A very particular collaboration

Here are some of the films Ingmar Bergman made with Liv Ullman: Persona (1966), Shame (1968), Hour of the Wolf (1968), The Passion of Anna (1969), Cries and Whispers (1972), Scenes From a Marriage (1973), Autumn Sonata (1978), Saraband (2003). If you know just one or two of the films on this list—to which I should add Faithless (2000), the excellent film Ullman directed from Bergman’s script—you probably know that we’re surveying one of the great collaborations in cinema history. Great not only because Bergman was a visionary director and Ullman an actress of singular gifts, but because each of those films were elevated and deepened by their creative dialogue. Actors were far more essential to Bergman’s cinema that is the case with most of the great auteurs, and Ullman was so much more than a muse.

Begrman and Ullman were married for a time, and had a child—another collaboration—and theirs is a fascinating, at times chilling love story. He was over 20 years her senior, a notoriously difficult, neurotic, particular man already on his fourth wife—whom he’d leave for Ullman, just as Ullman would leave her first husband for him. He bought a house for them on Fårö, the island where they shot Persona and many subsequent films, and surrounded it with a high stone fence. He wanted to keep her there and she needed to spread her wings, which in time she did, embarking on an international career with few filmic highlights that didn’t possess his signature, but with numerous successes in the theatre. They remained close friends and creative allies until his death in 2007. Their relationship deserves serious investigation. It deserves so much more than the narrow, sentimental gloss it gets in Dheeraj Akolkar’s Liv & Ingmar.

The film’s chapters are given titles like ‘Love,’ ‘Loneliness’ and ‘Pain.’ The music feels best suited to a soap opera or a commercial for long distance rates. There are shots of tastefully arranged photos and letters which Ullman’s hand gently glides across, and shots of Ullman gazing solemnly from a beach or an empty stage, or through the window of a car. In short, this documentary, about people who made some of the most austere and emotionally brutal films ever made, is super-cheesy. More importantly, it seems largely devoid of curiosity. Ullman is the only interview subject. Akolkar apparently spoke to no one else, not even Bibi Andersson, Ullman’s frequent co-star, and another of Bergman’s actress-lovers. There are no archival interviews with Bergman or cinematographer Sven Nykvist, his other great collaborator. There’s almost nothing about the nature of Bergman and Ullman’s working life—which surely can’t be separated from their love story—how it was negotiated, given their intimacy, how characters and stories were developed, and so on. It’s hardly the case that Ullman isn’t articulate on these subjects—though only a fraction of the duration of Liv & Ingmar, the interview Ullman gives on Criterion’s new Persona DVD/BD (see previous post) brims with insight into their process.

There is a moment near the film’s end in which Ullman describes following an impulse to go visit Bergman on the last day of his life. The scene is almost unbearably moving, but what makes it so moving—the phenomena of having someone whose life is so utterly intertwined with yours—only emphasizes all that this film lacks.    

                   

Persona's still-haunting sliver mirror

There is no settling into Persona (1966), so let’s not settle in. A projector’s viscera glows white hot, whirring celluloid flutters by, a cartoon prototype appears, then a shard of silent slapstick: set to modernist horror movie music, the prelude reminds us we’re watching a movie; it’s also incorporating spectatorship into the realm of its story. A sheep is slaughtered, a spike is driven through a hand, a tarantula crawls across a white surface, a bespectacled boy (Jörgen Lindström) wakes up in, it seems, a morgue; at least, the elderlies sharing his pale space look dead enough. Perhaps the unnerving images that preceded were excerpts from his dreams; perhaps they were the dreams of the dead surrounding him, their psychic vapour. The boy tries to read Lermontov (!), but gets distracted, like us, by the screen, or, for him, the lens, but, actually, a barring window or membrane separating him from the dissolving images of two women’s faces. He reaches out, to that screen-lens-membrane, to us, to the women, or some elusive, amorphous mother that the pair represents. Hard cut. Prelude over. Roll opening credits. We’re not so much acclimatized for Persona as sufficiently jarred to enter it.

