1085 Bergman's The Serpent's Egg and Berlin

Preliminary sketch notes about my knowledge of Berlin, my experience of Germany, the rise of Fascism, Bergman and the Serpent's Egg, together with the Christopher Isherwood viewpoint

My knowledge of Germany developed through my childhood as my aunts prayed in our garden air raid shelter, and then looking at the crater of the demolished house after a rocket bomb fell in a nearby road. A relative who returned from a Prison camp liberated by the Russians said they were worse than the Germans. An uncle and his wife returned from serving five years as part as the allied forces reconstructing West Germany into a prosperous democracy, marvelling at the motorway net work and whispering to adults about the reality of a black market and politically and emotionally divided nation

And then I read the official reports of the war crimes tribunal on Belsen and Auschwitz and thought I understood what the whispers had been about. A couple of years later I saw Laurence Harvey, Julie Harris and Shelley Winters in a recreation of Christopher Isherwood's story "I am a Camera" from Goodbye to Berlin, made into a play and then the film released in 1955 when I was sixteen and four years away from trying to be a writer on one of the two portable Olivetti typewriters I managed to sell during my ignoble half year as the training course star pupil and subsequent failure as a sales person.

Laurence Harvey was not my idea of being a writer, but I was instantly attracted by the nightclub sleaze world in inhabited by Sally Bowles, although at the time having no idea that the central character was a homosexual like his creator. I did understand something of the juxtaposition between the existentialist lives of the central characters and the rise of Hitler and the fascists, but it was more the emotional recreation of a time than the historical factual reality. This came later

It was not until 1964 that I acquired a Pan edition of William L Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for twelve and sixpence, a good buy for a 1400 unabridged academic history. I valued everything Allan Bullock had to say and his recommendation that this was the one book to place in the hands of anyone who wanted to know what happened in Germany 1930-1945 remains even more valid today.

A year before I had travelled by train through Germany to Stockholm but my experience was travelling at night and being a little spooked by my memories of what I had read. In prison in 1961, we had been allowed to have sent in Teach Yourself German, as we had this idea of going Munich and to Berlin and committing some non violent civil disobedience action at the boarder between East and West just to make the point that we opposed the worker's and the capitalist bomb. In 1965 as part of a grand European Tour, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France in three weeks in my mini estate, my male work colleague and I camped by the Rhine and entered a large beer tent where Germans made spaces for us to sit with them a drink enormous pints of beer singing songs we did not understand. We then did not find the municipal camp in Munich and motored on until we found one in the Black Forest and then entered an Inn where we were looked at closely and we felt we were the subject of everyone's conversation as we gambled at menu items but had a good inexpensive hot meal. Later we stayed with a German young woman and her mother at their flat in Geneva, who I knew from college days, and that is the extent of my reality experience about Germany and its people for over a decade.

I went to Munich in my imagination in 1980 through Time Life and where the frontispiece is of beer tankard upon beer tankard followed by an evocative mixture of pictures and words got the measure of the city and its people. There have been few, if any, films about life in Germany before and after the two world wars that I have not seen, and since the birth of Sky TV, on its history and documentary channels.

Another dimension of early Sky was that you were able to pick up German TV channels and these were more interesting to watch late at night and sometimes during the day when they had their Parades and Festivals, but still I hankered to be a carefree artist in Berlin, especially after finding that most people took off all their clothes in the main public park and that something of the twenties night life continued. I had seen the work of Kurt Weil recreated on stage and on TV and then Lisa Minnelli and Noel Gray had brought us Cabaret to the screen, in 1972, a work which remains vivid a portrait, and which I watch on DVD at least once a year.

But only last midweek did I view Bergman's the Serpents Egg made in 1976, the most odd and disappointing of his score of films experienced over the past year. The main language of the film is English with an unconvincing David Carradine as an alcoholic Jewish Trapeze artist who drinks himself into stupor for some inexplicable reason and Liv Ullmann as a failed circus performer trying her hand at being an oversize Sally Bowles. The film follows the same path as I am a Camera, Cabaret and others, people being decadent oblivious at first and then pretending not to notice, until shortages, and mounting street violence forces then to appraise what is happening to their neighbours, I like Carradine from his TV series mystic searches for enlightenment but he and this film is a mess. The last segment attempts to knit everything together with a kind of pre Joseph Mengele experimental doctor who both Ullmann and Carradine encounter. It is perhaps the darkest and bleak portrait of the time but it added nothing to my knowledge and experience.

I have one other brief experience of the German people, a party of local authority bigwigs from a twin town who I took on a coach trip to the largest in door shopping centre in Europe to meet its creator Sir John Hall who tried to convince them about the merits of his development despite my alerting beforehand that right and left had united to ban such a development from their city. I then had a drink with his son and son in law while the party went off to shop. Some came back early with their purchases for a drink and it was only then that I realised that if you excluded the language difference they were just same as any group of politicians representing the extremes of opinion and interests.

I still hope to go to Berlin and sit in the sun among others without any clothes and chat up a bird in a nite club hoping she is not a male transvestite!

1023 Bergman's The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal is regarded by many as the best work of Ingmar Bergman I do not, but this has nothing to do with cinematic excellence or artistic achievement, but with personal interaction. The film is included as a Barry Norman 100. He praises the film for the recreation of medieval Europe and while the devices used to portray the central issues may have been original they are over done even pretentious now.

