THE EUROPEAN ART MOVIE: PUTTING ON A SHOW

PUTTING ON A SHOW: THE EUROPEAN ART MOVIE
The great film-makers of European art cinema are now silent. Why should we value what they achieved? Why did their work so easily descend into pastiche and self-parody? And how far was their appeal based on their freedom to explore sexuality in an 'adult' way?
by Thomas Elsaesser
Originally published in Sight and Sound, April 1994
"I don't want to make films again...This film [After the Rehearsal] was supposed to be small, fun, and unpretentious...Two mountainous shadows rise and loom over me. First: Who the hell is really interested in this kind of introverted mirror aria? Second: Does there exist a truth, in the very belly of this drama, that I can't put my finger on, and so remains inaccessible to my feelings and intuition?...We should have thrown ourselves directly into filming...Instead we rehearsed, discussed, analyzed, penetrated carefully and respectfully, just as we do in the theatre, almost as if the author were one of our dear departed." (Ingmar Bergman, 25-26 March 1983, quoted in Images—My Life in Film.)
Ingmar Bergman is hardly a name contemporary cinema makes much use of, except as an adjective, usually applied to Woody Allen films that the reviewers find embarrassing. But it has not always been so: in the early and mid-60s Bergman had enormous prestige, swelling in a rising arc from The Seventh Seal (1956) to The Silence (1963) and Persona (1966) before subsiding fitfully with Hour of the Wolf (1967) and Shame (1968). It was the time of film clubs and the Academy Cinema, and I distinctly remember a programming meeting of the Sussex University film society which broke up in disarray over the question of whether it was possible to call both Wild Strawberries and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance great films (we settled for Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and were lynched by our audience). The row led me to start a film magazine, having discovered in Cahiers du cinéma Godard's eulogy 'Bergmanorama' practically next to his piece on Sam Fuller's Forty Guns. For at the height of middle-class Bergmanomania (in the pages of Sight and Sound, for instance) and Movie's 'Nicholas, not Satyajit,' Godard taught us that the cinema (or le cinéma) was one and indivisible. Especially when, like Godard, you were intent on reinventing it.
"Summer with Monika is the most original film by the most original of filmmakers. It's for today's cinema what Birth of a Nation was for the classical cinema, it's And God Created Woman, but fully achieved, without putting a foot wrong, a film of a total lucidity with regards to both its dramatic and moral structure as well as its mise-en-scene." (Godard in Arts, 30 July 1958.) Reading what Bergman has to say about Summer with Monika in Images ("I have never made a less complicated film. We simply went off and shot it, taking great delight in our freedom") and then watching it on video, Godard's enthusiasm is understandable: it is a glorified, glorious home movie, a hymn to a young woman's sensuality, and for the director of A bout de souffle clearly an open invitation to mix Rossellini and Rebel without a Cause.
Reviews in Britain were more circumspect. In The Listener (9 July 1959) John Weightman, "after recently assimilating a new batch of four films by Ingmar Bergman, made between 1949 and 1953," reflects on the director's "extraordinary unevenness of quality. How can he be at once so subtle and so unsubtle?" Weightman disliked Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, but liked Summer with Monika, along with Three Strange Loves (aka Thirst) and A Lesson in Love, mainly because of its poetic (i.e. neo-realist) qualities: Bergman "reflects the instability of the couple's relationship in the changing mood of water and sky," the acting is of "uncanny accuracy," and in Three Strange Loves and Monika "the two young husbands are perfect examples of the decent, naive, Scandinavian male who is driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." The last point is nicely offset by Bergman's description (in The Magic Lantern) of how he fell in love with Harriet Andersson during the making of Summer with Monika, and how pleased they were when it turned out that they had to re-shoot most of the outdoor footage because a faulty machine at the lab tore up several thousand metres of the negative.
But Weightman ends his review on a now familiar note: "In putting all these characters and moments of life on to the screen in so many brilliant, if fragmentary episodes, Bergman has done something for Sweden that no-one, to my knowledge, is doing for England. But there may be a parallel in France. Two or three young French directors, like Bergman, have deliberately turned down attractive foreign offers and international stars in order to produce films that have a local, home-made or hand-made character. The camera is again being used as a private eye, as a means of expressing a single yet complex view. This return to the artisan tradition is an interesting development, even though some of the initial products have all the defects of first novels...The cinema is such a rich art form and the poetry of the camera so much more facile than poetry in language, that it is easy for the filmmaker to get drunk on the possibilities of his medium. I think Bergman is slightly drunk in this way."
Quick Hollywood, slow Europe
Weightman's essay contains such a handy compendium of the terms which made Bergman and others the icons of auteur cinema that it prompts the question of what has happened to those towering representatives of European art cinema? Or more precisely, what can still hold together the idea of the 'auteur' and that of a 'national cinema' (as it also applied to the late Fellini, or to New German Cinema in the 70s, or British cinema in the Thatcher 80s)? Weightman already sees what Bergman has "done for Sweden" in the double perspective we have inherited: the quintessential and clichéd of a nation's character embodied in personal or 'poetic' cinema, and the defensive stance of "hand-made" films against slick entertainment. For behind the question of the fate of art cinema, of course, lurks that other one, debated ad nauseam, aired afresh every year at Cannes or Berlin: the future of European cinema vis à vis Hollywood (whether "attractive foreign offers" or France's GATT reactions about its cinematic patrimony). A few years ago, a Channel 4 programme Pictures of Europe neatly assembled all the standard arguments, voiced with varying degrees of pessimism by David Puttnam and Richard Attenborough, Bertrand Tavernier and Paul Verhoeven, Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders and Istvan Szabo. One of the least sentimental was Dusan Makavejev, who probably has more reason than most to be wary of the idea of national cinema, but who also needs to believe in auteur cinema: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen; living in the twentieth century means learning to be American."
In academic film studies, the Hollywood versus Europe question seems at times like the founding myth of the discipline, so much so that it is usually discussed under separate headings: the economic case (Thomas Guback's chapter in Tino Balio's The American Film Industry, Kristin Thompson's Exporting Entertainment, Ian Jarvie's Hollywood's Overseas Campaign); the cultural case (a UCLA- and BFI-sponsored conference in London last year was partly devoted to the topic); and the formal case (either early cinema scholars' debate about Europe's deep staging and slow cutting versus Hollywood's shallow staging and fast cutting, or a difference in story-telling). This last distinction is outlined by David Bordwell in Narration and the Fiction Film, where character-centred causality, question-and-answer logic, problem-solving routines, deadline plot structures and a mutual cueing system of word, sound and image are seen as typical of 'classical' cinema, while other narrative conventions are self-conscious and strategic deviations from the classical norm. Film studies, for once, does not seem totally out of touch with the views of the industry. The norm/deviancy argument could be seen as repeating, at the level of film theory, the hegemony of Hollywood at the cultural and economic level, since all other film styles merely reconfirm the power of the dominant by their very strategies of displacing and circumventing it. Similarly the opposition Europe/Hollywood, as worked out around early cinema, has been echoed since the 20s in the Hollywood complaint that European pictures are too slow for American audiences, a point taken up by many European directors and actors who have worked in both industries.
