Excavations on Bergman's Films: Themes, Impressions, and Impact with Shalon Van Tine and Jordan Dubin

In this episode of Excavations--a show that I and Jordan Dubin do primarily for the youtube channel and the patron's podcast-- we pull back the curtain on the genius of Ingmar Bergman, one of cinema’s most acclaimed filmmakers, with the insightful Shalon Van Tine and Jordan Dubin. Shalon Van Tine, a cultural history PhD candidate, helps us unravel the man who mastered the art of creating cinematic masterpieces on a tight budget, his profound devotion to theatre, and his collaborations with some of the most talented individuals in the industry. We shine a spotlight on three themes that are woven into the fabric of almost every Bergman film - the silence of God, sex and guilt, and the artist's relationship with his craft.

Our conversation meanders through specific Bergman classics like Wild Strawberries, as we dissect his introspective filmmaking style and his talent for amalgamating complex themes into a single narrative. We examine The Silence, a film that offers a novel viewpoint on the role of language in cinema and Bergman's use of music to overcome communication barriers. Shalon guides us in dissecting Bergman's portrayal of relationships, guilt, and femininity, and offers interpretations of his films like Through Glass Darkly and Persona that further illuminate the themes of masculinity and emasculation dominant in his works.

We conclude our insightful journey with a reflection on Bergman's influences and the psychoanalytic elements embedded in his films. Learn about Bergman's impact on later directors and how his personal interactions with women shaped his narratives. We also ponder over the visually arresting aesthetics that are characteristic of Bergman's films and how they assist viewers in deciphering his cinematic universe. For movie buffs, this episode is a delightful exploration of a legendary filmmaker's body of work.

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:35

Hello and welcome to Varn blog. I am here with my arts crew well, part of my arts crew and that is Shalon Van Tine, who I'm going to make sure that I actually say the right place that your PhD candidate and right place that you work, because I think I've flipped them many times in introducing you or put you at a different Ohio University. So is a PhD candidate in cultural history at University of Ohio and teaches for University of Maryland. Jordan Dubin is the co-host of excavations with me. I always want to make it evocations and I don't know I named the show that can be the next one.

C. Derick Varn: 2:30

It doesn't really work. Excavations is kind of what we do, whereas evocation is magic. And we are talking about one of Shalon and mine and Jordan's, I believe favorite film directors, igmar Berman. And while I feel like I always get drug on air to talk about Tarkovsky, I've literally done 13 or so Tarkovsky a podcast. It's kind of ridiculous. I've recorded three different podcasts in Solaris over the course of ten years. Anyway, today we're talking about Berkman, who arguably best filmmaker or bestest filmmaker, I don't know and so I'm gonna let Shalyn introduce Berkman to you guys, because I'm gonna step back a little bit for this one, and then we'll start talking about our favorite of his films. And I will just say I've seen I don't know probably 20 Berkman movies, but I haven't seen all of them, so I am not the specialist here. So we will begin with Shalyn.

Shalon Van Tine: 3:52

All right. Well, I should start off by saying that you know, amongst film directors and film critics, igmar Bergman is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest filmmakers of all time. So he's personally he is personally my favorite film director of all time and I've seen almost all his films. Haven't seen some of his television films, but even his lesser films are great movies. So whoever your favorite director happens to be, I would say it's a pretty safe bet They've either been influenced by Bergman, directly or indirectly, and in some way or another. So you know you mentioned Tarkovsky earlier. You know he's. He's said that he only cared about the opinions of two people Bergman and Brasson. So I know a lot of your listeners are David Lynch fans. He's said that all of his movies are influenced by Bergman films. Stanley Kubrick said that Bergman was the greatest filmmaker of all time. Both both him and Akira Kurosawa even wrote Bergman personal letters praising him. So if you're someone who hasn't seen any Bergman films, what we wanted to do today is just kind of cover some of the main ideas that you'll see throughout all of his works. So just to give a little bit of background, bergman was born in 1918 in Sweden and he was born into a upper middle class family with a really strict Lutheran minister for a father. So even though Bergman deals with a lot of universal human themes in all of his movies, his movies are also very autobiographical. So all the psychological and spiritual torment that he experienced growing up is evident in all of his all of his films. Now, he wrote and directed somewhere somewhere around 60 movies give or take in his lifetime, and even though he's considered one of the best filmmakers of all time, he actually considered himself first and foremost a playwright. So he viewed cinema as secondary to his work in theater. He ended up directing somewhere around 170 or so plays in his life, so more than double the amount of films that he did, and he famously said that theater is my wife and film is my mistress. So that's, you know. He definitely placed a much stronger role that theater played in his life than film, which is, you know, somewhat ironic considering that he's one of the best filmmakers ever.

Shalon Van Tine: 6:48

Now, he began making films in the 1940s, but his best works are probably done through the 50s, through the 70s. Those seem to encompass his peak filmmaking and practically all of his films, perhaps with a few exceptions. Can we can consider those quote-unquote high art type films, not only for his you know cinematic skill and his psychological insight, but it's also something to to consider too that his films were also very low budget, which is sometimes surprising for people considering how beautifully they're filmed and and how well they're done. But most of his films were actually low budget, usually under a million dollars. I think his most expensive film, for example, was Fannie and Alexander, which was which ran like five hours and it's full length, which was only seven million dollar budget, but that was his most expensive one. So which is still low budget if you're familiar with like filmmaking cost. But so one of the things I should mention before we start talking about his films is that Bergman was known for working with an incredibly talented group of people which made his film so wonderful. That's gonna be and I apologize in advance if I mispronounce any Swedish names but most importantly his cinematographer, sven Nyquist, and the actors Max von Sydow, gunnar Bjornstrand, erlen Josefinn, beebe, anderson, ingrid Thulen, gunnar Lindblum and Liv Ullman. Those are kind of his core actors that he works with in all of his movies and cinematographer, and they all bring their own talents to his movies. So I should just note that before we start talking about Bergman himself, because his films were really enriched by these people.

Shalon Van Tine: 8:55

Alright, so we can probably, if we want, to reduce the themes in Bergman's films down, we could probably reduce it down to about three main themes that you'll see in pretty much all of his films. The first one is the silence of God, the second one is sex and guilt, and then the third one, I would say, is the artist and his relationship with his art. So you tend to have a lot of analyses on Bergman that focus on the first two, like his struggles with theism and his, you know, emotional struggles with sexuality and relationships and family Although the last theme is sometimes forgotten, although it's just as important and probably arguably more important as it's probably in all of his films which is that creative struggle and what, what it means to be an artist versus an entertainer, the sort of vampiric qualities that come with being an artist, what performance means for an artist. So these are some.

Shalon Van Tine: 10:05

These are some things that are gonna that you'll see throughout all of Bergman's pictures. There's, of course, a lot of sub themes, such as the complicated nature of femininity and fragile masculinity and violence, identity and personhood and the the line between reality and dreams. So these are things that come up a lot, but ultimately Bergman is just known for capturing the human condition in a very dark and bleak and in-your-face kind of way. So we're gonna explore some of these themes and I think Jordan was gonna start us off on whichever, whichever movies she wanted to talk about first.

