Years after Ingmar Bergman’s chamber drama The Passion of Anna was released in 1969, Liv Ullmann was quite frank in admitting that he wasn’t sure what he wanted to express through it, presumably due to the huge personal turmoil that was unfolding between both director and actress on the verge of their breakup. The messiness that resulted is no doubt evident in certain creative choices, with Ullmann’s titular character being largely absent in the first half, and Bergman bringing her back in halfway through with a jarring time jump. At the same time though, this uncertainty also instils his direction with an improvisational quality that he has often kept a distance from in his career, bringing a raw vulnerability to this study of dishonest lovers.
The influence of the French New Wave had slowly been pushing Bergman closer to deconstructions of cinema throughout the 1960s, but perhaps with the exception of the magnificently postmodern Persona, there is little as bluntly self-referential as the interviews he conducts with his actors here. These come in the form of four interludes clearly breaking away from the main narrative and positioning his cast as avatars who know these characters on a far deeper level than any friend, lover, or even themselves.
Bergman uses documentary-style interviews as formal interludes, stepping outside the narrative to gain insights from each lead actor.
Max von Sydow is the first of these, speaking of the lonely Andreas Winkelman as a recent divorcee shamefully trying to hide his identity and destroy his means of expression. He stands in sharp contrast to Ullmann’s Anna who claims to desire the absolute truth of her relationships, yet takes refuge in lies, realising too late that reality is uglier than she would like to believe. Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson respectively play troubled spouses Eva and Elis, one being “a woman who can no longer cope with the fact of her own disconnectedness,” and the other an amateur photographer who believes anyone horrified at human madness is a hypocrite. Like so many of Bergman’s films, his rural home island of Fårö plays host to this drama, as its physical isolation pushes these characters to commit cruel, heartless acts against each other.
Much like Through a Glass Darkly, this is a true chamber drama, developing layered relationships among four complicated characters.The Passion of Anna isn’t always a great show of spectacular visual style, but Bergman’s blocking and lighting of faces remains a highlight all throughout.
As for the mystery of who is killing the animals on this island, Bergman purposefully leaves enough ambiguity to suggest that it could be anyone – perhaps with the exception of Andreas who saves a hanging puppy. The clearest suspect in the eyes of the local police and residents is the mentally ill loner Johan, though after he is driven to suicide by a violent mob, it soon becomes apparent that he is innocent. More than anything else, this thread of murders injects The Passion of Anna with menacing undertones, suggesting a desire for sadistic violence in the most ordinary people.
If we are to pin the killings down to a single character though, then perhaps we should look to Anna. Just as the identity of the animal killer is kept uncertain, so too is the truth of her past as a wife and mother, which she asserts was a perfectly happy life before her family perished in a car accident she accidentally caused. After discovering an old letter from her husband also named Andreas, von Sydow’s Andreas Winkelmann sees through the façade – their relationship was full of “complications, which in turn will trigger terrible emotional, agitation, physical and psychological violence.” Often when Anna proclaims her belief in total honesty and “striving for some form of spiritual perfection,” Bergman cuts away to these typed words that have imprinted themselves in Andreas’ sceptical brain, eroding our trust in her words.
Sharp, well-placed cutaways to Anna’s late husband’s letter, as the camera tracks along lines of writing describing their marital troubles, imprinted in Andreas’ brain.For the first time in any Bergman film, we are able to appreciate the bright blue of Ullmann’s eyes, especially during this five-minute monologue delivered entirely in close-up.
That said, it is also perfectly evident that Anna has convinced herself of the lies she has constructed, and so in a strange way there is still a profound honesty in Ullmann’s performance. In one five-minute close-up, she speaks with sincerity about the cliché of two people becoming one through marriage, and then as her monologue turns to the car crash, her head slightly tilts and she turns her glassy gaze just beyond the camera. This is the second of Bergman’s films to be shot in colour, but the first featuring Ullmann, and through this vibrant photography the vivacity of her bright blue eyes can finally be fully appreciated in all their expressive beauty.
Warm, pastoral landscapes set the scene of this island’s rural isolation.Bergman’s artificial magic hour lighting sheds a blazing red glow over Andreas and Eva’s brief affair, filling it with lust and guilt.Summer eventually turns to winter on the island, and Bergman’s colour palette shifts with it, leading to some magnificent exterior photography of frigid, icy tones.
Further revealing the depths of Anna’s lingering trauma are her night terrors. The first time they appear we distantly hear her screams from Andreas’ bedroom, though later we see them for ourselves as Bergman’s camera enters her mind. Up to this point he has crafted a rich palette that has shifted from warm summer tones and artificial magic hour photography into the cold dead of winter, though here he reverts to the austere black-and-white imagery of his previous films. Shame draws the closest comparisons of all to the bleak, war-ravaged scenes of Anna sailing across the ocean on a refugee boat, meeting a woman whose son is being executed, and fruitlessly begging her for forgiveness, though Bergman is more cryptic with such surreal symbolism as this. The guilt that haunts her is deeply layered, and only stokes further questions regarding the role she played in her husband and child’s deaths.
The surreal black-and-white interlude of Anna’s dream looks far more like Bergman’s previous work, offering insight into her traumatised, guilty mind.
With tensions as thick and unresolved as these, it is only inevitable that they will spill over into her relationship with Andreas, and a full-blown expose of each other’s lies violently erupts. If we didn’t have any suspicions by this point that Anna had purposeful intent in killing her family, then they are certainly piqued now as she runs the car containing her and Andreas off the road, with only his quick reflexes saving them both. Both sides frustrated and ruined by the impasse they have reached, Anna leaves Andreas by the side of the road, and Bergman slowly zooms from a long shot into his nervous pacing. “This time he was called Andreas Winkelman,” the running voiceover enigmatically concludes, linking him back to Anna’s deceased husband and suggesting a universal plight that plays out in variations of the same story.
It is far from Bergman’s strongest ending, and The Passion of Anna does not exactly possess the formal strength of his most avant-garde works, yet there remains something compelling about his wrestling with these complex characters dynamics, straining against the violent assault of outside forces. With both Hour of the Wolf and Shame sharing these concerns, a loose thematic trilogy forms around these films, collectively testing the psychological stability of Ullmann and von Sydow’s cynical lovers. Although this is the weakest of the three, watching Bergman deconstruct his own interpersonal vulnerabilities with imperfect honesty offers absorbing insight into the limits of our humanity all the same.
An enigmatic long shot to end the film, slowly zooming in on Andreas’ nervous pacing – formally questionable, but not awful.
The Passion of Anna is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV.
The rapid destruction of civilisation by the fictional, unnamed war in Shame is split into two halves, each mirroring the other in chilling severity. The first part of society to crumble are the homes and lives of its citizens, spelling out apocalyptic horror in almost every shot from the moment bombs start falling. Only when social order has been extinguished can the second seal be broken, twisting the souls of survivors into distorted shadows of their former selves. It is with their total moral defeat that Ingmar Bergman settles an all-encompassing hopelessness over the only war film of his career, taking this study of human violence to its logical, haunting end.
It was only a few months after Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow wrapped production on Hour of the Wolf that they collaborated with Bergman to play another couple tormented by inner and outer demons. Jan and Eva’s minor frustrations at the start of Shame are nothing compared to what awaits them down the road. They are but humble farmers who have retired from careers as violinists, and even as hints of an impending invasion accumulate in tolling church bells, armoured vehicles, and radio broadcasts, they still find time to sit down and speak casually of their futures over lunch. Learning Italian, playing music, having babies – the expectant optimism of their conversation is only vaguely disrupted by Eva’s dig at Jan’s selfishness, which he nevertheless takes in his stride.
The last moment of lingering peace in this four-minute shot, holding on Ullmann’s expressive face before the bombs start falling.
The four minutes we spend studying Ullmann’s sensitive face in this unbroken shot makes the emotional whiplash a mere few moments later land with shattering formal impact. Bergman’s frenzied editing of jets flying overhead and exploding bombs drastically accelerates the pacing, as Eva drops to the ground and Jan gazes up in terror. It is at this point in Shame that both embark on an emotional odyssey of confusion, fear, hatred, guilt, and anger, while the contentment we witnessed earlier in the scene becomes little more than a distant dream.
Perhaps their subsequent slog across desolate landscapes of burning buildings, dead bodies, and bombs kicking up dust on the horizon had some cinematic influence over later war films too such as Apocalypse Now and Come and See, as Bergman brings an enormous visual scope to his cheerless narrative. Sven Nykvist’s cinematography is as crisp in its monochrome austerity as ever, panning with the characters across cataclysmic set pieces larger than anything he had shot before, while Bergman strips back dialogue to hold us in the grip of his visual storytelling.
Bergman’s camera pans with the car across devastating landscapes, revealing the extent of the apocalyptic horror.Ullmann’s eyes are bright and honest. You can virtually see the terror of the war reflected in these close-ups.
It is in these wordless sequences that entire worlds are built beyond the scope of the immediate plot, revealing lives that were once as vivid as Jan and Eva’s, yet which have been painfully extinguished. Here we witness the true extent of the war’s destruction – the charred husk of church in the distance hosting a small funeral procession for example, and a boat of refugees floating atop an ocean of dead bodies. Even this far away from the mainland, Shame’s disturbing symbolic imagery continues to haunt its survivors.
