Bergman's Best

A DECADE AGO, Ingmar Bergman loathed critics. His unquestionably worst film, Not to Speak About All These Women (1964), was devoted to attacking a pathetic character who embodied the critic. In the late sixties, perhaps influenced by Liv Ullman, his lady at the time. Bergman warmed a bit and granted a few interviews. Even then it seemed he felt an interview was a chore, a quite unpleasant side effect of fame to be conducted with the smug assurance of the true artist.

As late as 1972, Bergman still played his games of aloofness. He told Birgitta Steene that he never thought about his past films. When Charles Thomas Samuels began his interview, Bergman admonished. "This way you've started will only keep us talking like two puppets discussing absolute nonsense."

What a different sort of dialogue is his interview with John Simon, '46, conducted while Bergman filmed The Touch (1971) but published for the first time in Ingmar Bergman Directs. Now we find two men joking with each other, categorizing directors as good or bad, feeding each other's prejudices:

Simon: Are there any young film-makers that you particularly like? I hope you don't like Godard.

Bergman: No, no, no.

Simon: I detest him.

Bergman: Yes, I do, too,

Each man asks the other to express his views, and Bergman treats Simon with respect.

Simon asks about difficult passages from Bergman's past films. With Steene, Bergman's reaction to such topics was "Birgittal" but with Simon it is, "I will try to be honest." He does think about the past films, had seen Winter Light a few weeks before and was "very satisfied." The Seventh Seal is sometimes successful, sometimes not. Bergman even discards a major myth he had created. Concerning the endlessly quoted parable he wrote for Cahiers du Cinema (July, 1956), in which he compared himself to an anonymous artisan working on the cathedral at Chartres, he now tells Simon: "Very romantic, Forget it."

The presumption of the interview, as of the rest of Simon's book, is that Bergman is the greatest genius the cinema has produced. The sum of his artistry, in Simon's view, surpasses all other film-makers'; the individual works are unmatched except by Fellini and Antonioni at their best. In the interview. Simon tells Bergman his judgment straight off, but the book is by no means mere obeisance, though the unsparing acidity characteristic of Simon's New York magazine theater column corrodes few Bergman frames.

Four long essays fill most of the book, one each on the films Simon considers to be Bergman's best: The Naked Night (1953) which Simon, setting a welcome precedent, calls by its correctly translated title The Clown's Evening: Smiles of a Summer Night (1955); Winter Light (1962)) and Persona (1966). Simon's analytical and descriptive abilities, seen most often in his film reviews in The New Leader, flourish in these expansive essays, unencumbered by the disputatious color of his reviews.

Simon's most enduring articles have always been on the few films he loves, while he has been quick to trifle with or even denounce the imperfect nascent films so influential in the development of a classical style like Bergman's. In dealing with the classical, he is on his own firmest ground, and in his Bergman book Simon is willing, for the first time, to take his stands, in relation to--not merely above--other crities.

JUST AS MANY PEOPLE think of John Simon only as a malicious theater critic, so for many the quintessence of Bergmanism remains, unfortunately, The Seventh Seal. Simon mentions the film only a few times, and in passing; his omission is one of his best critical judgments. In 1956, the film made Bergman intellectual chic. In later years, its fame, coupled with its lack of substance, led many to a premature disenchantment not only with Bergman but with foreign films as a group. The labored allegory's saintly sheen cannot disguise its sanctimony; stark and serious do not by themselves make profound.

Viewed in perspective--as a compelling project Bergman had to get off his chest--The Seventh Seal can be recognized as an impressive failure. Its ostentatious images, with a couple of exceptions (the witch-burning, the flagellants), make better stills than film. But the concerns of the film find more coherent treatment elsewhere. The spiritual plagues are more carefully distilled in Winter Light; the worldly ones are more powerful in The Clown's Evening.

The Clown's Evening, Bergman's first masterpiece, sums up attitudes Bergman had suggested in his films of the preceding three years. During the course of a single day's action, we see the owner of an impoverished travelling circus and his mistress, the bare-back rider, each betray the other. Albert tries to return to the wife he had left long ago. Anne, partly in retaliation, has a pitiful affair with a condescending actor. Both are rejected in these attempts to escape the circus life, and, after still further torment, the day ends with the pair together again, walking in silence alongside the caravan.