Jordin Dubin: 10:49

Good question. Yeah, well, where to start? Honestly, as stated beforehand, there's between 50 to 60 films and TV spots that Bergman directed. I think he said that somewhere along the lines of 10 of his films are the ones that he's most proud of, and he's a bit regretful of others, but I think that we could probably start with one of the most prominent ones, which would have to be wild strawberries. I think it's a good place to to start tying in a lot of the themes and sub plots that that you were bringing up beforehand. So it's also a cool way to introduce one of his main icons and who he was basing a lot of his early screenwriting and cinematography off, of which was, of course, victor Schostrom with the Phantom Carriage, which is forever his favorite film.

Jordin Dubin: 11:42

He plays Isaac Borg, I believe in. In the film he's the main character, an old man kind of on the last legs of his life, reflecting on his history, on his family relationships and sort of experiencing his memories and ghosts as one, and he's, as he's, going through places from his past. So what do we have to say about wild strawberries?

Shalon Van Tine: 12:11

for starters, Well, just just as a side note not really about the film if you mentioned Schrostrom, who was one of Bergman's film heroes, and the Phantom Carriage was also a favorite of Stanley Kubrick who, if you've seen the Shining, has referenced Phantom Carriage. The scene in the Shining where he is chopping through the door is a reference to two films really, one Phantom Carriage and another one that came out a couple years before, a Griffith film called Broken Blossoms. But I just wanted to mention that because Kubrick also drew a lot upon a film that we might talk about later, the Silence for the Shining. So you'll see a lot of those, those sorts of overlaps. But wild strawberries, in my opinion, is one of my, one of my favorite Bergman films.

Shalon Van Tine: 13:11

It's, it definitely deals with this sort of in this, this theme of introspection and looking back on your life, and and the main character is an old man, like you said, he has he's, he's arguably had a good life, he's, he's been successful in his career, he's being honored by the university that that he taught for, and yet he has this coldness in relationships with people, the thing that should actually matter the most.

Shalon Van Tine: 13:45

And and these, this sort of theme comes up a lot in Bergman films where you have somebody who's financially well off, they're, they're professionally celebrated and yet they don't have any, any current relationships in which they have any warmth. And part of this stems from part of this film. Like does a lot with flashbacks and going back to his childhood and sort of finding these moments of intense emotional pain and then the the main character is, you know, having to deal with that as he's trying to trying to accept the fact that he's being celebrated and he doesn't necessarily think he's worthy of being celebrated. There is a horrifying scene where the main character has a dream where he is standing in front of a classroom and he's being tested, and you know, by his peers and he everything sounds like nonsense in the way that a dream dream works and it's this most stressful thing I've ever seen as an academic, especially I imagine.

Shalon Van Tine: 15:15

Yes and and and and that sort of goes through the whole movie. Just this, this sense that you know he, he's, he's been a phony his whole life, that that he's, he's being celebrated, his, his life's being celebrated but doesn't necessarily deserve it. And he's, he's not the best person. But. But I could go on and on about this one. So you should say more about your thoughts on wild strawberries sure.

Jordin Dubin: 15:44

Well, something that I heard from from Bergman in a series of interviews that he did for a Swedish television, was that while he tends to weave himself throughout a character, a number of characters that show different sides of him, this movie was sort of autobiographical, but much more related to his father, who the main character is meant to represent a very stern, cold man, kind of bottled up rage inside of him, terrible relationships with the people around him, of course, especially his children, but even with his maid, you know, there's a funny series of interactions between them. He's basically ready to leave anybody and everybody behind at any given point in time, as long as he has, you know, a logical reason, something very pragmatic that stands behind it. And I think the character of his daughter-in-law is a really interesting one, and there that's Ingrid Thulin, I believe, who is another one of his ensemble cast that you mentioned earlier, who's wonderful, and she doesn't really mind hiding her disdain for him. She's pretty open about what's wrong with the relationship between her husband to his son and and the father, and that just there's just like this boiling tension between them as they're driving through the countryside on the way to this university, and she kind of creates an opportunity to you know, face head-on all of these issues that he's left in his wake throughout his life and he's pretty much in denial, it seems. At first he's always got a great reason for everything and he's done the best that he could. There's this issue of you know got to take responsibility for your own actions, but it never really tends to be reflected in himself. So I find her to be a really interesting foil.

Jordin Dubin: 17:44

The other character that comes up is a young woman, a hitchhiker that they pick up on the way, who is youthful, flirtatious, sort of open, and and she's got two lovers with her.

Jordin Dubin: 17:58

One of them, again, is a man who is interested in theology and in practicing divinity, and the other is a bit more of a libertine and she just doesn't know how to split her love between them, and I think there's some really interesting conversations that happen both in the car and when they stop for for lunch, overlooking a beautiful view, and I think it's.

Jordin Dubin: 18:22

It's just one of the, the first ones where you get such an inner play between all of the different themes that are woven throughout his movies and really interesting personal reflections. I think it it should be said as well that the the film is voiced over by the main character, so we get to really think with him, to hear his thoughts, and once they come upon the old home that he, he lived in with family, he's just totally brought back there. It's as if this, this place with its memories, is the the new timeline that we're a part of, and so, with him being the narrator, we get to see the narration of his own life, where he gets to be a secondary character, just someone watching in the audience, sort of the same way that we are.

C. Derick Varn: 19:16

It's a kind of a fascinating script that that was written here and it's sort of like yeah, like metacognitive in a lot of ways yeah, I mean when the character of Sarah, for example, the hitchhiker that we mentioned, is also his and it's played by BB Anderson in both cases. But the name is also invoking of his childhood, our young adult not quite sure where you would put it in his life, love, who comes up in a lot of these reminiscences in the beginning, but who you know ends up marrying his brother and the casting there. Trying to think of who else does casting like that, where, where, where the double casting definitely plays into reminiscence. I'm trying to think of who Bresson kind of does that sometimes too, but it's, it's, it's very interesting when it's.

C. Derick Varn: 20:23

This is not a movie you can half watch, but but this movie is interesting because most Bergman movies kind of announced themselves and while this is very well shot incredibly well shot actually, when you first start off in the beginning it very much seems like a normal 50s foreign like movie.

C. Derick Varn: 21:00

I don't know how else to say that. It's framed, traditional square framing and all that as you watch the movie and the dreams and reminiscences and their being on the road plays more and more into it. It's not. The framing starts to change and I think that's actually really really interesting and that's in addition to how well it's acted and that the script is layered. I mean it's incredibly layered with the dreams and the reminiscences and both kind of nearly like things that seem coincidental on the trip that end up bringing up specific memories. It is kind of fascinating because this is all done through very good framing and very good writing, but you could imagine someone getting the script and being like nothing's happening and yet too much is happening at the same time. They're just going from Stockholm to Lund, like it's not that big a deal, but it's fascinating and it's a movie that I think also that I've really appreciated watching multiple times because of the subtlety of the acting here and you expect that with Ingrid Thulen and Bibi Andersen, because Bergman always gets amazing performances out of them.

Shalon Van Tine: 22:41

But yeah, ingrid Thulen. So a lot of people usually mention Bibi Andersen or Liv Ullman when they're talking about Bergman's actors, but Ingrid Thulen doesn't get mentioned as often. But she should be, because she's amazing actress. And I'll just say as a side note, I usually don't care about how good actors and actresses are, they're the least important in cinema, in my opinion, to a film.