In Pictures of Europe, Paul Verhoeven and Jean-Jacques Annaud described American speed as a "positive quality," as did Beineix, Zanussi and Luc Besson. Puttnam and Almodóovar were more even-handed, while Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde preferred the slower delivery of dialogue and less hectic action of European cinema, along with—not surprisingly—Wim Wenders, Bertrand Tavernier and Liv Ullmann. Paul Schrader thought that it boiled down to a fundamentally different attitude to the world: "American movies are based on the assumption that life presents you with problems, while European films are based on the conviction that life confronts you with dilemmas—and while problems are something you solve, dilemmas cannot be solved, they're merely probed or investigated." Schrader's distinction helps tease out some of the formal implications: the norm/deviancy model, for instance, could be criticized for assuming the validity of the problem-solving model for both kinds of cinema. And while his theory doesn't work too well for comedies, which never pretend to solve the issues they raise, it might explain why a happy ending in a European art film is felt to be a cop-out, a fundamentally unserious mode of closure. After all, isn't one of the characteristics of 'modern' cinema (until recently synonymous with the art film) its metaphysical doubt about master narratives of progress, preferring to be skeptical of linear time and the efficacy of action? Such is the view of Gilles Deleuze, who in his Bergson-inspired study of cinema holds a more dynamic view of Godard's distinction between "action" and "reflection," contrasting instead the movement-image of classical cinema with the time-image of modern cinema.
Transatlantic crossing
Of course, the problem-solving model is not intended to characterize a film-maker's personal beliefs; it is merely posited as the norm underlying, if not both kinds of cinema, then both kinds of audience. American, or 'classical,' films are the dominant because they are made ('tailored' was the term already used by King Vidor) for an audience used to Hollywood (and which audience isn't?), while European filmmakers are said to express themselves rather than (ad)dress the audience. But if one assumes that art cinema merely sets its audiences different kinds of tasks, such as inferring the characters' motivations (as in The Silence), reconstructing the time scheme (as in Cries and Whispers) or guessing what 'really' happened and what was merely imagined (as in Persona), then the difference is one of genre or expectation: the tasks of the art film are intuitively recognized by the spectator and either avoided as a chore or sought as a challenge. And one should remember that among audiences watching art films are also American spectators—in fact, it was the US distribution practice of the art-house circuit which gave the term 'art cinema' its currently accepted meaning.
Indeed, this may be the rub, the point where a 'cultural' view differs from the cognitive case. By the logic of reception studies, it is ultimately audiences who decide how a film is to be understood, and they often take their cue not only from title, poster, actors or national origin, but from the place where a film is shown, in which case an art film is simply every film screened at an art-house cinema, including old Hollywood movies, as in Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller retrospectives: the cinema, one and indivisible. It's something of a lame definition, and a 'cultural' argument might avoid the tautology by viewing the Hollywood/Europe opposition merely as a special case of a more general process in which art and other films have assigned and reassigned to them identities and meanings according to often apparently superficial characteristics, but which on closer inspection provide an instructive map of movie culture that ignores all kinds of stylistic boundaries but speaks eloquently of the life of films in history. One could even call it a map of misreadings. European films intended for one kind of (national) audience or made within a particular kind of aesthetic framework or ideology, for instance, undergo a sea change as they cross the Atlantic and on coming back find themselves bearing the stamp of yet another cultural currency. The same is true of Hollywood films: what auteur theory saw in them was not what the studios or even the directors intended, but this did not stop another generation of American viewers from appreciating what the Cahiers critics extracted from them.
If this is now a commonplace about Hollywood, it is just as true about European art cinema. The qualities for which film-makers were praised were not necessarily what the audiences liked about their movies, and what made the films famous was not always what made them successful. In the case of Italian neo-realism, for instance, the film-makers' aesthetic-moral agenda included a political engagement, a social conscience, a humanist vision. Subjects such as post-war unemployment or the exploitation of farm labour by the big landowners were part of what made neo-realism a 'realist' cinema, while the fact that it did not use stars but faces from the crowd made it a 'poetic' cinema. Yet a film like Rome, Open City about the Italian resistance braving the German Gestapo with communist partisans and Catholic priests making common cause against the enemy—represented only a particular (and short-lived) political compromise, while with established performers such as Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi it was not exactly a movie that used lay actors. Rome, Open City became a success abroad for many reasons, including its erotic, melodramatic and atmospheric qualities. In one often reproduced shot there is a glimpse of Anna Magnani's exposed thighs as she falls, gunned down by the Germans, while in another scene a glamorous German female agent seduces a young Italian woman into a lesbian affair and supplies her with cocaine. To American audiences, unused to such fare, the labels 'art' and 'European' began to connote a very particular kind of realism, to do with explicit depiction of sex and drugs rather than political or aesthetic commitment.
Bergman is crucial here. Respected in the early 60s for his films of existential angst and bleak depictions of religious doubt, he was able to get finance for his films from Svensk Filmindustri in part because in the art houses of America graphic portrayals of sexual jealousy or violence as in Sawdust and Tinsel or The Virgin Spring, or of a woman masturbating (in The Silence) defined adult cinema for the generation prior to the 'sexual revolution.' When in the mid-60s other film-makers in Europe (Denmark, Germany) began to make films for which the label 'adult' was a well-understood euphemism, and when the Americans themselves relaxed censorship, the art-film export suffered a decline as an economic factor for European national cinemas (in Italy, for instance). But it remained a cultural and artistic force, above all for subsequent generations of more or less mainstream American directors from Arthur Penn to Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese to Francis Ford Coppola, and also for the academy: without the European art and auteur cinema, film studies might never have found a home in American universities.
What can we call this re-assignment of meaning, this fluctuation of critical, cultural and economic currency between one country and another? A misunderstanding of the filmmaker's intention? An acknowledgment that as many Bergmans exist as there are audiences recognizing something of novelty interest or spiritual value in his films? Or just an integral part of what we mean by 'art cinema' (and, finally, by any form of cinema), where the primary economic use-value is either irrelevant (because of government subsidies, as in the case of Bergman), or has already been harvested, leaving a film or a film-maker's work to find its status on another scale of values? It is what forms a 'canon' (see recent Sight and Sound essays by Peter Wollen and Ian Christie), or makes a film a 'classic' (see the slim volumes in the BFI Publishing series).
