On Screen

...Speechless and cold, the wind/The weathervanes are clanging...

...In Bergman, however, the real is too near to us with toothbrushes, radios, revolvers...

...The film reconstructs, from Johan's diaries and Alma's confessions, the events that lead up to the disappearance...

...Those responsible for—or, better, guilty of—this film lack the least inkling of "pure," to say nothing of "imagination...

...The painter runs off to the chateau, where he is subjected to all kinds of horrors...

...Thomas Aquinas, and the director, Michel Deville, is no help at all...

...With the decolletes, to be sure, the film does considerably better...

...My own two favorites are, first, Alma's anxious face in the dark room comforted suddenly by one, and then two disembodied hands?the rest of Johan is submerged in night...

...Veronica's is that of middle-class stolidity, which, once the black magic of its youthful seductiveness has worn off, must lose out to the creative imagination...

...It reminds me of my favorite lines from Hdlderlin: "Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde/Klir-ren die Fahnen...

...Lindhorst's world is that of art and the spirit, of white magic...

...Hoffmann's supernatural is acceptable to us because even his natural world is remote, romantic, fabulous...

...Benjamin is like a gorgeously wrapped and beribboned Christmas package containing an empty box, and, as such, emblematic of the present state of French culture...

...or, contrariwise, the sudden and chilling appearances of the old lady with the hat and of Heerbrand at the hour of the wolf...

...To make the costumes and repartee saucier, the feebleminded plot is couched, or bedded, in the 18th century, permitting deeper de-colletage and profounder epigrams...

...There is, moreover, a sudden and unintegrated appearance in the film of Maestro {Kapellmeister) Kreisler, the hounded musician, who is Hoffmann's alter ego in two of his major works...

...Alma runs after Johan into the woods where he is attacked by the entire company, led by Curator Heerbrand...

...It has a splendid cinematographer in Ghis-lain Cloquet, who is inventively assisted by Claude Pignot's art direction and Rita Bayance's costumes...

...Among the young ladies, Anna Gael is an absolute stunner, and a few others are worth a lip-smacking or two...

...A painter, Johan Borg, disappears from a small Frisian island where he spends the summers with his wife, Alma...

...Thus, roughly, the plot...

...Lindhorst changes into a bird of prey to deliver the coup de grace...

...Yet Nina Companeez, the scenarist, gets no closer to Chamfort and Riva-rol than to St...

...In a climactic scene, Johan and Alma have dinner with this company and are humiliated and divided against each other...

...In The Magician, Bergman had already borrowed a thing or two from Hoffmann's weird fantasies...

...then they appear to his pregnant wife as well...

...And, secondly, Johan and Alma embracing in the late afternoon light on the threshold of their cottage...

...To be sure, Hoffmann in other stories, such as "The Mine at Falun," also saw things in this way...

...The world of the spirits, for Bergman, becomes the seigniory of evil: The supernatural corrupts the artist who is exposed, precariously balanced, corruptible...

...Under the triple assault of homosexuality, necrophilia and exhibitionism, there cracks a noble mind...

...Finally, one of the ghostly crowd—if such they be?leaves a gun with Johan, who shoots his wife and thinks he has killed her...

...In "The Golden Pot" (1814), which no less a man than Thomas Carlyle first translated into English, the student Anselm is torn between two realms...

...First Johan begins to see demons and to sketch them...

...The cast, headed by Max von Sydow, is splendid from top to bottom and the soundtrack, often using electronic music, is one of the spookiest within memory...

...his host, the Baron, announces that he is now Veronica's lover, then scurries off across walls and ceilings...

...After watching an old lady (the superb Naima Wifstrand) remove her face—an especially brilliant bit of film-making—Johan is made up en travesti by the sinister Archivist Lindhorst, and invited to make love to the nude, seemingly dead Veronica on a stone catafalque, while the Baron and Baroness and their ghoulish crew Ieeringly watch...

...it becomes a veritable nipplorama—at times there are enough nipples constellating the screen to turn it into a milky way...

...In Hoffmann (who was a composer and conductor as well as a writer), Kreisler is called Johann, just like Bergman's hero...

...What this is, though Bergman does not tell us so, is an improvisation on themes from E. T. A, Hoffmann, the great German romantic storyteller...

...We get large areas—fabrics, walls, foliage—in strong solid colors instead of the usual fussy patterns...

...This creates a poster-like effect, with sizeable chunks of one or two striking colors leaping out of an equally brilliant but contrasting solid-color background...