Shalon Van Tine: 23:12

But in Bergman's case the actor does play a major role in his movies. And so Ingrid Thulen what's especially interesting about her role in this film and how she plays it and she also plays similar characters in other films by him these sort of cold, repressed kind of characters that are very sharp around the edges, I guess she could say so. She kind of works as like an unexpected parallel to the professor Isaac, the main character in this film, as they're both kind of cold and have trouble creating relationships with people and both of them are dealing with this sense of guilt. So guilt is a main theme in this film, as in most Bergman films, and I so both of these characters and yet he is old, she's young, they don't technically have anything in common other than the fact that she's a daughter-in-law, right.

Jordin Dubin: 24:27

Yeah, she's carrying his progeny.

Shalon Van Tine: 24:30

Right, right right. And so the name will become once he passes away, yeah, and so there's this guilt for wanting to abort the child and he's feeling all this guilt about living a life that he doesn't think that was actually deserved. So she does a great job of playing these kinds of characters who have a lot going beneath the surface but is very cold and icy on the surface.

Jordin Dubin: 25:06

Probably I prefer their own good as well, because often implied she's certainly not a one-dimensional female character.

Shalon Van Tine: 25:14

No for sure. I would say probably one of the best roles where she does this kind of thing is in the movie the Silence that I mentioned earlier. That was sort of that Kubrick sort of loosely adapted into the shining. I say loosely, of course, but in the Silence the Silence to Give a Quick Plot overview of that film that came out in 1963,. It's about these two sisters and one of them has a son and one sister.

Shalon Van Tine: 25:55

Ingrid Bullen's character is incredibly. She has some kind of serious illness and the other sister is Well, I'll say Ingrid Bullen has a serious illness and she's extremely cold and she sort of cringes at warmth and connectedness to other people. Yet her sister is much more promiscuous and goes out and has sex and kind of rubs it in her face and she's much more emotionally outward. And then you have this child who's sort of stuck in the middle between two sisters in a big sort of empty hotel and kind of meets all these characters along the way and sort of observes this relationship between these two sisters, one who's cold and sickly and bitter, and then the other who is warm and motherly and sexual. But Bullen does this part so incredibly well and there's even a really sort of jarring scene at the beginning of this film and again, I'll note this came out in 1963.

Shalon Van Tine: 27:23

I think there's ever been a film before this time period that had a scene like this, where Bullen's character, you know she masturbates on screen and it's like this sort of it's not a sexy kind of masturbating, we have this. It's almost sickly Like she's angry at her sister. There's a sort of incestuous tension between them and to sort of piss her off, the other sister kind of throws her sexuality in her face and then Bullen like runs off to her room in the very second scene of the film like masturbates, but it's like veryit's not sexual, it's almost like a release of anger, exactly, and it's like that but it's. And then she's also this like seriously ill I don't think we ever learn what it is, I'm guessing like tuberculosis or something. She's coughing up blood. But she also drinks heavily and smokes heavily.

Jordin Dubin: 28:34

She's accused of having the same euphoria issues that her father passed away with in that movie as well. I think there's a sort of hinted bipolarity there. Oh right, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 28:47

I feel like that comes up a lot and it's also, I mean, the context for the silence is, you know, they're at some vague war, at some vague, unstated Central European countries, so like nobody can really communicate except for those two either.

Shalon Van Tine: 29:06

Yeah, language plays a major role in that film.

Jordin Dubin: 29:10

And the name has a meaning as well. We should probably say there's apparently only like 34 or 38 lines of dialogue in the whole thing, or exchanges of dialogue rather, and we keep relating to the actress's name because we only get the names of the characters about an hour into the film.

Shalon Van Tine: 29:31

Yes, and the names of the characters are important too, so it's Anna and Esther.

Jordin Dubin: 29:42

And the son is called Johan.

Shalon Van Tine: 29:44

Johan, yeah, so yeah, language does play a major role in the silence. It's like you said. There's not much dialogue. Much of it, ismuch of the emotions, are conveyed through visuals and when there is talking often there is, the people speak different languages. So the two sisters are in a hotel, in a fictional place that they don't speak the language of the people there. So the one person, one character that you see is this Like a hotel constable yeah.

Shalon Van Tine: 30:28

Who sort of you know takes care of the sixth sister, and they can't actually understand each other yet through this human contact and this, the sympathy that he has for her and the sort of compassion that he has in a sort of parental kind of way Taking care of her, they do end up understanding each other, just without words.

Jordin Dubin: 30:58

Little body language, a bit of scribbling on pieces of paper.

Shalon Van Tine: 31:02

Yeah, and there's sort of subplot too that also plays into this notion about the inability for people to communicate. And the irony there is that Thulun's character is a translator. That's her career, so her career is translating languages, yet nobody can actually communicate with each other, even though they're all basically in the same room, in the same place.

Jordin Dubin: 31:37

They just refuse to speak to one another, even at a certain point, and use Johan as a bit of a go-between.

Shalon Van Tine: 31:43

Yes, yes, and of course there's always something that will transcend language in Bergman films and that's going to be Bach. So Bergman is hugely into Bach. It's his favorite composer. You'll hear Bach in pretty much at least half of his films. So there's a moment in the silence where they play Bach's Goldenberg variations on maybe a record player, maybe it was the radio, and there's a moment where all the characters, the tensions between the characters, just momentarily subside while Bach is playing. And it's almost as if Bergman is making the point that when you can't communicate through everyday language and the inability to communicate through an everyday language, the one way that you can communicate is through music, and that music sort of transcends those miscommunications that come through with the word.

Jordin Dubin: 32:56

Yeah, the word is something that's often, uh, cast a lot of doubt upon by characters or just even in the script itself, through a lot of his films. Words aren't good for much. Words do not express true meaning, they can be used to hide one's actual feelings or intentions, or oftentimes characters lack the correct words, whether it be in another language or in their own, to communicate something. But Bergman really believed that artists, especially musicians, had an ability to express what is inexpressible, what is inconceivable otherwise, to give us sort of shards into higher planes. And he was searching for that, the answer to the question why does music exist? Where does it come from? He asked musicians throughout his whole life and he never seemed to get a satisfactory answer. But he relies upon it really heavily in a lot of films, even in the silence, very little audio going on there beyond a bit of Bach here and there, a bit of war rumblings outside, and then one of his other favorite tropes, which was a ticking clock, of course, which is something that we also have in Wild Strawberries to tie it back. He's obsessed with watches, with grandfather clocks, with clocks on the street, but the sound of the ticking clock is very evocative, obviously, and it's something that's used to fill a lot of sort of empty sound space and just really creates tension, in this movie especially. Yeah, for sure it's interesting too because, like we said before, that the kid's name is Johan and in her inability to even practically say her sister's name to her sister, we only learned it so late on. She won't really call him by name either, and when she's asked what's being played on I think it was actually the record player at that point in time by her sister she says Sebastian Bach. She can't even say the full name, johan Sebastian Bach.

Jordin Dubin: 35:03

There's a lot of repression with the character Esther, but the really interesting thing for me is that whenever she's behind closed doors that repression just comes completely unbottled. She's a heavy drinker. She's laughing and dancing around the room, she's wreaking havoc. She's maybe crying or angrily masturbating or banging on a door later on, but she knows how to compose herself when she's in the company of others.

