Godlessness and Godawfulness
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon Godlessness and Godawfulness Like the great artist he is, Ingmar Bergman is striving for that limitation, that circumscription, in which the master, as Goethe says,...
...It could take for its motto two verses of the great Swedish poet, Gunnar Ekelöf: "You say you almost can no longer breathe/ What of it...
...With the possible exception of Resnais' Night and Fog, this is by far the best anti-tribute to Nazism ever put on film...
...The faces, all the faces, register only more or less violent despair, more or less frustrated expectancy...
...There are outbursts of passionate desire and passionate loathing or self-loathing...
...I am fed up with you," says the pastor to his mistress, "your eczema, your periods, your chilblains," and he excoriates her in a scene all the more fierce for being set in an innocent country schoolroom where the boys' and girls' lavatory keys hang, neatly labeled, peaceably side by side...
...When, however, he deals with human beings rending one another, Bergman's dialogue is as pointed as ever...
...Miss Monroe emerges not as a human being, but as a mere figment of Hollywood's imagination...
...The film conveys its mood brilliantly...
...Here the acting also does wonders...
...This may be because the absence of God can touch us only if we are first made to feel His presence...
...a rare boon in movies, especially American ones...
...the schoolmarm is an unbeliever but, with characteristically Bergmanesque irony, has had "evidences" of God such as the pastor cannot have...
...Marilyn, on the other foot, is a full-length "tribute" to Marilyn Monroe, consisting of clippings from all her Fox films and sappy narration sappily spoken by Rock Hudson...
...But they are seen only as under glass— glass which really is not glass but ice, impenetrably thick and unbreakable...
...Or, conceivably, God, around whom the whole thing revolves, is not a very interesting character...
...The antipodes are not really antipodes...
...Her head, in profile, is lowered and totally dark except for contours limned by the thinnest outline of light...
...asks the young woman, and, helped by Ingrid Thulin's masterly handling of these simple, penetrant words, Bergman achieves the grandeur of true pathos...
...The pastor breaks off and does not break off with the teacher...
...Such manifold qualities are needed for a good documentary, indeed for a good film of any kind...
...In one bravura scene, the pastor, played by Gunnar Björnstrand with his customary controlled intensity, begins to read a letter from his mistress...
...The two antithetical profiles correspond...
...It is a stiff, barren film, in which situations arc guessed at rather than explored, a suicide is received impassively by all concerned, and the human heart seems lost in the depths of a bottomless, hyperborean winter...
...That a woman of such glorious loveliness and femininity should consent to heap so many ashes on the fire of her beauty does immense credit to Miss Thulin's artistic integrity...
...Or it may be that such starkness of plot, such spareness of incident, simply does not lend itself to filmic treatment...
...To quote Ekelof again, "It is its meaninglessness which gives life its meaning...
...And what a secondrate imagination it is...
...At least, he is not an actor who can...
...There is a jejune attempt to suggest the seamy side of Thomas' life, but it is almost more cowardly than no mention at all...
...He wants to end the relationship, while she hangs on all the more desperately...
...The pastor smarts under what he calls "God's silence...
...But it comes out only as a showcase for Richard Burton, who mopes around with poetically windblown hair, recites Thomas' poetry unpoetically (when there are all those fine recordings by the poet himself...
...Winter Light is scarcely even a good one...
...And Stoumen's artistry extends even to the acquisition of an imaginative musical score by a genuine composer, Ezra Laderman...
...She is marvelously solicitous, bewildered and tough, and as ready as Miss Thulin to forego all glamor...
...Pastor Bergman's film—especially in the sumptuous irony of its last line—certainly does make its point...
...But neither can the pastor, to whom she sends him...
...Sven Nykvist's photography performs its usual miracles, as when the pastor and the teacher are driving across a darkening snowy landscape, and their faces are shot behind a passing parade of wintry trees reflected in the car window through which we look in...
...But, sad to say, the film-maker's mastery alone does not guarantee a great film...
...There are no credits listed and none are due...
...The fisherman's anxieties over the atom bomb, which, he reads somewhere, the Chinese will use indiscriminately, are driving him to suicide...
...they are united by their suffering...
...This inadequacy we know from before: from The Seventh Seal and Through a Glass Darkly—the image of "the spider God," by the way, recurs here...
...We must face the fact, then, that Bergman is no St...
...And it works...
...The next shot is of Björnstrand's face, also in profile, but fully lit by the lamps of the sacristy...
...Nothing in this world (with the possible exception of action painting and film criticism) has suffered more from the one-sidedness of its practitioners...