A knight returns battle weary from the Crusades, a noble endeavour which has left him questioning his motivation and faith.

But he finds part of his island homeland ravaged by plague and the moment he arrives exhausted on the island, he is greeted by death, and fortuitously there is a set up chess set and he challenges death for game where the stakes are time and potentially a reprieve. I like this aspect, although we should always have an awareness of death, our own and those we care about, who may those we know intimately and those we do not. On TV last night, or the night before there was the reported death of a family of four including a baby but the survival of their 8 year old son with his grand parents? On the same programme there was a report on a memorial service for a 14 year old who elected to enjoy her last months rather than try and prolong through further chemo, and who had launched a charity to help other young people. Now one is the horror of sudden death, did father or mother or both cry out to God to spare their children? And also the peace of that comes from knowing and preparing. We may cling to life and fight off death that is being human, but to play and gamble, I do not like that myself but do not judge others who do.

On his journey to his estate and wife the Bergman creation encounters a small band of strolling players, a couple with a young child. These appear to be good parents, skilled in the craft, a happy couple struggling for food and for paid work. The husband is something of a romantic and devout, seeing the Virgin Mary and her child but this is not first vision he has recounted to his partner.

While performing at a village the third member of the group is willingly seduced by the wife of the blacksmith and they go off for a time to enjoy each other. The blacksmith and other actor having a few drinks at the local inn, the male community, supported by those females present turn on the man holding him responsibility for the action of his colleague. Fortunately he is rescued by the knight's assistant. Returning to his family they offer hospitality to the troubled knight who thought he had a way of winning the chess match against death until death tricks me into revealing his plan. Their simple fare of fresh milk and wild strawberries and relaxed chat eases his mind and has a great bearing on the outcome of the film.
There are other events with affect the knight, his assistant and the players. A young teenage girl is to be burnt as a witch and as the leader of a religious sect who carry crosses and whips each other, urges the peasants to abandon their self interest and pleasurable ways and seek forgives and redemption before they are killed by the plague.

It is argued by Barry Norman and by others, that the plague represents an evil force, which will sweep many people away before their natural time, and therefore they need to live their lives more appropriately. Well I concur with the aspect of preparation and always seeking appropriate redemption for any sins of omission and commission.

The wronged blacksmith decides to join forces with the good player he had wronged but this reconciliation is short-lived when they encounter his wife and the errant performer. She claims she has been seduced and mislead and her husband is only too willing to believe this, while the errant player attempts to fake his death only to be cut down when he attempts to spend the night in a tree, and death comes and breaks the tree.

The knight touched by the kindness of the couple and their child devises a plan to lose the game but buys sufficient time to return to his estate, to see his wife and to takes the other key characters with him with the exception of the couple and their child. The knight and those with him perish, and this is no surprise, but they find their faith and are saved from damnation. The young couple and their child. Well one must not spoil the ending must we, which in Bergman films may or may not matter. It is the way he tells them, now which comedian said that and of whom?

This is grim dark film which according to others is authentically set in time. This was a third viewing and a second reconsideration based on my memory and the draft text. If I live long and develop the memory loss of my mother and of others, what will I remember if all I have is just the list of films experience, or the list of Bergman, the work Ingmar Bergman? It could be Wild Strawberries and this film because they are about age, death, remorse, forgiveness and redemption. I hope I summer with a Monika, but there are many layers of Bergman to unravel still, hopefully.

1041 Bergman's The Magician

It is Sunday, a day when I work for at least eight hours as every other but try and reflect on matters of faith, belief, spirit and soul and view conventional films about religious issues and those which concern aspects of the supernatural. Some I watch over and over again as the Shoes of the Fisherman, Quo Vadis and The Ten Commandments, and the Mission, Some I want to watch but find the experience too overwhelming as Mel Gibson’s Passion, although I do plan to view again on Good Friday. Others are less well known such as Preminger's, The Cardinal, The Devil at 4 O'clock with Spencer Tracey and The Garden of Redemption. I also appreciate work about different faiths such as Kunden and Seven Years in Tibet, together with Epics with a spiritual theme with Ghandi the one I return to from time to time..

There also those produced as science fiction and fantasy entertainments What Dreams May Come and Vanilla Sky, Constantine, Dogma, Revelation, The Body and the Sin Eater, Cronos, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth and countless others, some dealing primarily with the Occult.

Tonight I have decided to reconsider three or four of the others viewed over recent months beginning with a disappointment, Bergman's the Magician, although it contains several haunting images, particularly the opening sequence when the small troupe a Magician, played by Max von Sydow, a young male assistant who plays female parts and speaks for the dumb Magician, and his 200 years old aunt witch figure selling dubious love potions and making money for her future, together with a young "normal" coachman.

The opening sequence begins with a derelict scaffold building next to the coach in scene of desolation before they move on through a dark and frightening forest where on stopping they encounter an actor dying, and they take him with them, but he dies and is placed in a coffin when they arrive at a town where they are asked to do a private performance for the Consul, a kind of Mayor.

The scene is set for some genuine magic and reflections on the nature of God and man. While the aunt does appear to be able to manipulate nature in her own interests, we quickly learn more about the nature of the hypocrisy and misuse of power by civil authorities, a chief of police and medical officer health figure, than we do about the true nature of the universe.

