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.

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.