“La Guerre est Finie” - Alain Resnais (1966)

Alain Resnais’s fourth feature film, La Guerre est Finie (English: The War is Over, 1966) was, like his previous three features – Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Muriel (1963) – another cinematic expedition into how we construct our personal narratives from ideas and past memories.  On this occasion, though, his film was less overtly theoretical and had more dramatic action and a tense political context that perhaps makes it more accessible than his earlier works [1,2]. Nevertheless, the film is very much a continuation of Resnais’s contemplative themes about love and life.

The story of La Guerre est Finie concerns a few days in the life of a contemporary (1965) Spanish revolutionary, Diego Mora, who has spent his life working to overthrow the long-ruling fascist Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco.  Franco had come to power during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) [3], when fascist forces overthrew the democratically elected Republican government.  Since, at the time, that  overthrown Spanish republican government had included communists and socialists, it was one of the rare times in history in which such a leftist government had emerged in a democratic fashion.  As such, that Spanish republican government has always been cherished by leftists who believed in the peaceful emergence of socialism, and so its restoration had always been for them a romantic dream. 
   
Thus, on one level at least, Diego represents one of those romantic dreamers dedicated to (re-)establishing that idyllic socialist paradise.  But Diego in this film is not just an abstraction; he undoubtedly reflects to some degree the real-life characteristics and circumstances of the film’s screenwriter, Jorge Semprun.  Semprun had a fascinating background. After having been  imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II, he worked clandestinely in Spain as an anti-Franco revolutionary for the Communist party from 1953 to 1962.  In 1964 he was expelled from the Spanish Communist Party over ideological differences, whereupon he commenced his writing career, with La Guerre est Finie as his first output.  He would subsequently contribute to the scripts of a number of political thrillers, including Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969), The Confession (1970), Special Section (1979), and Resnais’s Stavisky... (1974).  He later even served as Spain’s Minister of Culture from 1988 to 1991.

So Semprun was not only a social activist but a thinker, and what we have in La Guerre est Finie is a full-spectrum depiction of a thoughtful man, a man with ideas, worries, goals, and passions. Resnais tells this tale, in cooperation with his frequent cinematographer Sacha Vierny and musical composer Giovanni Fusco (Hiroshima Mon Amour, L’Avventura, L’Eclisse, Red Desert), by offering in slow-disclosure fashion a potpourri of incidental detail that conjures up the inner, mental life of the protagonist [4].  This includes momentary flashbacks as well as imaginary “flash-forwards” – worriedly imagined possible future events.  These suggest that the narrative witness is not just an external companion that is observing the action, but is also privy to Diego’s stream of consciousness. All this is more impressionistic than expressionist (although the word “impressionistic” has been confusingly used in the past with respect to films, and I will not dwell on that term), and it represents one of the most refined examples of Resnais’s unique style of storytelling.

Resnais’s approach here can only work if the director has good acting in the key roles, and Resnais was fortunate to work on this occasion with two stars who gave outstanding performances: Yves Montand and Ingrid Thulin.  Indeed, although the film’s focalization is almost exclusively on Diego, Thulin’s sensitive performance as his girlfriend is, to me, the most crucial element in the film.

As mentioned above, the film dwells in Diego’s mental space, and he we see that he is not just a monomaniac obsessed with his revolutionary activism; he is, like most all people, a complex individual with multiple areas of concern.  Three of these areas, or levels, are of especial significance, each of which has its associated narrative:

• Political Justice. 
  Diego is a professional revolutionary who has no other occupation than to work secretly to undermine the Franco government.  Associated with this level of concern is the Marxist-Leninist narrative that prescribes a roadmap for obtaining the desired revolutionary outcome. Diego operates within this narrative, but since it has failed to make progress in Spain for more than twenty-five years, he has serious doubts as to its efficacy.
   
• Romantic Adventure.
  Diego is an adventurer who enjoys the excitement and camaraderie of working together on dangerous missions. He tells his girlfriend, Marianne, that when he is outside of Spain, he misses “being part of something together.” Irrespective of whether the grand communist design is succeeding, Diego revels in his abilities to be a major player in this game, and this includes spontaneous romantic episodes with similarly inclined adventurers of the opposite sex. In this connection Diego plays many distinct roles with separate aliases for each role.
   
• Love.
  One of those past romantic episodes evolved into a serious relationship with a woman who loves him passionately. His now steady girlfriend, Marianne, wants them to have a long life together, and she spends her time thinking of narrative possibilities that could make this happen.

All of Diego’s sometimes-conflicting narratives on these three levels involve wishful goals that are fraught with roadblocks. And in none of these narrative levels of Diego's does hatred or resentment play a role. As the film proceeds, we see Diego’s struggles to come to terms with his multi-layered life.
       

In the opening sequence, Diego Mora (played by Yves Montand) and his communist sympathizer friend Jude arrive from Spain at the French border town of Biriatou, where Diego is interrogated by a French border inspector (Michel Piccoli).  Diego is illegally entering under the name of René Sallanches, whose passport he is using, and when he is interrogated he coolly fools the guards with his detailed knowledge of the Sallanches family, information about whom he has memorized but whom he has never met. 