Nearly 50 years after its debut, Persona can seem less like a linear experience than a cinematic ecosystem, a movie-place containing interconnected elements, most famously, images of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman, the film’s ingenious actresses, their merging and/or interlocking faces and hair. But that sense of the film as an object to behold and puzzle over dissolves once you start watching it. The opposite of ponderous, the economy of the opening expository scenes is bracing. Alma (Andersson), the nurse, is debriefed by her superior (Margaretha Krook) about their their new patient, Elizabet (Ullman), an actress who stopped speaking one night while playing Elektra on stage and has yet to recover. A hard cut to a brief flashback appears in the midst of this: a tight close-up of Elizabet in the moment of her sudden pause—a pause yet to be broken. It’s as though, all at once, a veil fell away and she became paralyzingly aware of the sham of her performance, or of this play, and that awareness followed her into the rest of life. Authenticity was in that moment all but drained from the world, through the rare moments when she’s presented with something undeniably authentic—a television broadcast of a self-immolating monk in Vietnam, a photo from Jürgen Stroop’s report on the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—she recoils.

Does Elizabet’s crisis mirror that of Persona’s writer and director, Ingmar Bergman? He’d spend the first part of the 1960s making increasingly strange, inventive and claustrophobic films exploring the traumas and liberation of living in the absence of God. During those same years younger filmmakers were renovating film language, making the movies exhilaratingly self-conscious, producing, for example, movies about genre in place of more genre movies. With Persona, Bergman took that new self-consciousness and went inward instead of outward—he applied these new tools to an exploration of inner life. As Paul Schrader eloquently puts it in an interview included in Criterion’s superlative new Persona DVD/Blu-ray package, Persona is a milestone not because it was the first shot in a revolution but, rather, because it was the second. Me, I didn’t live through the revolution in question, but this second shot, once it came to me, was the one that wounded me permanently. I first saw Persona when I was 16, and it was the most transfixing, mysterious and, frankly, erotic experience with moving images I’d had. It remains all of those things for me. I’ve seen thousands of movies since, but every time I come back to Persona all those movies seen only heighten and reinforce my appreciation.

I was saying something about story, and, truly, for at least half of Persona the story remains crisp, clipped, just cryptic enough to intrigue. Alma and Elizabet are sent to Alma’s superior’s cottage on the island of Fårö. It’s summer, the sun never sets, and the scene seems idyllic. Elizabet remains mute, but her beguiling face could be read as sympathetic, even fascinated. So Alma talks and talks and her life, which she previously described as “decided,” begins to seem looser, at once less fixed and more interesting. She tells stories, and in the same way that this movie works as profoundly as it does because it acknowledges its movieness, her stories possess the transfixing-mysterious-erotic power they do because they come to us as stories—flashbacks would never have the same impact as the sentences so deftly delivered by Andersson. Elizabet becomes something like a best friend, or a therapist, or a vampire—later on she’ll actually drink blood. Does she truly care about Alma’s life and career, or about that impromptu orgy she partook in and never told a soul about before? Is Elizabet genuinely interested in Alma or just searching for material? For an artist, maybe for actors (and writers) most of all, are both things not always in play?

Persona’s key moment, or the whole movie in one scene: Alma in bed, the night not dark but slivery, the air almost smoky, and Elizabet soundlessly enters her room like a Japanese ghost. Like the boy, the two women will gaze into the screen or mirror, faces close, stroking hair, a seduction, a spiritual merger… And then comes some sort of betrayal; petty revenge; a simmering resentment that briefly tears up the physical substance of film itself; friendship becomes a duel; then a visit from Elizabet’s confused husband (Gunnar Björnstrand) and a turning of tables—maybe Elizabet’s real fear wasn’t of being false but of being ordinary, like Alma. You can explore the emotional geometries in this movie for ages. This is the trick: certain fundamental mysteries endure, but the character dynamics and the feelings involved are only too identifiable. “Persona” means mask and masks continually fall away in Persona. But, in spite of all these haunting close-ups, how do we know for certain when we’ve arrived at a real face?   

