conjured up in her reviews, Pauline Kael refers to The Silence and Persona as recent Bergman pictures that “had been organized so subconsciously that they were only partly on the screen - the rest still in his head.” She also referred to “the pall of profundity” hanging over his work from Wild Strawberries to Hour of the Wolf - in her reaching a point of critical despair with Through a Glass Darkly - despite “the development of an extraordinary expressive technique and control over actors” intermittently producing “sequences of great intensity.” Suddenly, Kael in a review titled “A Sign of Life,” admits to being held to account by the “direct and lucid” accessibility of Shame.

The stylistically disparate second trilogy is linked thematically by Bergman’s philosophical reflection on the ineffectuality - social, political and emotional - of the artist. Consistent with the fleetingly ‘new’ Bergman in Shame, is the representation of the chaos of life in the last stages of an unidentified war and its effect on a couple isolated amidst a great many displaced people, like them without beliefs or any political faith as if “seen through an ordering intelligence.” Bergman remains in full control throughout to give us a rarely achieved vision of ordinary people in a ‘normal war’ the film having “the inevitability of a common dream.” Bergman treads a difficult path between realism and the formalism of the morality play. Expressiveness of style - the strange affective hybridity of the caesura in Persona (“Bergman’s brainstorm”), and expressionism in Hour of the Wolf - are pointedly avoided in Shame. Plausible details are also the omens of tragedy. Rather than figures for identification, the inadequacies and frailties of the couple are ruthlessly exposed. Bergman resists schematisation and keeps them at the centre of the film. Their futile escapism is underscored by their position as artists - retired concert violinists- whose work is shown to have no possible relation to the fractured world around them (Dawson).

Hour of the Wolf

Bergman returned to the special intensity of feeling in “a stylised-dream-play atmosphere” in the chamber drama, Cries and Whispers (1973). Interiors set in varying shades of red, as Robin Wood pointed out, stands in opposing mode to Godard's use of Brechtian distancing in Weekend (1967), for example (171). Kael tellingly concludes that [unlike Persona and Shame] Cries and Whispers, “compellingly beautiful as it is, [came] too easily to Bergman” allowing the viewer to “sink back and bask in flesh, but keep scanning the woman as Other [which] doesn’t get any of us anywhere.”

Bo Widerberg

In the late fifties there was growing belief among a generation of film critics and younger filmmakers that the gap had been widening in Sweden between the previous generation of filmmakers and postwar audiences. Bo Widerberg (1930-97), film-maker, novelist and film critic, saw the older generation of directors, most notably Alf Sjöberg (Miss Julie 1950) and Bergman “with a straight line running from Swedish theatre at the turn of the century” to Bergman's films (20 from 1945-59), already in a place apart in the history of Swedish cinema. “It was as the representative of the earlier craftsman tradition, as the creator of an aesthetics of illusion” for which Bergman was attacked in the late fifties-early sixties. (Tytti Soila 204). The younger critics were influenced by Cahiers du Cinèma and the films of the New Wave, particularly those of Truffaut and Godard.

Widerberg was only 13 years Bergman's junior but his attitude to the cinema was completely different. Soila comments that the “transition in the early 1960s in the history of Swedish film was greater than the transition to sound thirty years before” (205). As a critic Widerberg had plenty of opportunity to see the advance of the French New Wave in the late 50s. He called for a commitment to the portrayal of ordinary people and their actual conditions and for “a neo-realistic style” filmed in actual locations. While Widerberg never questioned the artistry of Bergman and that of famed documentary filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff (The Great Adventure 1952), he attacked them for not freeing themselves from the controlling interest of the production companies, to shape their films independently in focusing on current problems in society. In 1962 Widerberg in his book Visions in Swedish Cinema, a manifesto inspired by the example of Godard and Truffaut, calling for the renewal of art cinema in which he charges that “what Bergman exports abroad consists of mystic light and undisguised exoticism - not suggestions for alternative modes of action or of moral possibilities, [so reinforcing] the most trivial myths about Sweden and the Swedes. […] He makes vertical movies in a situation where we, more than ever, need a horizontal cinema, a sideways art” (quoted Cowie 207). Here Widerberg is attacking traditional 50s Swedish films as Truffaut in his manifesto attacked the 50s script-bound ‘tradition of quality’ in 50s French cinema.

Raven's End

One imagines that the the trilogy beginning with Persona may also have been intended, at least in part, as Bergman's rejoinders to this kind of critique with secular suffering replacing religious doubt as the primary focus. When Widerberg made his own films, Ravens End (1963) and Adalen ‘31 (1968) were acclaimed for truthfulness in the recreation of working class life in the thirties “that mocks the artificiality of films set in that period being produced by the Swedish film industry.” In a 2000 newspaper poll Raven’s End was voted 'the greatest Swedish film ever’. “The camera is for [Widerberg] a recording instrument ready to capture the nuances in everyday behaviour [non-professionals played alongside professionals] and the features of the physical world.” (Cowie 186). In his next film Love 65 (1965) with a young film director in the film bearing some resemblance to Widerberg both physically and in his expressed opinions (Cowie Sweden 2, 202). Widerberg departs from the deployment in his earlier film of the wide angle lens, deep focus and long takes for a more existential approach to conveying emotions with space for digression in the narrative. In Love 65 “expressive modes allow the characters to emerge from their daily environment. Widerberg “matches the most adventurous styles of filmmaking in Europe (he acknowledged 8 1/2 as a major influence) in the attempt to convey through tangential, ambivalent methods, the difficulties of [contemporary] commitment” (Solla 208). In Elivra Madigan (1967), a story of a love doomed by the rigid compartmentalism of late19th century life, audiences found easier it to identify with the romantic fate of the couple. Elvira was Widerberg’s greatest box office success, both at home and internationally. Starting filming with only a 20 page screenplay, he was apparently in no doubt of the nuances required to suggest the relevance for sixties audiences.