Diego goes by many names, and to his communist colleagues, he is “Carlos”.  He spends six months of the year in Madrid and the other six months in Paris working for the party in its efforts to upend the Spanish government by means of labor unrest.  We learn that Diego is returning on his own initiative to France on this occasion in order to warn his communist colleague Juan not to enter Spain from France, because the Spanish authorities are arresting all his close comrades in Madrid and will likely arrest Juan, too, if he arrives there.

Diego goes to Paris and eventually hooks up with (these people are always shifting to clandestine locations) cell boss, Roberto (Paul Crauchet), whom he urges to stop Juan’s imminent departure to Spain. But Roberto overrules Diego, telling him that Juan is urgently needed in Spain to make preparations for a May Day general strike and public demonstration that is only twelve days away.  Roberto, who is doctrinaire communist functionary, tells him that the comrades in Madrid always exaggerate any danger: “they’re too close to things to see the situation clearly.”  So here is a conflict across Diego’s narrative levels.  On the personal “Romantic Adventure” level Diego is concerned about the safety of his comrade Juan; but his superior on the “Public Justice” level tells him that the bigger picture is more important and that he should ignore his concerns about Juan.

But Diego persists on the Romantic Adventure level.  Curious to know more about the Sallanches family, whose daughter Nadine had covered for him when the border police had called her, he tracks down their apartment and is greeted by the beautiful Nadine (Genevieve Bujold).  Nadine, who has communist sympathies,  is impressed that Diego, he calls himself “Domingo” here, is a full-time revolutionary.  Before long they are kissing and wind up making love.  Afterwards they part with the mutual understanding that their encounter was just a romantic moment.

Then Diego goes to his real girlfriend Marianne’s (Ingrid Thulin) apartment, which is where he normally resides when he is in Paris.  Now we enter into the “Love” narrative level, and in this context Diego begins to acknowledge aloud some of the absurdities of his long-frustrated political activities. He tells some of Marianne’s guests,

“Spain is no longer the dream of 1936, but the truth of 1965.”

Later that night Diego and Marianne passionately make love.  It is interesting to compare the two love-making scenes.  With both women, Diego’s approach of undressing his lovers is the same, suggesting he is initially in similar mental states.  But although the two scenes are sensuous, they have distinct feelings to them.  The scene with Nadine is abstract and full of tender innocence (Romantic Adventure); while the scene with Marianne is deeper and more intensely involving (Love).

The next morning Diego attends a meeting with his doctrinaire Spanish Communist Party overseers, and he internally reflects on the futility of “trying to rebuild your country from afar in the likeness of your memory.”  But he is loyal.  As he enters the meeting room he thinks to himself,

“You see once more those desiccated, tireless, worn-out men, fastidious about detail but less clear about the larger picture. . . . Ready to die: your comrades.”

He urges them to cancel the May Day strike, because the Spanish government will be ready for it, but again he is overruled.  In this context, factual evidence and good sense are less important than the ability to quote Lenin.

Later Diego becomes aware that the supposedly innocent Nadine is involved with a youthful gang of communist revolutionaries who pursue a more violent agenda: they want to destabilize the Spanish government by disrupting the tourism industry with terrorist bombings.  Diego is also concerned about Nadine’s safety when he learns that she and her friends are now under police surveillance. 

When Diego returns to Marianne’s apartment, she informs him that he has new, urgent orders to return to Spain the next morning.  Now Diego’s three narrative levels are coming clashingly together.

• He wants to stop Nadine and her gang from undertaking terrorist acts.
• He wants to be with Marianne
• He doesn’t want to carry out the Party’s orders for the new mission.

But Marianne, realizing how important his political activities in Spain are for him, offers her loving support and even says she is willing to move to Spain in order to be with him.  Diego is his typical noncommital self in this exchange:

Marianne: “I love you.”
Diego: “I know you do.”

Nevertheless, Marianne’s love for Diego is boundless.

The next morning Diego resignedly gets ready to go and reflects that, despite his world-weariness, he is still committed to action:

“You’re seized again by the comradeship of long battles. . . . by the stubborn joy of taking action.”

This would seem to indicate that the Political Justice narrative takes final precedence in the film.  However, in the film’s final five minutes the focalization, which had exclusively been on Diego up to this point, shifts to Nadine and Marianne.  We learn that the film’s initial border-crossing event was not so successfully transacted as we had presumed.  Diego’s return to Spain will place him in extreme danger, and Nadine and Marianne rush to try stop him from reentering Spain before it is too late.  Love comes to the fore.

The final shot of the film features a slow dissolve, superposing images of the fatalistically committed Diego and Marianne’s desperate, unvanquishable love, as she attempts to save him.  This, combined with Giovanni Fusco’s celestial music, gave me an epiphany of love’s limitless grace, and it represents one of the greatest film endings I have ever seen.

What makes La Guerre est Finie a great film is that it is not just about a fading political dream, but about life itself.  It is more generally concerned with how we can manage to blend the “I” (Romantic Adventure) with the “We” (Political Justice), and Love is the mysterious key to this, as exemplified by Ingrid Thulin’s moving performance.  Diego’s commitment to his communist goals can be considered in this case to stand for whatever we choose to do in the public world.  These goals we need to fit together with a meaningful sense of spirited adventure that animates our existence.  This can be hard to manage and sustain, but love can often offer the grace to save us and keep us going.