In which case, the old idea of European films as expressive of their national identities would appear far-fetched. It would suggest that 'national cinema' makes sense only as a relation, not as an essence, being dependent on other kinds of film-making, such as commercial/international, to which it supplies the other side of the coin and thus functions as the subordinate term. Yet a national cinema by its very definition must not know that it is a relative or negative term, for then it would lose its virginity and become that national whore which is the heritage film. Instead, the temptation persists to look beyond the binarism towards something that defines a national cinema 'positively,' such as "the decent, naive, Scandinavian male...driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." Another positive definition is of a national history as a counter-identity. Such might be the case with the films of Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, fanning out towards a broader media interest in Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas in which (to us) complicated national and post-colonial histories set up tantalizing fields of differentiation, self-differentiation and protest. For these films, international (i.e. European) festivals are the markets that can assign different kinds of value, from politico-voyeuristic curiosity to auteur status, setting in motion the circulation of new cultural capital beyond the prospect of economic circulation (art-cinema distribution, a television sale).
One conceivable conclusion is that both the old Hollywood hegemony argument and the post-modern paradigm (it's what audiences make of films that decides their value) hide a more interesting relationship in which national cinemas and Hollywood are not only communicating vessels, but (to change the metaphor) exist in a space set up like a hall of mirrors, in which recognition, imaginary identity and miscognition enjoy equal status. It suggests that Bergman's carefully staged self-doubt, Weightman's prophetic faith in his early poetic cinema and American audiences' frisson at the 'mature' director's candid look at sexual obsessions and violent marital strife may have a common denominator. Retrospectively, negatively, by a kind of paring away, they delineate the slim ground occupied by an auteur who also, like Bergman, has to signify a national cinema: high culture themes, stylistic expressivity, that indeterminacy of reference critics prized as 'realism.' By contrast French cinema is a national cinema with such a diversity of strands that it makes its auteurs (Godard, Resnais, Truffaut, Rivette) almost marginal figures in the overall constellation.
Auteur cinema today may not be dead, but what we mean by an auteur has shifted somewhat: for Europe and America, it is no longer about self-doubt or self-expression, metaphysical themes or a realist aesthetic. The themes that still identify Bergman as an auteur would today be mere affectations, a filmmaker's white carnation in his button-hole. Instead, auteurs now dissimulate such signatures of selfhood as Bergman sported, even when they believe or doubt as passionately as he did. Authority and authenticity lie nowadays in the way film-makers use the cinema's resources, which is to say in their command of the generic, the expressive, the excessive, the visual and the visceral. From David Lynch to Jane Campion, from Jonathan Demme to Stephen Frears, from Luc Besson to Dario Argento—all are auteurs and all are valued for their capacity to concentrate on a tour de force, demonstrating qualities not so far removed, finally, from Bergman, "drunk on the possibilities of his medium."
Bergman and Corman
Reading Bergman's Images—My Life in Film (in fact two years' worth of interviews with Lasse Bergström with the questions cut out and bits from the director's work books and The Magic Lantern pasted in) with this in mind leaves one a little disappointed. One learns about Bergman's dislike of colour (because it takes away mystery), the importance of lighting (and of Sven Nykvist), and that some of his early films were devised in order to experiment with complicated camera movements. But he says next to nothing about many of the other things that make him a great film director—his use of close-ups, his work on the soundtrack, the composition of incredibly complex yet fluid action spaces within the frame in both indoor and outside scenes. Biographical details, childhood memories, moral introspection, the theatre, actors and actresses, music and music-making make up a loosely woven narrative that discards chronology and groups the films under such oddly coy titles as 'Dreams Dreamers,' 'Jests Jesters,' 'Miscreance Credence,' 'Farces Frolics.' Often Bergman confesses of this or that film that he doesn't have much to say about its making. Contrary to the title, there is little here about images. Instead, what holds the book together is a daunting effort to account for the process of story-conception, of what mood to be in when writing, what memory to follow up on, what dream to cross-fertilize with an incident he has read about, what well of anguish to tap when the plot seems to wander off in the wrong direction.
It reminds one of how much legitimation and cultural capital Bergman the film director still derived from writing, from being an author as well as an auteur, and at the same time how removed he was from the routines of Hollywood scriptwriting—from story-boarding or using the script as the production's financial and technical blueprint. In this, he conforms to the cliché of the European director: improvisation on the set or on location, the most intense work taking place with the actors, the film taking shape as the director penetrates the inner truth of the various motifs that the story or situation first suggested to him. Bergman, the Important Artist.
The notion that Bergman's films are autobiographical has both given them coherence and authenticated them as important. In a sense, Images supports some of the earnest exegeses of his work: one finds the theme of the artist caught between imagining himself a god and knowing he is a charlatan and conjurer; the motif of the lost companion/partner in an alien city, a war zone, an isolated hospital; the transfer of identity and the destructive energies of the heterosexual couple. But Bergman is also candid about his own compliance with his admirers' interpretative projections. Images opens with the admission that Bergman on Bergman, a book of interviews from 1968, was "hypocritical" because he was too anxious to please. And in a similar vein, he now thinks the notion, endorsed by himself in the preface to Vilgot Sjöman's Diary with Ingmar Bergman, that Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence form a trilogy is a "rationalization after the fact": "the 'trilogy' has neither rhyme nor reason. It was a Schnapps-Idee, as the Bavarians say, meaning that it's an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol." (And yet a look at the filmographies of Godard, Antonioni, Truffaut, Wenders, Herzog, Kieslowski shows how important a prop the idea of the trilogy is for the self-identity of the European auteur.)
Reading Images a little against the grain of its own declaration of authenticity, it seems just conceivable that Bergman's claim to being one of the cinema's great auteurs rests most firmly on his ability to dissimulate: that the big themes, the flaunting of moral doubt and metaphysical pain, represent not a personal plight transfigured into art but the doubly necessary pre-text for a cinematic tour de force. The big themes were doubly necessary, I am suggesting, because they helped to define his cinema as a national cinema and because they allowed him to reinvent himself as a filmmaker: prerequisites for creating an oeuvre that could be recognized as such at a time when Hollywood still had genres and stars rather than directors as stars.
As to Bergman the figurehead of a national cinema, Images makes clear how many overt and covert threads connect his films to the key authors and themes of Scandinavian literature. His immense achievement was to have recognized and made his own dramatic situations, themes and characters that echoed those of the great Scandinavian playwrights, Strindberg and Ibsen especially, and to have used his lifelong work in the theatre as both a permanent rehearsal of his film ideas in progress, and as the place to forge the stock company of actors and actresses who give his films their unmistakeable look, feel and physical identity: Harriet Andersson and Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. Even so private a film as Persona uses Strindberg's one-act play The Stronger; even so ostensibly an autobiographical work as Fanny and Alexander borrows, apart from its explicit references to Hamlet, motifs, names and allusions from Ibsen's Wild Duck and Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata and Dreamplay.