Persona was always my number one when it came to movies that I felt begged for inclusion in the Criterion Collection. Criterion hasn’t neglected this happy occasion. This gorgeous new package has the best looking transfer I’ve seen. The strongest supplements are, for me, the interviews: one with Andersson, Bergman and Ullman at the time of the film’s release; one with Bergman from 1970 for Canadian television; a new interview with Ullman, in which she emphasizes the rigour of Bergman’s collaborative process and the many important elements that were discovered only during production or in the editing room; and the aforementioned interview with Schrader, who supplies sturdy historical context and still beams like a schoolboy when expressing his admiration for this film. If you could see my face right now, I suspect I’m beaming too. 

                    

Closer and closer readings: Farber on Film

An essential volume on any film-lover's shelf, the new Farber on Film: the Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America, $40 US/$50 CAN) was edited by Robert Polito, who authored a terrific Jim Thompson biography some years back called Savage Art. Farber died last year at the age of 91. He hadn’t written about film since the 70s, when he dedicated himself full-time to painting. Yet his perspective retains a colossal vitality. He wasn’t bent on prescience. On the contrary, he was rigorous about seeing movies as they played to their moment in time. (It’s why he was wrong about the protagonist’s motivation in Taxi Driver—Travis Bickle’s gnomic personal obsessions have aged better than Farber’s suggestion that he should have been driven by pure need for celebrity.) But Farber immersed himself in films with an observational prowess that the rest of us are still trying to catch up to.

Taxi Driver

As promised in the subtitle, this doorstop delivers the whole course of Farber’s critical career, nearly 800 pages worth. The book has an exhaustive index and lends itself to random browsing, but there’s something cathartic in reading from cover-to-cover, in watching Farber develop his sensibility through the 40s in regular columns for The New Republic or The Nation before seeing that sensibility come to full fruition in the expansive essays that populated his revered late collection Negative Space. As Polito notes in his superb introduction, “Farber is perhaps the only American critic of modernism to write as a modernist.” From the first sentence Farber is cantankerous and muscular and eager to push the language. From the first he’s broad in vision, weaving the state of wartime US politics and culture, the state of film industry and film art, into his arresting, provocative prose. From the first he thwarts the urge toward quick-fix criticism so that you can’t even tell if he likes something, and who cares when he’s drawing us always closer to really seeing and hearing what the movies are doing, what they can do, what they don’t do, what they should.

Double Indemnity

The title Negative Space is apt: Farber can be pretty damned negative at times—at first blush you might wonder if he actually likes movies—while his roaming senses, trained by painting and photography, not to mention sports, always peruse the whole of the filmic space, digging into corners, probing the cavities, sometimes at the expense of certain elements we often cling to as being essential, like theme. While getting high on his championing of underdog works like Moontide or The Set-Up or anything produced by Val Lewton, my head spun and my jaw dropped when Farber, at times given to contrarianism, laid into Double Indemnity, The Magnificent Ambersons, Laura, My Darling Clementine, The Third Man, Sunset Blvd with such merciless, surgical precision. But Farber's readings feel more alive, more actively wrestling with these films and what they represent—where they fall in the culture—than the vast bulk of comfortably reverential, historically assured writing they’ve generated from hundreds of other writers—myself included. True, Farber’s take on Rashomon feels excessively sharpened by preconceived suspicions about Kurosawa’s flashy technique while basically ignoring the dark tide of uncertainty that undercuts its every scene, just as his dismissal of Billy Wilder’s cynical adoration of tough-talking lowlifes seems the product of Farber’s general repugnance toward Wilder’s employment of gloss. But unlike every other critic who’s ever used that laziest of pejoratives, “arty,” Farber invested the first half of his career in defining precisely what sort of threat studio era “artiness” posed.

