Key Features of Ingmar Bergman Films - Movie Review Example

Ingmar Bergman is one of the most important film makers of European Cinema of all times, whose concern was always the existential essentials. His films were peopled by characters that were forced to face themselves, with personal crises of doubt, loathing, sickness and death. The meaning of human existence with a God, who chose to keep silent, was his constant concern.( “ As flies to wanton boys are we to th Gods, They kill us for their sport” says William Shakespeare in King Lear, Act four , Scene one . ). He tried to portray this existential conflict in the most essentialist manner, stripping out everything that was not essential. To quote Jesse Kalin: “Bergman’s subject is not being as such, but the moral world – ourselves as human beings in the twentieth century; what is deepest and most true and essential about us , and what meaning we can find for our lives in the face of the truth..” (.The Films of Ingmar Bergman, Page 1) The existential struggle becomes acute in women as their loneliness is deeper in a male dominated society. How do these women communicate with each other in this world of loneliness? The denial of both sexual pleasure as well as the maternal bliss makes their quest for themselves much more frustrating. Persona (1966) and Cries and Whispers (1972) are two great works of this master that form wonderful examples for psychodrama of the modern life as well as for Meta cinema or self reflexive cinema. In Persona it is a speechless woman who confronts an over speaking woman, who essentially speaks of her dilemmas, which strangely confirms to the dilemmas of the listening silent woman. The film opens with a pre-title sequence of a bewildering Freudian montage of seemingly unrelated images, indicating that it is dealing with dark contradictions and never matching opposites. Of the images in the opening montage, the image of the cinematic projection apparatus with the carbon arc of a projector is repeated in the end of the film as well. .Elisabeth Volger (portrayed brilliantly by Liv Ullman ) is a noted stage actress , who is thirty plus of age and who loses her speech mysteriously in the middle of a performance while she was acting as Electra, the Greek mythological character .After staying in the hospital for a brief period , she is removed to a sea side cottage for psychiatric observation. She comes under the care of a private nurse named Alma (Bibi Anderson ).The nurse opens herself up to the patient and tells her all her frustrations as well as her hopes and dreams. She talks about her sex life which is very troubled, about her desires which remain unfulfilled, of her hopes about marrying her current boy friend. As she dreams of having children by him she echoes the denial of maternity as an oppressive feeling in a woman (“I’ll marry Karl-Henrik and have a couple of children, which I’ll have to raise…”) Denials lead to sins. She reveals her past sins too. The patient listens, but keeps mum. She is withdrawn from the world of uttered words, sealing herself off from the world like a hermit, and is trying to communicate silently through signs and facial expressions as well as through the written words. The two women represent the opposites in every sense. But as the film progresses they start resembling each other physically. There is evident power play in their strange communication. The nurse is more powerful. She is in charge of the sick bed. The patient is the needy and the dependent. But confronting a silent listener constantly with words becomes maddening to the nurse. The relationship is so imbalanced and hence frustrating to her. She becomes lonelier and is forced to confront her own realities alone as the listener, to her stories of dreams and confessions, refuses to share the same with her. She grows jealous of her patient who seems to be self-satisfied. Her own personality starts crawling out of her body and starts to get into that of the other, the patient. The patient’s husband comes to visit her but addresses the nurse as if she is his wife. Bergman doesn’t make it clear whether this sequence is a dream of Alma, the nurse or the reality. Here the fantasy and the reality get intermingled, or the border line between them gets blurred. The problem with an actress is that she is forced to carry with in her a lot of characters of different shades, a professional hazard she has to live with. But this slowly starts to blur the essence of her own character. The life on the stage is equally demanding as one in the real world. She acts for other characters; she speaks their words; she tells the world about their desires and hopes as well as their confessions of sins. Where is she then, where are her desires and sins? Bergman forces one to look at this existential dilemma or crisis of an actress. When the actress stops speaking, when she abandons her words, she is deciding to go back to her self. She is withdrawing herself even from the real life roles of hers, of wife, mother and the famous actress. She is deciding not to be a character, real or otherwise, but to be her self. It is then that she is made to confront another character, the nurse, a live character. Through this live character the actress is retrieving herself. The nurse stops to be the other. All her desires and hopes, her sins and frustrations are becoming that of the actress too. The two personalities start to merge into one. They become the two different facets of a divided personality, which has to merge into one to be complete. This clue is very cinematically expressed by Bergman by placing the two women in front of a looking glass mirror. They observe themselves as two halves of the same personality; the viewers too observe them as that. Though the interpreters say that only one woman of the two is real, the other being a projection, the audience is not finally sure which one is the real and which one the projection. The film portrays such deep emotional and spiritual desolation that the audience gets sweeped off their sense of judgment. The ever increasing insanity on the screen starts affecting the audience too. The film indicates that the world outside is equally insane. The audience is reminded of the political insanity outside when he sees the footage on the T V set, of a Vietnamese monk immolating himself .Another reference to the insanity of the outer world is when Elisabeth stares with sad eyes at a still photograph of the victims of Nazi terror being rounded up. In the midst of all these in sanities, with a startling sequence Bergman reminds the audience that it can all be a fantasy. He reminds them that may be they were just seeing a film. In final sequence the projector and the running film come back. The projector brakes or the film burns and the screen goes blank. It was cinema only, or fantasy only .According to Bergman, “When film is not a document it is a dream” (The Magic Lantern, Page73) But even that cinema or dream collapses. The unspoken anxieties have no hope of escape. The Cries and