It is especially appropriate to see La Guerre est Finie now, in these recent times of social catastrophe, when the US electorate has pushed America onto a course of permanent eclipse.  The election of a volatile man and his bigoted, rent-seeking entourage bent on dismantling the American institutional structures of democracy, human rights, and the rule-of-law that have long served as a beacon to the wider world can be disheartening to those who have dedicated their lives to making the world a better, more cooperative, place [5,6,7,8]. Many people may be demoralized in the face of the relentlessly backwards-moving  path we are now facing, as another fascist specter has arisen.  But we should not give up [6]. We should instead be inspired by the inarticulable message implicit in this story of La Guerre est Finie.  Look at Marianne’s earnest gaze at the close of the film and forever hold onto it.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Acquarello, “06-06-04: Alain Resnais by James Monaco”, Strictly Film School, (2004).  
2. Acquarello, “La Guerre est finie, 1966 [The War is Over]”, Strictly Film School, (2003).  
3. Matthew White, “Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Franco Regime (1939-75)”, Necrometrics, The Historical Atlas of the 20th Century, (2011).   
4. Lisa Broad, “La Guerre est finie”, Issue 58, Senses of Cinema, (14 March 2011). 
5. Meghan O’Rourke, “Mourning Trump and the America We Could Have Been”, The New Yorker, (10 November 2016).  
6. Masha Gessen, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival”. The New York Review of Books, (10 November 2016).  
7. Adam Davidson, “What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘the Deal’”, The New York Times, (17 March 2016).   
8. Zoe Williams, “The Dangerous Fantasy Behind Trump’s Normalisation”, The Guardian, (15 November 2016).  

“Wild Strawberries” - Ingmar Bergman (1957)

Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), widely considered to be one of his greatest films, came directly after his The Seventh Seal (1957), when he reached the pinnacle of his artistic success [1,2]. Though those two films had quite different settings (The Seventh Seal was an expressionistic fable set in the Middle Ages, while Wild Strawberries was a contemporary story about one day in the life of an old man), they both covered people agonizing over life’s meaning. In some ways, though, as I will mention further on, Wild Strawberries continues with an outlook that Bergman had touched on in his earlier To Joy (1950) and Summer Interlude (1951).

In Wild Strawberries, a 78-year-old emeritus medical professor and physician is about to be conferred as a doctor jubilaris (jubilee doctor), celebrating fifty years of distinguished service.  The occasion sets him to reflect on just what he has accomplished and whether he has achieved his goals in life. The film covers his day-long journey by car from his home in Stockholm to Lund, where he had originally received his doctorate and where the doctor jubilaris ceremony is to take place.  Over the course of that journey, he has encounters with people along the way and has several disturbing dreams during occasional snoozes that contribute to his increasingly reflective mood.

Some reviewers of the film have found it to be a confusing jumble, because of the heterogeneous collection of characters and circumstances that appear in the journey [3].  I will suggest, however, that this confusion may be due to the many interacting issues and themes that Bergman covers in the film.  Here are a few of them:

• Death.  We all know that we will eventually die, but an old man feels death to be imminent.  He then becomes, in Heidegger’s terminology, a more authentic “Being-towards-death” and must confront this issue.

• Judgment.  As suggested in Bergman’s earlier To Joy, most young men seek some sort of greatness, without necessarily knowing what form it is to take.  Usually men seek honors, wealth, professional distinction, and a successful love life, and these successes are to be verified by external judgments.
   
• Resentment. When one is hurt or rejected, one may feel resentment towards the responsible parties.  We usually know that this resentment is counterproductive and wasteful – it is a pain even to be around resentful people – but it is difficult to overcome resentful feelings.
   
• Withdrawal. One approach to reducing resentful encounters is to withdraw from the conflicting scene.  This can make one detached and more objective, but it also means disengagement.  Some people nurture a natural tendency to withdraw whenever there is something contentious.
   
• Age Perspective. There are basically three age groups in the story: young people (late teens or early twenties); mature people (thirties),and old people.  Each group has its own outlook, set of responsibilities, and perspective.  Depending on your own age, you are likely to see this movie more specifically from one of these perspectives.
   
• Relations with Women.  Bergman was fascinated with women and how they related to the world and to men.  In this story Isak Borg has interesting relationships with a number of women (Miss Agda, his mother, Marianne, the two Saras, and his wife).

All of these themes and issues interrelate to each other and are touched on in the course of the narrative presentation.  The various scenes of the film can be grouped into the following sections.

1.   Isak
The story begins with Isak (played by famous Swedish actor-director Victor Sjöström) at his writing desk stating that our personal relationships are mainly devoted to discussing and evaluating other people’s behavior (i.e. they are mainly judgmental).  That is why he has gradually “withdrawn from nearly all so-called relations.”  He also mentions that he started out in life working for money, but ended up with a love for science.  Thus it seems that he has chosen a career where his achievements can be measured objectively.