Jordin Dubin: 35:35

There's another kind of touching and interesting scene in the beginning of the film. You see the closeness of the mother and son. They're very expressive and affectionate, almost incestuous Again, almost incestuous. She tells him to strip naked, to cut into bed to have a nap, but her sister comes in at that point while they're both asleep and she sort of reaches further faces. She wants to caress them, but even then she's so repressed she can't even bring herself to touch them while they're asleep. So it feels like that's a huge part of this movie as well. What can and cannot be touched, who can and cannot be touched, who gets to be touched in the first place? So, whether it's the sister who's going out and finding someone to sleep with at a dark theater or in, I think, in the church, they ended up having sex in the church or just another hotel room, locked away in the same hotel, and Esther can't even get Johann to cuddle with her.

Jordin Dubin: 36:44

Only your mother gets to do that.

Shalon Van Tine: 36:46

Yeah, and of course we also have to think too that many of Bergman's films are very Freudian in the sense that there is a relationship like this with his mother in many of the films, and Bergman in one of his autobiographies talks about how much he loved his mother. He even says that he was in love with his mother and would try to kiss her and she would be kind of like push him away and kind of cold towards him. But then other times, like when he would see her from afar, she would seem warm, and so I think that the character of Johann, that's the son, he's sort of being Bergman here himself.

Shalon Van Tine: 37:37

And there's a scene in the silence where, well, I should say, a lot of scenes in the silence are from Johann's point of view. It's from a child's point of view, sort of looking in on very adult things, and there's lots of scenes where he's sort of looking around the hallway at something or peeping in a room or looking through a peephole While his mother has sex, while his mother showers, things like that.

Jordin Dubin: 38:09

And don't forget the midget actors.

Shalon Van Tine: 38:12

Yes, and the actors. So there's a lot of this very closeness or desire for closeness in a not unsexual way with the mother and son. And then this is also sort of complicated by the fact that both sisters also seem to have or at some point had some kind of incestuous relationship with each other. That has now gone sour, and this sort of incestuous theme comes up a lot, I mean even in Wild Strawberries, to go back to that.

C. Derick Varn: 38:59

Yeah, Sarah is the cousin of Berg yeah.

Jordin Dubin: 39:06

Although I suppose that was a bit Cousin's back then, wasn't he? Less of an issue. Although just to make it even better, yeah, it's incestuous between cousins and she goes for a different brother.

Shalon Van Tine: 39:17

So very much. Yeah, there are multiple films, so one of my favorite Bergman films through the Glass Darkly is.

C. Derick Varn: 39:27

Oh God, yeah, which is the first in the trilogy that silence ends right. Like they're not. This is thematic trilogy, but like it's through Grass, darkly, then Winter Light and then the silence. Those are all.

Shalon Van Tine: 39:42

Yeah, so there's somewhat considered an unofficial trilogy, although I would kind of say personally that the silence looks more like persona.

C. Derick Varn: 39:54

Yeah, I was about to say persona.

Jordin Dubin: 39:56

Yeah, then I would put those two with Autumn Sonata.

Shalon Van Tine: 40:00

Yeah, that's interesting.

Jordin Dubin: 40:01

Yeah, I think I would agree with that there's a lot of even framing, that similar, just in the cinematography. You get all of these beautiful shots very close up, with one of the actresses facing head on the camera and the other in full or three-quarters profile, which was used a lot. Which movie? Well, in the silence you have that at least twice.

Shalon Van Tine: 40:23

You have that persona.

Jordin Dubin: 40:25

And you have that in Autumn Sonata when the mother and daughter are playing piano, does it?

C. Derick Varn: 40:29

come up in through a Glass, darkly I mean, I will say a lot of his 60s films about women. I mean, we talk about this quote trilogy, but I actually kind of want, Maybe this is bad, but I kind of lump them all thematically together. Yeah, I mean it's not unfair.

Shalon Van Tine: 40:51

And yeah, like you were saying, the famous persona scene where you have one actor's half-face split with the other actor's face, he did that first in the silence before persona, and that's been. Filmmakers have given homage or ripped that off or whatever you want to call it that particular thing like dozens and dozens of times. I'll just point to a very recent film that people might have seen Celine Schiama's Portrait of a Lady on Fire is very heavily drawn from Bergman and persona, but yeah, through Glass, darkly. It is a very, very, very important, but it actually has an incestuous scene between sister and brother where it's not just insinuating, nope it happened in real time.

Shalon Van Tine: 41:48

So I do wonder, I guess, if you're growing up in Sweden, isolated, and how else do you get?

Shalon Van Tine: 41:59

so blonde early 20th century, you don't have anything to play with, maybe. Yeah, so yeah, but that theme does exist throughout. But I think also there's more to it than that, just the sort of salaciousness of that. I mean, bergman is very concerned with familial relationships and how familial relationships are not only the most important relationships but also the most toxic and the most damaging to your entire psyche and how so much of your Like I said, it's very Freudian so much of what happens in your childhood and these little moments that happen in your childhood and things seen through the eyes of a child are sort of compounded in a weird way when you're an adult, and so I think Bergman understood this on a very visceral level, which is seen in these ways that these uncomfortable relationships form between siblings, between parents and children, and so forth.

Jordin Dubin: 43:06

Yeah, I have to add on to that, having just watched a really interesting documentary that was made about four years, I believe, before he passed away, called Bergman Island, with a Swedish documentarian who went and interviewed him and got some really interesting sort of candid moments, things he hadn't said before. He really speaks about his relationship with both of his parents, but specifically his mother, which I think is the more formative one as he touched on. He only longed for her. He was very affectionate, he wanted to be touched and held and he always wanted to touch and caress and while she was happy and their home was happy, she didn't want that from him and he was also a big crier. Apparently he really did hide under tables.

Jordin Dubin: 43:58

There's a bunch of Fanny and Alexander scenes that he really draws very much from his own personal life. But he was seen as overly sensitive, overly attached, overly affectionate, and at one point she takes him to a pediatrician complaining of all of this and the doctor understands her and says well, you've got to wean him off of this affection stuff and the crying. You know he's not a little girl, he's a little boy. He needs to be raised into a young man. So that just cemented this massive chasm of distance between them and certainly didn't do anything for the lifetime of longing that he had.

Jordin Dubin: 44:39

And this really comes through in basically every familial relationship that he shows, and even interpersonal ones between lovers to some degree. But the other side of that is that, of course, how you're treated as a child, the kind of parenting that you are subject to, is often what you subject your children to, and, as we were speaking before, the show that the man had nine children by several different wives. So he wasn't, you know, any stranger to abandoning or creating distance between them, and he didn't find himself to be a particularly talented father. He was a lazy family person. It was the last thing on his mind. So as his film career goes and expands, he starts to reflect on his own parenting style, and again that comes up in a number of films. But so the guilt goes both ways, as it often does, and I think another thing that needs to be added to guilt, which is pretty core both to the silence is and others and many others.

C. Derick Varn: 45:51

Basically, Silence, persona through grass darkly winter white.

Jordin Dubin: 45:55

Out of sonata humiliation yeah, often very humiliated. His father yeah, his father did the whole. You know I'm smacking you because I love you thing. Now kiss my hand Also again. Very fanny and Alexander and Esther in the silence talks about. She's not jealous, she's not angry, she's none of this, she's just humiliated. Everything makes her feel belittled and he felt belittled His whole youth as well. And it comes through in so many characters and you know, being humiliated makes you behave in.

