Ingmar Bergman: The Strength of Surrender

From the Life of the Marionettes (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

From The Life of the Marionettes is a semi-sequel to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage, which had been released seven years previously, with a new cast (Robert Atzorn and Christine Buchegger) replacing Jan Malmjso and Bibi Andersson. Bergman drew on his cinematic and theatrical expertise (as a playwright as well as a director) to create a visual and narrative tour-de-force that equaled his finest experimental work of the 1960s.

Made during his enforced exile in Germany while facing tax accusations in Sweden, Ingmar Bergman's From the Life of the Marionettes is a devastating depiction of a marriage in crisis and a complicated psychological examination of a murder,  Peter, a businessman, fantasises about murdering his wife, Katarina, until a prostitute becomes his substitute victim. After the crime, Peter and Katarina's doctor and others try to explain what happened. This intriguing picture, which jumps back and forth in time, swings fluidly between seduction and repulsion, and the German ensemble is outstanding.

From the Life of the Marionettes is Bergman's only German film. Conceived in Sweden and written during a time of personal crisis, Bergman had been working in the German theatre and had started to feel comfortable about making a film in his non-native language. 

Writing on the genesis of the film in Images, My Life In Film, Bergman notes: 

“During my second year in Munich (in 1977), I had begun writing a story I called Love with No Lovers. It was heavy and formally fragmented, and it mirrored an upheaval that clearly had something to do with my exile. The setting was Munich, and it dealt, as did my silent movie dream, with a large amount of film segments that had been abandoned by the director.[...]

Nobody in Sweden wanted to invest a penny in Love with No Lovers, even though I was willing to put my own money into it. I spoke with Horst Wendlandt, who was the German coproducer of The Serpent's Egg, but he had been burned by that experience. Dino De Laurentiis declined as well, and it was soon evident that this large, expensive project would not get off the ground. That was all there was to it. I had been around and knew that the more expensive your projects were, the greate the possibility of refusal.

I buried the project without bitterness and didn't think about it further. Later, in order to foster and strengthen the ensemble at the Residenz Theater, I thought it might help if we made a television play together. So I carved the story about Peter and Katarina out of the buried Love with no lovers.

There are a few scenes left from the original script, but, by and large, From the Life of the Marionettes is fresh.

The film is based on concrete observations and memories surrounding a theme that had haunted me for a long time: how two human beings who are insolubly and painfully united in love at the same time tryp to rip themselves free of their shakle.

The main characters of From the Life of the Marionettes, Peter and Katarina, appeared previously in Scenes from a Marriage, in which they acted as counterpoints to Johan and Marianne in the first episode.”

The following article by S. Masukor describes Bergman’s examination of the modern male psyche in Marionettes in relation to Bergman’s earlier Hour of the Wolf.

The shocking murder of a woman opens Ingmar Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) and frames its plot, which explores an unceasingly gruesome vision of male brutality. Peter (Robert Atzorn), a bored middle-class man, simultaneously displaces and fulfills his vivid fantasies of killing his wife, Katarina (Christine Buchegger), by murdering a sex worker, also called Katarina (Rita Russek), and then violating her corpse. Twelve years earlier, Bergman had anticipated this killing in Hour of the Wolf (1968), another film that culminates in male violence. During a sleepless night, Johan (Max von Sydow) confesses to his wife, Alma (Liv Ullmann), his murder of a young boy. By the end of the film, Johan has shot Alma in a rage and disappeared, abandoning her and her unborn child.

The men in these films are similarly consumed by desire for domination and fear of losing control: both express their anxieties about masculine identity in violence; both are deeply homophobic but possibly gay and incapable of being close to women who are stronger and more open to life than they are. Yet by the time he made From the Life of the Marionettes, while in self-imposed exile in Munich, Bergman seems to have refined his notion of how these anxieties are weaponized: the confused, formless anger that propels Johan to madness in Hour of the Wolf has in Peter become directed and focused, his targeting of women made explicit. While each film is formally masterful—Bergman’s staging is impeccable, and Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer on both, uses light dynamically to create striking shots—their visual beauty does not mask the aggression and brutality enacted by their male protagonists.

