Word: bergman
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...structure of 20th century religious thought, the works of Ingmar Bergman perch like gargoyles. Their gnostic faith belongs to no known dogma; their acrid doubt is too large to sit in the cool shade of existentialism. The Shame, latest of his grotesqueries, once again prays to a dead God, once again mixes actuality and surrealism, calamity and humor, a fertile mind and an arid soul...
...year is 1971, and the scene is Bergman's favorite symbol: an island off the coast. There, a violinist named Jan Rosenberg (Max von Sydow) and his wife Eva (Liv Ullman) cower in their farmhouse, waiting out a civil war that rages on the mainland. It is a truism that in many childless marriages one of the couple assumes the role of the baby. In the Rosenbergs' case, it is Jan, cosseted and petted by Eva during his incessant tantrums and irrational fears. Infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering, afflicted with a bad heart and a sick psyche, Jan lives...
Monstrous Metamorphosis. In Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard saw the end of the world as a vast traffic jam. Bergman's concept is less visual-and more chilling. His people never see history; like radiation, it destroys them without touching them. Jan and Eva become aliens in their own marriage. They rage against their cage and at each other. As Samuel Beckett puts it, "The mortal microcosm cannot forgive the relative immortality of the macrocosm. The whiskey bears a grudge against the decanter." Half from fear, half from the desire to have the child Jan cannot give her, Eva sleeps...
...less cosmic new approach not only brings us closer to Bergman, it brings him closer to his favorite script-writer. The visual effects in Hour of the Wolf made points the dialogue just suggested. Persona was perhaps Bergman's first work that had to be a film, not a novel set to beautiful pictures...
Presumably we'll begin to feel a few rows closer to Bergman with each film from now on. He's now appealing less to our intellect, more to our emotion. If this is true, it's especially worth going to the Charles and seeing The Dove. (Negatives, the feature with it, you can forget about--though then the short will be costing you about a dime a minute). The Dove is funny and pretentious. It will show you what's to be seen on the surface of "classic" Bergman: what probably won't be seen there much longer...