Shalon Van Tine: 46:31

Yeah, there's sort of jumping on that, and also what Derek mentioned earlier about how how Bergman views women.

Shalon Van Tine: 46:40

And it's kind of funny considering that you know he he was married like five times he that's not including his mistresses.

Shalon Van Tine: 46:50

You know most of his main actresses he had relationships with at certain points and but so you know, and you know, I'm assuming and we can assume through what he said and what others have said, that you know they were not peaceful relationships, they were full of full of drama and heartache and humiliation, and but the sort of irony there is that I can't think of any other director that has so perfectly captured femininity and and and you know what it's like to be a woman and dealing with those very particular kinds of things that you typically many directors aren't very good at portraying, and and that is in part due to the fact that, like his actresses were amazing, but but there's also this awareness that Bergman has that makes him very good at capturing the depths of the female psyche, which is that he knows he was not a good husband.

Shalon Van Tine: 48:04

He knows all these things and that's why he's working out a lot of this guilt in this way through his films. And so one of the best directors of women happened to be not very nice to nice, nice to women and, sort of told, at a young age that he was becoming one.

Jordin Dubin: 48:25

Yeah, I think he really identifies and uses women to act out a lot of act out a lot of his own feelings that that don't make sense for men to have. I mean, he often makes men incredibly egotistical, weary of women, even misogynistic in a lot of ways, and I think that he's far, far more sympathetic and happy to show elements of his own psyche through female characters.

Shalon Van Tine: 48:50

Yeah, so his, his male characters are typically a sort of exaggeration of himself. I believe, and it's you'll, you'll see that, like in most of his films, his male characters, they they're egotistical because they're actually insecure or you know they're, they act out in you know machismo ways because they're actually, you know, very fragile terrified yeah.

Shalon Van Tine: 49:19

Yeah, so it's this. This, the way he portrays masculinity, is in very similar ways to his understanding of women, which he seems to understand the women's point of view so well, because he portrays these men as being very horrible in many ways.

Jordin Dubin: 49:41

Well, why don't we take it to the seventh seal? I think this is a great tie in that because he. Yeah right, he said that Max von Siedau and Gunnar Bjornstone kind of represented different sides of himself there, as they were playing two different characters.

C. Derick Varn: 49:57

It's interesting to me. I mean, one of the things about Bergman I think if we're going to talk about movies is famous for it's actually what we would consider his there, well, what we in America would consider as early movies, although that's a good 15 years into his film career, because he starts making movies in 1944. But is you know the seventh seal, and we've already mentioned wild strawberries. But those are the two, those are the two kind of male movies. And then you get the other thing he's really known for is the Virgin Spring, which I think he's kind of known for as much for its being remade and used as a as a backdrop for all these exploitative 70s films, and that as as much for the film itself. But the seventh seal is interestingly a very male movie and it's also one of the only movies where I feel like the women are. You might disagree with me, but I actually I don't feel like the women in this, in our full characters, but it's deliberately so.

Shalon Van Tine: 51:05

Yeah, I mean you've got Seven Seal, I mean, is in many ways almost a comedy, which is kind of funny to say considering the themes, but it's actually one of his more lighthearted films, even though it's the one that he's kind of known for.

Shalon Van Tine: 51:22

Totally agree, kind of dark.

Shalon Van Tine: 51:24

But yeah, it is deliberate because it's almost set up like a medieval morality play.

Shalon Van Tine: 51:31

We're dealing with a theme out of, or a scene out of, the Middle Ages, where you have for those who haven't seen it, seven Seal 1957, one of Bergman's most famous films.

Shalon Van Tine: 51:46

Essentially, the idea is you have a knight who's been fighting the Crusades and has become disillusioned and has a crisis of faith and he meets death and in order to try to prevent death at least from happening to his friends, he gets into a game of chess with death. But throughout the whole film is really focused on this crisis of faith and the silence of God and in many ways it's kind of set up with the sort of stock characters that would be in a medieval morality play. I mean, there are the theater troupe is essentially kind of a holy fool kind of character who has a vision of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child, but him and his wife and their child are sort of supposed to represent the holy family and anyway. So yeah, that is deliberate. I think that's why these characters aren't as psychologically developed, I think, as some of his later stuff even though that doesn't take away from how great the movie is.

C. Derick Varn: 53:10

So it's a great film, and I think it's, but I think the only two characters who are like character characters is Max Von Seedow and maybe just and the Squire, and that's it right, and it does seem like.

Jordin Dubin: 53:25

I love him the Squire yeah, he's my favorite.

C. Derick Varn: 53:32

And I guess death is actually pretty well for, yeah, death.

Jordin Dubin: 53:36

The farm cry. Actually, well, no doubt about that. He said that, you know, death is something that he thought about every day of his life. He was constantly afraid of death and, in you know, this sort of constant torment, he decided to put it into a film, and so that's why he chose to have death as a main character, who comes very, very early on something that needs to be confronted all throughout and who can barely be evaded. But he is just a fantastically funny character. We've got him in that Very clever.

C. Derick Varn: 54:14

Everything about that movie is so much more funny than you think it should be.

Jordin Dubin: 54:18

Absolutely yeah. I mean, you've got the theater troupe, which again goes back to a theme that we spoke about early on, just like the centrality of performers and artists. You've got this traveling troupe. It's kind of doing a story within a story. They're doing a play within a play here. They're untouched by evil things, even as they're going through a countryside that's stricken with plague.

Jordin Dubin: 54:47

One of the actors is just about his body, as you can get. He's getting into fights with the locals because he's running off with their wives, but you have the sort of you know Mary Joseph and baby Jesus characters going on in there. Then I think I guess we have to say a little bit about this movie as well, is that he had written it before and it was rejected, and not until a Smiles of a Summer Night one in Khan did the film get taken up. Then he could kind of do whatever he wanted because he was already on a roll of so much success. But he also said that no one interfered with his work after that film. So Seventh Seal is just like a super high point. And he also says that it's at a point in time where people stop really critiquing his work. He can't get any honest opinions. Everyone's already falling all over it, which is pretty funny.

Shalon Van Tine: 55:46

But but that go ahead. I was just gonna say that theme of death, you know, besides being a character, of course, plays throughout that whole movie. And you know there's even this wonderful little bit which is something that is in all of Bergen's films. He often has these great little side bits that you know.

Shalon Van Tine: 56:12

Anyway, there's this great bit where the squire is talking with someone who is painting the dance of death scene on a wall and they're both very dismissive of the religious fervor that is happening in response to the Black Death. And I can't remember if it was the squire or the painter who said it, but they were. You know he was asking why are you painting, you know, all these scenes of death when there's like death all around you? And the painter is, he said something along the lines of well, you know, a skull is actually more interesting than a naked woman, like, and I think that kind of says something about how Bergman, you know, we know that he, the theme of sexuality and women and relationships with women is a major theme for Bergman, but I think death is also a little bit trumpet Nothing sexier than death.

Jordin Dubin: 57:15

I was wondering what you were saying.

C. Derick Varn: 57:17

It's. This movie is, you know, probably the most pastiche. But it's interesting because you bring up that scene, because I was thinking when I saw this movie I actually saw it rather late, because I don't know why I waited so late to watch the seventh seal. I guess maybe because I'd seen it pastiche so much I thought I kind of already knew it.