Beyond their role of giving him a form (the chamber play) and a set of dramatic conflicts (Ibsen's bourgeois family falling apart through the "life-lie"; Strindberg's couple tearing each other to pieces in sexual anguish and hatred), the dramatists Bergman is attached to remind one of the importance of the texture of speech and voice for our idea of a national cinema, and indeed for the European art cinema as a whole. This suggests that one function of auteur cinema as a national cinema, before the advent of television, was to transcribe features of a nation's cultural tradition as figured in other art forms (the novel, theatre, opera) and to represent them in the cinema. One can follow this process in Bergman's career, where the films from the late 50s onwards tend to be more or less self-consciously crafted images, first of the Nordic middle-ages and then of a middle-class Sweden. From The Seventh Seal to The Virgin Spring and The Magician, from Wild Strawberries to Hour of the Wolf, from Cries and Whispers to Fanny and Alexander, there is an uneasy acknowledgment of the identity others have thrust upon him as a national icon. One response is parody or pastiche: is it merely hindsight that discovers in Bergman's big themes a wonderful excuse for putting on a show? Re-seeing The Seventh Seal I was amazed and amused by its Grand-Guignolesque elements, not just Death and the strolling players but even the young girl's death at the stake. Its deftly staged spectacle, atmospheric touches, wonderful sleights of hand and sarcastic humour prompted the perhaps blasphemous thought that Max von Sydow's Knight back from the Crusades was closer in spirit to Vincent Price in a Roger Corman film than to Dreyer's Day of Wrath or Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc.
Hence, perhaps, a trauma that seems to have haunted Bergman briefly, even more urgently than his arrest by bungling Swedish bureaucrats for tax fraud: the fear of an arrest of his creativity. The tax business resulted in a six-year-long self-exile to Germany, and seems to have wounded him to the quick. But so did the pun in a French review of Autumn Sonata (with Ingrid Bergman) which suggested that "Bergman was not only directing Bergman, but doing Bergman." Images is in a sense the record of having laid that ghost to rest, for it gives rise to the theme of an artist becoming a pastiche of himself, a fear Bergman sees confirmed in the later work of Tarkovsky, Fellini and especially of Buñuel, whom he accuses of a lifetime of self-parody. Tying in with the "Schnapps-Idee" of the auteur trilogy, self-parody is perhaps the fate Bergman believes lies in store for all European auteurs who outlive both the economic and cultural moment of the national cinema with which they are identified. From more recent times, the cases of Herzog and Wenders come to mind (though the counter-examples are as interesting: Rossellini, when he began to make his great historical films for television, or Godard, when he took on video as if as a way of taking back his own earlier films, commenting on them by spraying them with ever more metaphysical 'graffiti'). In Bergman's case, the farewell to the cinema was not only the signal to carry on with the theatre, but it also led him to reinvent himself as an autobiographer, novelist, scenarist, and the self-reflexive, slyly exhibitionist essayist he shows himself in Images, treating his big themes with an irony not always present when he was turning them into films.
Ghosts and dreams
So how does one go about writing Bergman back into the contemporary cinema, into a film history other than that of the European auteur/national cinema? I would probably start not with Wild Strawberries (usually considered his stylistic breakthrough to a 'modern' cinema), but with a film from eight years earlier which strikes me, for much of its 83 minutes, as being as timelessly 'modern' as all great films are: Three Strange Loves (1949), which though cast in the form of a journey, rather like Wild Strawberries, has a searing visual intelligence, a pulse, a body, a shape, a fury, as if made by someone "drunk on the possibilities of his medium." Bearing in mind the febrile energy and extraordinary urgency with which Three Strange Loves moves between its characters' past and present predicaments and the various people to whom the central couple were or are tied, that old art-cinema staple of the reality/illusion divide, which is one of Bergman's big themes in so many of his films, takes on a new meaning, becoming part of the heroic effort to wrest from cinema, that medium of time and space, a logic neither enslaved to chronological time nor to physical space, but instead creating another reality altogether.
In his best moments Bergman manages to render palpable a sense of indeterminacy such as has rarely existed in the cinema since the great silent European films of the 20s (Murnau, Lang, Dreyer): not psychological or psychoanalytical, but 'phenomenal.' In this sense, Bergman inscribes himself in an art-cinema, non-classical tradition, as one of those directors whose craft goes into making possible those imperceptible transitions between past and present, inner and outer space, memory, dream and anticipation which also give contemporary post-classical cinema its intellectual energy and emotional urgency. Bergman, in order to achieve this kind of energy, experimented in Three Strange Loves with an extraordinary fluid camera and complex camera set-ups. Realizing how much more difficult it was to achieve spatial dislocation in the sound film, he nevertheless did so brilliantly in some of his subsequent films—through the soundtrack in The Silence and the lighting in Persona, as well as through the floating time of presence and memory, anticipation and traumatic recollection of Cries and Whispers.
In this respect, Bergman's film-making is as modern as Godard thought it was. Three Strange Loves to this day gives one the feeling that this is the kind of cinema that every generation has to reinvent for itself, that the cinema always starts again with this kind of vulnerability and radicalness. If it means being branded as art cinema, so be it, at least until it becomes the prisoner of the body it seems fated to create for itself, that of an auteur's cinema pastiching its own cultural self-importance.
Liv Ullmann and Bob Hope
One of the most poignant passages in Images occurs when Bergman discusses Liv Ullmann's primal scream at the climax of Face to Face: "Dino De Laurentiis was delighted with the film, which received rave reviews in America. Now when I see Face to Face I remember an old farce with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. It's called Road to Morocco. They have been shipwrecked and come floating on a raft in front of a projected New York in the background. In the final scene, Bob Hope throws himself to the ground and begins to scream and foam at the mouth. The others stare at him in astonishment and ask what in the world he is doing. He immediately calms down and says: 'This is how you have to do it if you want to win an Oscar.' When I see Face to Face and Liv Ullmann's incredibly loyal effort on my behalf, I still can't help but think of Road to Morocco."