Whispers is about four women and the anguish of their souls. Here again the denial of pleasures of sex and the bliss of maternity is a core theme which lead to the lonely sufferings of these women. In their loneliness they desire closeness and caring, but they fail to communicate with each other. Two women have come back to their old English family manor to be present at the death bed of their sister. Agnes (Harriet Anderson) the sister who owns the manor is the one in her death bed. She is a virgin and has cancer in her womb. In her forty years of life she had not known the love a man .The film deals with the last two days of Agnes in her death bed, her agony and death and her resurrection The other two sisters are married. But Karin (Ingrid Thulin) is very unhappy with her marriage. She has an impatient anger for her husband as well as for life at large. Her husband is a very cold man. In a harrowing scene, in one of her flash backs Karin tries to mutilate her sex organ as an expression of protest to her chilly old man husband. Maria, the third sister is beautiful but selfish. She thinks only of herself and is more like a spoiled child. Though married Maria’s casual eroticism had forced her into the “bliss” of adultery, driving her husband to attempt suicide. Anna (Kari Sylwan), the fourth woman in the midst of the three sisters is a loyal maid who takes care and nurses the dying Agnes. The bodily pain of Agnes is the central point of the narrative. But, with this as the background ambience, the film tells about mental agony of all the three sisters who are delineated from each other but who wish for closeness and care between themselves. The delineation between these women is expressed cinematically by the way the camera looks at them. For example Agnes body gets fragmented in many of her close ups. All the four characters are distinctive in their dresses too. All the characters are exposed through occasional flashbacks which are strictly subjective. Though the flashbacks depict the character’s feelings and motivations, the audience is caught in the confusion whether these flash backs are realities or illusionary fantasies or intimate dreams. For Bergman dreams are as important as the realities as he takes always a psychoanalytical posture with his characters. Of the four women Anna, the maid is the only one blessed with maternal bliss. She treats Agnes as her own child. She consoles the dying Agnes by the presence of her warm body. The only solace and grace that Agnes receives in her death bed is the warmth of Anna’s motherly body. But she, with so much of care could not salvage anything. Agnes dies, so also her biological daughter. As in Persona, the unspoken anxieties and intolerable agonies have no hope of escape. The film has a very painful scene that showcases the deep physical pain and the deeper mental agony of Agnes before her death. Nothing helps her. Pain with out relief is the thematic core of the film. Neither medicine nor religion offer relief from pain. The Chaplain who comes to administer the last rites to Agnes too seems to be lacking faith in his own prayers. Here again the audience is confused whether the scene is depicting reality or dream as the presiding minister utters an unusual prayer. “Pray for us who are left here on the dark dirty earth under an empty and cruel Heaven. Lay your burden of suffering at God’s feet and ask Him to pardon us.” Bergman makes clear his philosophy of life that life can be made meaningful only through love either as intuition and dream or by the real physical touch .loveless ness and loneliness as well as the inability to communicate with each other are the causes for the mental agonies of all the characters in this film. Even in the face of death they cannot hold themselves together. Even under the shadow of death the omnipresent emotion left is pain and loneliness. The inability to communicate and reach out to each other echoes only the cries and whispers of grief. (Incidentally the term “Cries and Whispers” is taken from Mozart’s Twenty First Piano Concerto given by the Swedish music critic Yngve Flycht) To overcome the agony of this reality, the women dream of being together and caring. Karin who is desperate with a sense of guilt is reached out by Maria in a dream sequence. Maria is one who is not scared of touch and she caresses her own sister who responds too. They try to care for each other. They try to communicate through ballet gestures and lips. Anna on the other side tries to console Agnes by caressing her with her body. Touch each other, caress each other , thus communicate love and care for each other in this otherwise lonely world seems to be the message Bergman gives out. The final sequences of the film highlights a sort of parallel between Jesus Christ on the cross and Agnes dying in her bed. Jesus Christ was equally lonely on the cross as like the dying Agnes. She is shown lying dead by a high angle shot which invokes the crucifixion motif. The shot of Anna holding her body reminds one of the painting Pieta by Michelangelo. It is from this crucified position that Agnes resurrects like Jesus Christ. The last scene of the film is a visual invocation of the lines from Agnes’s diary. On a seemingly cool summer day all the four women are walking outdoors.There is a swing and they stop by it. And here the diary entry goes like this: “All my aches and pains were gone now. The people I am most fond of in the world are with me. I could hear them chatting around me, I felt the presence of their bodies, the warmth of their hands”. The resurrected Agnes finally experiences perfection in her communion with the world outside. Even a few seconds of love and togetherness can make the whole life, worthy and meaningful. The color pattern of the film is red and black and white. Almost every scene of the film dissolves out into red. To quote Bergman: “In the screen play (Of Cries and Whispers) I say I have thought of the color red as the interior of the soul. When I was a child I saw the soul as a shadowy dragon, blue as smoke, hovering like an enormous winged creature, half bird, and half fish. But inside of the dragon everything was red.” (Images: My life in Films, PP 90) All most all Bergman films are on the inner existential struggle that the humans go through in life. To quote Jesse Kalin again: “We will be abandoned, our worlds will collapse, and then we will suffer. This will happen to each of us, and one can hardly remember a Bergman character who has escaped this fate. Indeed one might think of Bergman’s films as almost systematic explorations of such sufferings” (The Films of Ingmar Bergman, PP7) ======================== Sources cited: 1) Bergman Ingmar, The Magic Lantern ,Penguin Books, Viking Penguin inc.,40West, 23rd Street, New York, 1988 2) Bergman Ingmar, Images: My life in Films, Arcade Publishing, New York, 1994 3) Kalin Jesse, The Films of Ingmar Bergman , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , United Kingdom, 2003 4) Shakespeare William, King Lear , Hayes Barton Press, Read More