Shalon Van Tine: 57:38

And I didn't think it was gonna be funny.

C. Derick Varn: 57:41

Yeah, partly because Bill and Ted, but that scene actually does, interestingly, remind me of scenes in Tarkovsky, particularly in Andre Rougalab, when Andre Rougalab was talking to the Greek and the Greek guy by Compaigner. But I find it interesting because, like, the point of the scene is almost complete, completely opposite. And we know, I don't, we know how much Tarkovsky, le Bergman, and we also know that this film came out about nine years before Andre Rougalab was released. But it is interesting because that's one of the few times in a Bergman movie where I feel like there's there's an actual dialogue going on between two directors. That's a lot more conscious. Yeah, yeah.

Shalon Van Tine: 58:29

I think Andre Rougalab was Bergman's favorite Tarkovsky film, so I'm sure that he's picking up on that. And and yeah, I can't you know both Tarkovsky and Bergman loved each other. They were each other's favorite directors. Sure, and I'm gonna butcher this quote, so forgive the paraphrase, but you know Bergman said something somewhat poetic about Tarkovsky's films, which is that you know Bergman himself tried to. You know that Tarkovsky captures the world of dreams, but Bergman's only ever been able to, like, knock on its door or something like that.

Jordin Dubin: 59:09

Again, I'm butchering the quote.

Shalon Van Tine: 59:10

But so yeah. So it doesn't surprise me that there are direct homages to Bergman's work in Tarkovsky's film.

Jordin Dubin: 59:20

That's really funny. I love that scene between Jöns and the painter. I mean, if you consider both of the roles, one has just returned from a crusade, so in service of God in one way or the other. The other is painting inside of a church and neither of them seem to have much by way of faith or belief. They're full of doubt and at the end of the day, it's not that they come to some sort of agreement or understanding or one offers a solution or an answer that's better than the other. They just decided to get drunk on Geneva instead. So hey, why not?

Jordin Dubin: 59:57

But apparently I mean that scene has to be pretty. It is. It has to be pretty central to his conception, beyond just conjuring up this image of death playing chess, because the whole idea came to him when he would visit churches with his father in Uplan and he saw a painting on the wall of a nave these vault paintings by a very famous ecclesiastical painter called Albertus Pictor, and it was literally just a picture of death playing chess with the knight. And that's where he got the idea for the seventh seal from.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:37

It's kind of crazy how much I don't want to spend too much time on the seventh seal, but how much it gets referenced even contemporaneously. I mentioned Tarkovsky, but I actually also have to mention Roger Corman, because the dance of death scene which finishes the end is clearly kind of ripped off in Mask of the Red Death in 1964.

Jordin Dubin: 1:01:02

So I haven't seen that.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:01:03

I mean don't forget Woody Allen.

Jordin Dubin: 1:01:06

Love and Death. There's an entire last scene.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:01:09

That's basically a comedic version of that. That's the one, woody Allen left to Bergman yeah. Yeah, woody Allen's favorite directors were Bergman, fellini and probably the Marx Brothers.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:26

Yeah, that makes sense, Actually it's a pretty potent trio right there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:30

That tracks. It's interesting to me when we talk about these 50s movies, because I think the 50s to 60, because, like I mentioned, I think, the three most famous movies by Bergman that I saw A because they were released by the Criterion Collection first. B because they were referenced so much as Wild Strawberries, seventh Seal and I put off them so forever and the Virgin's Ring, because Virgin's Ring was remade as an exploitation movie by Wes Craven, last house on the left, but it's those movies are referenced a lot, but we were talking about the movies from what I think is his peak period, which is 61 through like 74. And what I think is interesting about the three movies that we're mentioning from this early period Seventh Seal, wild Strawberries, and we haven't talked about Virgin's Ring. I guess we do kind of have to talk about it, but like Throw that in there.

Jordin Dubin: 1:02:38

now let's go through the relevant themes, same answers.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:42

Yeah, those are the, but those are the male movies. For me, like these are the movies about, like Min and male reaction and how messed up it can be, even though, you know, and since it's a morality play, the Seventh Seal kind of breaks up the man into many different characters and then we have the regretful, you know, man approaching that from Wild Strawberries and the Virgin's Ring you got the avenging father character, which everything is also still really messed up and I mean it's and I guess the other men there are like rapists.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:26

so yeah, I mean it's.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:03:31

The masculinity thing. Yeah, I agree that, like his later stuff, tends to focus more on a female perspective, and I keep coming back to Through Glass Darkly. But there's to give a brief summary of Through Glass Darkly, it's essentially, you know, you have a woman who has an illness. That I believe is schizophrenia. But I can't believe if they mentioned that it was schizophrenia.

Jordin Dubin: 1:04:05

I think that was a diagnosed even yes, okay.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:04:09

And it's essentially how the men around her sort of deal with her. There's her father, there's her brother, there's her husband and although the central focus is on her, her name's Karen. The central focus is on Karen and there's an interesting bit where, well, and all the men in this movie are emasculated. So the introduction to the movie. You see basically all the men together and they're kind of having a machismo, masculinity contest with each other over something silly and you learn throughout the whole movie that all of these men are emasculated in some way.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:05:04

For instance, the father wants to be, he's a novelist, and he really just wants to be a writer for the prestige of it, not because he's like a true artist and he feels guilty, because he's sort of using his daughter's illness as a way to give him some ideas for writing a novel. Her brother, for instance, is like sexually repressed and sort of confused, and Karen sort of toys with them and plays on that, on those insecurities. So the main person in this movie, Karen, who is the one that is actually tortured, she's has this awful illness and there are scenes there that could be straight out of a horror movie. So I'm sure that you guys want to talk about that aspect of Bergman as well. But really, for her to reach the pure sort of artistic self, it means the death of masculinity in this movie. And so you guys want to talk more about what's going on.

Jordin Dubin: 1:06:23

Her husband's emasculated because he can't really be much help to her in one sense. Yeah, I was thinking of that, and on the other yeah, go ahead.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:31

No, go ahead, finish that up. Oh, I was just gonna say.

Jordin Dubin: 1:06:33

On the other she starts having these wild visions of having sexual relations with her. She's having sexual relations with a spider god, so even in that sense he's not needed in her life.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:47

One of the things that I find interesting about this movie that I noticed when I was rewatching the stuff to prepare for this, is that the Egress Darkly comes out in 61, the Virgin Spring comes out in 60. And the only reason I was gonna bring up the Virgin Spring is because that character, the daughter who is raped and killed his name is Karen.

Jordin Dubin: 1:07:11

Caudian? Yeah, that's, I think, his mother's name.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:14

Yeah, and it comes up. Yeah, it's his mother's name and this comes up twice in like a year.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:07:21

There's certainly more Caudians in later films there is yeah, Bergman does just a side note, but Bergman does have a short film called Karen or Korean, and about his mother, which is just a bunch of photographs that she sort of. It's a short, like five minute, 10 minute film, but a bunch of photographs of her and then she kind of like fades over time. It's not really I wouldn't run out and watch that first or anything, but just mentioning it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:55

Yeah, it just seems interesting to me that both of these like sacrificial women figures well, one's a girl and then sacrificial women figure are come out in the same year, I mean within a year of each other.

