Film Alert 101: 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.