A dark and gloomy film, The Clown's Evening presents life as a brutal humiliation--a life difficult to endure which, in the final analysis, resignation and companionship may make tolerable. Many people interpret the film as absolute pessimism, probably because it eschews the idyllic presentation of Bergman's earlier films such as Summer Interlude and Summer with Monika. But the romance in those films eventually breaks down--totally. The more concentrated Clown's Evening begins after the break-down, discrediting illusions that we never see on the screen.

Simon divides this film into two elements: the visual and the thematic. His justification is unclear. He would never tolerate such bilidity on the part of a film-maker. His examination of The Clown's Evening is, however, sufficiently perceptive on all counts to make this weakness merely an organizational problem. Attaching defailed comment to extensive paraphrase. Simon gives a clear picture of Bergman's command, particularly of the nightmarish flashback done with heightened contrast and masterful manipulation of sound. Drawing somewhat on earlier analyses by British critics Peter Cowie and Robin Wood, he integrates his observations, obtaining a more complete picture of The Clown's Evening than has been seen before.

Bergman's best comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night, has a clever structure that allows its tone to range from the comic to the bitterly tragic. At base level, its concern is with the rebounds its numerous characters make between lovers. Though its charm and impact are unique, its subject and its unusual emotional range create an often-noted resemblance to Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game--a film Bergman had not seen at the time he made his production, and which he does not like today.

SIMON THINKS RULES OF THE GAME one of the very best films ever made, but he barely mentions the famous comparison. As one alternative, he tries to emphasize the geometrical nature (or "quasi-mathematical, or even biochemical"!) he perceives in the "oscillations" of the characters. He soon leaves such doctrinaire analogies behind, proceeding with the most knowing comments yet written about the film. Yet, extending his criticism too far, Simon gets caught up in still more analogy as he tries to set up metaphors (theater, dance, and music) within which to fit the analysis.

Simon chose Winter Light to represent Bergman's religious trilogy from the early 60's. More than any of Bergman's other films, it has an austere, condensed visual strength that makes analysis of its imagery almost superfluous. Its depiction of religiosity is ambiguous, yet profound, and so Simon carefully explores possible conclusions to be drawn from the ending--where the pastor, whose faith has deserted him, begins the Vespers service before an audience consisting solely of his church's staff and his atheist former mistress.

Simon gradually uncovers the substance of Winter Light, moving us in the same way that the film itself moves us as he completes his interpretation of the film as a heightened, penetrating version of the insight that "hell together is better than hell alone." In considering the visual impact of Winter Light, he examines the ways in which watching a film of Communion affects the viewer. This type of analysis could well have been brought to bear on Persona, a film so sophisticated that many one-time viewers found nothing but visual impact.

Persona is the most innovative of Berman's films and, as Simon points out, it is also his most difficult. Simon's honesty as a critic is well revealed by comparing his original review of the film (The New Leader, May 1967), in which he admitted he did not yet understand it, with the article in the current book, in which he presents several years' reflection with no condescension toward the reader. When the film was first released, many baffled reviewers gave up, terming Persona a work of poetic images with no substance. The first intelligent analysis was Susan Sontag's essay reprinted in Styles of Radical Will.

Sontag argued that the film could not be understood in terms of plot. To do so would necessitate strict identification of each scene as real or imaginary, destroying the coherence built up from the disjoint opening images. The film presents an actress whose mental condition has suddenly left her mute. She is accompanied by a young nurse to an empty house on the sea. There they somehow merge or change identities--most people got that far, but that's, not very far at all. The film is not a puzzle but a meditation, Sontag said, and that interpretation is Simon's starting point.

But Simon, in his longer essay, goes beyond Sontag. He is much clearer than she, to begin with, in his framework of a meditation on the numbers one and two. He explores the film as a perfectly realized experiment, the Ulysses of the cinema, and, putting scholarship before pleasure, even admits that there are influences from Godard. In the Persona essay, even more than in the other three, Simon's presentation is helped along by his editors' useful choice of stills, many in sequences, which clarify important scenes and give a feeling for the marvelous texture of Sven Nykvist's cinematography.

Simon did not choose the structure of his book, Since it is the second volume in a series, he inherited the organization set up for the first volume--an interview, a short essay, detailed analysis of four films. Had Simon written according to his own desires, he might have written a survey work. That would have been too bad. Several fine general studies of Bergman exist now, and Simon's disagreements with Wood and Cowie and others are not so major as to warrant another. So Simon has written essays on just four films. They are the best, most thorough critiques of single fims that he has written--perhaps the best, most thorough that have been written on any films.