© Sight and SoundPUTTING ON A SHOW: THE EUROPEAN ART MOVIE
The great film-makers of European art cinema are now silent. Why should we value what they achieved? Why did their work so easily descend into pastiche and self-parody? And how far was their appeal based on their freedom to explore sexuality in an 'adult' way?
by Thomas Elsaesser
Originally published in Sight and Sound, April 1994
Poner en la sombra: el cine arte europeo
Los grandes realizadores del cine arte europeo ahora están en silencio. Cómo debemos valorar sus logros? ¿Porqué sus trabajos han descendido fácilmente al pastiche y la autoparodia? Y cuan lejos está su atracción basado en su libertad para explotar la sexualidad de una manera “adulta”?
"I don't want to make films again...This film [After the Rehearsal] was supposed to be small, fun, and unpretentious...Two mountainous shadows rise and loom over me. First: Who the hell is really interested in this kind of introverted mirror aria? Second: Does there exist a truth, in the very belly of this drama, that I can't put my finger on, and so remains inaccessible to my feelings and intuition?...We should have thrown ourselves directly into filming...Instead we rehearsed, discussed, analyzed, penetrated carefully and respectfully, just as we do in the theatre, almost as if the author were one of our dear departed." (Ingmar Bergman, 25-26 March 1983, quoted in Images—My Life in Film.)
No quiero volver a hacer filmes otra vez… Esta película [Después de ensayo] se suponía pequeña, divertida, sin pretensiones… Dos enormes sombras se levantaron y aparecieron sobre mí. Primero: ¿Quién diablos está realmente interesado en esta clase de aria introvertida menor? Segundo: ¿Existe alguna verdad en las entrañas de este drama
Ingmar Bergman is hardly a name contemporary cinema makes much use of, except as an adjective, usually applied to Woody Allen films that the reviewers find embarrassing. But it has not always been so: in the early and mid-60s Bergman had enormous prestige, swelling in a rising arc from The Seventh Seal (1956) to The Silence (1963) and Persona (1966) before subsiding fitfully with Hour of the Wolf (1967) and Shame (1968). It was the time of film clubs and the Academy Cinema, and I distinctly remember a programming meeting of the Sussex University film society which broke up in disarray over the question of whether it was possible to call both Wild Strawberries and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance great films (we settled for Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and were lynched by our audience). The row led me to start a film magazine, having discovered in Cahiers du cinéma Godard's eulogy 'Bergmanorama' practically next to his piece on Sam Fuller's Forty Guns. For at the height of middle-class Bergmanomania (in the pages of Sight and Sound, for instance) and Movie's 'Nicholas, not Satyajit,' Godard taught us that the cinema (or le cinéma) was one and indivisible. Especially when, like Godard, you were intent on reinventing it.
"Summer with Monika is the most original film by the most original of filmmakers. It's for today's cinema what Birth of a Nation was for the classical cinema, it's And God Created Woman, but fully achieved, without putting a foot wrong, a film of a total lucidity with regards to both its dramatic and moral structure as well as its mise-en-scene." (Godard in Arts, 30 July 1958.) Reading what Bergman has to say about Summer with Monika in Images ("I have never made a less complicated film. We simply went off and shot it, taking great delight in our freedom") and then watching it on video, Godard's enthusiasm is understandable: it is a glorified, glorious home movie, a hymn to a young woman's sensuality, and for the director of A bout de souffle clearly an open invitation to mix Rossellini and Rebel without a Cause.
Reviews in Britain were more circumspect. In The Listener (9 July 1959) John Weightman, "after recently assimilating a new batch of four films by Ingmar Bergman, made between 1949 and 1953," reflects on the director's "extraordinary unevenness of quality. How can he be at once so subtle and so unsubtle?" Weightman disliked Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, but liked Summer with Monika, along with Three Strange Loves (aka Thirst) and A Lesson in Love, mainly because of its poetic (i.e. neo-realist) qualities: Bergman "reflects the instability of the couple's relationship in the changing mood of water and sky," the acting is of "uncanny accuracy," and in Three Strange Loves and Monika "the two young husbands are perfect examples of the decent, naive, Scandinavian male who is driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." The last point is nicely offset by Bergman's description (in The Magic Lantern) of how he fell in love with Harriet Andersson during the making of Summer with Monika, and how pleased they were when it turned out that they had to re-shoot most of the outdoor footage because a faulty machine at the lab tore up several thousand metres of the negative.
But Weightman ends his review on a now familiar note: "In putting all these characters and moments of life on to the screen in so many brilliant, if fragmentary episodes, Bergman has done something for Sweden that no-one, to my knowledge, is doing for England. But there may be a parallel in France. Two or three young French directors, like Bergman, have deliberately turned down attractive foreign offers and international stars in order to produce films that have a local, home-made or hand-made character. The camera is again being used as a private eye, as a means of expressing a single yet complex view. This return to the artisan tradition is an interesting development, even though some of the initial products have all the defects of first novels...The cinema is such a rich art form and the poetry of the camera so much more facile than poetry in language, that it is easy for the filmmaker to get drunk on the possibilities of his medium. I think Bergman is slightly drunk in this way."
Quick Hollywood, slow Europe
Weightman's essay contains such a handy compendium of the terms which made Bergman and others the icons of auteur cinema that it prompts the question of what has happened to those towering representatives of European art cinema? Or more precisely, what can still hold together the idea of the 'auteur' and that of a 'national cinema' (as it also applied to the late Fellini, or to New German Cinema in the 70s, or British cinema in the Thatcher 80s)? Weightman already sees what Bergman has "done for Sweden" in the double perspective we have inherited: the quintessential and clichéd of a nation's character embodied in personal or 'poetic' cinema, and the defensive stance of "hand-made" films against slick entertainment. For behind the question of the fate of art cinema, of course, lurks that other one, debated ad nauseam, aired afresh every year at Cannes or Berlin: the future of European cinema vis à vis Hollywood (whether "attractive foreign offers" or France's GATT reactions about its cinematic patrimony). A few years ago, a Channel 4 programme Pictures of Europe neatly assembled all the standard arguments, voiced with varying degrees of pessimism by David Puttnam and Richard Attenborough, Bertrand Tavernier and Paul Verhoeven, Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders and Istvan Szabo. One of the least sentimental was Dusan Makavejev, who probably has more reason than most to be wary of the idea of national cinema, but who also needs to believe in auteur cinema: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen; living in the twentieth century means learning to be American."