Cataclysmic imagery of burnt-out churches and bodies floating in water, detailing the lives and deaths of others as they tangentially intersect with Jan and Eva’s.
Bergman’s colossal set pieces are not a departure from the interior lives of his characters though, but rather an extension of their troubled minds, where the stakes for the second part of this battle are waged. Here, a new question is posed – if it takes a nation’s military to topple structures and end lives, then what sort of psychological forces does it take to kill the human spirit? Gaslighting innocent people through scare tactics is one viable method, as we see footage of Eva doctored to make her sound sympathetic to the enemy, thereby eroding her trust in authority. Self-disgust is a powerful weapon too, as former mayor Colonel Jacobi manipulatively offers Eva and her husband protection in exchange for sexual favours. Perhaps the most crushing weapon of all though is the mutual contempt that manifests between lovers, preventing any return to domestic tranquillity even when the immediate danger has faded.
Gunnar Björnstrand is solid in his supporting role as Colonel Jacobi, bringing a fascinating power dynamic to Jan and Eva’s home life – and especially when it completely flips.
The incredible composition of Jan’s profile obscuring Eva’s face as both rest their heads after the first day of the invasion started might be the last true moment of peace they share in this film. When they finally return to their farm afterwards, no longer is Eva the same calm, strong woman she was before. One day when she discovers Jan weeping, her only acknowledgement of his feelings comes as a short, savage jab – “Cry if you think it helps.” The prospect of having children is now out of the question, and her bright, honest eyes are widened in fear and sorrow.
Bergman’s trademark composition of faces brings a sombre gravitas to this moment, finally giving Jan and Eva a chance to rest their heads.
Perhaps even more shocking is Jan’s transformation from a coward into a ruthless killer, nihilistically participating in the dog-eat-dog world that has risen up around him. Jacobi is the first to suffer a prolonged, painful death at his hands when he fatefully requests the return of a large sum of money, and later when the married couple meets a young soldier on the road, Jan doesn’t hesitate to murder and rob him too.
Shame is unusually bleak even by Bergman’s standards, capturing Sweden’s harsh, desolate scenery as an extension of his characters’ immense emotional trauma.
Where the internal and external violence of Shame intersect most acutely is in the eventual fiery ruin of Jan and Eva’s home, mercilessly set alight by the military for Jan’s refusal to pay up the money that would earn Jacobi his freedom. This daunting set piece simultaneously represents the brutal destruction of everything they have built together over many years, and the easily avoidable consequences of Jan’s stubborn greed – the money that he pretended not to have was hidden in his back pocket all along. The disbelief written across Ullmann’s face upon this reveal might almost be read as fury if it wasn’t so completely drained of emotional energy. Like so many of the greatest war film directors, it is Bergman’s profound ability to draw such profoundly personal stakes from widespread trauma which shape his severe, pensive ruminations. From there, Shame just keeps descending into an irreversible degradation of innocence, love, and compassion, dehumanising the same people we might have once trusted to restore sanity to a broken world.
This fiery, calamitous set piece marks the end of Jan and Eva’s stable home lives, rendering the destruction of their relationship on a huge scale.Crushing betrayal written on Ullmann’s face as von Sydow pulls out the hidden money.A melancholy long dissolve pulling us from this long shot of a single, black boat on the ocean into an intimate arrangement of weary faces, echoing the composition from earlier.
Shame is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
Symbolic contemplations of spiritual isolation, broken identities, and human mortality have long instilled an existential unease in Ingmar Bergman’s films, and yet as we trace back the steps of one mentally unwell painter leading up to his death in Hour of the Wolf, it becomes clear that none have come this close to outright psychological horror. The demons that pour from Johan’s mind onto blank canvases are almost Lovecraftian in their eerie, abstract creation – he is haunted by an old woman whose face comes off with her hat and the terrifying Bird Man, along with the meat-eaters, the schoolmaster, and the cast-iron, cackling women. That they are simply figments of his tortured imagination makes them no less dangerous, or any less real. After all, they are also fully visible to his wife, Alma. Her recount of Johan’s final days may not offer hard answers to the many lingering mysteries left in his wake, and yet in her abiding love, compassionate understanding can be found.
It is surely intentional on Bergman’s part that the name Alma was used in his previous film, Persona, similarly characterising a woman who acts as the mouthpiece for an interdependent couple. Where Liv Ullman played the mute Elisabet there though, she openly invites the audience into the film as the Alma here, directing her narration directly to the camera. She is nothing less than astounding, following up on Persona with another viscerally interior performance, now torn between complete helplessness and determined support for her husband. It is her point-of-view that Bergman frequently takes in Hour of the Wolf’s visuals and narrative, often mirroring the fearful delusion embodied by her co-star, Max von Sydow. Much like Persona, this is a study of dual identities blending in isolation, only with its focus shifted to lovers rather than acquaintances.
Liv Ullmann’s second role in a Bergman film comes two years after Persona, connecting directly with the camera as the troubled wife of Johan, and further revealing the extent of her acting range.
Besides Alma, Johan, and his evil spirits, there is another presence on this small island where they reside. Visions of his ex-lover Veronica disturb him with small talk and seductions, lulling him into dreams of the past which in turn add to the mounting shame his demons feed on. The letter she reads to him does not have an explicit sender, but given its menacing, apocalyptic undertones, it is safe to assume their identity.
“You don’t see us, but we see you. The worst can happen. Dreams can be revealed. The end is near. The wells will run dry, and other liquids will moisten your white loins. So it has been decided.”
Ingrid Thulin is Veronica – one of Johan’s past lovers, and perhaps the most dangerous hallucination of all.
Neither is it terribly difficult to guess the conspiratorial truth that lurks behind the guises of Johan and Alma’s bizarre neighbours who frequently drop by without notice. One of them, Baron von Merkens, appears kind enough to extend an invitation to his castle for a large dinner party, though anyone with the vaguest understanding of Gothic storytelling conventions will know to take this as an ominous warning.
As the guests settle at the Baron’s large table, Bergman’s camera rapidly circles them in a dizzying 360 shot, before manically whipping between POV close-ups of them talking right down the lens as their conversations bounce across the room. Afterwards, one of the men performs a candle-lit puppet show, though Alma is far more preoccupied by his leering face staring down at her, partially concealed by a shadow crossing his mouth like a wide, dark smile. The Baroness’ reveal that she has hung Johan’s painting of Veronica directly in front of her bed ends the evening on a note of uncomfortable humiliation, and leaves behind a lingering dread as they return home.
An almost Hitchcockian shot with the 360-degree spin, circling the table as guests settle down for dinner.An incredibly subjective camera with its whip pans between close-ups, and characters talking right down the lens.Ullmann’s eyes drift from the puppet show to the man in the rafters, shot with the shadow of a beam cross his face like a dark, clownish smile.
Bergman’s framing of his entire ensemble is almost always confronting, but those intimate scenes consisting solely of Johan and Alma are often just as sensitively composed. The camera’s deep focus intensely studies the insecurity that crosses von Sydow and Ullmann’s faces in breathtaking arrangements, and as Johan speaks of that dark hour every night “when nightmares come to us,” his tormented expression is lit but nothing more than a single match. Outside too, it similarly becomes apparent that this couple has built their house on uneven foundations, with the steep, rocky hills of this rural island throwing off the balance of Bergman’s exterior shots.
A combination of lighting, framing, and staging gives us Bergman’s inspired compositions of faces, expressing a deep melancholy in Johan and Alma’s love.Bergman shoots on the steep slopes of Fårö for his scenery, using its off-kilter, rocky terrain to throw off the visual balance.
While much of this story takes place through Alma’s flashbacks and her perusal of Johan’s diaries, Hour of the Wolf continues to sink us another layer deeper via his personal, distorted memories of one fated summer vacation. His violent struggle and murder of a young boy on the edge of a cliff is brightly over-exposed, separating us from reality and forcing us to question how much of this scene is merely symbolic, while in place of diegetic sound we simply find Lars Johan Werle’s unsettling, dissonant score. Mouths open, but no screams can be heard, cruelly stifling the painter’s raw expressions of agony.
Perhaps this boy was yet another demon that resided inside Johan, who even after being killed and thrown into the ocean simply floated back to the surface. Maybe the scene is closer to a representation of truth than we might like to believe, revealing another dimension of darkness to the painter’s subconscious. Either way, it has left a guilt within him which cannot be killed, and given the long dissolve which transitions from this dream back to Alma’s horrified face, we can clearly see that it haunts her just as much.
A dream in high-contrast, highly-exposed black-and-white, revealing the surreal depths of its protagonist’s mind much like Wild Strawberries.
When these spirits inevitably re-enter at the deepest point of Johan’s breakdown, all pretensions of civility are dropped, and that vague unease manifests as phantasmagorical terror. Bergman had already proven himself a talented surrealist in films like Wild Strawberries, but the aberrant horror he crafts in images of the Bird Man revealing his wings, the Baron walking up walls, and the old woman finally ripping her face off is downright chilling. After powdering Johan’s face and dressing him up like a cadaver prepared for the grave, these mischievous figures push him to his final stop – Veronica’s naked, dead body. He runs his hand over her skin from top to bottom, perversely drawn to her lifeless figure, and even as she starts cackling, he tries to kiss her. Her head tilts back into the light, casting harsh light and shadows across her sadistic face, and then all of a sudden, we realise the other demons are watching too.