I will resist the temptation to spoil some of the fun, but suggest that close attention is paid to the young man and to suspend judgement, from the time when because the wives fancy the Magician, the good burghers are only willing to immediately cut up his body after he is killed, to establish if his powers are genuine, but then become sacred when he reappears after the dissection has been completed!

The accompanying film notes are helpful because they explain the Bergman message is less conceptual and based on the prejudices of his early experience. He and his wife, Bibi Anderson, had a great time where they were struggling actors, leading a bohemian existence, in a small flat in the town of Helsingborg where on Saturdays they were invited into a pastry shop to have free cakes and hot chocolate with whipped cream and they were frequently invited to the homes of people where they could eat their fill. Their credit was extensive and they were invited to local castles and mansions to sing, read and act while performing at the theatre
This contrasted with what happened when they moved to Malmo where they had little contact with the locals who expected much but were unwilling to pay. He represents the good citizens through the Consul who keeps his distance, and who tries to formulates rules about relationships and panics when he discovers that his wife has become involved with the players who he considers to be a rabble
Bergman has also explained why he made one of the civic figures particularly obnoxious. He is reported to have said that there is a tendency to marry within the theatre and for actors have an illusion about their existence forgetting how "we actually appears when we are not stage." Henry Schien, a critic was married to Ingrid Thulin who plays the assistant in the film and wanted her to give up the theatre and films and devote herself to art and to craft. "I invited him to Malmo to try and prove him wrong" says Bergman

He admits that the character of the health official had a real life counterpart, the husband of Thulin who Bergman regarded as arrogant, and is said to have treated him in a humiliating manner, although this was subsequently contested and the man is said to have become a close friend. Bergman also admits a malicious streak with the couple picked up in Wild Strawberries who were also based on people known to him. Bergman adds that he sold the film to the studio executives as an erotic comedy!

My next venture was to find out if the remake of the Wicker Man measured up to the brilliant original.

1036 Bergman's Saraband

Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband is the sequel to Scenes of a Marriage and my brilliant provider sent the DVD's so that I could view them sequentially, or perhaps it was an act of coincidence.

The openings sequence of Saraband, a prologue sees Marianne, Liv Ulman aged 63 looking on her life through a table covered in black and white photographs although this film is in colour made in 1983 when he was 86 and when in the film former husband Johan of Marianne is also 86. (I liked the use of black and white photos says he who has printed a work 101 in Black and White!)

The next aspect of the film is uncanny as shortly after the couple meet again, after an absence of thirty two years, the husband says that he is undertaking a prolonged view of his life, a pre judgement day, just as I have been doing as an integral part of the work project. Marianne asks about his conclusions and he describes his life as idiotic shit (a significant difference here because I know I have made positives differences in outcomes at several times although whether this outweighs the rest, is another question, probably impossible for me to assess, or for others to judge without the cataloguing and weighing up of everything that has been, and it multiplicity and complexity of causes.

He also devalues the relationship describing their marriage as hell, stating that a priest previously told him that marriages worked if there was a good relationship and unshakeable eroticism.
They lacked the latter which she admits in Scenes from a marriage was the consequence of the relationship with her mother, and a father pushing her to become a lawyer against her wish to become an actor, (the rebelliousness, curiosity. adventure taken from her but which she finds in her next relationship)

The film discovers what has happened to the couple since they broke up and went their separate ways.

Their relationship past and present becomes secondary to that of his son and grand daughter, and we enter another familiar Bergman territory, after the mother daughter harrowing experience of "Autumn Sonata, "and "Through a glass darkly," between father daughter and son and the relationship between the aging professor and his son in "Wild Strawberries."

When father and son meet unexpectedly they both express hate and loathing in their mutual disappointment about the relationship... Father admits never to have taken to his child, while son had becomes inconsolable when he loses the love of his life to cancer and he now makes a life with his daughter something which his wife warned him not to do from the unstated fear that such a relationship would destroy them both.

The son is an associate professor, runs a chamber orchestra, and plays the organ which was the instrument of his musical degree but now concentrates on the cello which he teaches his daughter. She has potential but is locked into what her father has taught, and pushing her to the local conservatoire so she will remain living with him

The Grandfather fixes for her to go to a friend in Russia to work with an outstanding artist. At the conclusion she decides on a solution which takes her away from her father, and does not become dependent on the string pulling of her grandfather. But is this the conclusion?
An aspect which struck me is that the after remarriage and going to America the father returns to his homeland and then isolates himself away amongst beauty and a significantly larger library than my own. (I must get back to reading and rereading and to learning Spanish and to daily walks and use of the exercise bike)

The films makes me think more of biological gene cloning than cycles of behaviour repetition, and that we share experiences of thought and feelings more generally than recognised and accepted although I believe this is a more focussed occurrence among creatives of intellectual ability.

The relationship between parents and their children is more brutal in these films than others, with Marianne being disappointed with the mental illness of her daughter shut away in an institution and another daughter who has gone to live at opposite ends of the earth.

The inevitable occurs between the elderly man and his younger former wife in one of the most touching and caring scenes of the whole of film. (I must do that that play about old old age). The inevitable is also that their relationship is momentary and it is their destiny to go separate ways until the permanent physical parting of the death of one.

There is also inevitability about the ending both between his son and daughter and his former wife and her psychotic daughter.