In academic film studies, the Hollywood versus Europe question seems at times like the founding myth of the discipline, so much so that it is usually discussed under separate headings: the economic case (Thomas Guback's chapter in Tino Balio's The American Film Industry, Kristin Thompson's Exporting Entertainment, Ian Jarvie's Hollywood's Overseas Campaign); the cultural case (a UCLA- and BFI-sponsored conference in London last year was partly devoted to the topic); and the formal case (either early cinema scholars' debate about Europe's deep staging and slow cutting versus Hollywood's shallow staging and fast cutting, or a difference in story-telling). This last distinction is outlined by David Bordwell in Narration and the Fiction Film, where character-centred causality, question-and-answer logic, problem-solving routines, deadline plot structures and a mutual cueing system of word, sound and image are seen as typical of 'classical' cinema, while other narrative conventions are self-conscious and strategic deviations from the classical norm. Film studies, for once, does not seem totally out of touch with the views of the industry. The norm/deviancy argument could be seen as repeating, at the level of film theory, the hegemony of Hollywood at the cultural and economic level, since all other film styles merely reconfirm the power of the dominant by their very strategies of displacing and circumventing it. Similarly the opposition Europe/Hollywood, as worked out around early cinema, has been echoed since the 20s in the Hollywood complaint that European pictures are too slow for American audiences, a point taken up by many European directors and actors who have worked in both industries.
In Pictures of Europe, Paul Verhoeven and Jean-Jacques Annaud described American speed as a "positive quality," as did Beineix, Zanussi and Luc Besson. Puttnam and Almodóovar were more even-handed, while Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde preferred the slower delivery of dialogue and less hectic action of European cinema, along with—not surprisingly—Wim Wenders, Bertrand Tavernier and Liv Ullmann. Paul Schrader thought that it boiled down to a fundamentally different attitude to the world: "American movies are based on the assumption that life presents you with problems, while European films are based on the conviction that life confronts you with dilemmas—and while problems are something you solve, dilemmas cannot be solved, they're merely probed or investigated." Schrader's distinction helps tease out some of the formal implications: the norm/deviancy model, for instance, could be criticized for assuming the validity of the problem-solving model for both kinds of cinema. And while his theory doesn't work too well for comedies, which never pretend to solve the issues they raise, it might explain why a happy ending in a European art film is felt to be a cop-out, a fundamentally unserious mode of closure. After all, isn't one of the characteristics of 'modern' cinema (until recently synonymous with the art film) its metaphysical doubt about master narratives of progress, preferring to be skeptical of linear time and the efficacy of action? Such is the view of Gilles Deleuze, who in his Bergson-inspired study of cinema holds a more dynamic view of Godard's distinction between "action" and "reflection," contrasting instead the movement-image of classical cinema with the time-image of modern cinema.
Transatlantic crossing
Of course, the problem-solving model is not intended to characterize a film-maker's personal beliefs; it is merely posited as the norm underlying, if not both kinds of cinema, then both kinds of audience. American, or 'classical,' films are the dominant because they are made ('tailored' was the term already used by King Vidor) for an audience used to Hollywood (and which audience isn't?), while European filmmakers are said to express themselves rather than (ad)dress the audience. But if one assumes that art cinema merely sets its audiences different kinds of tasks, such as inferring the characters' motivations (as in The Silence), reconstructing the time scheme (as in Cries and Whispers) or guessing what 'really' happened and what was merely imagined (as in Persona), then the difference is one of genre or expectation: the tasks of the art film are intuitively recognized by the spectator and either avoided as a chore or sought as a challenge. And one should remember that among audiences watching art films are also American spectators—in fact, it was the US distribution practice of the art-house circuit which gave the term 'art cinema' its currently accepted meaning.
Indeed, this may be the rub, the point where a 'cultural' view differs from the cognitive case. By the logic of reception studies, it is ultimately audiences who decide how a film is to be understood, and they often take their cue not only from title, poster, actors or national origin, but from the place where a film is shown, in which case an art film is simply every film screened at an art-house cinema, including old Hollywood movies, as in Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller retrospectives: the cinema, one and indivisible. It's something of a lame definition, and a 'cultural' argument might avoid the tautology by viewing the Hollywood/Europe opposition merely as a special case of a more general process in which art and other films have assigned and reassigned to them identities and meanings according to often apparently superficial characteristics, but which on closer inspection provide an instructive map of movie culture that ignores all kinds of stylistic boundaries but speaks eloquently of the life of films in history. One could even call it a map of misreadings. European films intended for one kind of (national) audience or made within a particular kind of aesthetic framework or ideology, for instance, undergo a sea change as they cross the Atlantic and on coming back find themselves bearing the stamp of yet another cultural currency. The same is true of Hollywood films: what auteur theory saw in them was not what the studios or even the directors intended, but this did not stop another generation of American viewers from appreciating what the Cahiers critics extracted from them.
If this is now a commonplace about Hollywood, it is just as true about European art cinema. The qualities for which film-makers were praised were not necessarily what the audiences liked about their movies, and what made the films famous was not always what made them successful. In the case of Italian neo-realism, for instance, the film-makers' aesthetic-moral agenda included a political engagement, a social conscience, a humanist vision. Subjects such as post-war unemployment or the exploitation of farm labour by the big landowners were part of what made neo-realism a 'realist' cinema, while the fact that it did not use stars but faces from the crowd made it a 'poetic' cinema. Yet a film like Rome, Open City about the Italian resistance braving the German Gestapo with communist partisans and Catholic priests making common cause against the enemy—represented only a particular (and short-lived) political compromise, while with established performers such as Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi it was not exactly a movie that used lay actors. Rome, Open City became a success abroad for many reasons, including its erotic, melodramatic and atmospheric qualities. In one often reproduced shot there is a glimpse of Anna Magnani's exposed thighs as she falls, gunned down by the Germans, while in another scene a glamorous German female agent seduces a young Italian woman into a lesbian affair and supplies her with cocaine. To American audiences, unused to such fare, the labels 'art' and 'European' began to connote a very particular kind of realism, to do with explicit depiction of sex and drugs rather than political or aesthetic commitment.
Bergman is crucial here. Respected in the early 60s for his films of existential angst and bleak depictions of religious doubt, he was able to get finance for his films from Svensk Filmindustri in part because in the art houses of America graphic portrayals of sexual jealousy or violence as in Sawdust and Tinsel or The Virgin Spring, or of a woman masturbating (in The Silence) defined adult cinema for the generation prior to the 'sexual revolution.' When in the mid-60s other film-makers in Europe (Denmark, Germany) began to make films for which the label 'adult' was a well-understood euphemism, and when the Americans themselves relaxed censorship, the art-film export suffered a decline as an economic factor for European national cinemas (in Italy, for instance). But it remained a cultural and artistic force, above all for subsequent generations of more or less mainstream American directors from Arthur Penn to Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese to Francis Ford Coppola, and also for the academy: without the European art and auteur cinema, film studies might never have found a home in American universities.