A sequence of deeply unsettling images unfold as Johan returns to the mansion, and the demons reveal themselves. The elderly woman tears off her face, the Baron walks across walls and ceilings, and finally he is brought to the death bed where Veronica’s body lays.
The wide shot of this diabolic ensemble cackling at the camera in twisted positions makes for a frighteningly morbid composition, with two peeking around corners, another perched in a window like a bird, and another still lifting her dress in vicious mockery. Johan, with his make-up now smeared across his face, can only resign in defeat and recognition of his mutilated ego.
“I thank you… that the limit has finally been transgressed. The mirror has been shattered. But what do the shards reflect? Can you tell me that?”
Bergman mastered the art of the close-up, but none are so haunting as this, as Veronica throws back her head into the harsh light and cackles, upside-down.The more one studies this shot, the more disturbing it becomes, as Bergman builds Johan’s humiliating torment to a peak.
His lips continue to move yet no sound emerges, much like in his murderous dream, and again later when he meets his end at their hands in the woods. Bergman’s montage editing throughout his death is fast and violent, weaving in close-ups of ravens, eyes, and blood, and Alma is there to witness it all. In pensive reflection, she returns to a passing thought that crossed her mind earlier in the film, which might answer why these demons were visible to her as well.
“Isn’t it true that when a woman has lived a long time with a man… isn’t it true that she finally becomes like that man? Since she loves him, and tries to think like him, and sees things like him. It’s said that it can change a person. Is that why I began seeing those spirits? Or were they there regardless?”
One of Max von Sydow’s great performances, suffering through shame and self-loathing as make-up is smeared across his face.
To extend that line of questioning even further, did those demons truly die with Johan, or do they now simply live on in her mind? Through this psychological blending of identities, Hour of the Wolf warps our most intimate attachments into our greatest vulnerabilities, denying us even the sanctuary of Alma and Johan’s love to fall back on as a source of security.
At the same time, it doesn’t seem as if Bergman would have it any other way, especially considering the selfish contempt between couples which is present in so many of his films, and yet which is mostly absent here. Alma is a troubled woman, but she may also be one of his most purely compassionate characters he has ever written, surrendering her own stable mind to ease her husband’s heavy mental load. Even when faced with the existential horror which Bergman so surreally instils in Hour of the Wolf, there is still grace to be found in that hopeless, sacrificial love.
Hour of the Wolf is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
Through the twenty years of Ingmar Bergman’s career leading up to his crowning achievement Persona, his long running fascinations with the human face had manifested in some of the art form’s finest close-ups. It is “the great subject of cinema,” he believed. “Everything is there.” He didn’t need David Lean’s extraordinary panoramas or Michelangelo Antonioni’s modern architecture, though he certainly demonstrated a fine control over both visual devices whenever a scene called for it. To him, faces were landscapes on their own, with the potential to be shot in an unlimited number of angles, lighting setups, and arrangements within ensembles – and that isn’t even considering yet the incredible facial expressions reliably delivered by his troupe of recurring actors. In profile shots, the curves of the face become valleys and mountains, while front-on portraits might be partially hidden by shadows or visual obstructions.
Faces become like landscapes to Bergman in Persona, with slopes, crevices, and mountains – entire worlds of expression.
As such, there is an inherent tension between any character’s outward communication and internal emotions in a Bergman film. Not necessarily at odds with each other, but at least working in conjunction to create a mask of some kind. One which Carl Jung might describe as “designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.” Or to put it even more simply, a persona.
Therein lies the case for why this film may stand as the finest formal synthesis of Bergman’s intimate visual style and his deeply psychological subject matter, examining the perplexing duality which simultaneously defines humans as social beings and distinct individuals. All abstract truths conceived in one’s mind must be filtered through some sensory expression to reach the outer world, and Bergman does not discount his own film from that inevitable distortion. The raw materials of cinema itself become integral to Persona’s very form, opening and closing with montages of film reels, flickering lights, a penis, a cartoon, a silent comedy sketch, and a dying sheep, among other images. Even the very final shot of the film after Bergman’s camera pulls back to reveal his crew shows the film reel running out, and the incandescent arc lamp of a projector slowly dimming, signifying the end.
Bergman is playing with the raw materials of cinema in Persona – light, illusion, entertainment, all tying into his meditations on identity and artifice.
Much like everything else we witness in this film, these are but mere representations of reality, only possible through illusions of light produced by machines. And yet like the young boy we see at the start reaching out towards a giant screen featuring blurred images of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson’s faces, we too might find ourselves suspending our disbelief during Persona, convincing ourselves on some subconscious level what we are watching is not art, but truth.
A boy reaches out to Ullmann and Andersson’s faces in the opening montage, trying to grasp the illusion of the cinema screen.
Perhaps it is a similar recognition of this artifice which prompts theatre actress Elisabet Vogler to become voluntarily mute as she stands onstage, simultaneously rejecting both artistic and verbal forms of expression, and setting off the events of the film. To her nurse Alma, Elisabet’s mental strength to wilfully remain silent inspires great admiration, though the head doctor describes her philosophy from a far more nuanced, understanding perspective.
“The hopeless dream of being – not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others, and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures.”
One of the great all-time female performances arrives through Ullmann’s magnificent silent acting, marking the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with Bergman.
Here lies the key to unlocking many of Persona’s confounding mysteries, moving us closer to the core of one character who conceals her identity with silence, and another who conceals her own with speech. It is one of the finest monologues that Bergman has penned, but it also takes a turn halfway through as the doctor begins to apply pressure to Elisabet’s belief, questioning her methods to separate herself from the world’s superficial facades.
“But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.”
With this diagnosis, the remedy becomes apparent – a short stay for both Elisabet and Alma at the doctor’s summer estate. Like so many other Bergman films, his home island of Fårö plays host to this retreat, isolating the two women on beautiful, stony coastlines surrounded by the Baltic Sea.
Bergman’s home island of Fårö plays host to this retreat, isolating Ullmann and Andersson in its stark, beautiful scenery.
The dynamic contrast already set between Alma’s endless talking about her life and Elisabet’s patient listening continues here, drawing formal divisions in their characterisations as a submissive, emotional woman and her more assertive, rational counterpart. At the same time, there is also a subtle blending of the two which begins to take place. As Alma recounts a memory of sunbathing nude with her friend, making love with two strangers who approach them, and cheating on her partner, she also confesses a mental guilt which directly conflicts with her physical actions. “Is it possible to be one and the same person at the very same time – I mean, two people?” she wonders aloud, considering both halves of her mind as separate beings.
Personal secrets begin to spill out, and a power dynamic is set – Alma as the caring, expressive nurse, and Elisabet as the silent, judgemental patient.
Through Bergman’s blocking of their faces, this relationship continues to manifest in visual compositions he had played with many times before, specifically that which half-obscures one face with another in a representation of symbiotic duality. Not only is Persona his greatest stylistic accomplishment to date, but his cinematographer Sven Nykvist too deserves a great deal of credit for his camera’s sensitivity to the delicate movements and expressions of these actresses.
This is an immense accomplishment for cinematographer Sven Nykvist as well as Bergman, offering up some of the finest compositions of faces in both their careers – and cinema history.
When Elisabet enters Alma’s bedroom one night like a spectre, there is a surreal ethereality to the soft wash illuminating their slow, strange embrace, letting them caress each other’s faces and hypnotically gaze right at the camera. Later as they bring their heads together and look downwards, Bergman shrouds them in darkness against a white background, tracing the outlines of their intersecting, virtually indistinguishable profiles. While the emphasis on Elisabet’s face is her shrewd, perceptive eyes, only Alma’s mouth is visible, declaring that “I’ll never be like you. I change all the time. You can do what you want. You won’t get to me.” Once again though, her words are telling a different story to the corresponding reciprocals being depicted onscreen. One is of the head, the other is of the heart, and both might as well be two parts of a single, indivisible woman.
An ethereal night time meeting, lingering on the edges of consciousness as both women embrace and stare cryptically at the camera.This could very well be the shot that defines Bergman’s entire career, catching both faces looking downward in silhouette, but there is also incredible formal detail with the emphasis of Andersson’s mouth.
Bergman could not have cast two more suitable actors for these roles either, with both Andersson and Ullmann bearing visual similarities, yet expressing totally inverse personalities. Andersson brings a spontaneous vivacity to Alma’s lengthy monologues throughout Persona, speaking whatever thoughts come to her mind, while initially staged in the foreground of Bergman’s frame as the primary subject of our attention. Meanwhile, Ullmann often sits behind her, watching with an impassive face that refuses to reveal even the slightest passing thought. She may have been late to joining Bergman’s company of regular actors that Andersson had already been part of for years, but in time she would prove herself be among his most integral collaborators, starting with her tremendously silent performance here.