He then describes a disturbing, expressionistic dream (Dream1) he had, where he is wandering around in the deserted streets of an old part of Stockholm and sees several symbols of death: a mounted clock with no hands, an eerie man with no face who falls down dead and bleeds profusely, and a horse-drawn hearse carrying a casket.  The casket falls to the street, revealing a corpse that is another Isak, a doppelganger.

2.  The Journey Begins
Very early in the summer morning of the commemoration, Isak wakes up and decides he can drive the 600 kilometers to Lund in his car and make it in time for the 5pm ceremony.  He gets into an argument over this decision with his fussy maid, Miss Agda, who is about as old as Isak is and has been serving him for forty years.  In this connection, Isak remarks,

“I hate resentful people.  I wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone Miss Agda.”

At breakfast, Isak’s daughter-in-law, Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), who has recently been staying with him, says she would like to ride with Isak so that she can go home to her husband (and Isak’s son), Evald (Gunnar Björnstrand) back in Lund.

As Isak drives with Marianane in his old sedan, their conversation is cordial, but distant.  He peremptorily tells  her not to smoke and that there should be a law forbidding women to smoke. Finally Marianne comes forth with her real opinions about Isak:

“You’re a selfish old man. You’re utterly ruthless and never listen to anyone but yourself.”  . . . . . . “Your judgements are very categorical.”

Isak is stunned by these remarks, but as is his custom, he tries to hide his feelings. Note that though the protagonist of this tale is Isak, we will see throughout the film that Marianne seems to be the voice of Bergman.  They soon decide to stop and visit the summer house that Isak’s family used to use during his first twenty years.

3.  Stop at the Summer House

Isak sits down and looks at the now-vacated summer house and lapses into a dream (Dream2a).  He has a vision of a time almost six decades earlier when the young girl he loved, Sara (Bibi Andersson,  who was Ingmar Bergman’s paramour at this time) is outside the summer house picking wild strawberries.  Since there are two Saras in this story, I will refer this one as ‘Sara1'. Sara1 is then approached by Isak’s cocky younger brother, Sigfrid, who impudently flirts with and kisses the girl, even though she falteringly insists she is loyal to her upstanding boyfriend Isak.  This is clearly a most painful memory for Isak, when the girl he most loved became susceptible to the oily charms of a “good-for-nothing” rogue in his own family. The dream shifts to a luncheon right afterwards in the summer house involving the large Borg family (Dream2b), where Isak’s young twin sisters tease Sara1 and Sigfrid about having seen the two of them kissing.

Waking from his painful dream, Isak encounters a young woman hitchhiker, also named Sara (Sara2, also played by Bibi Andersson).  Sara2 is unquenchably bubbly, innocent, and flirtatious – a modern girl. She and her two male admirers, one of whom studies science and the other theology, are also headed to Lund and so are invited to climb into the car and travel with Isak and Marianne. 

4.  Encounter with Anger
On the road, they almost hit an oncoming errant car, which crashes off to the side.  The two occupants of this car, Mr. and Mrs. Alman, turn out to be a hopelessly bickering mature couple who spend all of their time in outspoken mutual resentment.  This six-minute interlude seems to be a demonstration of just the kind of relationship that Isak abhorred and always sought to avoid. Yet this can be a natural outcome for judgmental people who feel they can score points by continually lodging telling criticisms.

5.  Stop for Gas
Stopping for gas in the area where Isak had his first medical practice, the gas station proprietor (Max von Sydow) recognizes Isak and tells him that everyone in the area still cherishes his memory and his contributions.  Hearing this heartfelt praise, Isak wonders to himself if perhaps he should have stayed in that town all his life instead of going off to pursue greatness.

6.  Stop for Lunch
Further on, they stop for lunch at an open café near the home of Isak’s 96-year-old mother, giving Isak and Marianne the time to go off and pay her a short visit.  The mother, who was seen in the Dream2b to be bossy and judgmental, is now ice-cold and grumpy.  She has outlived all but one  (Isak) of her ten children, and now all she has is their old children’s toys – but she can’t remember whose was whose.

7. Further Dreams

Isak then snoozes and falls into more dreams, each of which includes impossible aspects and so cannot fully represent true memories.  In the first of them (Dream3a), Sarah1 is outside the summer house and coldly holds a mirror up to Isak’s 78-year-old face and tells him how ugly and old he looks.  Then she berates him, telling that she is going to marry his brother Sigfrid and pointing out how useless all his learning has been:

“You know so much, and you don’t know anything.”

Sara1 then goes over to Isak’s sister Sigbritt Borg’s baby and offers it motherly tenderness and caresses – exactly the kind of mothering that Isak missed out on.  Afterwards Isak peers through a window from outside to see Sara1 and Sigfrid inside showing marital tenderness towards each other. 

The dream then shifts to a bizarre and nightmarish medical examination conducted by the extremely judgmental Mr. Alman (Dream3b).  Isak badly fails all the tests, and Mr. Alman tells him, “you have been accused of guilt” and that he is incompetent.  Moreover, Mr. Alman goes on, Isak has been accused by his dead wife, Karin, of being “callous, selfish and ruthless.”