So how are we to watch these films—in particular, how are women to watch such unrelenting examples of male anger and entitlement, and what can we draw from the portrayals of the women who incur this wrath? In her 1996 essay collection Reel to Real, the feminist theorist bell hooks, addressing dominance in heterosexual relationships, observes that “there are moments when submission is a gesture of agency and power, [and] a distinction has to be made between conscious surrender, an act of choice, and the submission of someone who is victimized and without choice.” For hooks, love is something that can fortify the person who loves, regardless of whether it is reciprocated. Throughout From the Life of the Marionettes and Hour of the Wolf are moments of such conscious and complete love, offered at some point by each of the three women; the two wives, Katarina and Alma, at least, gain strength from them. As the men disintegrate both mentally and physically—hunching into their clothes, their faces twisted into expressions of pain—the women, independent and engaged with the world in ways their husbands are not, do not diminish.

The key idea under investigation in From the Life of the Marionettes, adapted for German television from a longer script called Love with No Lovers, is the intertwining of passion and contempt—a theme that turns up time and again in Bergman’s work—which makes it difficult for either party in a relationship to break free. Through a series of vignettes, we observe the unraveling marriage of Peter and Katarina Egermann in the days leading up to Peter’s brutal murder and rape of the other Katarina. The Egermanns were first introduced as peripheral characters (played by Jan Malmsjö and Bibi Andersson) in Scenes from a Marriage, representing an alternative trajectory—they are unhappy but stay together—to that of the series’ central couple, Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson). Like Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage, Katarina Egermann is a more modern woman than the female characters in Bergman’s earlier films. Described disparagingly by the sleazy psychiatrist Mogens Jensen (Martin Benrath) as a “career woman”—a perspective that does not stop him from trying to sleep with her—Katarina represents an independence that thwarts Peter’s idea of what a wife should be. But while Peter harbors fantasies of murdering his spouse and at one point kicks her roughly in the face after he has been talked out of a suicide attempt, Katarina remains simultaneously autonomous and open to their relationship. Bergman here gives his female protagonist a fuller humanity and a better aptitude for life than he does her male counterpart—something that had been increasingly the case since the early days of his career. Unlike Hour of the Wolf’s Alma, who is partially reliant on Johan for her livelihood and becomes independent only after he disappears, Katarina does not need Peter, and continues to thrive once he is gone.

Yet this freedom is granted only to the married Katarina. Her sex-worker double, who offers one of Marionettes’ most startling images of conscious empathy, is denied any form of renewal. The scene between Peter and this Katarina is shown twice: the first image of the film—shot in color, as is the final scene—is of her shoulder. Then we see her open, curious face and her finger tracing the outline of Peter’s face—a Bergman motif. The first time the scene occurs, it is a generous, tender image that is then disrupted by Peter’s sudden violence. But the second time it plays out, just before the end of the film (and now, like the rest of the movie, in black and white), it becomes clear how radical this gesture is. By now, we know that she has felt unsettled by him. “Something about you is strange,” she says. “One of the girls wanted to stay here and keep an eye on things. Maybe it was stupid of me to send her away.” Despite this, she chooses to be empathetic. The fact that the film plays out conservatively and kills her off, in the long-standing cinematic tradition of punishing prostitutes, does not diminish the symbolic power of her action: it is not because she has chosen compassion that Katarina is murdered but because the system in which she is caught offers no escape. As Peter repeats throughout the film: “All ways are barred.”

Like From the Life of the Marionettes, Hour of the Wolf portrays the spiral into madness of its male protagonist, which cannot be halted by his wife’s compassion and generosity. The moody, secretive Johan, a successful painter going through a bad patch, and his good-hearted wife, Alma, have been spending the summer on a remote island. (A similar location, the island Fårö-, would soon serve as the setting for Shame and The Passion of Anna, two other films from the late sixties featuring Ullmann and von Sydow as tortured couples—and the scenes that bookend it, in which the present-day Alma gives a documentary-style report directly to the camera on the events of the plot, prefigure similarly self-referential moments in those films.) The pair’s time on the island ought to be a pleasant one, but Johan is haunted by dark visions that fracture his sanity.