The chemistry between both Andersson and Ullmann only continues to grow more complex as the well-defined dynamic between them starts to break down. When Elisabet first speaks off-screen and encourages a tired Alma to go to bed, the nurse sits up in confusion, not quite believing what she heard. Rather than accepting that her patient has actually spoken, she simply repeats her words, as if verbalising an inner voice. Later when she discovers during their stay that her private life has in fact been the subject of Elisabet’s own supercilious study, the balance of power flips entirely. The observer has become the observed – the last place she wants to be. Acting out of spite for the first time, Alma leaves a shard of broken glass in the open for Elisabet to cut herself on. When she does, the silent eye contact they both share from a distance is full of mutual, contemptuous understanding. This island has turned into a battlefield of identities.
Bergman breaks the illusion of cinema as the status quo disintegrates, burning up the film reel as if it too can no longer bear the weight of its own illusion.
At this point in Persona, just as the status quo has been disrupted, Bergman rips us from his story and back into our own heads. The film reel burns, as if unable to sustain the disturbance that has taken place, and another montage of seemingly random images plays out. In some ways, the formal experimentation Bergman is carrying out here isn’t terribly different to the self-reflexive diversions from conventional narratives that Jean-Luc Godard was also exploring in the 1960s, but the purpose it serves in Persona is far more rooted in Bergman’s own cerebral curiosities. As his characters gradually transcend the limiting identities they have chosen for themselves, so too does his film break down its own façade of truth. When we do eventually make a return to the main story, there is no simple reversion to how it was before. Alma has turned in her white attire for Elisabet’s black, and the tension between them has fully manifested in an outright tangle of personas.
Seeking to draw out a raw, emotional reaction from the composed Elisabet, Alma pushes her to the brink of her patience in a physical confrontation. The threat of boiling water provokes a scream of fear, emerging from a place of honest emotion she has suppressed, and which Alma thrives on – “No, don’t!”. Conversely, the arrival of Elisabet’s husband on the island elusively switches out these women in the other direction, with the visiting man approaching Alma instead of his wife. Bergman’s deep focus blocking once again lifts off in this scene, bringing Andersson and Gunnar Björnstrand’s faces together in sweet reconciliation over past misgivings, as Ullmann’s face imposes itself as a silent, detached presence. Whatever her conflicts have been with her husband, it is not her silence which heals old wounds, but rather Alma’s warmth and connection. Her words from a few scenes prior about the importance of such affectionate openness begin to make even more sense here.
“Is it really so important not to lie, to tell the truth, to speak in a genuine tone of voice? Can a person really live without babbling away, without lying and making up excuses and evading things? Isn’t it better to just let yourself be silly and sloppy and dishonest? Maybe a person gets better by just letting herself be who she is.”
Crisp, deep focus as Alma slides into Elisabet’s role in her relationship, patching up old wounds while Elisabet remains emotionally disconnected in the foreground.
Still, how long can Alma really keep up this act of being a kinder, more considerate Elisabet? “I’m cold and rotten and indifferent. It’s all just sham and lies,” she cries in the man’s tight embrace, just as Bergman pans his camera to the side to reveal a daunting, front-on close-up of Elisabet. In her silent gaze that stares right down the lens, we see these same insecurities manifested as introspection, rather than the outward expression native to Alma’s personality.
At this point, deeper truths about both women and their ever-shifting traits begin to unravel quickly, building to a monologue that plays out twice in a row and pays off on the dual patterns woven tightly into the film’s structure. Alma may be the one who is delivering it, and yet the second-person perspective she speaks from pins the anecdote squarely on Elisabet, verbalising the mute woman’s unspoken thoughts. In this moment, the psychoanalysis which Elisabet had tried turning on the nurse now reverts back to the patient, as Bergman interrogates another false persona adopted by countless women in society – the image of the warm, caring mother. Like many of the characters she has played during her career as an actress, this is just another role she felt she must perform, composing herself with dignified grace while internally torn apart by fear and repulsion.
The traditionally uninspired shot / reverse shot film techniques finds new life in Bergman’s hands, mirroring a single monologue across the speaker and the listener. Even the lighting is inverted on both their faces.
The first time Bergman plays out this monologue, it is Elisabet’s face which we hang on, its left side cloaked entirely in shadow as she listens in subdued shame. When it comes to an end, a sudden, atonal bang on the piano throws us back in time by a few minutes, and repeats the exact same scene in the mirrored reverse shot. We sit now with Alma as she speaks, her face tightened in attentive focus, and its right side covered in darkness. The distinction of whose story is really being told barely matters at this point – like the two halves of the human brain, we are simply given conflicting perspectives of a single experience, visually expressed through the spliced close-ups of the left and right sides of their faces.
An eerie spliced close-ups of both women’s faces, emphasising their similarities and revealing both as equal halves of a whole.
Even by Bergman’s standards, this is unusually experimental filmmaking, though this profound interrogation of human duality asks for nothing less than intellectual patience. When it is time to pack up and leave the estate, there is notably one less woman in the household – has Alma’s decisive rejection of Elisabet pushed the manifestation of her insecurities deeper into her subconscious? Has she absorbed that alter ego into her own personality, and emerged a more balanced being? Or is Alma in fact the figment of Elisabet’s mind that has taken over her life, as we saw with her and Björnstrand’s romance?
The following montage of Elisabet on stages and sets doesn’t quiet help in any search for answers, but it does serve to remind us as Persona comes to its obscure end that these characters have always been little more than artificial constructs, holding no inner lives other than what Bergman instils in them. His film is both deceitful in its purposeful manipulations, but also intricately designed to evoke truths through bold, symbolic expressions, fully recognising the impossible task of creating any pure representation of reality. With the ubiquity of such pointed polarity, Bergman reaches deep into our psyches and exposes our greatest internal paradoxes, creating an avant-garde masterwork that is as entrancingly elusive as it is invasively intimate.
The camera pulls back in the final seconds to break the illusion of cinema for the last time, transporting us back to reality where Persona is just a film.
Persona is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
There is little wonder why All These Women has been so maligned over the years as one of Ingmar Bergman’s worst films. This brightly coloured pastiche is about the furthest thing one could imagine from the black-and-white meditations on faith and love which have defined his greatest artistic triumphs up to this point. Even his previous comedies such as Smiles of a Summer Night carry a more eloquent wit than the slapstick and buffoonery he happily indulges in here, and which one snobbish music critic awkwardly inflicts on the film’s country chateau setting while visiting famed cellist Felix. Cornelius hopes to write a biography on the reclusive musician and additionally get his own composition broadcast on the radio, but unfortunately his host has made himself scarce, leaving the writer in the hands of his seven female companions. Bergman is swinging wildly in all directions with his comedy, but the point of his derision is firm – this industry of artists and critics is a totally vacuous farce.
Quite significantly, All These Women also marks Bergman’s foray into colour filmmaking, imbuing Felix’s grand summer estate with a Baroque radiance that is ironically tempered in a largely monochrome production design. The towering candelabras, marble floors, and undecorated walls are pristine in their silvery whiteness, while costumes and the odd piece of furnishing imprint dark shapes on the mise-en-scène. As such, the small flourishes of colour that Bergman inserts truly stand out in his scenery. The flowing pink gown Cornelius wears while in disguise, the dusty orange sunrise shedding light across Felix’s bedroom, and the vivid red outfits at his final concert each become the centrepiece of multiple compositions, many of which carry the symmetrical precision of Peter Greenaway’s films.
Bergman’s first film shot in colour is a lush display of vibrant visual direction – clearly influences of Michael Powell and Jean-Luc Godard in the set and costume designs.
Of course, Greenaway was still sixteen years away from his cinema debut at this point though. Bergman’s actual influences here are incredibly diverse, appropriating the Technicolor vibrancy of Michael Powell’s mannered dramas, the heightened physical comedy of the Marx Brothers’ zany hijinks, and the formal self-reflexivity of Jean-Luc Godard’s genre deconstructions. Though a little subtler, the parody of Federico Fellini’s 8½ in All These Women is also notable. Both films share a dazzling Italian spa set and a postmodern critique of artistic egos, but Bergman’s strongest critique of the Italian filmmaker is directed at his relationship with women.
Despite the choice to shoot in colour, Bergman still often builds sets out of black-and-white, emphasising isolated splashes of vibrant hues – here, the red quill.
Much like Guido’s dream in 8½, Felix is surrounded by a harem of adoring female fans in All These Women, played by many of Bergman’s frequent collaborators including Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, and Bibi Andersson. There are seven in total, many bearing nicknames drawn from art history, Irish legend, and Christian theology. Bumblebee is his “official” mistress who takes an immediate liking to the foppish Cornelius, while Adelaide is his discontent wife, and Isolde is the flirty chambermaid. Filling out the rest of the female ensemble is Felix’s ageing patroness, his student protégé, his young cousin, and his piano accompanist, each serving their own clearly defined roles in his home, and collectively serving his outsized ego.
All These Women is closer to Peter Greenaway in its visual design than any other Ingmar Bergman. A rapid yet brief shift of gears that pays off in this instance, despite its formal flaws.