Some people only wish to experience film and have to wish to learn how it was made. On this DVD those of us who like to understand the perspectives and something of the process will enjoy the 30 mins film in which Bergman describes something of the making of the film together with interviews from Liv Ulman and others.

"There is more of this film in his head than in the script," he says.
"The film has a life of its own after I have created it and then I cannot bear to watch it."
Ah ha, just as well I wrote about the ideas in this morning's piece on Creativity three to four years ago but still after the piece written at the end of second millennium after the birth of J .C. which I discovered only earlier in the night. The significant thing for me is that I also recalled the contents of this piece on Saraband first written last October.

1028 Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage

It was not until October 14th 2006 that I encountered Scenes from a marriage Ingmar Bergman. Even by Bergman standards this film has a layered intensity and a clarity which is extraordinary. As art it is the kind of experience which makes struggling expressionist like me despair, knowing we will never create anything which will approximate.

It is also a commentary on the truth of relationships

Because my emotions were raw, I found this film too powerful to experience at one sitting, although I have since after buying my own copy.

The work was not constructed as a film for theatre but a six act 50 min TV series which won such acclaim that a leading national marriage counsellor approached Bergman for advice (just in case you think I was overstating its merits).

The work was reduced to two hours for a stage play and then in 1983 it became the present film of 2.40 mins with 16 scenes in four segments 4 x 4.

The film begins with photos being taken for an article about the ideal marriage. There are good hints that all is not what it seems, two people brought together by circumstance the wife previously married for a short period, his background I am not sure, his wife a lawyer like her father specialising in divorce, he is involved with psycho technology, they have two children they are complacent confident talk about their relationship to others.

At a dinner party they are witnesses to their best friends tearing chunks out of each other linking with a scene from Wild Strawberries.

Then we have the scene which one person in every marriage which ends unexpectedly will recall with pain, when the other makes the announcement. But can such an announcement be made which does not devastate. Is there such a thing as dissolution by mutual consent?
But worse is to come when the wife finds out that best friends knew and did not say, but from their point of view saying what they know could have precipitated what might not never have been.

However this is not the end in terms of the couple never meeting again, but it is the end of what they thought the situation had been. The brilliance of the film, its uniqueness, is that it then takes you along the journey of self discovery, growing enlightenment and maturity which is part of the continued growing up we all experience, and where some have to do it alone or with others, at least for a time, but it there ever any going back, and if there is, can it work?

In this instance Bergman answers the question in another film

1019 Bergman's Wild Strawberries

But then there was the Wild Strawberries, a film which will only be fully appreciated by old persons aware of death as they too reflect on their lives and seek redemption.

I am not sure about some of the imagery and the dream sequences and flashbacks, but there is so much I could identify with.

The film begins with Professor Borg who although living with a housekeeper is alone after the death of his wife, with a flashback suggesting the marriage was unhappy and that he never recovered when his childhood youth sweetheart married a brother and is alive now a75 year widow with six grown up children. He has had a troubled night with a dream which portends his death.

I liked the feel of the dream which touches my own in the sense of being an observer as well a participant and therefore contemporary experience never recaptures the innocent intensity of childhood experiences.

This is an important day for the Professor when he is to be honoured for his work of fifty years and the impact of the dream is to make him get up and travel by car rather than plane in carefully planned journey which his son also a doctor and his housekeeper had arranged. She is upset and does not understand his change of plan. He confesses that this is a major change for him too. He admits be being an isolate living for his work and a pedantic with routines so this change is untypical. His daughter in law, who we later learn has had troubles with her husband, decides to travel with him by car and early on in the journey he takes her to where the family lived or somewhere similar to the location of the wild strawberry patch which leads to the memory as a young man of relationships and where he meets a young girl and her two companions on their way hitchhiking to Italy. They symbolise youth, hope, the future and they are fearless, but kind- one is going to be a doctor the other a cleric, they are middle class intelligent and the world is theirs.

Soon after they have recommence their journey they are nearly hit by a car on the wrong side of the road which over turns and although they are able to right it, it is too damaged to continue so they give a lift (the car is big enough with three rows of seats), but after a short period they eject the couple who spend the time attacking each other in their own ways… a negative relationship but which has a positive effect on the relationship between father and daughter in law, daughter in law and her husband later and between the professor and the housekeeper.

After an enjoyable lunch father and daughter in law go to see his mother who is 86 alert with her memories this is another significant moment for me as she comments that all but one of children are dead that she sees only one grandchild once a year that she has fifteen great grand children who she has never seen.
She is grateful that her son has called in on his big day, it is a treasured moment for her because she does not know if she will ever see him again or him her.

There are touching moment at the end with his social professional recognition of the award which is similar to getting freedom of the city with marching through the streets. The ceremony is in Latin which brings a reminder of how universal academic language once was. The trio of backpackers serenade him at bedtime and he hopes they will keep in contact although he knows they will not. But the film ends on positive notes. His daughter in law is pregnant but the husband does not want a child, the ending suggests reconciliation and he will accept the child.

One core of the film is that question can God exist in the world of science and this is argued between the travelling student cleric and doctor to be who comes to blows hints and indicates something of one of great conflicts of the final segment of the century.

