A Hapless Hybrid
SIMON, JOHN
A Hapless Hybrid Ingmar Bergman: Film and Stage By Robert Emmet Long Abrams. 208 pp. $45.00. Reviewed by John Simon ROBERT EMMET LONG has attempted the impossible: to produce something that...
...The two films have noth?ing in common...
...Reviewed by John Simon ROBERT EMMET LONG has attempted the impossible: to produce something that is both a lavish coffee-table picture book and a serious critical study of Ingmar Bergman's oeuvre in film, theater, television, and literature...
...Under a picture from The Devil's Eye, the caption has Bibi Andersson kissing Jarl Kulle (Don Juan), but the fellow she is kissing is Axel Duberg (her fiance in the film...
...Not counting Dreams, where they figure in separate episodes, the pair were teamed in only two more movies...
...Grant?ed, for the kind of book Long has writ?ten, extensive background reading is not necessary...
...Of the volume's 190 pages, let us assume 90 are text...
...To quote the overworked "only connect" is almost like quoting "To be or not to be...
...We read that Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Bjornstrand played so well opposite each other that they would "appear together as a team in a series of other Bergman films...
...If that is the sole parallel between Bergman and James you can conjure up, it is no rabbit from a top hat, only rabbit-fur lining from a topcoat...
...but in that case why pretend to it...
...Either way, a book isolating the visual aspect of one of the world's most verbal and intellectual filmmakers would not be doing him justice...
...The fuzziness extends to the power of observation...
...Merchant and Ivory have made a few successful enter?tainments, but they have yet to produce a work of art...
...He offers workmanlike synopses of the films??although he overlooks the role of the saucy Petra in the lives of Egerman pere and fils in Smiles of a Summer Night, does not explain that Kann's vision of the Spider God in Through a Glass Darkly is motivated by a glimpse of a helicopter through the window, and fails to mention the inserts of the leading actors discuss?ing the characters they portray in The Pas?sion of Anna...
...Bergman is, above all else, the supreme evoker of men and women in emotional conflict...
...Long writes that the hero of Wom?an Without a Face gets involved with "a demimonde," when he means demimondaine, which is pretty gross...
...Of course, it is quite suffi?cient for plot summaries, and at these the author is proficient enough...
...How come, then, I have never heard of him in either capacity...
...Or, about Berg?man's last staging of one of his favorite Ibsen plays: "This is aproduction of Peer Gynt one would not have wanted to miss...
...Or a survey including the gritty and not very coffee-tableish early work...
...Yet in this humbler field he slips up as well...
...This smacks of confusing esthetic evaluation of performance with moral judgment on the character portrayed...
...In the Preface, Long speaks of his unlimited "enthusiasm for Merchant Ivory films...
...Why Kane of all choices...
...Equally troublesome is a frequent fuzziness of expression, as in "Winter Light is one of Bergman's most nearly perfect works...
...Such errors cast doubt on Long's cred?ibility as a serious scholar, critic or styl?ist, though they do not eliminate him as a coffee-book writer...
...Pretty stills from his more lav?ish later films...
...More naive yet is the implication (or seeming implication??with Long it's hard to tell) that Liv Ullmann is better than Max von Sydow in Shame, where she is "splendid as Eva," whereas his Jan is "a weaker figure...
...In addition, Long faults cer?tain Bergman films for narrative lacunae without explaining that these stem from TV miniseries being cut down for theatri?cal feature films, not from flaws inherent in Bergman's conception...
...In fact, the award was shared by four of them...
...Add to this the occasional factual error, as when Brink of Life is said to have won a joint Best Actress award for its three leading ac?tresses at Cannes...
...That is slop?py redundancy...
...The early pages bristle with curious lapses...
...So 1 came to Long's current book with some skepticism...
...That is manifestly impossi?ble...
...And what of the artful an?tithesis: "In Howards End, E. M. Forster remarks, 'only connect,' but in From the Life of the Marionettes, Bergman's char?acters can connect with nothing...
...In the text itself, they are not numbered, causing problems in locating the appropriate note each time one turns to the back of the book...
...Clearly the captain does not rebel against his son, but vice versa...
...as a try at either genre, the book is a fail?ure...
...On the other hand, there is something sophomoric about the parallels Long pos?its, like some dutiful college student try?ing to impress his teacher...
...But who is he...
...The jacket copy describes him as "a recognized critic of American and British literature and a commentator on the per?forming arts...
...As for being innovative, almost all great films are that...
...Even Long's "Selected Bibliography" contains items I don't believe he has read, and important items like Susan Sontag's es?say on Persona are not listed...
...Note the execrable syntax.] As they move out of a theological background into the world, they place extraordinary emphasis upon art??James in his tales of artists and writers, and Bergman in his films involving the performing arts...
...What is more common than artists using the world they move in as their subject matter...
...on the next page we get, "To [sic] whom can the question of meaning?less suffering...