Jordin Dubin: 1:08:14

I think Virgin Spring won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1960 and then Glass-Darkly the next year also in Oscar, yeah, next year.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:27

It's interesting. I can't. I'm not quite sure what I make of both those characters having his mom's name, but it does not seem unimportant. And with Bergman it's also really hard. For I was talking about how, like all the 60s movies, when they're like well, these three are thematic trilogy and I'm like I feel like all the 60s movies are thematic, like it's just. I mean because through Glass-Darkly and like it's easy to rate, like the three that are supposedly a thematic one, but also we mentioned the high overlap between the silence and persona. But through Glass-Darkly and the mental illness in it and persona are also clearly related. That's so.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:09:25

So in Bergman's mind, I believe he would make the argument that others have made as well, that mental illness, or more generally, insanity, is the closest to the purest form of artistic or philosophical realization, however you want to call it, or even just being in touch with reality.

Jordin Dubin: 1:09:50

Yes, you have some sort of grasp on planes of existence that are out of our reach. People who claim to understand what's going on in front of their eyes tend to get nothing. I mean, I think that's part of what the title says, right Like through a Glass-Darkly is from a quote in Corinthians, where we're looking as through a Glass-Darkly and Glass is a weird translation it was the mirror, and obviously they didn't have Glass mirrors in the days of Paul, so that was like a bronze, a piece of metal that was highly shined up. You can't really see well, but he says that at the end times we'll all see clearly.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:10:29

Yeah, and here we have this, you know, like glimpse into how dark Bergman's psyche is, because in through Glass-Darkly, towards the end of the film, karen's illness has gotten so bad that you know it's hard for her to control her. I don't know if you want to call them visions, but for episodes, but she has these moments where she's almost like in a trance and she's seen God. But the darkness there is that God is essentially a spider, an awful spider that wants to rape her.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:14

Yeah, big rabies spider.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:11:16

And so it's this like abyss spider and she's like connected with it in this very sort of like yellow wallpaper kind of way. Yeah, and I think the very last words of the film, if I remember correctly, is she says something like Father Spoke to Me, or something, and so, yeah, I think there's a direct connection there that Bergman makes between the insanity and revelation.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:51

Yeah, in these 60s movies there's so many elements of horror movies, and sometimes I think it's because horror movies are ripping Bergman off, but there is the fact that they kind of culminate in Bergman actually making a horror movie. So the Hour of the Wolf is a horror movie flat out Like.

Jordin Dubin: 1:12:09

Totally.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:11

You know, it's it totally is.

Jordin Dubin: 1:12:13

It's got some weird stuff too, Like I think there was a bit of a special effect there that kind of made me go whoa, how did he do that?

Jordin Dubin: 1:12:22

actually it was probably very simple and do it cheekily At the time, but yeah, that movie was straight up scary. Like again, we have nightmares, dreams and reality intertwined in a way that's kind of imperceptible. What's really going on? Interpersonal, like relationship, violence, shit going on in the world around you, this interesting juxtaposition in that way, inner and outer lives, and all of that being fearful of your neighbors and shut away on an island. That was filmed on the Faroe Island where, through a glass, darkly was as well. That was actually his first film there and that's when his whole love affair started with the place where he ended up living and dying as well.

Jordin Dubin: 1:13:17

It's a ton of films, so Seclusion, man in Silence, all of this. But yeah, I think there is an element of terror that's woven pretty subtly and then very explicitly through a glass darkly.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:13:35

Well, I would just add that if you're someone who likes horror films but you have not seen Bergman, then you are missing out on true horror Totally.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:13:46

Because, nothing is more horrific than staring deeply into the abyss, and Bergman does not need to rely on gimmicky body horror stuff, although there are many elements of that in his movies. He doesn't need to rely on gimmicky shock stuff that a lot of horror directors do rely on. Instead, he just places us within the darkest parts of our psyche and lets that just be the most horrific thing as it is.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:26

I've got to say Persona and Hour of the Wolf. If you see this and you like we mentioned David Lynch and I'm like well, basically, if you take the movie Sunset Boulevard, the American Hollywood movie, and then you blend it with Persona and Hour of the Wolf, you have most of the late David Lynch movies.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:14:45

Right, I mean Mahal, and Drive is kind of a rip of Persona.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:50

Yeah, and so is Lost Highway.

Jordin Dubin: 1:14:53

I literally think that Lost Highway, the character there is so obviously the character of Death from Seventh Seal, Like just they're identical physically.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:15:04

So one film that if you are into horror and you wanna see that in a Bergman film, definitely watch cries and whispers.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:14

Oh.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:15:14

God, yeah, cause that one's rough.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:19

That was good. Like that's a movie that you feel dirty after watching.

Jordin Dubin: 1:15:23

Yeah, for sure. Also Sprinkle with Incest, might we add.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:15:27

Oh, yes, a lot, so common theme. But yeah, watcha cries and whispers. One of his later films from the 70s it, I believe it's 1972, there are scenes in that movie that are just hard to watch, and it's not because there are. It's like bloody or gory or anything like that, like what you typically expect in that kind of, you know, horror genre. No like blood's curdling. Yeah, the screams that just don't stop and it's sort of relentless and I can't really describe how it's horror, but it is absolutely horror.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:13

The dream sequences do involve zombies, but-.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:16:17

That's true. Okay, I know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:21

But like no, I mean-. Tennis, Thence not like a, you know, TV version of a zombie, but Agnes dies of cancer and then she shows up in Dreams. It's so horrific that, just to put it into like historical perspective, it was distributed by Roger Corman in America Like, which is kind of hilarious that was at his roster, because that name doesn't mean anything.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:48

Okay, roger Corman is the guy who made all like the Edgar Allen Poe movies from the 60s. He was basically the like 50, 60s horror guy. So if he's distributing the movie, it's actually kind of because it's. They were literally marketing it to both the like foreign language art house world but also to the horror world and to Sick.

Jordin Dubin: 1:17:16

Fox, that makes sense.

Jordin Dubin: 1:17:18

Actually, I wanted to tag something else onto the Lynch connection, which kind of occurred to me again while listening to a series of interviews with Bergman. Otherwise it seems that they have a very similar creative process and I had certainly heard David Lynch say this earlier on. But he would get struck with an image in his head, something that he was really dedicated to materializing. It didn't have to have any particular meaning, and I think with Lynch, the merrier, the better you can read in what you like. Maybe he doesn't even have his own meaning behind it. But with Bergman he would also be struck with an image, but he would then build a whole world around it, and with cries and whispers. He was struck with an image of a red room in a large castle, in a sort of distant place, and a couple of women, all wearing white, and they were speaking, but he couldn't hear what they were saying, but they clearly had something to say.