Mr. Alman then takes Isak outside into the wood and allows him to re-watch a remembered 40-years-earlier scene of his wife cavorting with an extra-marital lover (Dream3c).  After they make love, Karin speaks dismissively of Isak’s hypocritical pseudo-sympathy.  She tells her lover that whenever she tearfully confesses her sins to her husband, he will always say that there is nothing to forgive,

“but he doesn’t mean a word he says, because he’s cold as ice.”

Clearly the marriage of Isak and Karin was a failure and perhaps merely a more reticent and civil version of the type of marriage exhibited by the Almans.

At the end of these three dream segments, Mr. Alman remarks that the dreams have all been concoctions of Isak’s mind in order to separate himself from the world.  When Isak asks Alman what will be his punishment for this guilt, his judgmental critic responds by saying it will presumably be the usual one: loneliness.

In the original Bergman screenplay that I saw, but is not present in the film, there is a fourth brief dream segment at this point where Sara1 comes to Isak and tells him he is supposed to go get his father.  She stretches out her hand to him, but then rushes off too fast for the old man to follow her and disappears.  “If only you had stayed with me,” he yells out to her.  This missing segment would offer further evidence that losing Sara1 was the main regret in Isak’s life.

8. Marianne and Evald

When Evald awakens, he and Marianne are alone together in the parked car, and she confides to him about her troubles with her husband Evald.  She had informed Evald a few months earlier that she was pregnant, but he was adamantly opposed to bringing a child into the world.  He emphasized how different they were by pointing out that her overall desire was to live and create life, while his was to be “stone-cold dead.”  She was told by Evald that she would have to make a choice between him and the baby.  This level of coldness goes beyond Isak’s, but as she tells Isak, when she saw his cold-as-ice mother, she understood how both Isak and Evald had grown up to be so cold – it was in the family.  She tells Isak that when she gets to Lund she will tell her husband that her choice is the baby. 

Then the effervescent Sara2 and her two buddies rush up to the car to present Isak with the wildflowers they have just picked.

9.  Ending in Lund

They arrive in Lund on time, and Isak’s doctor jubilaris ceremony with all its Latinate pomp is duly held. It all appears somewhat stuffy and hollow, though.  Later in the evening as Isak is about to go to bed, he hears outside his window Sara2 and her two friends joyously singing a serenade for him.  Then after her two boyfriends are out of earshot, Sara2 tells him,

“It’s you I really love, you know.  Today, tomorrow, always.” 

Isak smiles and says, “I’ll remember.”

Evald comes to Isak’s bedside, and Isak asks him about his relationship with Marianne.  Evald glumly says he will give in to her demands, because he cannot live without her.  After Evald leaves, the film closes with Isak, now more contented, settling into sleep as he recalls a pleasant childhood memory of his parents relaxing outside the summer cottage.


Wild Strawberries ends its rather subtle and complex story in a contemplative mood.  It all goes down smoothly for the viewer thanks to the film’s superb production values.  The cinematography, editing, and acting are all so well done that we barely notice just how smoothly they were performed.  They effectively enhance our fascination with what interests us, Isak’s journey and its meaning.

Over the course of Isak Borg’s long day, people from different generations have been presented – from  the headstrong exuberance of youth, through the quarrelsome bickering of mature couples, to the cold rigidity of old age.  According to the way Isak was accustomed to viewing things, everything and everyone is accountable; and guilt is to be assigned appropriately. But this kind of judgmental accounting, characteristic of Isak, Evald, and others, can only lead to accumulated resentment and a desire to withdraw from life.  However, this is not where Isak ends up at the end of the film, from my perspective.

At the end, there is a change in Isak. He is willing to suspend his judgmental side. He is comforted to hear that Evald and Marianne are on the way to working out their own problems.  At the same time, he is not simply giving up and accepting things just as they are. No, I think he has come to a more enlightened state. Rather than perpetually mourn the departure of Sara1 from his life, Isak has turned to see that the mysterious magic of love and life is always present.  Sara1 can be reincarnated into Sara2, who represents the eternal vitality of life.  After all, she loves him “today, tomorrow, always.” In this sense I detect an echo of Bergman’s To Joy, and even more, of his Summer Interlude, wherein the female protagonist learned to celebrate and affirm the wonder of life’s  mysteries, even when they are sometimes terminated in an early death.  After all, death is inevitable for all of us, and we must remember to accentuate those opportunities that life perpetually affords us, as well as savor those memories of beautiful moments.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Mark Le Fanu, “Wild Strawberries: ‘Where Is the Friend I Seek?’”, The Criterion Collection, (11 June 2013). 
2. Peter Cowie, “Wild Strawberries”, The Criterion Collection, (11 February 2002).  
3. Bosley Crowther, “Screen: Elusive Message; Wild Strawberries' Is a Swedish Import”, The New York Times, (23 June 1959).  

