The Cinema of Naked, Desolate Reality

In 2001, in an interview given to the Stockholm Newspaper Press, Ingmar Bergman could not restrain himself when confronted with the state of twenty-first century European cinema. He compared the business of filmmaking to a butcher’s trade and the profession of prostitution. His remark arose from witnessing the flood of unrestrained pornography and imported sexuality sweeping into European cinema. At eighty-two years of age, the disgusted Bergman, withdrawn into the solitude of the island of Fårö, was directing a stage production of Mary Stuart. At a time when Hollywood’s unreality had completely swallowed global cinema, Bergman’s vision made me return afresh to the classical body language of film—its native grammar of image, gesture, silence, and aesthetics—which once more announced to my mind the vast, still-unrealized potential of this modern and popular art.
 
In three days, I watched six films. It was as though I rediscovered cinema’s archetypal imagination. Winter Light (1963), with its rural priest’s divine silence; Through a Glass Darkly (1961), with its neurotic heroine’s God-haunted insect; The Silence (1963), with its bewildered alienation; Summer Interlude (1951), with its Platonic love—all together build the timeless stairways of Bergman’s cinema, steeped in spiritual intensity.
 
In Bergman’s films, the consciousness of God is locked in ceaseless struggle with Freudian instinct. We behold a sea, utterly still. A desolate suburban road. A jagged mountain peak. A half-darkened room and faces twisted in unbearable expression. In Sweden’s cold climate, within landscapes draped in white snow, life seems to turn grey, embalmed in stillness. This oblique inwardness makes his films appear almost hostile to surface reality, instead driving them toward profound, concealed truths. Bergman’s characters speak with the soul, not the lips. The cinematic idiom of his age was already pared down; his was even more. Words are so few, silence so heavy, that the conventional structure of cinema assumes an entirely different shape. In this language of film, an obscene, naked interior consciousness of human life is brought forth.
 
Through a Glass Darkly plays like a psychological dream. We encounter there the architecture of a Freudian house. In that house is a tiny, secret door. The boundary between the conscious and the unconscious worlds is crossed and revealed. The civilizational sheath of relationships—lover and beloved, brother and sister, father and son—falls away. Primeval desires, dreams, and instincts awaken.
 
The theme of Persona (1966) is almost the same. A woman cannot truly love another woman if she denies her own instinct. Gradually, without telling her, she begins to inhabit the other woman’s being. Against instinct stands God. And it is there that love as an institution exists—an institution whose absence we feel in every fold of modern life. Yet within Bergman’s consciousness, this too is conditional. A silent sprint. A camera upon noisy railway tracks. A comic character. A voluptuous heroine—whose face, when touched by sorrow, turns grotesque. They run, slantwise, toward the camera. The camera retreats. Suddenly, the character halts. Harsh notes of a piano strike. A melodrama, though the image remains still. Then again, solitude devours the scene.
 
For many Bergman devotees, this film is a beloved initiation into his cinematic language—a preface, an introduction. It entwines the admirer with the director’s own method of creation. Liv Ullmann here plays the nearly inevitable role of a mute woman. Throughout the film, her silence is counterpointed by Bibi Andersson, who plays a talkative nurse. The story unfolds in the turbulence of their relationship inside a cottage on a remote island. Two actresses who discovered, with terrifying intensity, their reflections inside one another. It is said that upon seeing two women with near-identical faces, Bergman conceived the story. How chilling! In reality, the human face itself dictated the cinematic blueprint of character. Think of it. We had always heard that a director chooses actors after conceiving the story. This was a journey in reverse!
 
Fanny and Alexander (1982) is among my most cherished of Bergman’s works. It may be called an extension of his autobiography. Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the inner life of a decaying bourgeois family in twentieth-century Sweden. It is a film steeped in Bergman’s signature solitude and his portrayal of the insecurity of selfhood. He channels the intensity of bourgeois life through distortions of mind, then lifts it toward a new realm of joy, hope, and anticipation. The children are depicted with such naturalness within both nature and society that it is hard to believe this is cinema at all. Its grandeur is such that it appears like a series of Napoleonic-period oil paintings—lavish, luminous, almost painterly.
 
The character-constructs in Bergman’s films bear the signs of a grave, modern sensibility, one that consciously wounds the bourgeois instinct within the lovers of art cinema. It is not the nakedness of the body but of the mind that renders the viewer unsettled, even obscene. To reach eternal truths requires a will and a self-awareness, and to provoke such awakening Bergman holds up a mirror before us, urging us to search within for answers to his questions. The locked mind resists; the characters’ distortions rebound violently within the spectator’s consciousness.
 
Bergman dreamt nightmares. Vulgar nightmares. And the audience, too, emerges from the cinema hall haunted by the same nightmare. They become aware of his inescapable silence. A mechanical shadow-image, born of a human problem, rises from the screen into our consciousness—before at last dissolving into the unconscious realm of obscene dreams. Not the unreal sexuality of the twentieth century, but the intrinsic sexuality of civilized human beings: this is what Bergman renders.