However the heart of the film is about mortality and the possibility of resurrection in a reality sense, not just the concept of absolution, reparation and redemption. Especially when in one sequence the professor fails to answer the question what is the first duty of the doctor, and he fails to the answer which is to seek forgiveness yet while he learns that his son hates him (from his daughter in law), Max Von Sydow as a garage proprietor and his pregnant wife refuses to let him pay for petrol, water and oil check because of his previous service to the family and community and given this unconditional love he openly queries whether he should have left and move on, alas in my case the world of child care was swept away by social services although I have to add that would have I ever have become a chief officer had it not been for this double revolution of social services and local government change coinciding with health 1971 1974. One should not attempt to seek redemption in the last moments although this may sufficient for some, but for the rest is has to be an ongoing quest as close as we can to the original sin.

1021 Bergman's Three Strange Loves

Much of my work is about memory. My own and that of others. Remembering Bergman’s Three Strange Loves requires a good memory because it is one of those films with compartmentalised stories, which also interact, so although you find a part absorbing you are aware that is part of a whole. If you are in theatre remembering detail becomes impossible so you rely on any available film notes or critical comments to remember and form a considered judgement. There are films where a lot more is remembered. Much is about feelings.

I saw this film on DVD in October 2006 and now 5 months later, the words help to conjure mood and fleeting scenes. As with the Silence ,the film centre on train journeys, It was made in 1946 and contains a train journey through war destroyed Germany with the train besieged my hungry people during a stop.

One of my aunts lived in Germany just after the end of the war, with her soldier husband and she conveyed something of the atmosphere. Too often war films made over the past three decades, fail to convey the fear and desperation, the devastation and horror nightmare which the majority of the population of the cities and major towns experience in most countries of Europe. This si the nightmare which Hitler and German forces created and should never be forgotten.

The film opens with a whirlpool and there is one weekend moment at the commencement of the film where the couple have a weekend away and we are in the familiar Bergman territory of water, boats and countryside.

This is the story of a trained ballet and general dancer who is subsequently injured and debates changing to a career as a folk singer. She is used to attention and controlling men through her sexuality and looks. She is prone to talk about herself and her problems, she is inclined to drink too much, especially at night and this only makes her humour and relationships more difficult.

The title of the film three strange loves suggests three different kinds of relationships between three sets of couples and here I found some confusion.
The first relationship is between the girl, as a young woman and a married soldier, although she does not know he is married with three children, until the weekend/holiday together. He appears to subsequently spend time between his wife and his young mistress and his wife comes to the home of the mistress to look her over in an act of desperation to protect herself and her children. This coincides with the mistress admitting she is pregnant three to four months along the way and her uncertainty of when provokes her lover to question paternity and to break with her. I am not clear if she subsequently become unable to have anther child because of natural complications in which loses the child or because of a bungled abortion.

This affects her subsequent life and relationships as it would anyone, but in her case more so. It affects the relationship with her husband, coming to a head during the journey back from the trip where she has accompanied her husband via a scholarship bursary to Italy and other places, and where she meets the former lover as he passes in the train in the opposite direction going on holiday by train returning by plane, the reverse of their venture. Their conversation is a social which on the surface is devoid of the emotions which governed their relationship. I could not remember if the former lover was with his wife or a new woman.

During the latter stages of the train journey the husband becomes so fed up with the behaviour of his wife, especially her lack of control over money, although he appears controlling in an opposite direction, that he imagines he has killed her. However the sexual bond between them and underlying affecting triumphs over their problems in a moment of mutual passion as the film ends and they return home on midsummer's day, a day when it used to be/ perhaps remains traditional for people to dance the night away literally.

My confusion uncertainty remains over the nature of their form of love, which I think is about the love a woman has for her husband who has died some 15 years before. There is a scene at the cemetery and meeting up with a former school friend who has a photograph of the films central character although I am unclear of the connection with three of them. my interpretation is that the former friend attempts to seduce the widow who is tempted but draws back running off and there is also the suggestion that she takes her own life by going into water, but I may be off kilter by a wide margin about this third strange love. I came across on review which did not appear to help until I studied the photos and from sets of stills and it seems that the husband had a relationship with the former school friend who attempts to seduce the widow.

There is a minor relationship between the widow and a practicing doctor who attempts to seduce her, and she has to break away with him threatening that she will have a great breakdown unless she responds to his request.

There were aspects of this film which interested but I would not view again compared to Autumn Sonata, Through a glass darkly, and Wild strawberries. It is a film of substance. Anyone reading this could be discouraged for seeing the film, but all that has happened is that I have admitted my inadequacies, in memory, in critical understanding and literacy.

I have failed to explain why the loves are strange. I am very tired and will try Sleep ather than persevere. I had intended to also cover Saraband and the World in Pictures, an Almodovar and the second quartet of Lost so the day is ending in failure.

What do we remember of past loves an relationships when we are old. Does it matter and why is the love relationships of others of interest to us. Do we imagine we learn? I will not give in to sleep.

1020 Bergman's The Silence

The Silence was my 10th Bergman film experience and I gave it undivided attention on 24.10.2006. I still cling to being able to watch something, write something and think something at the same time.

It was just after my birthday in March 2007, four months after watching the Film, and I make the choice to reconsider the film in preference to watching an interesting film on TV, and writing about a non political episode of West Wing where the character Josh experiences post traumatic stress. The subject of the episode, and the film, required undivided attention, so I chose what should have been the least emotionally demanding activity.