...On page 119, a caption reads "Erland Josephson as Baron von Merkens," though this still from The Hour of the Wolf shows Georg Rydeberg as Counselor Lindhorst...
...The chapter on Secrets of Women de?clares early on that the film's success "established Bergman for the first time as a skillful practitioner of comedy...
...That is risibly little with which to capture a giant, multiva?lent career...
...The Passion of Anna was the first film in which Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist mastered the medium of color, yet none of the three stills from it is in color...
...To be sure, it is hard to imagine exact?ly what a Bergman coffee-table book would be...
...His writing often laps?es into cliche, as when he concludes his chapter on Scenes from a Marriage with the bathetic banality of Erland Joseph-son and Liv Ullmann being "so totally convincing together that one has the con?viction that one knows them...
...A cou?ple of pages on, we read about a "hunch?backed, ineffectual son, whom the captain oppresses and against whom he rebels...
...Only the single previous book he did for the same publisher is cited: "Abrams' acclaimed 1991 publication The Films of Merchant Ivory...
...In trying to explain why Sven Nykvist replaced Gunnar Fischer as Bergman's cinematographer, Long speaks of a change in look "from the tense light-and-dark studies of Fischer to the subtler, more naturalistic compo?sitions of Nykvist...
...near its end, we are told, "for the first time Bergman became recognized as a direc?tor with a gift for comedy...
...Nearer the truth is a self-effacing remark of Fischer's I recall from an interview, to the effect that Nykvist was simply the bet?ter cameraman...
...Does two make a series...
...It suffices to glance at the illustrations from The Silence to see Nykvist reveling in chiaroscuro...
...This topos is so commonplace that a less farfetched analogy could surely have been found...
...Altogether, Long seems like a long shot for so elaborate a book from so sump?tuous a publisher...
...Most pathetic is the following passage: "Although Bergman, the son of a pastor, and Henry James, the son of a theologian, would seem to have nothing otherwise in common, they have in at least one re?spect...
...It also seems very wrong not to show that fine actress Gunnel Lindblom in any of the stills from The Virgin Spring or Winter Light, films she contributed to impor?tantly...
...Apropos Prison, we read, "She then goes over to a man by an overturned car whom [sic] she believes is Tomas...
...The Pas?sion of Anna, we are told, deals with "lone?ly embitterment in which, in a manner similar to that of Nathanael West's Miss Lonely hearts, there are only victims and victimizers, in which [again?] the victim?ized vent their rage upon the innocent...
...A reader with limited knowl?edge of Ingmar Bergman's work can ac?quire welcome information, and there are points of interest for the better informed too...
...its otherwise empty cylinder con?tained a single face-blackening blank...
...In his text, he quotes only from a handful of works, and not necessarily the best ones...
...Long asserts that, besides viewing Bergman's films in Sweden, and the theatrical pro?ductions that have come to this country, he has "read all of the books and many of the articles published on Bergman in English...
...As a stab at compromise, this is a pretty daring one...
...I have now examined this earlier work with its peculiar title implying that there is a filmmaker called "Merchant Ivory," when, in fact, though they have lived and worked together for a long time, Mer?chant and Ivory are two persons, with the former producing the films that the latter directs...
...He is either the author or editor of 28 books," of which 27 remain unnamed...
...it would take more time than anyone but an out-and-out Bergman specialist could spare...
...Well, he does give us enough of Bergman's famil?ial, social and biographical backgrounds...
...The chapters are numbered in the table of contents and, correspond?ingly, in the notes...
...Although its judg?ments on the films strike me as sound, there are things to give one pause...
...Long overlooks Barbro Hiort af Ornas, marvelous as Sis?ter Brita...
...But he cites interesting pro?duction data, adduces useful quotations from and about Bergman, and includes some nice shots of the director at differ?ent ages...
...Does this mean there is a higher category of Bergman works that this film cannot quite aspire to...
...What does Long get right...
...He tells us that Persona "is extraordinarily subtle and stands with Citizen Kane as a milestone in innovative film making...
...anxious children, however dramatically framed, are not his trademark...
...They are the people next door...
...Or can all works of art??or perhaps just Bergman's???at best achieve near-perfection...
...if you must stoop that low, then you had better put it to more impressive use than this...
...Final?ly, I would not have picked for the jacket cover a still from Fanny and Alexander showing two-fifths of the boy Alexan?der's face, the rest of it blocked out by the back of an adult interlocutor...
...even be asked...
...Long is fuzzy even in his thinking, as when he tells us Lawyer Egerman's face is blackened after a game of Russian roulette in Smiles of a Sum?mer Night because the gun was "loaded with soot...
...I doubt that...
...Personally, I prefer the wares of ivory merchants...
...Long's critical study is even more fore?doomed...
...The publisher is not above serious gaffes, either...
Vol. 77 • October 1994 • No. 10