High Sierra

While working through Farber’s ongoing reports from the American cinema of the 40s and 50s there were times I wondered if his division of films into the economical/unassuming/action-driven and the pretentious/Oscar-baiting/self-consciously flashy wasn’t too reductive, not to mention highly oriented toward, and more forgiving of, what can’t help but feel like an almost exclusively masculine sensibility. Yet the narrative inherent in Farber on Film, the long and dogged establishing of a perspective, builds in increments, shaping itself through reflection, reassessment, comparison and cultural change, until we arrive at the first definitive statement of Farber’s thesis-in-progress, the 1962 essay ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.’ “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” White Elephant Art, by contrast, is plagued by “a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film.” Farber zeroes in on something that can manifest as many things for different viewers: spontaneity, abandon, risk, freshness, process-over-product, attentiveness to the full measure of what film can access, openness to accident. It also favours acting that seizes our fascination by being nothing more than, as he writes in ‘The Decline of the Actor,’ “simply curiosity flexing itself,” that prizes the fleeting exhilaration of something as ephemeral as Bogart glancing up at a street sign when he didn’t have to; the way Ida Lupino "works closely and guardedly to the camera, retracting into herself, steals scenes from Bogart at his most touching"; by the presence of Liv Ullman, "one of those rare passive Elegants in acting who can leave the screen to another actor and still score." The Elephant vs. Termite perspective found Farber embracing B-movies, where filmmakers were better able to wriggle free of the front office and quietly produce subversive wonders in the margins of often seemingly negligible material. It found Farber embracing sly supporting performances that could almost function as critiques of the pompous leads surrounding them. From ‘Pish-Tush’: “Movies that have become classics… are never more savage and uninhibited than in those moments when a whirring energy is created in the back of the static mannered acting of some great star.” But while Farber’s dichotomy remained in place, what compelled Farber changed radically as the 1960s changed assumptions about what might constitute artiness, termites and elephants. His gradual admiration and rich appreciations for Godard pays off all the more for the insights of his early skepticism. Defenses of Anthony Mann or Howard Hawks became defenses of artists as potentially "arty" as Chantal Ackerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Werner Herzog. He's actually quite friendly to Easy Rider, and to Terrence Malick. And far from cultivating a strictly male perspective, Farber gradually began to co-author essays with his wife Patricia Patterson. Among some of the best late essays are exhaustive assessments of Herzog, Luis Buñuel and Nicolas Roeg.

Farber, with typewriter and white-out

What’s great about Farber on Film is that it emphasizes how good criticism takes nothing for granted. Writing an essay called ‘The Subverters’ in 1966, when film studies departments and popular critics were busy trying to build a canon, “to bring some order and shape to film history,” Farber declared such efforts “doomed to failure because of the subversive nature of the medium: the flash-bomb vitality that one scene, actor, or technician injects across the grain of a film.” This persistent unruliness of movies is among the things that make it so seductive to some and infuriating to others. The medium is all about motion, and it refuses to sit still and politely concede to definitive, settled judgments. So Farber moved along with it. His opinions were strong and ruthless—and always open to adjustment. He’s one of the only critics whose reviews the reviewed filmmakers—that all filmmakers—can actually learn from, to say nothing of audiences. I know I’m a better, more fulfilled, more stimulated film watcher for reading him. I only hope it can make me a better film critic, too.

Liv Ullman at 70: a look back at Saraband

Liv Ullman turns 70 today. Her strangely angular, deeply sensual beauty; her tremendous presence even, perhaps especially, when silent; her worry, joy and wonder; her sometimes near-palpable warmth; her sometimes fearsome wrath: all of these qualities have kept me more or less spellbound since my teens, when I first saw her withhold words, incite confessions, and move ghostily toward that climactic merger of mind and spirit in Persona (1966) . 

She's truly one of the greatest of them all, and nearly as formidable a director as she is an actress. She's all the more admirable, too, for her ardent humanitarian work, though the greedy movielover in me would like nothing more than to see her return far more often to the screen, where she still radiates so much emotional texture, more so, in fact, with the force of familiarity. For this reason I figured I'd mark the occasion by posting my review of her final performance for her great collaborator and one-time husband, the late Ingmar Bergman. I wrote the piece before Bergman's death, not to mention that of cinematographer Sven Nykvist's, and have left references to the artists' former status among the living as is. 