I am still shattered from getting up early after going to bed late, then a good level of prolonged working over eight hours, an early afternoon cooked meal, a break to catch up on an F A Cup which was worthy of undivided attention, as later had been an England win against France in Rugby Union. I dozed when visiting my mother at the residential home where she was a resident, watching Hook, and then on return watched Time Team, had more to eat and dosed more until West Wing achieved my undivided attention.

In The Silence, two women, for a moment I thought one was mother, the other, her daughter, and travel in a train with a boy. They are sisters but this is not immediately apparent, perhaps it was and I did not pay the attention although I believe I did.

The film was made in 1963 and the impression is conveyed that it is hot somewhere in Europe. There is a southern feel to the travel rather than Nordic.

The boy witnesses a goods train of endless tanks passing by. War, in war, preparations for war, seems to be the message; this is not peace time produced goods on sale for use by others.

(I have spent a week going through too much paper, trying to relate the recollections of others about events four years ago, partly based on partial contemporary records, memories changed over time, the interpretations of a succession of people asked to establish facts and make judgements. I do not have the brain or memory for the task. But there is no one else and if I do not do it no one will).

The journey is interrupted as one of the women is taken ill. Looks like TB. They stay at a grand hotel to enable her to recover sufficiently to complete the journey. When I was a boy I lived a young aunt who had TB. The youngest of my mother's six sisters and four brothers, and who was the first to die. Her fiancée was studying to be a doctor at the University of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War and disappeared. She never knew what happened to him, nor had his mother and this affected her greatly; that was the kind of person she was, kind. But that is just a mixture of fleeting retained impressions and the memories of others.

The boy in the film appears to live with two women, I thought I knew him well as I was raised by three women, sharing a bed with them until I was nine or ten years of age.

There is suddenly menace as a solitary tank which rumbles around deserted streets near the hotel. Towards the end of World War II the rocket bombs came, over 140 falling in the area close to our home. I have a vivid memory of watching one flying over while making way to the Anderson shelter, praying its engine would not stop. It did but fell somewhere else. Sometimes we would go and look at the crater in streets nearby. Now children only know about this if their parents watch old films. It is black and white history.

The sisters and the boy do not speak the language of the place where they stay, but that it is an international hotel helps. The ill sister cries out once, perhaps twice: “I do not want to die here among strangers! Most people cry out that they do not want to die, to end, whatever their spiritual beliefs, and expectations, so this cry is interesting! Her sister, the boy, is they strangers? At least she will not die alone.

The boy is bored, uncomfortable and used to being on his own. I have never been bored in that sense because I grew up being on my own among others.

The hotel where they choose to stay is evidently the best in town and in most places. The corridors and rooms are vast, but there is an absence of other people. There is a service waiter on their floor and he is to play an important role as the film unfolds. The sisters seem to have money and the length of their stay does not appear to be a problem. As in all Bergman films, viewed so far, one of the characters, the sister who is ill, is an artist, a writer and lover of words. It is evident she can communicate through words but finds it difficult to communicate directly with people.

The boy has his own punch and Judy puppets and there is a troupe of midgets staying at the hotel and performing at a variety theatre. To-day we say height challenged. Significantly below average height is a mouthful. I am not sympathetic to this constant seeking to find neutral public expressions for what is the reality of everyday behaviour. You do not change prejudice by changing terminology that is why I liked In Bruges so much, because it spoke as people do and the midget made the most of being a midget.

In the film I should have watched tonight, I noted from an advance clip the statement to the effect that we all have secrets, guilty secrets. In Bergman films the secrets are shared between characters and with the audience. We learn something of the attitude of the sister, imprisoned by illness in the hotel, towards the physical aspect of marriage but who finds being physically alone unbearable. The younger sister, the boy's mother, has a different kind of problem and goes out leaving the boy in the care of the other sister and in effect the care of the hotel. That the boy is used to being on his own in this way is no defence.

His mother goes to a show where the troupe is performing. There is also a separate scene where the boy encounters the troupe in their room and is entertained by them. As with Fellini who makes a point of including abnormal physical forms I fail to understand the significance except to drive home the point that no one is in fact normal although with most the abnormalities are internal and in how they relate to the world.

A young woman told me that she encountered a stranger in the midst of a desert in central Europe and they made physical love and then went on their separate ways without communicating in words. In this film there is a similar situation because the man and the woman speak different languages. It was this aspect of the film which shocked 1960 audiences. The aspect, which had interested me, of the real event, is that it had taken place when the woman had been a fearless young backpacker in the sixties. I also knew someone who went on her own to India for six months before university. Now a days having one night stands with strangers who speak in different tongues has become common place for young people in a thousand holiday hotels in the Costa’s but justifiably think a boy or girl was crazy to go backpacking alone, anywhere. The nature of freedom to have changed. We are being asked to surrender some freedoms from.

The boy goes on walkabouts in the hotel and I am reminded of Jenny Agutter's film although in this instance the aborigine is the lonely floor waiter. It is not the performing troupe. The man is kind, especially to the sick sister and finds a way to communicate without language. The sick sister also appears able to communicate to the boy and writes him a message, which is similar concept to that of the History Boys, the passing on to a new generation. But beware the price of being a ring bearer, which for me is the main message of the magnificent Lords of the Ring. The Silence ends leaving you to speculate if the sick sister has died or has been left alone. Mother and boy continue the journey north.