“The Silence” - Ingmar Bergman (1963)

The Silence was Ingmar Bergman’s third film in a sequence of small-scale dramas that have been referred to as his “Trilogy of Faith” and which included the earlier Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Winter Light (1963). In each of these films, the action involves only a few characters and takes place over a period of no more than twenty-four hours. However, despite the "trilogy" designation, the three film narratives are unconnected, and by the time we get to The Silence, even the issue of faith seems to have disappeared from view.  Perhaps what really connects the three films is the frustrated concern about the absence of sincere human communication in the modern age.

The story of The Silence concerns the contrasting perspectives and personalities of two sisters who are returning home via the train and stop off for a day in a foreign city somewhere in Eastern Europe.  When I say “story” in this instance, I use the term loosely, because, just as in Winter Light, what we really have on view is just a collection of disparate episodes during a period of about one day that shed light on the inner makeup of the principal characters. Indeed, in The Silence very little happens and very little is communicated – silence mostly prevails – so it is intriguing that Bergman was able to craft a film that manages to sustain the viewer’s interest.  (In fact The Silence was one of Bergman’s biggest commercial successes, although that box-office popularity was probably mostly due to some of the film’s sexual content.)

The cast comprises five principal characters, two of whom only speak the language of the unknown foreign country and thus have no comprehensible verbal communication in the film:

• Ester (Ingrid Thulin), who is suffering from some unspecified and apparently terminal illness.
• Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), Ester’s young sister and mother of Johan.
• Johan (Jorgen Lindstrom), the ten-year-old son of Anna.
• The Waiter (Birger Malmsten), whom Anna meets and with whom she has sex.
• The Hotel Porter (Håkan Jahnberg), an elderly bellhop who works in the hotel where Ester, Anna, and Johan stay for a night.

The film opens with Ester, Anna, and Johan shown in a railway car cabin.  The opening shot establishes the characteristic mise en scene of the film – it maintains a medium closeup (or sometimes full closeup) framing for more than two minutes by closely tracking various characters of interest as they move about. The succeeding shot is similar and also more than two minutes in duration.  The effect is one of claustrophobic confinement and self concern.  It is immediately clear that Ester is very ill, and they decide to make a stop off in the next city, Timoka, where they book a two-room suite at an old hotel.

Ester takes to her hotel room bed, where she is shown solitarily writing, smoking, and drinking vodka in another two-minute shot.  Meanwhile Anna decides to take a nap in her own bed with her son Johan.  Soon the contrasting natures of the two sisters are evident.  Ester is an intellectual and lives the life of the mind.  Anna is sensually self-indulgent and mostly concerned with her own bodily needs. Indeed her interactions with Johan throughout the film are quite physical – she often kisses him sensually, has him scrub her back when she takes a bath, and sleeps naked with him in the bed. 

Anna then dresses up and decides to go out into the town. At a local bar, she blithely allows the waiter to make a pass at her.  Later while sitting in the balcony watching a stage performance, she is abhorrently fascinated at the sight of a couple in the next booth brazenly making love. 

When Anna returns to the hotel suite, Ester asks about Anna’s soiled dress, and it becomes increasingly clear that there is open hostility between the two sisters. Anna is irritated by Ester’s queries and chafes at reporting what she does to her sister.  She toys with the truth, but eventually confesses that she had sex with the waiter she had just met.  Ester wishes to make peace and says that she only has love for her sister; she then caresses Anna so affectionately that it is suggestive of something more than just sisterly warmth.  But Anna spurns these entreaties for affection and goes out of the hotel again.

Meanwhile Johan has been wandering alone around the hotel corridors. He runs into a performing troupe of Spanish dwarfs who are staying in another suite, and although there is no verbal communication possible, they playfully communicate with him via gestures. 

Later back in the hotel suite, Johan reports to Ester that he has just seen Anna enter another hotel room with a strange man.  When Ester goes out and finds the room, Anna, instead of being shamefaced in front of her sister, puts on a shamelessly open display of sexual fondling with the waiter in order to torture Ester.  Ester leaves, and Anna proceeds to have animalistic sex with her all-but mute lover.

The next morning Anna coldly prepares to depart with Johan for home, while Ester is too sick to travel and will remain in Timoka for a few more days.  We are given to believe that Ester is near death and might not make it home alive. Before Anna and Johan leave, Ester hands Johan a “letter” and urges him to read it.  In the final scene on the departing train, Johan is seen reading the letter, which turns out to be some vocabulary words in the foreign language used in Timoka.

There is little narrative movement in The Silence, at least in connection with the external events depicted, and little seems to be resolved.  In some sense the narrative “journey” in the story, similar to the other films in Bergman’s trilogy, is one undertaken by the viewer in an effort to understand the psychological profiles represented by the characters. 

• Ester represents a way of being based on high principles and the love of beauty. 
• Anna, on the other hand, is instinctive and willful; she resists communications from Ester that arouse guilt feelings. 
• Johan is innocent and open to being shaped by these psychological tendencies.

One might argue that to a certain extent it all seems excessively symbolic and schematic. The images of miliary tanks occasionally seen along the railway and in the city streets suggest the breakdown of civilized human relationships and a relentless movement towards violence. And what is the meaning and significance of the dwarf troupe? Their lives seem alienated, remote, and grounded in trivial role-playing – an unattractive portrayal of the social other.  And yet these diminished figures seem orderly and somehow innocent, too.  As for the Porter, he seems kind, but also clinical, as if he is a hospital orderly tending to a vast asylum of inmates.