Though the imagery he crafts from his rigorous blocking of these women clearly indicates a director who has trained in the art of visual composition, it still possesses more of a still-life, painterly aesthetic than we have seen from Bergman before. Characters pose in tableaux of upper-class elegance around lounges, sculptures, and grand pianos, making for a brilliantly jarring contrast to his otherwise lowbrow humour. While the women gossip at the poolside surrounded by Greek-style columns and sculptures, Bergman ruptures a splendidly composed wide shot with Cornelius’ abrupt appearance in a swan-shaped pool float. The critic’s humiliation only intensifies when later pushed to dress in unconvincing drag, hoping that he might finally be granted audience if Felix believes there is a new woman on the estate. Even the musician’s graceful cello music has an incongruent counterpoint in the recurring instrumental motif of ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’, amusingly shifting musical styles with each new variation.
Visual comedy played in wides like Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, even turning to drag as a source of laughs.
Still, for a director like Bergman with such powerful command over comedy and drama though, it is evident that he is not always playing to his strengths. Some of the film’s harshest critics will point to its sped-up chase scenes, overlong physical gags, and parts of Jarl Kulle’s exaggerated performance as evidence of the film’s messiness, and they aren’t entirely wrong. Even with the targets of Bergman’s satire in mind, much of this humour is far too clumsy.
When Bergman develops his comedy with a little more self-awareness though, he hits on something far more inspired. One could almost imagine Monty Python pulling off a similar trick when he cuts away from Bumblebee and Cornelius’ sex scene, flashes up title cards reading “To avoid censorship, the act of lovemaking is depicted as follows,” and segues into a tame, black-and-white ballroom dance. Similarly, when Cornelius accidentally sets off a box of seemingly unlimited pyrotechnics, Bergman is sure to inform us that “The fireworks should not be taken symbolically.”
These comedic formal interludes are extensions of Godard’s self-reflexive whimsy, and presage Monty Python by a few years.
There’s no doubt that this is among Bergman’s most formally experimental films to date, and by far his most playful. On a structural level he is often pulling his narrative in non-linear directions, and even chooses to open the film with the final scene of Felix’s funeral. His fate is thus sealed from the start and is seemingly confirmed when an assassination plot is revealed – ludicrously motivated, as it turns out, by Felix’s own desire to be executed for demeaning his art. When the time comes for his big radio concert where Adelaide will pull the trigger though, there is no need for murder. Felix anticlimactically dies of natural causes, leaving his women to mourn and Cornelius to conjecture the rest of his biography alone.
Always hiding Felix’s face through creative shot compositions, right up until his sudden demise. Bergman builds on his mystery even further when the women can’t even agree on a single description of him.
Even in death, this object of everyone’s worship is an obscure, mysterious figure. His face has been conveniently obscured the whole time, leaving a great deal to the imagination when each women sees his dead body and vaguely proclaims “He looks the same, and yet so different.” Perhaps each of them have conceived their own unique ideas of him, as when Cornelius begins reading his biography, none can agree on a single description.
Again, the symmetry and precision of Greenaway many years before his debut – Bergman’s painstaking direction is as rigorous as ever.
Not that it really matters at this point. The arrival of a new cellist in the house immediately soaks up all the love, affection, and attention once reserved for Felix, thereby relegating him to the pages of Cornelius’ history book. That we never really knew a whole lot about the famed musician makes this a particularly smooth transition. In the conceited world of All These Women, men are but faceless idols cycling in and out of fashion, hiding with infatuated fanatics behind facades of highbrow culture. Through Bergman’s irreverent pastiche and mischievous mockery, at least one truth becomes absolutely evident – art has no real relevance to the narcissistic pretensions of artists.
Fourth wall breaks everywhere, acknowledging the artifice of the satire.
All These Women is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
By the time Ingmar Bergman had finished directing Winter Light, he claimed to have come to terms with his agnosticism and the unknowability of God’s existence. The third part of his unofficial Faith trilogy thus offers new dimensions to his long-running spiritual meditations, formally manifesting that existential fear which has run through so many of his films – the universe’s cold, unresponsive silence. It pervades Bergman’s screenplay and sound design with glacial repression, stifling the attempts of estranged sisters Ester and Anna to communicate with each other and their surrounding environment. Though God is not the focus here, His absence still lingers in occasional mentions of the deceased family patriarch.
“When Father died you said, ‘I don’t think want to go on living.’ So why are you still around?”
It is a brief, symbolic nod to a higher power, but a significant one when it comes to understanding the catalyst for The Silence’s modern malaise. Ester is severely ill both mentally and physically, and so when Anna directs this question towards her, it is virtually an attack on her weakened spirit that cannot embrace either life or death. Instead, she wastes away in the oppressive limbo of her hotel room, which resides in the fictional European city of Timoka. Meanwhile, Anna ventures outside in search of adventure, hoping that it might offer her some meaningful, reinvigorating connection with the world.
The Silence is Bergman’s most minimalist screenplay in his career, but this just leaves the door open for some wonderful visual storytelling as we see in the superb opening train scene.
The third member of this travelling party is Johan, Anna’s son, who quietly observes their unsettled relationship and wanders the hotel’s faded Baroque hallways. This architectural marvel is a decaying monument to another glorious era when it might have been populated with posh clientele, though now it is virtually empty to due to some encroaching war. One might almost think of The Shining in the way Bergman symmetrically lines his empty corridors with chandeliers, ornamentations, and embroidered carpets, creating an ornate maze for this young boy to lose himself within and encounter an odd assortment of characters. With little else to keep him entertained, he recklessly shoots off his toy pistol, and when he looks outside a window a military tank rolls aimlessly through quiet streets like a lost child. Maybe aimless violence is simply humanity’s most natural instinct when left to its own devices.
Surely the scenes of Johan wandering the hotel corridors inspired The Shining. The symmetrical framing, the random encounters, and the haunting atmosphere are very recognisable.A tank wanders a street like a lost child – a portrait of aimless violence.
Well, violence and sex at least. There’s not really any doubt that The Silence is Bergman’s most explicit film when it comes to matters of carnal desire. Being far more comfortable in her skin than her sister, Anna is often shot in the nude while in her hotel room, and there is a touch of Freudian intrigue on Johan’s part as he spies her through a door. When she goes out to the theatre, she reacts with both fascination and disgust at the couple having sex a few seats down from her, which subsequently inspires her to invite a waiter she has had innocent flirtations with back to her room. Meanwhile, Ester’s only form of sexual expression is masturbation, though for her this is barely even a form of self-love. She is wholly disgusted by sex on a sensory level, unable to form a healthy physical connection with anyone else, let alone herself.
The arrangement of faces in Bergman’s frames is remarkably in tune with his characters as always, here crafting an image of Freudian tension.
These are but the symptoms of a contemporary society which has slowly eroded clear lines of communications between its citizens, and left in its place an apathetic void of emotion. Violence persists without purpose, and sex without love. How ironic it is too that Ester herself works as a translator, and yet she is as stumped as Anna and Johan when it comes to speaking with any of the locals. Like the city of Timoka, their foreign language is entirely invented by Bergman, offering a tinge of surrealism to this setting which pushes us and our main characters even further away from any firm reality.
Three layers to Bergman’s depth of field in this one, illustrating a disconnection between each character through the blocking and set obstruction.
This language barrier is partially why so many characters choose to remain silent, and yet even within our Swedish-speaking cast, that quiet tension continues to dominate. Bergman’s sound design flourishes in the absence of dialogue, building out rich aural textures which sensitise us to the tiny movements of each scene, and then break them up with unexpected intrusions – jet planes flying overhead for instance, or the recurring disturbance of a ticking pocket watch. When conversations do unfold, they are often filled with deliberate lies, miscommunications, and purposeful ignorance. Even between Ester and Johan, a simple discussion over how to spend time together cannot settle on a single direction.
“How about you read to me?”
“I’ll show you my Punch and Judy instead.”
The puppet show he subsequently improvises is childish in its cartoonish violence and garbled nonsense, creating a crude reflection of the film’s dysfunctional modern culture. Clear parallels are also well-drawn in the following exchange.
“What’s he saying?”
“I don’t know. He’s scared, so he speaks in a funny language.”
Beautiful detail in the relationship between Ester and Johan, left alone in the hotel together when Anna goes into town. The division between them is helpless, despite the longing to connect.
The disconnect between strangers, neighbours, and family members is thoroughly illustrated in Bergman’s world, but even as he continues to delve even deeper into Ester and Anna’s strained relationship, we even discover a detachment between the human body and mind. These women and their respective Jungian archetypes are thus set in opposition to each other – one sharply intelligent and discerning of the outside world, the other seeking excitement and caring tenderly for her child.
Perhaps this study of a psychological, feminine duality could be read as a precursor to Persona which would come out three years later, though Bergman is not so opaque here with the emergence of his characters’ darker ‘shadow’ selves. Anna is intellectually dishonest, carelessly throwing out lies to torment her sister, and when pushed to answer why she holds so much resentment, she doesn’t hold back in exposing Ester’s cold, arrogant judgementalism.
“It’s just that you always harp on your principles, and drone on about how important everything is. But it’s all just hot air. You know why? I’ll tell you. Because everything centres around your ego. You can’t live without feeling superior. That’s the truth. Everything has to be desperately important and meaningful, and goodness knows what.”
