THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L.
BACK TO THE WALL THE SCREEN It most become unbearable to be Ingmar Bergman, Jftdgfeg by. afe movies, he feels oar peculiarly modern emotions more urgently and emphatically than any other artist....
...At another point when Jenny arrives at Grandma's apartment at 3 a.m., the sun is streaming in the windows...
...Perhaps Bergman is too much the product of the modem Sc*ndanavia that follows from both Kierkegaard aad the welfare state...
...It may be a good thing for him to leave, at least for awhile...
...When Jenny comes in at 3 a.m., for instance, she finds her Grandpa up wandering about in a daze thinking he has to wind the big clock in the parlor...
...But then later it, tarns oat thai the origins of the nervous breakdown Jenay.has are in her Grandma's having locked her in a waxd|oh@ when she was a girl...
...As she recuperates ftoj {bit suicjde attempt, her husband comes to the hospital, bat can only spare one day away from his work, and .her teenage daughter ends an uneasy reunion in the hospital lo&age by saying pleasantly that she knows Jenny has neyer liked ber...
...Having begun by losing track of the time of day in the real world, Jenny ends up in her dreams in a candlelit room where she is dressed in a Renaissance costume of embroidered cap and gown...
...His films Ioce US, all in a closet like Jenny...
...And life awake is no more consoling...
...Btrt now Bergman himself has run afoul of that sort of objective reality he has usually allowed his characters to ignore...
...Historical dramas nave always been attractive to him because they can provide a holiday not only from the modern condition, but from the symbolic bleakness of modern life as well...
...This psychological escape Bergman sometimes needs usually turns out to be an escape from ait as well...
...In The Passion of Anna, Befanjven internliced into the story itself interviews with the actors about the roles they were playing...
...At times Bergman must feel as if he is about to suffocate, as if he himself will scream or go mad if he does not escape, fron the endless cycle of living and portraying The only release modern man has for these feelings is in his dreams, and the only release a modern artist has from portraying such feeungs is in history...
...When he cuts to fantasy sequences, as he does here, and thereby gives himself easy and automatic access to his characters' internal state, the result is always disappointing...
...Nowhere is the solipsism of modem life-the loneliness, isolation and inability to communicate* with others more intense than m his films...
...This disorientation then carries over into her dreams, nightmares and hallucinations and begins to remove her from the present altogether...
...Time comes unhinged in the film in a way that allows Jenny's memories of her past to become as real as present realities for her, and also allows the historical past to mix with modern life in Jenny's dreams...
...dead m another of Jenny's dreams, flee from the room when she tells them she has attempted suicide...
...People's watches keep stopping, at one point with die result that a colleague and lover of Jenny's (Erland Josephson) stays with her all night without realizing it...
...But people are also losing track of time in this film in some ways that are not so normal...
...The story is set in Sweden daring me summer months when the sun never sets, so even at the most normal of moments the characters are having trouble telling what time it is...
...Travel may take his nrind off his problems, and let him get back to work again later when he is refreshed...
...But it does not finally make those problems any more lucid or real to us...
...The taxman has intruded on Bergman's life so obnoxiously, and distracted him from his meditations so unpankmably, that he says he is going to leave Sweden to live abroad...
...According to his interviews, idle jfilnis ate very personal too, the relationships with hi*, repertory company being almost as pressurized off-screen as they are on...
...Jenny Isaksson (liv Ullmann) goes in an eayly scene to stay with her grandmother, who raised her...
...When Jenny begins to have her own breakdown after being the victim of an attempted rape, she sleeps interminably and has to be told what day it is when she awakes...
...In Face to Face Bergman therefore contrives to get Jenny into historical dress...
...Besides the reliving of childhood experiences, there is the visit from her dead parents, who come dressed in the nine-teen-forties clothing in which she last saw them...
...I manner, Jenny's parents, brought lack from tie...
...Tbdr one good fcwtune sefera to be needing only scant time and attest to maintain their very high standard of Irving, which gives them the leisure for their anguish...
...This does allow Bergman to externalize Jenny's problems with the same sort of iconography and ritual enactment that his medieval films provide...
...In Face to Face Bergman tries to take both ways out at once...
...As they sit and chat the night Jenny arrives, it seems they have such a fine, female relationship...
...The characters in Bergman's films live lives of pure emotion, unsullied by the petty concerns, like earning a Ih&g, ra wliteh the rest of us re bbgged down...
...Bergman lives with emotions like this .all the time...
...In his current work, Face to Face, Dr...
...This may be the real escape he needs, too...
...Jenny arrives for a party to be told she is three hours late...
...In fact there is in Jenny's night & Euns and hallucinations a. terrifying old woman with black eyeballs who eventually seems to become Grandma/herself...
...COLIH L. WBSTERBECK, JR.RBECK, JR...
...Like the dream that the heroine talks about at the end of Scenes from a Marriage, Jenny's dream is opaque, its imagery a private and seemingly arbitrary one...
...The fact is that Bergman is much better when he disciplines himself to symbolic gestures made by the camera rather than indulging in those that can be made by the script The arduousness of getting at internal realities from outside his characters inspires and clarifies his visions...
...They are in all his films, portrayed in very tightly- framed, claustrophobic scenes...
Vol. 103 • May 1976 • No. 11