One perhaps might liken the psychological types depicted here to those of other psychic dichotomies, such as Nietzsche’s separation of the Dionysian (Anna) and the Apollinian (Ester),  Herman Hesse’s bifurcated characters in his novel, Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), or even Sigmund Freud’s ego-superego-id structural modal of the human psyche. 

But Bergman’s The Silence has a mysterious expressionistic power that goes somewhat beyond these schemata. Sven Nyquist’s obsessively tracking camera, the internal sound of a ticking clock  (suggesting that time is running out?), and the many shots of characters shown via their reflection in a mirror all contribute to an atmosphere of threatening enclosure and isolation.  In addition the characterization of the psychic tendencies in the figures of two beautiful women, here superbly portrayed by Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom, takes the thematic elements beyond mere abstractions. Anna and Ester are not simply schematized conceptions, but are instead embodied, sensual beings. 

• Anna has animalistic sex with the waiter, but she reflects on these things, too.  She sobs over her feelings of guilt towards her sister. But she also rails at her sister, “you always harp on principles!”  Then she hatefully asks Ester why she continues to live and doesn’t just get her dying over and done with.

• Ester, the writer who seeks refined beauty and principles, still feels sexual urges, too.  There is another one of those long medium-closeup shots in the film showing Ester in her bed satisfying her sexual urges to a climax. Yet she only complains about this side of things: “erectile tissue, . . . it’s all a matter of erections and secretions!”  She goes on: 
  

  “I didn’t want to accept my wretched role. But now it’s too lonely. We try out attitudes and find them all worthless. The forces are too strong.”

• Johan is innocent and unformed, but he certainly does not represent the ego portion of Freud’s triad. He is not a bad boy, but he could become corrupted by his animal urges. He points his toy gun at people in the hotel, pretending to shoot them. On other occasions he steals and hides some of the hotel porter’s treasured personal photos and later urinates on the wall in the hotel corridor.

So the ending of the film showing Johan reading Ester’s letter and learning some foreign words suggests that his soul will not be lost.  He seems to be tentatively headed down the path, like that followed by his sister Ester, of trying to make contact with others in order to find something meaningful in this chaotic and uncertain world.

★★★½

“Winter Light” - Ingmar Bergman (1963)

Ingmar Berman’s Winter Light (1963) is, to me, his bleakest film. It is the second installment, after Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and before The Silence (1963), of what later came to be referred to as his “Trilogy of Faith”. All three of these films are concerned with the longing of people for a distant, silent God to reveal Himself to them. It is a continuation of the knight Antonius Block’s (The Seventh Seal), plea that God not hide in a fog of half-spoken promises.  

Winter Light concerns a Lutheran pastor’s crisis of faith, and Bergman once said that it was his personal favorite among his works.  Indeed the film must have been drawn from his own personal experiences, since Bergman was the son of a Lutheran minister and must have been familiar with the brooding atmosphere depicted in the film. In keeping with the dour seriousness of its subject, the mise en scene is austere and deliberate. The screen time almost matches the diegetic time, since the events depicted take place in a single afternoon, with the focalization on a single player and his interactions with a few principals. Moreover, viewing this kind of Bergman film (there are others along these lines) is something of a challenging experience, because the viewer is not given a clear-cut narrative pathway to follow. Instead we seem only to be given a series of dramatic encounters among a few people of contrasting personalities, and then we are left to see if we can draw some kind of not-very-certain conclusions about their personal and social circumstances.  To be sure, with any story it is up to the reader/viewer to provide much of the narrative construction in his or her own mind.  But with Bergman even more of this internal narrative construction is left to us.

The film opens with a noontime service woodenly ministered by Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Bjornstrand) and given to only about a half-dozen attendees. Among those attending the service are fisherman Jonas Persson (Max von Sydow) and his wife Karin (Gunnel Lindblom), as well as a bespectacled lady, Marta Lindblom (Ingrid Thulin), who we later learn has recently been Tomas’s mistress. Tomas shows no sign of human engagement on his face, even to Marta, when he administers the Communion. This slow, deliberate opening ceremony occupies 15 minutes of the 81-minute film and sets the prevailing tone of dry emptiness in response to spiritual seeking.  In fact the Swedish title of Winter Light is Nattvardsgästerna, which ironically means "The Communicants"; but for the most part, meaningful communication is absent here.  We eventually learn that not only is Tomas relatively uncommunicative with people around him; he has lost his contact with, and belief in, God, too.

After that opening service, Jonas and Karin Persson approach Tomas for a pastoral consultation concerning Jonas’s serious state of depression.  He has become obsessed with reports that China is willing to start a nuclear war.  (In truth this was no idle speculation: Mao Zedong asserted from the mid-1950s onwards that a nuclear war of mass annihilation would be to China’s advantage, since China would have enough survivors to rebuild, while Western capitalism would be destroyed.)  Tomas quickly recognizes that Jonas has lost his belief in life and is suicidal.  He reflexively tells Jonas that he should put his faith in God and that he should return for a talk after he escorts Karin home.