The Silence marks staggering acting achievements for both Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom, especially in a year where both would also give excellent performances in Winter Light.
Bergman’s talents as a writer of cutting dialogue are evidently far from wasted in this film, and yet given the pervasive silence that hangs between characters, monologues like this are exceedingly rare. In fact, all the dialogue in the film’s first half hour might barely fill a single page, leaving Bergman to move this narrative forward and build out characters through rich visual direction. His camera’s deep focus is crucial to the magnificent blocking on display here, opening strong with a five-minute shot of our main trio shuffling in bored discomfort around a train carriage, and later arranging haunting compositions of the sisters’ faces like two parts of a whole.
Relationships illustrated in Bergman’s blocking – Ester lonely in the foreground, Anna and Johan caught together in the background in a wonderful composition.
The power that both Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom draw from Bergman’s shrewd framing in moments like these is considerable. Thulin carries herself with poise and control as Ester, and when her mental agony bursts forth he often catches her haunted expressions from high angles – at one point offering her gentle repose as the porter helps her back into bed, and later casting her in harsh light as she fearfully approaches death.
High angles often intensify the impact of Ester’s breakdowns, peering down at her face from above.
Lindblom too receives similar visual treatment when she probes Anna’s raw vulnerability. Her rendezvous with the waiter at the hotel is little more than an excuse to pour out her contempt on someone who cannot speak back (“How nice that we don’t understand each other”), but this is no substitute for real love. Raucous laughter quickly turns into sobbing as she hangs over the end of the bed, while Bergman shoots her contorted expression and posture from another high angle. Thulin’s acting may have beat out Lindblom’s in their other 1963 film Winter Light, but both are very much on equal footing here, desperately pushing past a mutual repression to uncover profound, existential terrors.
Similarly, Anna’s breakdown towards the end of The Silence hangs her on the end of the bed and diminishes her in the frame.
These noisy eruptions of honest emotion can never survive long in The Silence though. The next morning after Anna’s breakdown, that wordless impassivity she shares with her own family is back in place, even heavier with bitter sullenness. With Ester’s implied death and Anna’s abandonment of her in the hotel room, it appears that disintegration of humanity in an aimless modern society is inevitable. The train which brought these characters into Timoka now departs with one passenger less, and yet the atmosphere onboard sounds just as lifeless as it did at the start. In The Silence, civilisation will persist even in the absence of love and meaning – just as it did before Ester’s passing, and just as it will continue to do through a gradual, noiseless self-destruction of the human spirit.
The Silence is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
In the 1950s, Ingmar Bergman directed three films with ‘Summer’ in their title, referring to the season of one’s life that blossoms with romance and vitality. Winter Light then clearly marks a drastic shift in the tone of his introspective meditations, isolating us in Father Thomas Ericsson’s lifeless, rural parish. His congregation at the Sunday noon mass is uninspiringly small, and as we sit through the last ten minutes of his service there is an overwhelming emptiness to the proceedings. The prayers, hymns, and liturgy of the Eucharist move by at a sluggish pace, while Bergman cuts between close-ups of the parishioners’ expressions ranging from deep in thought to downright bored. This church is not a sanctuary for Christians, as the minimalist beauty of its arched ceilings and rough stone walls rather mirrors the bleakness of the frozen landscapes outside, infusing Winter Light with a chilling severity that cuts right to the troubled hearts of its believers, sceptics, and doubters.
The first ten minutes of Winter Light is the most lifeless mass you have ever seen, and Bergman’s photography is at its bleakest.
The scope of this narrative is far narrower than many of Bergman’s previous films, taking place over the course of a few hours between two services on a frosty Sunday afternoon. Tomas’ spiritual crisis began a long time before we pick up on his story, and it will continue far beyond the point that we leave him, though this brief time frame applies an intensive focus to the point at which it cannot be contained any longer.
For the first time in his many collaborations with Bergman, Gunnar Björnstrand takes the leading role, bringing not just a brooding bitterness to Tomas’ ruminations, but also a common cold that plagued him throughout production. Rather than cutting around its interruptions, Bergman turns it into a part of his character, reflecting his spiritual sickness as a physical ailment. At one point after he echoes Christ’s words on the cross, “God, why have you forsaken me?”, a coughing fit even brings him to his knees in front of his altar, while Bergman shines a bright sun through the tall, arched window above him in a divine image of human frailty.
A divine composition from Bergman in Tomas’ church, his sickness bringing him to his knees at the altar.
In this moment, the only person there to hold him is his ex-mistress Märta, played by Ingrid Thulin with self-conscious modesty. She is deliberately dressed down here, drawing attention away from her natural looks and turning her into a figure who evokes pity, disdain, and occasionally affection from Tomas. She is a collection of contradictions that shouldn’t make sense from a strict religious perspective, being a firm atheist and yet believing more in the Christian virtue of compassion than any other character. Additionally, she is the most constant presence in Tomas’ masses besides his sexton and organist, driven to remain by his side out of a selfless love that he often pushes away.
To Björnstrand’s disillusioned priest though, she is a reminder of the material world he spurned to pursue a life of faith, which now seems to be worth little. Bergman offers both a pair of monologues which formally complement each other on either side of this ambivalent dynamic, holding a six-minute shot on Thulin as she laments a summer where Tomas reacted with disgust to her spreading rash, without once praying for her healing. Given Bergman’s usual talent for evocatively framed close-ups, this is far from his finest, though its breaking of the fourth wall does allow for a brutal honesty which only feeds Tomas’ insecurity.
“Your faith seems obscure and neurotic, somehow cruelly overwrought with emotion, primitive. One thing in particular I’ve never been able to fathom: your peculiar indifference to Jesus Christ.”
Ingrid Thulin gives one of her greatest performances as the atheistic Märta, offering immense warmth and compassion to Tomas’ doubting priest. The story of her rash even bears some resemblance to legends of stigmata affecting saints.
Throughout Winter Light he offers numerous reasons for his dwindling faith, including the horrors he witnessed during the Spanish Civil War, his wife’s premature death, and a recognition that he only took up this profession due to his father’s influence. And yet when it comes time for him to pour all of his disdain right back on her, he offers a far less sincere verbal assault, seeking to wound her for all his petty grievances.
“I’m tired of your loving care. Your fussing. Your good advice. Your candlesticks and table runners. I’m fed up with your short-sightedness. Your clumsy hands. Your anxiousness. Your timid displays of affection. You force me to occupy myself with your physical condition. Your poor digestion. Your rashes. Your periods. Your frostbitten cheeks. Once and for all I have to escape this junkyard of idiotic trivialities. I’m sick and tired of it all, of everything to do with you.”
Both Björnstrand and Thulin get a pair of monologues that feature some of Bergman’s best writing – one seeking truth, the other offering hate.
Björnstrand commands immense verbal power here, though it is Bergman’s savage pen which impresses most of all in this string of merciless barbs. Spouses have been tearing each other to pieces in his films ever since the 1940s, and while Tomas and Märta’s relationship is not the sole focus of Winter Light, this exchange goes toe to toe with Scenes from a Marriage as his quintessential depiction of undistilled resentment between lovers.
With the task of fostering his parish’s spiritual growth now seeming an impossible task, Tomas finds himself acting out in stubborn, angry protest. When one of his parishioners, Jonas Persson, confronts him after mass with concerns over an impending nuclear winter, Tomas cannot find the energy to offer the “benign answers and reassuring blessings” which his own “echo-god” keeps giving him. In an unsettling role reversal, it is the priest who starts confessing his lack of faith to the congregant, and all the while Bergman keeps underscoring the proximity between Tomas and the sculpture of a crucified Jesus hanging behind him on the wall. Christ’s tortured face looks down on his lost disciple with sorrow, and yet he remains as agonisingly silent as the God whose existence is being questioned.
“If there is no God, would it really make any difference? Life would become understandable. What a relief. And thus death would be a snuffing out of life. The dissolution of body and soul. Cruelty, loneliness, and fear… All these things would be straightforward and transparent. Suffering is incomprehensible, so it needs no explanation. There is no creator. No sustainer of life. No design.”
Bergman is one of cinema’s great blockers of faces – but just note the detail in placing Christ’s tortured face above Tomas’ here. He looks down at the priest, who is in turn distracted and looking at Jonas, who is similarly refusing to look at the person trying to reach him.A disconnection drawn between layers of the frame, fatefully distancing Tomas and Jonas.Light starts to shine in the window behind Tomas in this close-up – Bergman is a master of these subtle lighting alterations to change our perception of a character’s expression.
Tomas does not have the awareness of how extreme Jonas’ concerns are to comprehend the danger of what he is saying, and yet the disconnection that Bergman captures between them through his depth of field is just as inconsolable as the priest’s separation from God. Jonas silently exits, and as Bergman shines fresh sunlight through the window behind Tomas’s head, he is also struck with the despairing recognition of what he has done. No more than a few minutes later does he receive the devastating news – Jonas has shot himself in the head with a rifle, leaving behind a mourning family.
Bergman again emphasises the freezing winter exteriors when Tomas comes across Jonas’ body – a severe landscape to match the souls of these characters.
