Sometime in the early 1990’s I took a summer class at college on the films of Ingmar Bergman, showing scarless wrists, and survived. I have always enjoyed film studies, I had seen “Fanny and Alexander” years ago. It was my first cinematic exposure to magic realism, albeit of the northern European kind. I thought, this class should be enjoyable at some level. What I got was full exposure to an autuer director and a chance to see the full spectrum of Bergman’s work. We watched 10 films, allowed to bow out of one if we then saw an alternate chosen from videos on hold at the library reference. I bowed out of “Through a Glass Darkly.” I’m glad judging from the reaction of a classmate.
I ran into her at the vending machines about a week after the film, in between class break for another class ( I was known to do sleep deprived things like take two classes each summer session). We started to talk about the class, and she said she hadn’t seen me at that movie, I explained I watched an alternate. I eyed here as she nervously tore the wrapper from her candy bar, and before she took a bite she told me, “be glad, I still can’t believe Bergman thinks God is a big, hairy spider, a big, hairy spider” I have since read commentary on that film and have decided there is more to “Through a Glass Darkly” but you get the idea of how the class was effecting us.
I remember we saw “Summer with Monika” , “Wild Strawberries”, “The Seventh Seal”, “Fanny and Alexander” , “The Virgin Spring” , “The Magic Flute”, “The Touch” , "Smiles of a Summer Night" and a few more I can’t remember. It was a good sampling, I was open to forming an opinion about Bergman as a director. Besides seeing “Fanny and Alexander” early in college the only other exposure to Bergman was parts of “Scenes of a Marriage” I had seen on PBS in the late seventies but when you’re 13 all stories about just adults are confusing.
After viewing the Bergman films, I began to notice commentary about Bergman. My two favorites Bergman critics are Matthew Dessem in his blog, The Criterion Contraption and Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Dessem states that Bergman would have been a great horror director. He refers directly in his review of the movie “The Seventh Seal” to the dinner scene, when knight has returned to his castle. The camera centered on each of the guests, focusing on their horrifying reactions to someone entering the room before the camera shows it is Death himself.
Dessem also uses the example of how the lighting of the face of The Queen of the Night in Bergman’s filmed adaption of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, shows the drama and character of, well, the character. But while I think Dessem is right about that Bergman is good at effecting horror, it is the why of the horror that is at a much deeper, more subtle level.
Roger Ebert mentions repeatedly in his reviews of Bergman films and specifically in Great Movie review of the “Through The Glass Darkly”, saying “The great subject of cinema Ingmar Bergman believed is human face.” The director, along with his most eloquent cinematographer Sven Nykvsit and actors who followed Bergman on that journey, captures the human face in its most emotionally truthful state, and what can be more horrifying?
As a filmmaker, Bergman is known for his use of symbolism. I describe it as everything means something. His films have a rich suggestive vocabulary to them, such as when the main couple in the film “The Touch” harvest their apples from their small orchard. The couple is seen as a version of Adam and Eve, harvesting the fruit of knowledge in their own ‘Garden of Eden’, the fact that is in autumn, is telling and yes means something in this story of a wife’s infidelity. Literalism isn’t where it is at, as in the “Through The Glass Darkly”, God isn’t literally a big hairy spider to Bergman but it does mean something very important that Bergman wants to convey to his audience.
So in The Seventh Seal, Bergman pulls out all stops in his highly metaphoric tale of a physical and moral plague by having the very literal form of Death shadowing Von Sydow’s knight. Remember the iconic scene, Death playing chess with Von Sydow’s knight on the beach, how can anyone forget? I believe it is more than just a plot device. Yes, as Bergman says, we all “play” a tactical game with Death. But why such extreme symbolism, even for Bergman? Why does that scene stand out? After much thought, I have an answer, at least for myself.
When I first saw it, I experienced what I call my “American Schism.” I view, experience an event like a movie on an artistic, literary level but on another level operating simultaneously, sometimes my “American” psyche at a base lever is saying, “huh?”. That scene stands out, especially for me I believe because of lack of sensibility to other cultures archetypes built around traumatic events.
The European experience of the plague as represented in the literature I know, is extreme. Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Mask of the Red Death”, Werner Herzog’s hamlet-overrun-by-plague-rats in his movie “Nosferatu” and allusions to the plague in Brahm Stoker’s Dracula lead me to believe that Europeans and their cultural descendants evidence some sort of artistic post traumatic stress syndrome lurking just below the surface of the psyche about The Plague and it comes out in these exaggerated scenes. Pair that with Bergman’s Lutheran/Nordic pessimism and my guess you get Death playing chess on the beach with a knight returning from the Crusades.
I am glad that section was a summer evening class and I could drive out of the parking lot in the warm summer air, note leaving the intense images and feelings aroused by watching the movies, but mellowing them so that I could reasonably digest them later, even several years after the summer session ended.
I still think about those movies, what I remember of them and the emotions they evoked. Bergman's films are a minefield of artistic and emotional possibilities. And the class was a exciting and emotional foray into dangerous territory. I Sometimes I also think I’ll get a list together and re-watch the movies I can remember seeing, throw in a few more for good measure, eyeing scarless wrists, sometime.
