God, Death, Art & Love:

...In Winter Light (1963) a clergyman no longer believes in "a god who guaranteed me every imaginable security...

...The effect of the close-up is to force a kind of claustrophobic effect on the viewer...

...Love is possible between Bergman's characters, but becomes less an outlet for hope with each successive film...

...No, one needn't dig too deeply to find references to God, death, art, and love in Ingmar Bergman's films...

...The emotionally distant father in Through a Glass Darkly (1961) fails at committing suicide because the prospect of that infinite abyss terrifies him...

...The only humanity a Bergman character knows is raging within the self, and starving for want of companionship...

...Likewise, he refers to the antagonist in The Seventh Seal as "the ogre of death," though Bergman takes pains to endow death with ascetic refinement...

...Having dispatched skepticism so parochially, Lauder alludes to examples of it without deeper commentary (as a proof of alleged objectivity...

...A serious study of "Bergman's philosophical vision" and teachings may yet prove interesting, but this facile text falls painfully far from the mark...

...As for the interpretation, you can interpret it any way you like...

...Another book about Ingmar Bergman...

...Fettered by a loss of faith, his cynicism is searing: "What if God doesn't exist...

...A god I'd...fabricated with my own hands...

...In Bergman's later works, tormented reason and irrational needs plummet headlong into the abysmal chaos...

...Love is important in life, he informs us...

...But he steers clear of both controversy and scholarship...

...In their deepest fears, they regard life as a black hole of indifference and inhumanity...

...And yet Antonious, the knight in The Seventh Seal (1957), cries, "Why can't I kill God within me...

...For all this existential gloom and doom, the unflinching candor and intensity of his films are matched by a compulsion to find meaning...

...Characters in a Bergman movie may be moderately well-off, but economic privilege does not shield them from inner torment...

...the lens of his camera...

...But it is because the love needs to be realized-not because it is a gift from a caring God-that the struggle for purpose goes on...

...More likely (and most obviously), the mask is a reminder that, for all their love, the threat of death is omnipresent in the form of the plague...

...What a relief...

...begins the author's introduction...

...In the face of love between Jof and Mia," he observes, "death is reduced to a hollow mask...

...But he does not regard the interpreting of art as an answer...

...Later he reveals, "Out of my emptiness something was born which I hardly dare touch or give a name to...

...Concerning one of Bergman's made-for-television movies, Lauder extols, "The master of the close-up, Bergman uses this technique very effectively in Scenes from a Marriage (1973...

...death is mentioned in scenes from this-or-that film, we are told...

...A philosophy teacher at a Catholic university, Lauder allies himself with Aquinas as he eschews "all philosophies of skepticism" and, with a catechism's certainty, announces, "To claim that reality is absurd and then live as though it were meaningful is to live in a contradictory fashion...

...For serious Bergman fans, Lauder's God, Death, Art & Love elicits a less bemused reply to his glib, if consistent, retort...

...Bergman fills his stories with actors, magicians, photographers, and circus performers...

...A redundant and plodding description of the end of The Magician (1985) is especially embarrassing...

...What difference does it make?...Life becomes something we can understand...

...Images mean different things to different people," Bergman has said...

...When he describes "the rape and murder of a lovely, innocent young girl" in The Virgin Spring, Lauder ignores Bergman's pungent equation between her innocence and her self-centeredness...

...James W. Hickey Neurotic, introspective, Ingmar Bergman has never concealed his per-sonal obsessions...

...Son of a repressive clergyman, the seventy-one-year-old director has broached philosophical questions in over sixty films...

...A love...

...Also, conspicuously missing are an index, a bibliography, and a developed point of view...

...Often, Bergman's intimate movies reprise the same compelling themes: his desperate need to be comforted by a silent-perhaps nonexistent-God, the cold certainty of death, the raw cunning of human betrayal, and a desolate search for meaning...

...Why, in spite of everything, is he a baffling reality that I can't shake off...

...only the doing...

...To prove that "love somehow conquers death," Lauder alludes to a carnival wagon in The Seventh Seal on which a skeleton mask is prominently displayed...

...and otherwise pads his pages proclaiming the obvious...

...But Lauder offers the premise outright, as a Scholastic proof of a benign and reasonable deity...

...The more obvious explanation is that television screens require a larger, simpler image than do movie screens, so a made-for-television movie becomes a blare of close-ups when it is projected in a theater...

...Lauder is too heady with cursory praise to consider such details...

...But this new book by Robert E. Lauder barely looks in the right direction...

...Why does he live on in this painful and humiliating way even though I curse him out of my heart...

...No pat resolution graces Persona (1966), The Passion of Anna, The Touch (1971), The Serpent's Egg (1977): rendered impotent by indecision and disgust, Bergman's characters are left to stew in their own bewilderment...

...With a touch of philosophical whimsy I am tempted to answer my rhetorical question with another question: Why not...

...The reader is advised to seek out studies by Birgitta Steene (Ingmar Bergman, 1968), Philip Mosley (Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress, 1981), Bruce F. Kawin (Mindscreen, 1978), and Jorn Dormer (The Films of Ingmar Bergman, 1972)-who are aware that Bergman's "vision" involves more than what he sees through the lens of his camera...

...If anything, shooting for television prompted Bergman to abandon detailed sets in his later films, making them visually less absorbing than the black-and-white features...

...Suffering is incomprehensible, so it needn't be explained...

...God and death are as one in Bergman's dismal abyss...

...By admitting that he disagrees with Bergman's nihilism, Lauder prepares us for a possibly bracing debate...

...Bergman buffs would concur, for it sums up the existential dilemma...

...People's cruelty, their loneliness, their fear-everything becomes self-evident-transparent...

...Library sources are accepted at face value, cut-and-paste style, and other books on Bergman are "liberally paraphrased...

...Throughout, Lauder's haste and hyperbole distort Bergman's clear intentions...

...And death-extinction, dissolution of body and soul...

...Art is an outlet for expressing the problem, for fanning the fragile love that might otherwise perish...

...The plight of intelligence peering into that vast emptiness brings a double anguish-the sterility it finds there and an affirmation which it nevertheless still craves...