Tomas has little time to process his guilt and console Jonas’ family before pressing forward onto his 3 o’clock service. It is here that Winter Light’s position in Bergman’s unofficial Faith trilogy becomes most evident. This is the second film in a row that sees him refer to God as a “spider”, but even more significantly we find Fredrik the organist mockingly quoting Through a Glass Darkly’s thesis that “Love proves the existence of God.” No longer does this seem like enough evidence for Bergman, who now finds himself wrestling with the part of Tomas, Jonas, and himself so lost in existential dread that even love cannot be found.
A second mass a mere few hours after the first to bookend the film, sending Tomas to preach to an even emptier church than before.
Then again, who can empathise with this fear of total abandonment more than Christ himself, hanging on the cross? This is the allegory that the sexton Algot unknowingly draws to Tomas’ own plight as they prepare for a mass that no one has turned up to, forsaken by men and God alike in their holy mission. Specifically, Algot questions the biblical focus on the physical pain Jesus suffered leading up to his death given its brevity, while the betrayals at the Last Supper, the Garden of Gethsemane, and in Peter’s denial were far more torturous.
“He believes everything he’d ever preached was a lie. In the moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship – God’s silence.”
A voice on Märta’s shoulder, forcing her own reckoning with her love for Tomas.
As such, the question of why one must then continue with an empty mass is equated to Jesus’ own following through with a sacrifice for which he is not guaranteed any real reward. This endurance is posed as the very crux of Christian faith, which even Märta is shown to possess in spite of her atheism. A thin sliver of light illuminates her profile as she kneels and prays, consumed in darkness yet nonetheless imploring some higher power for understanding between neighbours.
“If only we could feel safe and dare to show each other tenderness. If only we had some truth to believe in. If only we could believe.”
Immaculate, minimalist lighting as Märta prays – a thin sliver of lighting illuminating her profile as she kneels in reverence.
The answer to Märta’s prayer comes not in some grand gesture of goodwill, but simply the start of the 3 o’clock service, persisting in the absence of any real congregation. It is impossible to fully penetrate the mind of Björnstrand’s lonely pastor in this moment, but Winter Light’s formal bookending of a pair of church services at least suggests the tiniest shred of persevering faith in his soul, offering a link between people and God despite the mutual silence. Who else will keep this hope for salvation alive, if not him?
Much like Tomas, Bergman ends his film with open-ended questions, finding resolution only in the ongoing acceptance that answers may never be found. Perhaps it is ironic that this it was during this production that he later claimed to have lost his faith, and yet the incredible spiritual patience that emerges in both the Christians and atheists of Winter Light uncovers an inerasable, universal belief in human goodness, transcending the most rigid boundaries of organised religion.
Winter Light is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
Ingmar Bergman’s first film shot on his home island of Fårö is also the first in his unofficial Faith trilogy, though this does not mean that Through a Glass Darkly was the start of his efforts to confront humanity’s troubled relationship with God. The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring preceded it by a few years, after all. Still, this is a far more contained study than either. Perhaps this is to its slight detriment, given that those other films land with greater formal ambition and impact, but this chamber drama is nonetheless an impressive continuation of his long-running spiritual quandaries.
Gunnar Björnstrand’s biblically-named David is the lonely patriarch of the small family vacationing on the rocky Swedish isle where this story is set, becoming a flawed, God-like figure to his children searching for some divine connection. He suffers from severe writer’s block, and as such finds that his only source of inspiration comes from his daughter Karin’s mental illness. It is a major insecurity for him, especially when he sees how easily ideas for new plays and operas flow from his son Minus. He is envious and self-absorbed, and so he withdraws into his anxious mind, holding back the love his children so desire.
David is representative of God in this family, withholding the love which his children crave.
For Minus, it spurs on a desperate desire to hold a thoughtful conversation with his father, while for Karin it manifests even more severely as a schizophrenic desire to contact the voices in her mind – one of whom she is convinced belongs to God Himself. As the most volatile character, she is the centrepiece of Bergman’s drama, and yet it is David who is at the root of its family issues.
The final member of this quartet is Karin’s husband, Martin, played with intellectual grace by Max von Sydow. He is emotionally independent of David, and yet due to the abundant empathy he has to offer his troubled wife, he is drawn into conflict with her father upon discovering his secret diary entries chronicling her illness.
“You know how to express yourself. You always have just the right words. There’s just one thing you haven’t the slightest clue about: life itself. You’re a craven coward but a genius at evasions and excuses. In your novels you’re always courting some god. But let me tell you, your faith and your doubt are very unconvincing. All that’s apparent is your ingenuity. Have you written one word of truth in your life as an author? Your half-lies are so refined that they look like truth.”
Bergman’s dialogue can be eloquently cutting, but the emotions it is conveying can never be reduced to outright contempt. Beneath it all, these characters hold great affection for each other. The trouble comes in trying to express those feelings in the absence of paternal guidance, which is magnified to an even greater extent by the isolation of the island where they are vacationing. Its seascapes are tranquil yet sparse, composed of two vaguely distinct shades of grey divided by a long stretch of horizon, while thin wharfs stretch out into the negative space from stony shorelines. Small clumps of vegetation dot these images, while in the distance a lonely lighthouse stands atop a cliff.
This is Bergman’s first film shot on his home island of Fårö, and the scenery pays off beautifully in framing the family drama. These are isolated characters, and the scenes of them wandering stony shores carry a bleak beauty.
The interiors aren’t much more inviting either, with the torn wallpaper and wooden floorboards offering these characters little warmth. Inside a shipwreck that Karin and Minus escape into from the rain, Bergman even designs a set that could have been from Andrei Tarkovsky, crossing rotting beams across the frame at all angles and trickling water into its collapsed base. Pushed right into the back of the shot we find the siblings huddled together, essentially imprisoned inside a giant manifestation of Karin’s unstable psyche.
This shipwreck makes for one of the film’s most powerful scenes, offering feeble shelter from the rain to Karin and Minus and becoming a giant manifestation of her unstable psyche.
Such stark minimalism leaves a rich canvas open for Bergman’s typically superb blocking as well, underscoring the imbalance between characters in two-shots that subtly darken one face and illuminate the other, and frequently hanging on them for minutes at a time without cutting. Sven Nykvist’s lighting is incredibly precise in these close-ups, passing shade over one half of David’s face while deep in contemplation, and specifically highlighting Karin’s wandering eye as she lies next to Martin at night. Like a conductor playing multiple instruments, Bergman orchestrates his staging and performances perfectly, each hitting different frequencies yet harmonising them within a shared doubt in the existence of a caring God.
Bergman is never content to just shoot his actors’ expressions – he is always lighting them according to the emotion of the scene, and highlighting specific features of their faces.
Harriet Andersson especially benefits from such austere photographic treatment, frequently becoming the camera’s central subject as Karin’s condition worsens and her desire to meet God intensifies. What starts as her hearing the non-existent sound of a calling bird eventually develops into more sinister voices coming from behind a wall, instructing her to commit shameful acts and delivering warnings of God’s impending arrival. When the figure she believes to be Him finally does appear, the invisible sight she witnesses is mortally terrifying – a spider with “cold and calm” eyes, and a “terrible, stony face.”
Karins is a brutally complex character, writhing with fear and anticipation as schizophrenic voices fill her head. Clearly one of Harriet Andersson’s finest performances.
It is effectively a vision of religion that is brutal and unforgiving, but it is also one which is opposed to the representation of God in David. His love may be questioned at times by those who struggle to connect with him, but it persists nonetheless. “I don’t know if love is proof of God’s existence or if love is God himself,” he ponders to his son. “For you, love and God are the same,” Minus answers.
To the young teenager, the significance of this brief but meaningful discussion has less to do with its subject matter than the fact it happened in the first place. “Papa spoke to me,” he mutters in disbelief, rediscovering his faith in his father through a tangible demonstration of his love. For these children, it is life’s most fundamental necessity, driving them further from reality the more it slips from their grasp. Equally though, Through A Glass Darkly savours those moments of profound affection when they do appear in even the smallest demonstrations, recognising how such powerful connections lead its characters towards a pure, redemptive grace.
Bergman ends Through a Glass Darkly on the perfect scene and final line – “Papa spoke to me.”
Through a Glass Darkly is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
Sin has taken on many forms in Ingmar Bergman’s films, from the creeping doubt of The Seventh Seal to the infidelity of Sawdust and Tinsel. The Virgin Spring marks the first time it manifests with such explicit violence though, deriving from bitter resentment and evolving into soul-crushing guilt. There is no undoing these physical actions the way one might deny an unclean thought, leaving this great shame to haunt every single character who manages to outlive the chaste, Christ-like Karin.
Tragically, it is her rape and murder which sets in motion everyone else’s reckoning with their own moral principles. After being sent off with her family’s servant Ingeri to deliver candles to a church about a day’s ride away, she is targeted by a trio of dubious herdsmen. One is simply a young boy, traumatically caught up in the devastating crime committed by his older companions. As witness to the incident, Ingeri is remorseful too, given that she had been jealously praying to Norse god Odin for Karin to be struck down. Even her mother and father bear heavy consciences, with Märeta confessing her own selfish desire to be the favoured parent, and the religious Töre being driven to commit a vicious act of vengeance upon discovering the identities of his daughter’s killers.