What can we call this re-assignment of meaning, this fluctuation of critical, cultural and economic currency between one country and another? A misunderstanding of the filmmaker's intention? An acknowledgment that as many Bergmans exist as there are audiences recognizing something of novelty interest or spiritual value in his films? Or just an integral part of what we mean by 'art cinema' (and, finally, by any form of cinema), where the primary economic use-value is either irrelevant (because of government subsidies, as in the case of Bergman), or has already been harvested, leaving a film or a film-maker's work to find its status on another scale of values? It is what forms a 'canon' (see recent Sight and Sound essays by Peter Wollen and Ian Christie), or makes a film a 'classic' (see the slim volumes in the BFI Publishing series).
In which case, the old idea of European films as expressive of their national identities would appear far-fetched. It would suggest that 'national cinema' makes sense only as a relation, not as an essence, being dependent on other kinds of film-making, such as commercial/international, to which it supplies the other side of the coin and thus functions as the subordinate term. Yet a national cinema by its very definition must not know that it is a relative or negative term, for then it would lose its virginity and become that national whore which is the heritage film. Instead, the temptation persists to look beyond the binarism towards something that defines a national cinema 'positively,' such as "the decent, naive, Scandinavian male...driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." Another positive definition is of a national history as a counter-identity. Such might be the case with the films of Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, fanning out towards a broader media interest in Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas in which (to us) complicated national and post-colonial histories set up tantalizing fields of differentiation, self-differentiation and protest. For these films, international (i.e. European) festivals are the markets that can assign different kinds of value, from politico-voyeuristic curiosity to auteur status, setting in motion the circulation of new cultural capital beyond the prospect of economic circulation (art-cinema distribution, a television sale).
One conceivable conclusion is that both the old Hollywood hegemony argument and the post-modern paradigm (it's what audiences make of films that decides their value) hide a more interesting relationship in which national cinemas and Hollywood are not only communicating vessels, but (to change the metaphor) exist in a space set up like a hall of mirrors, in which recognition, imaginary identity and miscognition enjoy equal status. It suggests that Bergman's carefully staged self-doubt, Weightman's prophetic faith in his early poetic cinema and American audiences' frisson at the 'mature' director's candid look at sexual obsessions and violent marital strife may have a common denominator. Retrospectively, negatively, by a kind of paring away, they delineate the slim ground occupied by an auteur who also, like Bergman, has to signify a national cinema: high culture themes, stylistic expressivity, that indeterminacy of reference critics prized as 'realism.' By contrast French cinema is a national cinema with such a diversity of strands that it makes its auteurs (Godard, Resnais, Truffaut, Rivette) almost marginal figures in the overall constellation.
Auteur cinema today may not be dead, but what we mean by an auteur has shifted somewhat: for Europe and America, it is no longer about self-doubt or self-expression, metaphysical themes or a realist aesthetic. The themes that still identify Bergman as an auteur would today be mere affectations, a filmmaker's white carnation in his button-hole. Instead, auteurs now dissimulate such signatures of selfhood as Bergman sported, even when they believe or doubt as passionately as he did. Authority and authenticity lie nowadays in the way film-makers use the cinema's resources, which is to say in their command of the generic, the expressive, the excessive, the visual and the visceral. From David Lynch to Jane Campion, from Jonathan Demme to Stephen Frears, from Luc Besson to Dario Argento—all are auteurs and all are valued for their capacity to concentrate on a tour de force, demonstrating qualities not so far removed, finally, from Bergman, "drunk on the possibilities of his medium."
Bergman and Corman
Reading Bergman's Images—My Life in Film (in fact two years' worth of interviews with Lasse Bergström with the questions cut out and bits from the director's work books and The Magic Lantern pasted in) with this in mind leaves one a little disappointed. One learns about Bergman's dislike of colour (because it takes away mystery), the importance of lighting (and of Sven Nykvist), and that some of his early films were devised in order to experiment with complicated camera movements. But he says next to nothing about many of the other things that make him a great film director—his use of close-ups, his work on the soundtrack, the composition of incredibly complex yet fluid action spaces within the frame in both indoor and outside scenes. Biographical details, childhood memories, moral introspection, the theatre, actors and actresses, music and music-making make up a loosely woven narrative that discards chronology and groups the films under such oddly coy titles as 'Dreams Dreamers,' 'Jests Jesters,' 'Miscreance Credence,' 'Farces Frolics.' Often Bergman confesses of this or that film that he doesn't have much to say about its making. Contrary to the title, there is little here about images. Instead, what holds the book together is a daunting effort to account for the process of story-conception, of what mood to be in when writing, what memory to follow up on, what dream to cross-fertilize with an incident he has read about, what well of anguish to tap when the plot seems to wander off in the wrong direction.
It reminds one of how much legitimation and cultural capital Bergman the film director still derived from writing, from being an author as well as an auteur, and at the same time how removed he was from the routines of Hollywood scriptwriting—from story-boarding or using the script as the production's financial and technical blueprint. In this, he conforms to the cliché of the European director: improvisation on the set or on location, the most intense work taking place with the actors, the film taking shape as the director penetrates the inner truth of the various motifs that the story or situation first suggested to him. Bergman, the Important Artist.
The notion that Bergman's films are autobiographical has both given them coherence and authenticated them as important. In a sense, Images supports some of the earnest exegeses of his work: one finds the theme of the artist caught between imagining himself a god and knowing he is a charlatan and conjurer; the motif of the lost companion/partner in an alien city, a war zone, an isolated hospital; the transfer of identity and the destructive energies of the heterosexual couple. But Bergman is also candid about his own compliance with his admirers' interpretative projections. Images opens with the admission that Bergman on Bergman, a book of interviews from 1968, was "hypocritical" because he was too anxious to please. And in a similar vein, he now thinks the notion, endorsed by himself in the preface to Vilgot Sjöman's Diary with Ingmar Bergman, that Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence form a trilogy is a "rationalization after the fact": "the 'trilogy' has neither rhyme nor reason. It was a Schnapps-Idee, as the Bavarians say, meaning that it's an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol." (And yet a look at the filmographies of Godard, Antonioni, Truffaut, Wenders, Herzog, Kieslowski shows how important a prop the idea of the trilogy is for the self-identity of the European auteur.)
Reading Images a little against the grain of its own declaration of authenticity, it seems just conceivable that Bergman's claim to being one of the cinema's great auteurs rests most firmly on his ability to dissimulate: that the big themes, the flaunting of moral doubt and metaphysical pain, represent not a personal plight transfigured into art but the doubly necessary pre-text for a cinematic tour de force. The big themes were doubly necessary, I am suggesting, because they helped to define his cinema as a national cinema and because they allowed him to reinvent himself as a filmmaker: prerequisites for creating an oeuvre that could be recognized as such at a time when Hollywood still had genres and stars rather than directors as stars.