...Writing and visualization are equally good in this commingling of history, art, hitherto unknown film clippings, the folk parable, knowing montage, and a just sense of how much horror is horrible without becoming unbearable...
...John of the Cross...
...ON SCREEN By John Simon Godlessness and Godawfulness Like the great artist he is, Ingmar Bergman is striving for that limitation, that circumscription, in which the master, as Goethe says, reveals himself...
...The action, such as it is, takes place between matins in one church and vespers in another...
...And the pastor stiffens himself to carrying on with his ecclesiastic duties without the presence of God...
...The fisherman, further appalled by the pastor's accidia, kills himself...
...The very quotations from Thomas manage to sound shabby out of context and surrounded by Howells' vapid interpolations...
...A sermon of a very different sort is Black Fox, a documentary about the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler...
...And in the restraint of this film—carried to fanatical extremes even in such things as camera angles and cutting —the master truly reveals himself...
...Few people attend the first service, and only the atheistic schoolmistress the other...
...and speaks the florid and bathetic commentary as if it were as profound as the best of Dylan Thomas...
...As a sermon on this text...
...Dylan Thomas, by Jack Howells, attempts seriously to glorify the poet...
...American actresses, please note...
...Who do you think can breathe...
...The human foursome, two related pairs of lovers corresponding to the string quartet, has attracted him before (notably in Dreams), but he never before hewed to it so closely as in the new Winter Light...
...Only Bjòmstrand seems less suited to this and other recent parts: He does not strike me as a man who could cry...
...For all its powerful sequences— let me mention also a church service fraught with chilling undercurrents—Winter Light is one of Bergman's rare disappointing films...
...Presently the camera plants itself squarely before Miss Thulin, who now proceeds to speak the contents of the long, impassioned letter...
...Stoumen also uses, judiciously and tastefully, the graphic art of George Grosz and of the film's staff artist, Byron Goto —to say nothing of Hitler's own unsuccessful paintings: qualis urtifex\ A little less judiciously, perhaps, we get the Doré illustrations for Dante's Inferno...
...Even people who are sure that they could not care less for a film like Black Fox will, if they see it, care...
...Nobody in Winter Light can breathe freely...
...The same stark Swedish village and same arid northern winter are shared by another couple: a fisherman and his wife with three children and a fourth coming...
...Black Fox compares the rise of Hitler to that of Reynard the Fox in Goethe's retelling of the folk tale, and Stoumen cross-cuts from the Teutonically oppressive, malefic illustrations by Kaulbach to the malefic, Teutonically oppressive history of the Third Reich...
...But it is Bergman, and, despite its limitations, deserves to be seen...
...And, typically, for one or two brief shots of the dilapidated Thomas as photographed by Rollie McKenna, we get endless lingering over Augustus John's portrait of the angelic young Dylan...
...The pastor's mistress stiffens herself to carrying on somehow with the pastor, though without his love...
...It concerns a dour, middle-aged village pastor still in love with his dead wife but having an affair with an amiably dowdy yet helplessly passionate schoolmarm...
...But more important than any tricks, the photography faithfully yet economically conveys the bleakness of the weather, the atmosphere and the condition humaine...
...She looks directly at us and tells her dismal little story under the unblinkingly merciless scrutiny of the camera: For minutes on end she meets her agony head on...
...Is there anything worse...
...1 must report also on two antitributes of another kind: masterpieces of injustice to their subjects...
...The dialogue is, unfortunately, less than distinguished when grappling with the issue of God...
...Or, perhaps, Bergman, whatever his greatness, does not have enough "ideas" for a film of ideas...
...Its maker, Louis Clyde Stoumen, is a man of many talents: He is a photographer, filmmaker, writer, designer and intellectual...
...The same goes for the darkly ravishing Gunnel Lindblom, splendid in the tiny role of the fisherman's wife...
...Finally he warns, "I better go now, before I say anything worse...
...His wife, a simple soul, cannot cope with such problems...
...In any case, Winter Light is inferior Bergman...
...It is like a screen-test being administered to a performer, only much more ruthless...
...I have already mentioned the spareness of the film: no music, scarcely any long shots, minimal cutting...
...The fisherman's wife stiffens herself to carrying on alone...
...Miss Thulin, as the schoolmistress and mistress, impeccably blends frowziness—almost frumpishness—with the awesome ardor of the Rilkean beloved shooting up far above her lover's pettiness...
...Max von Sydow's fisherman in a sea of troubles is a beautifully understated performance...
...Again, near the end, there is a shot of Miss Thulin alone in the dark church...
Vol. 46 • May 1963 • No. 11