But Tomas’s ambivalence towards his professional calling is evident when, alone, he stares up at sculptured crucifix on the alter and says to himself, “what a ridiculous image”.  Then Marta comes up to him.

Marta is a local schoolteacher, and it is evident as she hugs and kisses Tomas in private that she is used to intimacy with him.  But a crucial spiritual difference separates them: while Tomas complains about God’s silence, Marta assures him that He doesn’t even exist.  Before she departs, she urges him to read a letter that she has sent to him.

Tomas goes back to his office to read the letter, but first he pulls out some photographs of his beloved deceased wife, whose death four years earlier had left Tomas emotionally devastated. Then he turns to Marta’s letter. It turns out that Marta pours her heart out to him in the letter in a way that she could not do to his face. To present the letter-reading, Bergman shows Marta reciting it in closeup, directly into the camera for more than six minutes, sincerely and emotionally pleading her case. (Breaking the “fourth wall” by directly gazing into the camera always induces a heightened sense of empathy, and it is effective here.) This is perhaps the most memorable scene in the film, because its attempt at direct communication (which curiously can sometimes be assisted by the veil of a written message) so starkly contrasts with the rest of the film’s depiction of failed and inauthentic interaction.

In her letter Marta starts out by saying she knows that they don’t truly love each other.  For her part, it seems, she is acknowledging that her “love” was self-centered and therefore not true love.  She also painfully acknowledges her own weaknesses and faults, including the disfiguring skin rashes she is sometimes afflicted with and which she knows Tomas finds repugnant.  She tells Tomas that in her frustration with her excruciating sufferings, she finally prayed to the god she didn’t believe in to give her some reason to live, some task in the world that would justify her pain and call on all her strength. And she says that, amazingly, that prayer was actually answered!  She finally came to understand that her mission on this earth was to love Tomas unconditionally and unreservedly. 

Although the delivery of Marta’s letter is moving, Tomas’s reaction seems to be more that of irritation than of sympathy.

When Jonas returns for his consultation, Tomas, rather than reassuring him about the future and to trust God’s plan, opens up to him and confesses his own doubts about even the existence of God. Tomas suggests that there might by some intellectual relief in even knowing finally that “there is no creator, no sustainer of life, no design.” For once Tomas is willing to share his inner thoughts, but this is not the right moment and person with whom to share his philosophical despondency.  Jonas needs help, and Tomas is still wrapped up with is own selfish concerns and not sympathetic to the concerns and needs of those around him.  Jonas departs with a lost look on his face and shortly thereafter commits suicide.

Later, Marta affectionately tries to console Tomas and expresses her yearning to be his wife.  In another memorable moment of the film, Tomas responds by saying he is sick of her.  He had formerly loved his late wife, and now he is dead to human feeling. Then in exasperated tones, he definitively rejects his tearful supplicant:

“The real reason [I won’t marry you] is I don’t want you. . . . I’m tired of your shortsightedness, your clumsy hands, your anxiousness, your timid displays of affection. . . .  Once and for all I have to escape this junkyard of idiotic trivialities.”

For Tomas, it’s all about himself. God has deserted him, personally (at one point he asks rhetorically, “God, why have you forsaken me?”), and he doesn’t care about the pain of others. He dutifully goes to Karin Persson, who is suddenly a pregnant widow with three other children, and perfunctorily informs her of her husband’s death. Then he drives over to another nearby Church in Frostnas, where he is scheduled to give the 3pm service.  

There the church’s crippled sexton asks him a question that from his self-study of the Bible has has been bothering him.  Why does the Passion of Christ put so much emphasis on Jesus’s physical pain, he asks?  Wasn’t the fact that his selfish disciples failed to understand his true message much more painful, on the spiritual level?  Wasn’t the fact that Peter thrice denied Jesus the cause for even greater suffering – even leading Jesus to ask why God had forsaken Him? Tomas just listens.

Finally the service at the Frostnas church is supposed to begin, but there is only one worshiper in attendance – Marta.  The film ends with Tomas commencing with the Mass ceremony, and Marta with her head down in the back row of the church, praying.

One might say that in summary, Winter Light is only a negative presentation all the way.  Tomas, who when he was married had once believed that God is love and love is God, is now (during the film’s action) just an empty shell, merely going through the liturgical motions.  According to that account, there is little narrative movement, and the film is merely a depiction of incidents that expose the inner misery of a lost soul.

But I think Winter Light says more than that.  The key to the film is Marta, a role brilliantly performed by Ingrid Thulin. Marta, the avowed atheist, is shown devoutly praying in the film’s final moments. She is praying for Tomas. Actually Marta is Christlike in this story, with even her rash-damaged hands metaphorically evoking the image of crucified martyrdom. Tomas’s rejection of Marta is like Peter’s denial of Jesus.  So we see that the sexton’s story is reversed. Tomas is not the forsaken one, but the forsaking one. And Marta is the image of compassion, the saint. She feels the hurt, but, even more, she feels the selfless love. It is that final shot of Ingrid Thulin, as Marta, praying with her head down that uplifts the film and makes it worthwhile. And with that love, maybe there is even hope for Tomas.

★★★