Christian and pagan faith is woven heavily into the iconography of The Virgin Spring, binding characters together by their strong convictions and guilty doubt.
It is no accident that Karin’s death lands on a Good Friday here. Much like The Seventh Seal, the setting of medieval Sweden brings connotations of Christianity and paganism fighting over the souls of common people, and Bergman’s symbolism is perfectly pointed in its references to both. The night before Karin and Ingeri’s departure, he sets the scene for a Last Supper in the family’s modest dining hall, framing them beneath the heavy weight a giant, gnarled trunk which stretches its way across the room.
Always one to pay attention to the significance of his religious symbolism, the Last Supper imagery here ties into the impending “crucifixion” of Karin.
Later, a bastardised version of that holy feast takes places when Karin sits down for a picnic with her soon-to-be attackers, turning them into Judas figures who will betray her trust. Bergman’s photography in this forest is sharp, and yet it is frequently obstructed by dense foliage and collapsed trees, turning the natural location into an unruly, godless environment. It is also the perfect habitat for the one-eyed, Odin-like hermit that Ingeri encounters on her journey, offering ominous answers to her prayers and eventually driving her away in terror.
Another Last Supper, though this one bastardised by the Judas figures planning to betray the Christ figure at the centre.These dead, slanted branches are constantly obstructing Bergman’s frames here, fragmenting shots into pieces that bring a poignant brokenness.
Karin’s shattering death effectively splits The Virgin Spring in half, leaving its second part to open with the herdsmen unsuspectingly taking refuge at her family’s home. It isn’t long before they figure out their hosts’ connection to their victim, and with this realisation comes a fresh guilt bearing down on their minds. When one of them foolishly hands over Karin’s ruined dress, their identities become apparent to Märeta and Töre as well, and at this moment the brooding concern that has quietly sunk into Max von Sydow’s performance mutates into a furious conviction of what must be done.
As he goes about preparing the vindictive murder of his guests by way of pagan rituals, he finds an unlikely ally in Ingeri. Bergman’s imagery is striking as Töre wrestles a thin birch tree to the ground, setting him against a vast, desolate landscape that swallows him up in its grey austerity. Inside, she offers him a hot bath, where he uses the snapped branches to flagellate his nude body in a violent cleansing of the soul, before approaching the sleeping men. Even the idolatrous knife he carries bears the visage of a skull and bones, thrusted menacingly into the table as he waits for them to wake up.
Max von Sydow gives the best performance in this ensemble as the furious, grieving father Töre, mutating the character’s sense of faith and justice.
As The Virgin Spring builds its two acts to a pair of climactic struggles, the intimacy that comes with Bergman’s piercing close-ups uncomfortably turns on us. There are certainly moments shared between Karin and Töre early on which bask in their gentle affection, but even more impassioned are those tight frames of faces furiously pressed against each other in conflict. Whether it is the helplessness felt during Karin’s rape or Töre’s fierce killings, Bergman makes violence feel truly claustrophobic, even burning up a pair of combatants in one composition which stages them behind a hellish fire.
The Virgin Spring is Bergman’s most violent work to date, pressing faces up against each other in displays of brutal power and vengeful fury.
If Karin’s death represents the crucifixion of Christ though, then there is salvation to be found in the death of an innocent. Perhaps it is a holy miracle, or maybe just a quirk of nature, but the moment her grieving family lift her head from the place she was left to die, a spring of fresh water bursts forth from the earth. As Ingeri kneels to wash her dirty face and drink from the small fountain, a path to redemption for each of these sinners is uncovered in his profoundly spiritual imagery, expressing communal prayer through a beautifully blocked tableau. His screenplay is just as eloquent too, with Töre pouring out the sorrow, frustration, and devotion of a grieving father.
“You see it, God. You see it. The innocent child’s death, and my revenge. You allowed it. I don’t understand You. I don’t understand You. Yet, I still ask your forgiveness. I know no other way to live. I promise You, God, here on the dead body of my only child, I promise you that, to cleanse my sins, here I shall build a church. On this spot. Of mortar and stone – and with these, my hands.”
An exceedingly handsome tableau of prayer and salvation, manifesting through Bergman’s depth of field and intricate blocking.
The Virgin Spring may be a fable of Christ’s death and gift of salvation, but in Töre’s journey we also partially recognise the Book of Job. The test of faith which rips away that which he holds dearest, plunges him into deep despair, and raises him up again higher than before lays out a rich theological arc that Bergman meditates on with stirring grace. Questions of faith, virtue, and atonement may be nothing new for him, but their manifestation here through such visceral violence is punishing even by his standards, considering with uncomfortable introspection how these lofty ideals might survive our most corrupt, godless instincts.
The Virgin Spring is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel and Kanopy, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
The Magician has neither the severity of Ingmar Bergman’s more metaphorical dramas nor the light-hearted grace of his comedies, and yet there is an offbeat blend of both here which thrives in the performative scams of one travelling troupe. Max von Sydow is their bearded leader, Albert, specialising in ‘animal magnetism’ and conducting an aura of mystery through his apparent muteness. He is joined by his talkative assistant Tubal, his wife Manda who publicly presents as her male alter ego Mr Aman, and Granny Vogler, an old crone with an affinity for potions. Their driver Simson guides the company’s carriage through stark landscapes and misty forests, wary of authorities who may be tracking them down, and yet as a collective they nevertheless relish their bohemian lifestyle.
Bergman opens The Magician with these gorgeous long shots, framing his sharp horizons and misty forests to perfection.
Their arrival in a small, Swedish village headed by the curious Consul Egerman offers them an audience of varied interests. Public officials bet on Albert’s apparently supernatural abilities, with Dr Vergerus leading the sceptical charge against them. Elsewhere, the consul’s wife Ottilia desperately requests that the travelling charlatan contact her dead daughter, and a pair of naïve maids fall easily for Granny’s stories. While Sanna fearfully submits to the lie that the old woman is a 200-year-old witch, Sara wilfully consumes rat poison that Granny has disguised as an aphrodisiac, and ventures off to dark room with Simson in tow.
If these are the spectators of Albert’s grand lies and performances, then the magician may be representative of Bergman himself – an artist who is as equally frustrated by his blindest followers as he is his harshest critics. Perhaps he lumps himself in that latter category as well. When Albert steps away from the stage, his insecurities rise to the surface, peeling off his fake beard with quiet regret and recognising the hollowness of his act. There is little reward to be found in this profession, eventually leading Granny to abandon it altogether, and Manda to confess her guilt to a smarmy Dr Vergerus.
“Pretense, false promises, double bottoms. A miserable, rotten lie through and through. We’re the most pathetic rabble you could find.”
Bergman stages his actors across multiples layers of the frame with a magnificent depth of field, crafting tension in his ensemble.
With an ensemble as rife with conflict as this, The Magician’s deep focus photography flourishes in its tensions and alliances, visually dividing them into units which themselves are internally fractured. Such rich illustrations of character relationships are not unusual for Bergman, who just the previous year delivered his strongest films to date in The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, but new to his stylistic repertoire here are the dolly shots pushing in on his actors’ faces. It is a fitting match for these characters who demand the attention of audiences. The shadows that Bergman elegantly passes across their features in these cropped close-ups draw us even deeper into their shame, fear, and menace, though he reserves his greatest plunge into an unstable mind for Albert’s greatest con.
Cropped close-ups and sharp lighting drawing us into Max von Sydow’s largely silent performance.Bergman’s blocking of faces is always on point, casting Sanna in a soft light and Granny’s with harsher lights as she looms over the young maid.
After briefly humiliating the Police Superintendent’s wife and a local stableman with his hypnotic tricks, the charlatan appears to collapse onstage, dead from a heart attack. Dr Vergerus takes on the task of his conducting the autopsy, though soon he begins to feel the presence of some unsettled spirit. Bergman’s cinematography and storytelling here moves directly into the realm of psychological horror – disembodied hands creep slowly into frames, dirtied mirrors catch skewed angles of ghostly apparitions, and the production design itself seems to trap the doctor in its dusty, Gothic clutter. Albert lurks in the shadows, often cast in either pale light or complete darkness, eventually leaving his indistinct profile to loom over the face of a terrified Dr Vergerus.
Bergman submits to psychological horror as Albert haunts his the sceptical Dr Vergerus, pulling out some magnificently eerie shots with his Gothic production design and lighting.
This isn’t just an act of revenge for Albert, but an attempt to definitively prove that even the most hardened cynics can be duped with the right spectacle. Even then though, this struggle between faith and reason is not so easily put to rest. The arrival of police in the film’s final minutes might seem to be the end for these fugitive performers, giving Dr Vergerus good reason to gloat over their defeat – until they are extended an invitation to perform at the Royal Palace by the King’s own request. Bergman’s sharp and sudden veer into comedy at the film’s conclusion marks a final victory for his seemingly indestructible artists. They are scapegoats, bohemians, and cheats, but to root these parasitic entertainers out of a free society is an impossible task in The Magician. It is a nifty metaphor that the Swedish director uses here to turn a critical eye towards his own craft, and in his underhanded visual and narrative manipulations, he lightly exposes the fraud that unites him with his critics.
The Magician is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