There are film notes with the DVD and in this instance I read them afterwards and then replayed the film. I find this is the way to experience a film, theatre, sporting: go and take an emotional journey and then think, and then if inclined, watch again which I did in this instance because I needed to separate myself from the film and what its creator had intended.

1017 Bergman's Autumn Sonata

Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata is a challenging and disturbing film with it core subject of the relationship between children with their parents and parents with their children. Sometimes, as in this film it is better if parents and children are separated by their different worlds of experience. The time is not always right for an exchange of truth, one or both may not be able to listen, digest, understand, or accept, and yet without communication there can be no progress, development and resolution.
There is always the risk of irreparable damage and in this film we are left with the likelihood that this is what happens. It is both the fault of mother and daughter, but paradoxically, it is also not their fault. Hegel and Marx were simplistic in the proposition of the juxtaposition of opposites from which there can develop a synthesis. Black White Grey co-exists on a shifting spectrum of emphasis according to internal and external forces. Everything has a casual relationship and connection, predestined, predetermined but is also random and chaotic. Everything is controllable and uncontrollable, well, so it seems to me
In this film the parent is a concert pianist, past her best, wracked with back pain and losing her best friend. She only has the piano to give her life meaning and this is now failing her or at least the recognition of her peers and public regarding her professional ability. She is like the footballer and all those whose time upon the stage has to be limited by age and fashion.
She cannot cope with one daughter who is severely disabled and ill and by the other because a gulf in understanding has widened over years of unresolved issues about which the mother appears to be unaware.
The daughter is married having lost a child of her own, but the marriage from the outset was a compromise. Her husband is a country vicar living in a beautiful location and part of a local community, accepting the knowledge that he cannot convince his wife that he loves her unconditionally. He does not know how to reach that part of her which has been locked away.
He reads from one of his wife's two books about the search for identity and her hope that through a relationship she will come to understand herself. (Never a promising basis for a long term relationship)
The daughter writes to the mother inviting her to visit, and there is genuine joy and expectation at her arrival and a longing to be understood and accepted. The first problem is that daughter is looking after the disabled sister who the mother had placed in an institution.
This leads to the first of several great lines, "I have never had a taste for people who are unaware of their motives," says the mother when she finds that her daughter has failed to disclose in advance the presence of her sister in the household, when she is aware that her mother cannot cope with sickness in general and her disabled daughter in the particular.
The daughter is unable to communicate her feelings, and what she really wants, and what she is thinking. Fortunately, the husband understands, having become integrated with his own childhood and life as it had developed, but he also despairs of being able to make his wife understand and accept his unconditional devotion to her. He also understands his wife's pent up anger with her mother.
In an attempt to impress and bridge the gulf between words, the daughter plays the piano for mother and presses her to be honest in her appraisal. Mother cannot be anything other than honest, something which in reality the daughter finds humiliating. "Human beings cannot stand too much reality," but even as this point the film gives not hint of the ferocious interaction to come.
The daughter has partially resolved the death of her child through the belief that the child continues to exist in parallel life within a reality which is beyond our capacities to understand.
The mother is a woman who understands her own needs, and has the funds to pander to them. She has a clear view of her own childhood, and the person she has become has become and of her mother. She believes she understood her daughter during childhood and has little awareness that all her perceptions are challenged by the daughter.
Look into the abyss etc and once you step through certain doorways, into some portals, there is no return
The truth as the daughter sees it emerges. "Once you said I should have been a boy," so I hated how I looked.
"I wanted you to stay, to be a proper mother but I also could not cope with you as you were."
"You had taken care of all the words in our house."
"At fourteen you took over everything when you stayed home you put all your energy into me.” "It was horrendous I still shake horror/ terror about those years." The mother tries to explain how she felt about herself, why she could not stay or return what she tried to do and was not equipped to do.
"What scared me more I thought I was going insane."
"You damaged me for life just as you are damaged."
"You tied me down because you needed my love."
"And it all took place in the name of love."
"A mother and her daughter what a terrible combination."
"The daughter shall inherit the mother's injuries."
In the daughter's unhappiness mother's triumph
I remember very little from my childhood, says mother
"Only through music did I get the chance to reveal my emotions."
"I wondered if I had ever lived at all."
"Do some people ever live?"
"I see an ugly picture of myself"
"I spent my life accumulating experience."
"I cannot remember faces even my own"
"I remember the pain of the births but not the taste of it the details"
I wanted to love you but I was afraid of your demands
You can't put all the blame on me
You always wanted excuses there can be no exceptions
I wanted you to take care of me
But I was only a child
It is one of the most excruciating honest exchanges witnessed in the cinema alongside who's afraid of Virginia Wolf and Look back in Anger.
There is a necessity and inevitability about what happens although it would have been better that it had not.
There are several levels of revelation in this film. One is the performance of Ingrid Bergman in her last role before she died of cancer five years later. Her performance is no less remarkable than that of the disabled daughter while the other daughter is played by Liv Ulman being Liv Ulman at her best. The husband's role is expertly crafted. This film is such great truth as to be unbearable. I thought this was the best of all Ingmar Bergman's until Scenes from a Marriage and Saraband. There are others which inhabit separate dimensions which are also brilliant and painfully challenging.

1018 Bergman's Through A Glass darkly

I cannot remember seeing Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly before, but if I have then I have been in more of a fog than previously appreciated.

