THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L Jr.
DIVORCE SWEDISH STYLE THE SCREEN Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage is a movie about talk-a movie about a woman who learns to speak for herself, and thereby liberates herself from her husband. As I...
...It is an integral experience: it unites the characters, the audience and the filmmaker...
...Before the camera lingered on her after he had left, but now it stays behind with him...
...Can't you see that this incessant battle of words is futile...
...He grapples with the solipsism of life no less intensely than Marianne herself does...
...And of course their talk is still really as much at cross purposes as ever...
...On the contrary, far from trying to inveigle our feelings and imaginations, Bergman's film seems to achieve its power by giving us access to his feelings and imagination...
...Despite the fact that Johan beats her up this time, eventually knocking her to the floor and kicking her in his rage, the camera literally makes us see him the way we saw her...
...In the second instead of clinging to Johan to stop his leaving, her only thought is to make good her own escape...
...We have all survived -Marianne, Johan, you and I-and that seems to be a lot...
...But Bergman doesn't want this second scene to be merely a moment of triumph for her, and to prevent that, he shoots the scene exactly as he did the earlier one...
...As I also said, the film seems to be, judging by its ability to move audiences, a very powerful social document...
...The way that Marianne and Johan cling to each other in the last scene, they become a mirror image of the audience that sits before them...
...colin l. westerbeck, jr...
...Even though Johan and Marianne are together in almost every scene, the film usually deals with them separately, panning back and forth or cutting between them so that each is alone on the screen and, consequently, in our imagining...
...It seems somehow an affirmation just to have done so...
...It's possible that this strange framing is an accident occurring because of the reframing necessary when footage shot for television is converted for projection in theaters...
...It is a gesture made intentionally with the edge of the frame the same way you might, out of pure exasperation, put your hand over the mouth of someone who's talking too much, or who's saying things too hurtful to hear...
...The sense we have that the characters are cut off from their social environment is a result of our seeing them frequently as faces rather than figures standing in a setting or landscape...
...He loses himself in their identities...
...What more than that can we ask of any crisis...
...The dream Marianne relates to Johan is a language that is, though at last personal and sincere, completely private and impenetrable as well...
...The effect is to put him in the same position she was in earlier: that of the victim...
...If the hope that we take from their experiences as we leave the theater at the end is justified at all, it is because they have perhaps come closer to recognizing, and dealing with, this limitation on life itself...
...It is a limitation on art as well, and as a result Bergman has had to learn to respect it too...
...As director Bergman does have another view too...
...He subordinates himself to his characters and tries not to meddle in their lives...
...It's as if Bergman were telling his characters, "Enough, enough...
...It is a document, in fact, for the very reason that Bergman lets his characters have their own say...
...When he writes his characters' dialogue, then, Bergman doesn't impose his own view of their experiences on them...
...He makes his art out of the bare necessities of film narrative-editing, framing and composition - and he continually reduces that art to the bare bones of drama...
...From that glib and facile public language Johan used in the interview during the opening scene, he and Marianne have moved through all the varieties of speech to the difficult, completely personal language of her dream at the conclusion...
...Its hard-won individuality is also its limitation, since no one can explain with any certitude what it means, not even Marianne herself...
...As much as any physical relationship that Johan and Marianne have achieved with each other through an embrace, or a blow, their physical relationship within and to the frame of Bergman's camera has told us what we know about them...
...His heroine is a liberated woman, but his treatment of her doesn't exploit the momentary appeal of that, and his vision of human experience is larger than the local political issue...
...Whereas before, the camera stayed primarily on her reactions so that he became a darting, blurry figure moving across or behind her out of focus, now the focus is fixed on him, and she turns into the darting figure as she tries to dodge his blows...
...The aesthetic problem that Bergman has in making his film and the emotional problem that his characters have in living their lives are finally very much the same problem...
...He leaves it to the director to make his own view apparent...
...The first is the scene in which Johan (Erland Josephson) leaves his wife Marianne (Liv Ullman...
...In his management of all those aspects of the film which fall within the director's province-the framing, the editing, the composition of the shots, etc.-he tells a story that is in certain ways in counterpoint to the story his characters seem to be acting out...
...Bergman's treatment of his characters is even-handed and impartial like this because he sees their struggle not as one they wage against each other, but as one each of them wages against loneliness...
...Even in their embrace after her nightmare, they seem separate and withdrawn...
...The second is when she brings divorce papers to his office for signing...
...Moreover, it achieves this because Bergman himself has a certain personal integrity as an artist...
...Now seeing him the way we saw her, we think of him as we did of her...
...We see only the upper, immobile portion of the face, the mouth and chin being framed out of the picture...
...As plot the two scenes only detail Marianne's progress from dependence on Johan to independence...
...If Johan and Marianne have learned anything, it is this failure of all languages...
...It is a struggle in which neither of them ever really gains the upper hand or comes out ahead, and therefore Bergman can only pity them both alike, both equally, for their suffering...
...This is a very plain and minimal language that Bergman uses...
...The parallel between the scenes is itself established by the way Bergman shoots them...
...What is more important, though, I think we have the feeling that Bergman is there with us too, that he is in some important way suffering himself what his film would make us suffer...
...The likely explanation is that Bergman has done this on purpose...
...For example, much of the film is shot in extreme close-up...
...As in the scene where Johan leaves Marianne or the one where she brings him the divorce papers, Bergman's camera work continually makes us feel this impending, impinging loneliness by isolating the characters in the frame...
...But the probability is that in the original television version even more of the lower face was missing than here...
...Perhaps then what gives Scenes from a Marriage its power, its ability to move us, is just its integrity...
...In the first one she is dumbfounded, while in the second she dominates the dialogue...
...But at times the close-ups are so extreme that they do not even include the whole face...
...The scriptwriter's job is to efface himself from his work...
...We cannot deny it anymore than Johan and Marianne can overcome it...
...If we in the audience cannot help feeling relieved and perhaps even reassured at this outcome, it is because the human spirit has at least proven durable...
...In our postures of helplessness, we and the characters on the screen are at last united...
...The only times I can recall when they appear in the frame together as equals-appear side by side in a two-shot-are during the opening and closing scenes...
...It is that modern life so maddeningly defies symbolization: that it affords neither the artist nor the lover a way to objectify effectively, and so communicate, his experiences...
...Bergman's view of them and the inner logic of their own lives at last coincide here, in the last scene...
...Although he is both scriptwriter and director, Bergman clearly-conceives those as somewhat distinct functions...
...But the loneliness remains in the last scene too...
...This is what the reappearance of the two-shot suggests: that Johan and Marianne are back where they started...
...Yet as Bergman has been telling us the whole time, it all comes out even in the end...
...The only consolation the film can offer us is, paradoxically, that of fellow feeling...
...As an alternative to Johan's and Marianne's talking, he offers us a language of his own that is mute, a language of physical relationships...
...The loneliness that Marianne still endures seems in the closing scene to be a kind of solipsism, an ultimate confinement of each of us within himself, an inability to get outside ourselves and into touch with another human being...
...They are turned at right angles and stare off into space so that their eyes do not meet...
...Can't you see how much pain your talk inflicts...
...Sensing the self-deception and misunderstanding every time his characters' own statements become extravagant, Bergman refrains from making such statements himself...
...The film has been an enormous box-office success, but we don't feel that Bergman has made it so by merely trying to second-guess our expectations or manipulate our emotions...
...Where Bergman's own sympathies lie can be seen clearly from the way he shoots two parallel scenes that are, in effect, the epicenters of his whole film...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 11
