Just One More ... Please?

I've always been puzzled by the phenomenon of filmmakers who have commanded a major share of public attention internationally for years only to disappear, abruptly or gradually, from the scene.  Sometimes, I suppose, they grow old, lose their touch or their interest, repeat themselves, although that doesn't account (in the age of the VHS and then the DVD) for their classic work going out of mind.  Public tastes change, of course, which goes with the territory of being an artist in a commerical medium.  But when you consider that Hitchcock, whom I consider a second-rater who made a handful of pretty good films (can we argue about this later? it's not really my point here), is in this sense alive and well, while Fellini seems to be drifting from audience awareness, I can't fathom it.  There are many other examples, and I invite your invocation of them.

One of the big (i.e. inexplicable) ones is Ingmar Bergman.  In the early '80s he pretty much stopped making feature films except for small dramas commissioned by Swedish television (see a few of them and you'll have some idea how truly craven and corrupt American tv is).  But why does he seem to have dropped out of the cinematic vocabulary even of educated film-goers of good taste--i.e. like people who visit this site (well, it's true, dammit).  But for more than thirty years, from the early '50s on, he was widely thought of as one of the greatest writer/directors of the century, equalled by few, outranked by none.  He had an ear and an eye, he had a company of deeply devoted and wildly talented professionals, his pictures were de rigeur  if you took films seriously, each new one prompting from those of us who lived in the provinces during those years moans of "I can't wait" until it gets here.

Bergman first came to attention as part of those European films (mostly Italian and Scandinavian) of the early 1950s which featured snippets of nudity, mostly of the absurdly health, unselfconscious sun-worshipper variety.  Every once in a while, a Hollywood movie house during those years would bring back Illicit Interlude (1951) and the Saturday audience would be packed with high school males, yours truly among them.  It was The Seventh Seal (1957) which brought him to somewhat more respectable adult attention, with its rather heavy allegory and stunning camera work, and it was soon followed by intense domestic dramas about cold, distant husbands and fathers, stories of sexual transgression, agonizing religious doubt, the redemptive power or lack of it possessed by art.  Films such as Wild Strawberries (1957), Virgin Spring (1960), and Through a Glass Darkly (1961) still stand up extremely well from those years--and then things got better.  Bergman began exploring the relationships between the personal and sociopolitical in the staggering Persona (1966) and Shame (1968).  He found a broad audience for Cries and Whispers (1971)--whether because people loved it or thought, given Bergman's mystique at the time, that they ought to remains unresolved in my mind--and another one for Scenes from a Marriage (1973), in this case because I believe people found it so compelling.  After that, it was The Magic Flute (1975), a delightful but much truncated of Mozart's opera; Autumn Sonata (1978), Ingrid Bergman's last film and her first with him; and of course the great family epic and perhaps his most accessible work, Fanny and Alexander (1982).

Bergman could be funny--uproariously funny--when he chose to be: just have a look at The Magic Flute and especially Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), a timeless comedy of great invention.  But for the most part, his work bluntly and unapologetically portrayed intense psychic pain, the emotional violence that people did to one another as a matter of course in the name of love, duty, and God.  Bergman hurts, and if you don't feel it, you've unplugged your antennae.  But he also presents his pain--which you have no doubt he has felt himself many times--with such honesty, clarity, and aesthetic scrupulosity that one can only respect him.  He makes his audience work, not just by enduring the agony, but to find out what is really going on, who is the reliable source and who is not, why people say they are lying when they are actually telling the truth, why they subject themselves to injury needlessly. 

In spite of the subject matter, it all looks and sounds gorgeous.  Bergman first hooked up with DP Sven Nykvist in 1960 and they were still together in Fanny and Alexander; I doubt there was a cinematographer in the twentieth century who could render emotional states by light, shade, framing, and camera positioning with his skill and subtlety.  And the casts?  Well, consider: Harriett Andersen, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Eva Dahlberg, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Erland Josephson--every one of them willing to do what the boss called for, make it even better, and most of all completely submerge themselves in their characters.  I can do something with Bergman films I almost never do otherwise, which is to watch them for performances only.

Now cames Saraband, a small drama made for Swedish television two years ago which Bergman has announced is his last film.  I hope he reconsiders, but he doesn't really seem the type: this is not likely a Sinatra-esque farewell.  It brings back the principals from Scenes from a Marriage some thirty years later, played again by Josephson and Ullman, now long since both divorced and separated from their post-marital affair.  He is in his eighties, living far into the countryside, she is still a successful lawyer living in the city.  She has come to see him because he has asked her, which he denies--and, characteristically, we come to see two side of this issue.  His sixty-one year old son from another marriage and nineteen-year old granddaughter live in a nearby cottage; the relationship between father and son is as bad as you can imagine, although the son has his own ghastly sins for which to answer.  The story among these four is played out in ten little episodes, all related, but each with autonomous power and dramatic unity.  As it finished, I didn't want to believe this was it, that we wouldn't be seeing anything new from this genius.  All right, he turned eighty-seven just last week, and a man has a right to throttle back.  But I wish he wouldn't.  We need his honesty and mastery more than ever.  Presuming he keeps his word, though, there remains the DVD, and you'll never find a better justification for the technology.

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