...Benjamin is a marathon tease, an uninterrupted series of interrupted coitions, meant to keep us in suspense about which one of a slew of budding or overripe beauties will first bed the 17-year-old protagonist...

...Earlier, Veronica enlists a hideous witch to help her win Anselm...

...in any case, it is this kind of discrepancy that damages the film...

...Johan striking match after match in front of his slitted eyes in a vain attempt to domesticate the horror of the wolf's hour—so many master images...

...This time the question is to what extent can the lover help the beloved who is torn between sanity and a world of visionary horrors, the madness that (Bergman seems to feel) imperils the artist with its cruel yet cajoling lure...

...Sven Nykvist's dependably inspired camera is there to catch the most haunting compositions, trajectories, varieties of shade and texture, capturing as many nuances in black and white as the richest palette could with color...

...But caught in the painful pseudosophistication of Benjamin, they all prove dangerous acquaintances...

...There is a contradiction in Bergman's mind...

...They are a rich, eccentric group inhabiting a dilapidated chateau, and among them seems to be Johan's former mistress, Veronica...

...Yet the film tells us remarkably little about the crises of The Mad Artist, or of those of the loving woman who tries to save him...

...There are scenes, or at least shots, of great beauty, such as the grisly dinner party that aptly absorbs elements from Fellini and Butiuel...

...he is particularly afraid of that hour before dawn when nightmares and hauntings preponderate, when most deaths but also, paradoxically, most childbirths occur: the hour of the wolf, as Swedish country folk call it...

...In Hour of the Wolf, we find a Lindhorst, Heerbrand and Veronica not unlike those in Hoffmann, although the symbology has been inverted...

...Unfortunately, the real and the unreal in Hour do not mesh...

...Regrettably, the interviewer was not astute enough to ask how a cosmos can be at the same time godless and demon-filled...

...One thing must be said, however, for this deplorable film...

...yet the student ends up happily married to Serpentina, and is translated by Lindhorst to their magic castle in Atlantis...

...There is even a sequence, deliberately overexposed, in which Johan kills a little boy (again, shades of Persona), about whose meaning Bergman himself, I suspect, remains unclear...

...At the end of Benjamin there is a note reading, "Benjamin est une oeuvre de pure imagination...

...Consequently, instead of the real perfectly suffused with the sup-erreal, we get the mundane and the hallucinatory each in its corner?except for one or two marvelous scenes where the two indeed coalesce...

...In Hour of the Wolf the borrowing is chiefly from "The Golden Pot," but there is also a faint parallel to the story "Don Juan," in which a performance of the opera Don Giovanni figures rather as The Magic Flute does in the film...

...in the brisk wind, the laundry on the clothesline flaps hostilely around their faces...

...or the slow, choreographed entrances of the Baron and Veronica...

...Johan's madness—if that is what it is—gains...

...a penumbral lamp between darkling faces...

...Along with these reverse-Hoffmannian figures we get typical Bergman characters: The patient wife, Alma, bears the same name as the sympathetic nurse in Persona...

...thinking this to be a dig at poor old Fritz Kreisler, American audiences giggle inanely...

...Alma is left to bear the child—presumably in the wolf hour—and to wonder whether by falling in with her husband's demonology and visions she loved him too much or not enough...

...There is the supernatural one of the Archivist Lindhorst, who is a demon prince and sometimes changes into a salamander or vulture, and his lovely and loving daughter Serpentina, who can turn into a little green snake...

...A rowboat at dawn gliding past rocks...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon Highly Specialized Madness Afilm by Ingmar Bergman that does not work is saddening in itself, and when the failure comes as a sequel to the magnificent Persona, it is that much more disheartening...

...Hour of the Wolf returns to the problem of two people's interaction and interdependence to the point where two destinies become, or threaten to become, a single fused one...

...Veronica's last name is Vogler, the same as the disturbed actress' in the earlier film...

...Johan's sharp, shadowed profile bisecting Alma's tear-lit face against the gloaming of the Scandinavian night...

...And a demon that drives a jeep is simply not a demon, or even the raw material out of which the overexcited mind can make a proper demon...

...And there is the philis-tine, bourgeois world, typified by Rector Paulmann and his merry, calculating daughter Veronica, who loves Anselm but settles for the prosaic Registrar Heerbrand when he is appointed Counselor...

...In a recent filmed interview, Bergman spoke both of not believing in God and of actual demons that chased him out of habitations...