Hour of the Wolf is constructed in such a way that the audience can never be sure which actions are part of the material world and which take place within Johan’s visions. His murder of the boy, for example, could be read as a vision or as a memory, an indeterminacy effected by the image itself. The struggle between child and man is presented with a tangible vividness and attention to detail, yet it is shot in the overexposed, high-contrast cinematography that marks many of Johan’s hallucinations. When the couple visit the castle of their neighbor, the Baron von Merkens (Josephson), for a dinner party, von Merkens’s ghoulish guests chatter chaotically at Johan, their faces contorted under a hard, unforgiving light. Johan begins to break under the pressure, but Alma remains strong. As she and Johan walk back across the moonlit island, she tells him, “I’m not going to run away, no matter what they try,” even though she’s sure something terrible is about to happen. “I’ll stay,” she says, “I will. I’ll stay.” Although ultimately the power of her love is not enough to save him, like Katarina Egermann in Marionettes, she accepts that fact and moves on. Without Johan, there are no ghosts, and Alma is free to live with her soon-to-be-born child.

Addressing the hallucinatory figures who haunt him into madness near the end of Hour of the Wolf, Johan says, “The mirror has been shattered. But what do the shards reflect?” In Images, Bergman draws a connection between this identity crisis and the one sufferred by Peter in From the Life of the Marionettes. But the films offer no indication that these men can succeed in reassembling their broken psyches. Rather, it is the female characters here who have been able to make—in their fierce holding on to their capacities to love, within and against the structures of a patriarchy that is unrelentingly abusive—radical gestures of will and resilience. The men in these films have lost their senses of self, but the women have learned that, to return to hooks, “to love is to endure.”

– S. Masukor: Hour of the Wolf and From the Life of the Marionettes: The Strength of Surrender

Article here

Andrei Tarkovsky: On Dreams and Memories

Mirror (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Over a 24-year span, Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) directed seven feature films. In 1975, he released Zerkalo (Mirror), which marks the midpoint of his career. It was followed by Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), and Sacrifice, and was preceded by Ivan's Childhood, 1962, Andrei Rublev (1966), and Solaris (1972). 

Tarkovsky's final films were created in exile from the Soviet Union, and were shot in Italy and Sweden, respectively. Mirror has recently superseded Tarkovsky's other films, at least in terms of critical acclaim. It debuted in the top 10 of the Sight and Sound poll of the Greatest Films of All Time in 2012, finishing ninth in the Directors' Top Ten. (It was also Tarkovsky's highest-ranked work, coming in 19th place in the Critics' Poll.) 

This acclaim is undoubtedly due to the viewer's perception that this film provides privileged insight not only into Tarkovsky the man, but also into Tarkovsky the artist; for Mirror is not only the most autobiographical of all his works, but it is also the film that most succinctly summarises the filmmaker's aesthetic: his belief that cinema is, first and foremost, a medium of time, a medium that allows the viewer to experience the passage of time.

Tarkovsky had intended to write a novella on his boyhood recollections of the Second World War. He eventually gave up on this endeavour and began to consider replicating these recollections on film. The reproduction was the only emphasis of the initial draught. It was "filled with elegiac grief and yearning for my childhood," according to the author. At this stage, the title was A White, White Day. 

Unhappy with it, Tarkovsky opted to insert video interviews with his mother explaining her own memories of the time period as a point of tension or contrast in his second script. This concept would become Mirror. Despite his decision not to utilise interviews, he did include some brief photos of his mother, Maria Vishnyakova, and his second wife, Larisa Tarkovskaya, as well as the voice of his father, Arseny Tarkovsky, reciting some of the poetry. 

Rather than remaining focused on a single time period, he decided to create a narrative that moves backwards and forwards in time to chronicle one man's life throughout the twentieth century, a life lived not solely in the present but in a complex temporal zone between past and present, one where the past is still present to us, where the past is not past. This character, who is given the name Alexei in the film, is a stand-in for Tarkovsky, who appears briefly at the conclusion of the film, resting in bed and cupping a bird in his palm before releasing it into the air.  He adds, "It's nothing, everything will be alright".

In Moscow, Tonino Guerra, Italian poet and screenwriter (who worked with Petri, Rosi, Antonioni, and with Fellini on Amarcord) met with Andrei Tarkovsky, when The Mirror, had just been released in France.

With respect to this nostalgic film about the persistence of our first memories, Tonino Guerra asked Tarkovsky about childhood, death, and the nature of dreams. At the time, it was expected that Tarkovsy would begin shooting a new film ltalian Journey, based on an idea by Tonino Guerra.

TG: What is your earliest memory?

