Kante De Durst Not, Kante De Dur

For some reason, the death of Michelangelo Antonioni didn't make it into the celebrity death headlines yesterday, but that's probably just because, while Blow-Up is an influential mess of a film, his other efforts weren't well-known in the United States. And anyway, only one foreign director at a time can be honored here, and the Maestro died yesterday as well.

I've seen almost every one of Ingmar Bergman's films. The best offered, like the magic lantern of his youth, a vision into a different world, a dreamscape, where ideas could be more clearly nd distinctly synthesized. He was also quite funny, far more than anyone would give him credit for. Everyone remembers the chess game with Death in The Seventh Seal, but my favorite Bergman films are Persona, Scenes From A Marriage and The Virgin Spring, a disquisition on innocence and experience and the Original Sin, the Fall from Grace. The Virgin Spring is about a young woman who is raped and murdered by a gang of thugs, and her father's eye-for-an-eye reaction. After the thugs seek refuge at the father's barn, he eventually discovers the truth about them, and he becomes the very cold-blooded murderers he despises, out of revenge. The father even kills the boy that the two thugs travel with, a boy that had nothing to do with the murder. This violence springs from a family of committed believers in God, whose faith is tested through the episode. In the end, as the family seeks to bury their daughter, a "virgin spring" bubbles up from the ground, almost a sign from God that he approves of the violence, or read another way, a testament to how we deceive ourselves into believing whatever we do or think is necessary and just. The father ascribes special significance to the spring to excuse himself for his crimes.

This film came during the height of Bergman's questioning period, when he put out a series of films that touched on faith and belief. Persona comes after he had given up the question, and it's a far different achievement. The film is nearly impossible to explain, though I tried to do so for a college term paper, taking one scene and integrating it into a discussion of the full theme of the film:

His choice of shot sequence and composition in the film consistently sacrifices realism for more suggestive effects, in which the form seeks to mirror the content. Not only is this visually jarring, but it adds a great deal to the theme, particularly the intended self-reflexivity of the work. This reveals itself in several points of the film, especially in the scene where Alma (Bibi Andersson) confronts Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann) about her relationship with her son. Instead of crosscutting and showing Alma and Elizabeth's reactions concurrently during the scene, Bergman chooses to show Elizabeth throughout, then to "replay" the scene, showing Alma straight through to the conclusion. Why would Bergman slow down his film so, diluting a highly dramatic moment by doubling it?

This use of the lingering facial close-up ties directly into one of the central concerns of the narrative. The audience, given nothing else to look at but Elizabeth's face, must study it, break it down, mentally mark her expressions and details. When the scene doubles and Alma becomes the object of study, a visual connection necessarily sets up between the two. Earlier in the film, Alma says, "When I saw you (in a film), I noticed right away . . . we look alike . . . we are alike." The audience now must make the same connection Alma did earlier, and the identical sequence of shots stresses this connection. The shots close in on Alma as well, and we see the exact intent of all of her words, through expression and tone. Moving closer and closer into each character, we consequently move closer into their psychological state of being, and closer into their identities. By doubling the progression, we inextricably link the women's identities, merging them in a kind of transference. This of course comes to a head during the split-screen sequence at the end, but more about that later.

The narrative of the monologue is simple enough. Alma describes the reasons why Elizabeth had her child, and why she hates him, through to this day. At a party somebody told Elizabeth that she "lacked motherliness." So she gave in and let her husband make her pregnant. But, despite the acclamation of others, she was overwhelmed with a strong feeling of repulsion and hate for the child, even wishing him to be stillborn (she wishes herself to be dead inside). The delivery takes a long time, but the child survived, and he grew up with a deep love for his mother. But she still hated him, was repulsed by him, to the point that she could take no more. While this is an engrossing and difficult story, it is not a very long one. To capture the essentials would take under a minute. However, Bergman stretches the monologue, giving it more emphasis and making it longer to convey. He does this by (surprise) having Alma frequently reiterate her statements, "doubling" her speech. The examples of this are numerous. She says, "And you let your husband make you pregnant/ you wanted to be a mother;" "But all the time you acted/ acted the part of a happy expectant mother;" "You wished the child would be stillborn/ you wanted a dead child;" "Can't you die soon/ can't you die;" "It was a long and difficult delivery/ you suffered for several days," among other things. Using a reiteration for emphasis is a common technique in a dramatic speech such as this, but Bergman uses it to the extreme. It fits in perfectly with the doppleganger theme; the words are doubling over on themselves, just as the characters do. In addition to phrases being repeated in a similar manner, the same words keep coming up again and again. In particular, "afraid," "dead," "repulsive," "hate," "suffering," and those two old standbys, "mother" and "child," keep cropping up. The last line encapsulates this thematic, as Alma screams, "You think he's repulsive and you're afraid!" By bringing these words and phrases up continually in the speech, Bergman lets the dialogical form mirror the content as well as the film technique.

After Alma says her final line in the portion where the camera is on her, the shot merges for a moment in a brilliant use of split-screen technology. The right side Alma's face is shown, but is superimposed with Elizabeth's left side. This is shown for only a brief second. Suddenly, Alma grows afraid again. All of her control is lost, and she cries out, "No! I'm not like you, I don't feel as you do. I am Alma, I'm only here to help. I am not Elizabeth Vogler! You are Elizabeth Vogler!" After such a condemning speech, why does Alma suddenly grow so fearful? Perhaps the split-screen image plays to a self-realization in Alma that her demeanor is slowly meshing with that of Elizabeth. She realizes that her assertion of control is merely a projection of Elizabeth's personality on her, and that loss of true identity frightens her. Plus, it gives a response to the question of how Alma can know all these personal things about Elizabeth's life. That merger of shots confuses the true voice and the true speaker in the scene. Perhaps Elizabeth is saying all these things to Alma, or worse, through Alma. In essence, Alma gets frightened because she knows these statements are not in her true nature, and it suggests that she is losing that nature at the hands of Elizabeth. That is visually conveyed by the shot that literally links the two women's faces.

After Alma asserts that she is not Elizabeth Vogler, her words break down. "I'd like to have- I love- I haven't" is her only reply. In seeing her identity slipping away, her control does as well, even her control over her own words. This notion comes up again later in the film when Alma recites a chorus of disassociative, meaningless phrases. By the time Alma gets to the "I haven't, " her lips do not even move as the split-screen comes back into focus and remains there in freeze frame for a time. The image is flattened out by this freeze frame, giving a two-dimensionality to the work. It looks more like a picture, which is the image that sparks this sequence in the first place. The split-screen not only brings closure to this scene, but it further justifies the lack of cutting and the "replayed" scene technique. If the scene were done in typical Hollywood style, it would negate the brunt of this technique. The visual connection would not be as defined as before, the audience unable to study the images in as much depth as they do. The twin themes of doubling and merging, which come across so well due in large part to the technique, would be severely downplayed. The splitting of the image brings together the two women for the first time in the scene, and crosscutting would have put them together several times over before that. So, in order to get the full extent of effect out of his visual trick, Bergman had to shoot the scenes in that fashion.

Hey, I wouldn't get much use out of that paper, otherwise. It actually hold up (at least for me).

Bergman is an incredible filmmaker who returned to the same themes over and over again, studying and re-studying and coming to conclusions about the nature of man, woman, madness, faith and love. His body of work is a towering achievement, the likes of which we may never see again.