This is a moving and at times frightening portrayal of schizophrenia disintegration and of family response. There are just four characters in the film set in one of the Bergman Islands where the water is drawn from a well, lighting is by oil lamp and milk has to come directly from a cow. There are two linked families living next door in their isolation. The husband who appears to earn his living from fishing, not unintelligent but a practical man concerned with the realities of life and his young wife who has retreated into girlhood, cannot cope with a physical relationship, and is trying to hide the reoccurrence of voices she has to listen after returning home from what may have been a long period of hospital treatment.

The film coincides with the return to the island of her father who has run away to Switzerland following the illness of his daughter, to complete his latest book. He is an intellectual who tries to write the truth as he sees it, and as an artist he observes and writes about the experiences which interest him, so after the mother in Autumn Sonata there is in this film a father who cannot cope with the realities of parenthood.

(I have never claimed great insight into my own actions and motives, only too aware of the capacity to self deceive and present oneself to oneself in the best possible light, but I know only too well the difficulty of not seeing what is revealed in relationships outside of professional relationships)

To mark his return to the island his daughter and his younger son, learning Latin to enter university, have prepared a play which they perform.

The family of father, daughter and son have not been able to communicate and this is the core problem. Responsibility for the illness of the daughter appears to be apportioned not on father but with mother, who may have killed herself, but I am not sure about this aspect.

For me there are two key moments in this film. The first occurs when the daughter reads the entry in her father's diary where he states that her illness is incurable and where the husband has warned father that the psychiatrist has said that a relapse is likely. This is the peril of knowing and recording information which will be destructive if communicated to the subject.

She also reads that her father cannot help wanting to record the disintegration of his daughter, such is his detachment from her experience, although this is both true and not true. This is always the cross of the artist. How can the experience of others be translated into art if it is not the truth, and therefore is the experience in which you have shared in some way, but which is then not identifiable to those who provided the experience?

The second issue concerns the son and his fears, genuine that he too is going the same way as his mother and sister. He complains that his father he has never had a proper conversation with his father and after there has been an incident between daughter and her brother and she tries to tell her father, father realises that he has to give priority to his son and speaks with him so that the concluding words are those of the son who is thrilled to have had a conversation.

There is an argument for not telling some children about the truth of their parentage, "The bad mother’s handbook," is built around this dilemma. If you tell them, the individual is like to spend the rest of their life in fear and create a self fulfilling prophecy. But if you protect and try and cover up you will never be forgiven if found out which usually happens at some point although the individual concerned may come to have an understanding of reasons and motives, but often too late for relationships to be repaired.

The film ends on a more optimistic note than Autumn Sonata, but this if for cinematic purposes. The reality is darker. This is a grim subject sensitively acted.

The film highlights the acuteness of awareness, in this instance hearing and brightness which marks the illness recurrence, the most moving and memorable aspect of the film is the daughter explaining that there is nothing worse than to be aware of yourself and the illness without being able to prevent the relapse.

1014 Bergman's Summer with Monika

My knowledge of Sweden as a country comprised a two week college trip in between a Diploma in Public and Social Administration and Professional Training in Child Care. The journey was made by train through Germany and Denmark and after a few days in the capital we stayed at a Folkhighschool on the east coast near Forsa. There was also a memorable day at the University of Uppsala. My memory is of an endless countryside of forest and lakes, of a small town where the young people drove around in cars, picking each other up to party in the hills, and of news about President Kennedy, I think "I am a Berliner" rather than the day of his assignation. Until the trip my knowledge of the Scandinavian soul was based on the plays of Ibsen and music of Grieg(Norway), and the music of Sibelius (Finland). Abba was yet to come. and of one film Summer with Monika.

The attraction of the film, seen soon after I left school in 1955, was the promised sight of an unclothed girl going for a swim, which planted the idea of abandoning a boring office job and going off, pre hippy style, living rough, for love and sex. At the time I understood aspects of the reality of the tragedy which the film unfolds, but the lingering image was of the original summer of love.

I have seen a few Bergman films during the fifty years it has taken to grasp the significance of a film maker who has said all there is to say of value about the human condition and human relationships. It was logical to commence with Summer with Monika.

The story has been covered in many different ways before, and since. A nice young man of a good home, (although the boy has lost his mother at 8 and has a well intentioned protective aunt, and a father providing a good home and small boat, but sick and sad, but appears a good father), is picked up by an attractive young girl from a poor working class background with ineffectual mother, worn out by the struggle of a large family and drunken bulling and at times violent father.

The girl lives in a dream world of the cinema, wanting romance, a wealthy husband, so she does not have to work and can spend her time having fun and buying clothes. She is experienced and has a reputation to an extent that she known to the employers of the young man, and her brothers, as Mucky Monika! We learn that she has had an affair with one of the older men at work and an aggressive younger man from her environment. This young man encounters the couple during their summer among the southern islands and tries to destroy their boat but it is not his intervention which defeats the couple. They return to everyday reality after she becomes pregnant stealing food after she becomes pregnant, marries and live in a small flat where he works by day and studies nor a better life by night. They return, are married live in a small flat. We all know what to expect next and it does. He is left to bring up the child, and remember his taste of honey. There is great emphasis on the cinematography, which communicates the emotions experienced. This is not a great Bergman film but it remains an important part of my past experience and it introduced to the greatest film maker to-date.