AT: The first thing that I remember happened when I was a year and a half. I remember the house, the open terrace, the stairs from the terrace-only five or six steps-and the railing. Between the staircase and the angle of the house was an enormous lilac bush. It was a cool and sandy place. I would roll an aluminum hoop from the gate to the lilacs. At one point I hear a strange noise coming from the sky. I am seized with a panicked fear of dying, and hide myself beneath the lilacs. I look up at the sky since that’s where the noise is coming from. There’s a fearsome noise that becomes more and more intense. All of a sudden, between the branches I see an airplane pass. It's 1933. I never thought it might be a bird, but something very terrible.

TG: How did your parents get along with each other?

AT: It’s hard to talk about that. I was only three when my father left the family. Afterwards, we saw him but rarely. I’m left with two impressions. The first is this one: we lived in a small, two-room apart- ment in the old part of Moscow. My father, as you know, is a poet, and stayed up all night sometimes to write. He typed on a machine. I would hear him asking my mother every night, “Maruschka, tell me whether you like it better this way or that way,” and he would read her a line. My father generally accepted her suggestions. For the second memory, contrarily, I am a few years older; I have already started school. And my father came home very late one night. My sister and I were asleep already, and he started a fight with my mother in the kitchen. He wanted me to go to live with him in the other house. My mother didn’t want it. That night I couldn’t go back to sleep because I was asking myself what I should say the next day if they asked me who I wanted to live with. I realized that I would never go to live with my father, even though I missed not seeing him.

TG: How do you view death?

AT: I have no fear of death, really no fear. It does not frighten me. It is physical suffering that frightens me. Sometimes I think that death could give a surprising feeling of freedom. The kind of freedom that’s often impossible in life. Therefore I do not fear death. What is very sad, on the other hand, is the death of a loved one.

Clearly, when we mourn the loss of those we hold dear it’s because we realize that we will never again have the possibility of asking their forgiveness for all of our sins against them. We cry at their gravesides, not because we feel bad for them but because we feel bad for ourselves. Because we can no longer be forgiven.

TG: Do you believe that when a man dies everything is over, or that another kind of life continues?

AT: I am convinced that life is only the beginning. I know that I can’t prove it, but instinctively we know that we are immortal. It’s hard for me to explain because it’s very complex. I just know that a man who ignores death is a bad man.

TG: Tell me what you want to do with your next film. I don’t need the plot, just your point of departure, the idea that you like.

AT: I would like to film a scene against a window of a veranda with panes of glass that reflect the sun as it is setting. I already know that it takes five minutes for the sun to set. Then I would like the characters to speak their lines while the sun is setting so that very slowly the light in the windows will get dimmer and then go out. One moment the sun is there, and then five minutes later it is night.
I would also like to fiIm the instant when the first snow begins to fall, the kind of snow that whitens the ground and dissolves in two minutes. All the while the characters are in action.

Often we remove nature from films because it seems useless. We exclude it thinking that we are the real protagonists. But we are not the protagonists, because we are dependent on nature. We are the result of its evolution. I think to neglect nature is, from an emotional and artistic point of view, a crime. Above all it is stupid, because nature always gives us the sensation of the truth.

TG: I know that you have a little dacha in the country and that you retreat to it from time to time.

AT: It’s a log house about two hundred miles from Moscow. It’s the first time I’ve ever owned my own home. This is how I came to have a relationship with animals . . . a cat, a dog . . . I probably owe the possibility of knowing animals at all entirely to my wife. Since she started living in the country birds fly around her, perch on her shoulder, on her head. whatever it is, they never come near me but they walk alongside of Larissa.

TG: Do you give a lot of importance to dreams?

AT: There are two kinds of dreams. Those that you forget right away and the others that have a colossal importance. I would like to understand them deeply because they are messages.

TG: What is your most recent dream?

AT: Yesterday. One of my recurring dreams about war. War had just erupted. I seemed to be cold, marching with many others, stepping over bodies. We could only feel the bodies with our feet because we had our eyes fixed on an enormous television screen where a big expert con- soled us by saying that our scientists had succeeded in finding a way to increase the rotation of the earth so that our rockets would fire faster than the enemy’s. And in fact we could feel the earth turning beneath our feet as if we were bears on a giant ball, and there was this big TV screen with a fine grainy powder on it like snow over the face of the person speaking, and there was also snow on us and, very slowly, everything became a walk in the snow . . . almost a joyful moment. And then I’m walking and I see only white.

– Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky: Tonino Guerra 1978.