As to Bergman the figurehead of a national cinema, Images makes clear how many overt and covert threads connect his films to the key authors and themes of Scandinavian literature. His immense achievement was to have recognized and made his own dramatic situations, themes and characters that echoed those of the great Scandinavian playwrights, Strindberg and Ibsen especially, and to have used his lifelong work in the theatre as both a permanent rehearsal of his film ideas in progress, and as the place to forge the stock company of actors and actresses who give his films their unmistakeable look, feel and physical identity: Harriet Andersson and Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. Even so private a film as Persona uses Strindberg's one-act play The Stronger; even so ostensibly an autobiographical work as Fanny and Alexander borrows, apart from its explicit references to Hamlet, motifs, names and allusions from Ibsen's Wild Duck and Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata and Dreamplay.
Beyond their role of giving him a form (the chamber play) and a set of dramatic conflicts (Ibsen's bourgeois family falling apart through the "life-lie"; Strindberg's couple tearing each other to pieces in sexual anguish and hatred), the dramatists Bergman is attached to remind one of the importance of the texture of speech and voice for our idea of a national cinema, and indeed for the European art cinema as a whole. This suggests that one function of auteur cinema as a national cinema, before the advent of television, was to transcribe features of a nation's cultural tradition as figured in other art forms (the novel, theatre, opera) and to represent them in the cinema. One can follow this process in Bergman's career, where the films from the late 50s onwards tend to be more or less self-consciously crafted images, first of the Nordic middle-ages and then of a middle-class Sweden. From The Seventh Seal to The Virgin Spring and The Magician, from Wild Strawberries to Hour of the Wolf, from Cries and Whispers to Fanny and Alexander, there is an uneasy acknowledgment of the identity others have thrust upon him as a national icon. One response is parody or pastiche: is it merely hindsight that discovers in Bergman's big themes a wonderful excuse for putting on a show? Re-seeing The Seventh Seal I was amazed and amused by its Grand-Guignolesque elements, not just Death and the strolling players but even the young girl's death at the stake. Its deftly staged spectacle, atmospheric touches, wonderful sleights of hand and sarcastic humour prompted the perhaps blasphemous thought that Max von Sydow's Knight back from the Crusades was closer in spirit to Vincent Price in a Roger Corman film than to Dreyer's Day of Wrath or Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc.
Hence, perhaps, a trauma that seems to have haunted Bergman briefly, even more urgently than his arrest by bungling Swedish bureaucrats for tax fraud: the fear of an arrest of his creativity. The tax business resulted in a six-year-long self-exile to Germany, and seems to have wounded him to the quick. But so did the pun in a French review of Autumn Sonata (with Ingrid Bergman) which suggested that "Bergman was not only directing Bergman, but doing Bergman." Images is in a sense the record of having laid that ghost to rest, for it gives rise to the theme of an artist becoming a pastiche of himself, a fear Bergman sees confirmed in the later work of Tarkovsky, Fellini and especially of Buñuel, whom he accuses of a lifetime of self-parody. Tying in with the "Schnapps-Idee" of the auteur trilogy, self-parody is perhaps the fate Bergman believes lies in store for all European auteurs who outlive both the economic and cultural moment of the national cinema with which they are identified. From more recent times, the cases of Herzog and Wenders come to mind (though the counter-examples are as interesting: Rossellini, when he began to make his great historical films for television, or Godard, when he took on video as if as a way of taking back his own earlier films, commenting on them by spraying them with ever more metaphysical 'graffiti'). In Bergman's case, the farewell to the cinema was not only the signal to carry on with the theatre, but it also led him to reinvent himself as an autobiographer, novelist, scenarist, and the self-reflexive, slyly exhibitionist essayist he shows himself in Images, treating his big themes with an irony not always present when he was turning them into films.
Ghosts and dreams
So how does one go about writing Bergman back into the contemporary cinema, into a film history other than that of the European auteur/national cinema? I would probably start not with Wild Strawberries (usually considered his stylistic breakthrough to a 'modern' cinema), but with a film from eight years earlier which strikes me, for much of its 83 minutes, as being as timelessly 'modern' as all great films are: Three Strange Loves (1949), which though cast in the form of a journey, rather like Wild Strawberries, has a searing visual intelligence, a pulse, a body, a shape, a fury, as if made by someone "drunk on the possibilities of his medium." Bearing in mind the febrile energy and extraordinary urgency with which Three Strange Loves moves between its characters' past and present predicaments and the various people to whom the central couple were or are tied, that old art-cinema staple of the reality/illusion divide, which is one of Bergman's big themes in so many of his films, takes on a new meaning, becoming part of the heroic effort to wrest from cinema, that medium of time and space, a logic neither enslaved to chronological time nor to physical space, but instead creating another reality altogether.
In his best moments Bergman manages to render palpable a sense of indeterminacy such as has rarely existed in the cinema since the great silent European films of the 20s (Murnau, Lang, Dreyer): not psychological or psychoanalytical, but 'phenomenal.' In this sense, Bergman inscribes himself in an art-cinema, non-classical tradition, as one of those directors whose craft goes into making possible those imperceptible transitions between past and present, inner and outer space, memory, dream and anticipation which also give contemporary post-classical cinema its intellectual energy and emotional urgency. Bergman, in order to achieve this kind of energy, experimented in Three Strange Loves with an extraordinary fluid camera and complex camera set-ups. Realizing how much more difficult it was to achieve spatial dislocation in the sound film, he nevertheless did so brilliantly in some of his subsequent films—through the soundtrack in The Silence and the lighting in Persona, as well as through the floating time of presence and memory, anticipation and traumatic recollection of Cries and Whispers.
In this respect, Bergman's film-making is as modern as Godard thought it was. Three Strange Loves to this day gives one the feeling that this is the kind of cinema that every generation has to reinvent for itself, that the cinema always starts again with this kind of vulnerability and radicalness. If it means being branded as art cinema, so be it, at least until it becomes the prisoner of the body it seems fated to create for itself, that of an auteur's cinema pastiching its own cultural self-importance.
Liv Ullmann and Bob Hope
One of the most poignant passages in Images occurs when Bergman discusses Liv Ullmann's primal scream at the climax of Face to Face: "Dino De Laurentiis was delighted with the film, which received rave reviews in America. Now when I see Face to Face I remember an old farce with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. It's called Road to Morocco. They have been shipwrecked and come floating on a raft in front of a projected New York in the background. In the final scene, Bob Hope throws himself to the ground and begins to scream and foam at the mouth. The others stare at him in astonishment and ask what in the world he is doing. He immediately calms down and says: 'This is how you have to do it if you want to win an Oscar.' When I see Face to Face and Liv Ullmann's incredibly loyal effort on my behalf, I still can't help but think of Road to Morocco."

© Sight and Sound