Ullman's Norwegian, I realize, but since she's most familiar to us in Swedish, I'll opt to say på födelsedagen!

In the realm of art, the inextricable conspiracy between mortality and the photographic image is probably made most palpable and immediate in our relationship to seeing actors age in film. Watch a retrospective of any actor with a long, prolific career, and you soon notice that the way time makes its mark upon that actor causes the work to resonate more deeply. The almost spectral, larger-than-life presence becomes fused with the gradually dispersed pieces of evidence that reveal the all-too-human vulnerability to time’s passage. This betrayal of the myth of youth in the movies is one of the phenomena that make the medium uniquely powerful.

The mere illusion of time’s passage was one of the pivotal elements in our relationship to the characters in Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 television series Scenes From a Marriage. Over six episodes, Marianne (Liv Ullman) and Johan (Erland Josephson) endure the most tumultuous years of their relationship, finally winding up in, perhaps, their last embrace that literally seems to exist outside of time and the laws that govern every other part of their ultimately separate lives. The illusion is masterfully created through the intimate collaboration between Bergman, cinematographer Sven Nykvist and the two main actors, already familiar to viewers from previous roles in several prominent Bergman films, and the result is extremely moving.

But with Saraband (2003), also made for television and which Bergman has announced as his final work, time is no longer an illusion: Ullman and Josephson really are 30 years older now and their age is not only noticeable but an intrinsic feature in the affectionate but no less unwavering gaze of Bergman’s camera. What’s impressive about this is not simply that we, for example, notice the disquieting involuntary tremor in Josephson’s hands (he’s 82), but that he and Ullman, two of the world’s most accomplished living actors, have somehow managed to completely integrate their own ageing process with those of their characters. As with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy’s characters in Before Sunset (04), the actors have managed to, with utterly convincing nuance, evoke the same characters they played previously and to do so in a way that manages to account for all the messy life these characters have lived in the interim. What’s more, they make it look organic and easy.

Bergman, however, is not revisiting a previous incarnation but simply delivering the work he’s compelled to at this stage, breaking away from nearly all of the conventions of Scenes that don’t suit his current temperament. Nothing stinks of excess sentimentality or gimmickry here (aside perhaps from a slightly winky reference to 1968's Hour of the Wolf early in the film), but it’s played out like business as usual in the pared-down aesthetic characteristic of all Bergman’s television work undertaken after his last cinematic feature, 1982’s Fanny and Alexander. It begins, rather disarmingly, with Marianne addressing us directly, looking through old photos, giving a brief recap of her perfectly ordinary life since Scenes, and explaining the impulse to end her 30-year estrangement from Johan that sets Saraband in motion.

Marianne and Johan’s reunion anchors Saraband, but, wisely, it’s not made the whole of the film’s content. In fact, the more dramatic conflict isn’t between those two at all but between Johan’s son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) and his daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius), both of them cellists living off Johan’s considerable wealth and alongside the phantom of Karin’s long-deceased mother, who remains as beloved to all involved as Henrik is resented. The complicated, tormented (and clearly incestuous) nature of the relationship between Henrik and Karin certainly complies with the intense skepticism of family values that informed Scenes, but is offset by Karin’s youthful luminosity in a superb performance that implies the fruitful collaboration Dufvenius and Bergman might have shared if her career wasn’t just starting as his apparently reaches its end.

As observed in Time Out’s review, Saraband is “less a sequel than an expansive coda,” and while the psychodrama plays itself out in the foreground, the story of Marianne and Johan quietly re-blooms and then fades before once again becoming some densely potent image in their past. The reconfirmation of their love isn’t a magical remembering and correcting of love, as in movies like Random Harvest (1942), but a reminder of the genuine enigma of a love that cannot be managed. The combined effect of seeing both Scenes and Saraband leads us to the notion that while we’re helpless to control or predict the sudden shifts of love, we must stay attuned to that voice within us that might some day compel us to just reach out toward others regardless of what may happen. In short, it urges us to not let time just slip away.