Jordin Dubin: 1:18:24

And yeah, there's no one to give them a voice and the same thing with through a Glass, darkly. He was struck with the thought of the Orkney Islands not Farrow at this point he had to settle for less when it came to budget there. But he just had this vision in his mind of four people rising out of the sea, and that's exactly how it begins. And so he made these male characters in competition, like Shalyn had mentioned before. But he touches on a number of moments where it's just this itching sort of idea that comes as a vision that he wants to express. And he managed to get such an incredible ensemble of actors who so believed in his genius and were willing to try to play it out to his liking. And he was such a strong script writer that you could just start with an image and then build everything out around that. And I think Lynch comes in a very similar vein, but he takes it in a slightly different direction.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:26

Yeah, is this interesting? Because, again, I keep on mentioning the movies that I would pair together. But we mentioned the formal trilogy, but I think that there is like a quadrulegy of women at war movies which you could have, starting with the silence and then for Sana, then Autumn Sonata and then this and then Autumn Sonata, which are all about like I mean because in those movies men, now boys, may be important but men are not really that important at all in those movies. It's in. You have like women who have some kind of relationship that has clearly soured. In all four of those movies and a couple, it's hard, I'll admit, I don't entirely know what's going on in Persona the whole time. I'm not gonna lie about that. I'm not gonna lie about that.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:20:25

Although so Bergman Persona is probably Bergman's opus I would say Totally, and so if you're someone listening who hasn't watched Bergman, that's probably the film to watch. If you're just gonna watch one Bergman film, it does not have a-.

Jordin Dubin: 1:20:45

Which is a dumb idea, by the way. Right, only gonna watch one. Go with that one.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:20:50

You're not gonna have us three. Tell you how to watch all Bergman films. What if you only watch one? Yeah, so I mean Persona was. It came out in 1966 and it was one of the first films where he's really starting to experiment with the form of cinema.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:10

Oh yeah.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:21:11

And this you can actually pick up on in the very first scene, the very first scene of Persona has a film camera looking at the audience. I think Godard did something very similar in one of his films, so it turns the camera on the audience.

Jordin Dubin: 1:21:34

He's trying to be a French Nouvelle Vague director, but he ends up just inspiring them even more.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:21:42

Yeah, yeah, because he actually didn't like Godard's work. He found it too intellectual and void of emotion, which is true, they're very different filmmakers. But yeah, and so he's. And then one of the first scenes you see. You see a bunch of flashes of just sort of imagery, one of which is a erection yeah, Somebody's erection, I don't know whose, but it's where a fight goes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:09

Wasn't in the credits. And so this is before we could pause.

Jordin Dubin: 1:22:14

It's just more of like a subliminal thing flashing by.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:22:18

And then you see this big screen with Liv Ollman's face in the movie. She is an actress and you see her son sort of presses hand to the screen. So you have. It's almost as if Bergman himself is sort of reaching into the cinema and just he's about to show you a movie about his love of cinema. There's a similar scene to this in the silence, and I know I mentioned earlier that a lot, you can see a lot of stuff in the cinema. It's the same little boy, by the way, same boy, and in the very first scene, if you remember that, he does the same thing with the passing train. So the train window is framed like a movie screen and he sort of puts his hand up.

Jordin Dubin: 1:23:06

They have the same book as well.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:23:07

They're reading Leman Tove in both of those Interesting but you know there's the plot of Persona isn't really the important part. It's rather simple. You have an artist, Liv Ollman, who is no longer talking. She's gone silent, which obviously doesn't work when you are in theater. So there is a nurse, a younger sort of more talkative nurse, who is supposed to help her through it, and it's just the two of them together in the whole movie after that introductory scene. And well, actually there is one other character, but it's me Gunnar yeah.

Jordin Dubin: 1:23:52

Bernstein which is a husband at some point, but he's blind, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, great.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:23:57

And so you have Ollman's character who doesn't speak the entire time, but then you have Bibi Anderson's character who is nonstop talking. So you have Liv Ollman, who's basically, you know, like a silent id, and you have, you know, bibi Anderson, who is just the super ego, just constantly talking, and then there is a sort of I won't go too much into it, but there becomes a question of, you know, if this is one ideal or if this is yeah, if this is one person and two pieces of one person, or if these are actually two people and it's never exactly clear, you know.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:24:42

So this is one of his first forays into more experimental filmmaking, but, yeah, this is what a success as well.

Jordin Dubin: 1:24:53

I mean, that just got totally wrong so easily.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:57

Yeah, I think about like. Brunel does a similar thing in I forget the movies Discrete Charms of Bouchoise, yeah, but Pergman does it so much better Like.

Jordin Dubin: 1:25:15

And Bergen did like Brunel too.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:17

Yeah, I mean although I do like the movie that just referenced. But like when I saw Persona I was like, oh, I get it. Now I get what's going on in Discrete Charms a lot better. The same token, you know, like I've never come on my definitive interpretation of that film, like of Persona, because I've never made the decision if it's like one mind fragmenting or if it's two things, or, you know, if it doesn't even matter. And we mentioned that it feels like David Lynch, basically, you know, like I said, took Sunset Boulevard and then imposed Persona on it several times Totally and made that movie over and over again at the end of his career.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:03

But I do think that, like the whole, the question of you know which characters are real and who's a projection of parts of the psyche. I mean that's a trick that we have seen many, many times, particularly in melodramatic 90s movies, but it's done so well here. And yet also I do feel kind of mind fucked about the end of that movie. Like it is a movie that it's really hard to explain how it gets under your skin, but it really does. And then also there's just so much of that experimental part of the film and it calls attention to itself as an artifice that's just picked up again by horror directors, by Nine Inch Nails music video directors, like I mean the first part, like closer, is basically a rip off of the beginning of Persona, closer than the music video. So it's just, it's interesting if you've never seen Persona, how much is there? I?

Jordin Dubin: 1:27:18

guess I wanna Dallin. What do you think is a one person split psychologically or two characters?

Shalon Van Tine: 1:27:25

Yeah, I mean, I've never, like you know, said it is definitely this interpretation and I think Bergman would resist that too. I believe that Bergman, you know he said that he actually started to when he wrote Persona it was actually for and BB Anderson before he was gonna have, before he was gonna write this movie called the Cannibals.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:27:58

But then, after you know, working a little bit with Liv Ollman and with BB Anderson, which I believe this was Liv Ollman's first time in his film- I think I'm wrong and I think he just sort of like BB Anderson, introduced Liv Ollman to Bergman and she was notoriously kind of a kind of shy kind of person, kind of quiet, and so she was very intimidated to work with him. And after they started working together, liv Ollman said that you know he was like the best director, that you know like the most sympathetic to actors ever, and you know she had heard all these horror stories about working with Bergman but she was like none of these are true. But once he started working with them he decided to change the film to be more about giving them control over these characters. So I, you know, my interpretation has always been that these are sort of two parts of, you know, of the psyche. You know you have these sort of super ego and id sort of battling with each other. You know, for the ego.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:29:21

And there's also another important aspect of this movie which is performance and what it means to be an actor, what it means to be a performer. And he's also bringing in cinema into this as well, adding a new layer of complication, you know. And so you have this. You have a few layers of that going on here. First, on the most basic level, you have Liv Ollman, who is a performer who can no longer perform, and then you have this connection with BB Anderson, where the two characters somewhat merge together into the same person. You know that split face. But then you also have this fractured personality as well, which I think he represents well with. There's a scene where, kind of in the middle of the film, where the actual celluloid, the actual physical film breaks up and sort of burns apart Like highest tension moment.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:30:34

Yeah, and so you're brought back again to this awareness that this is Bergman. He's an artist, he's making art. What's his relationship with this art? He's making art about artists and their relationship with art through this new medium. So I think there are a few layers there happening that make this film so great, but it is hard to describe without seeing it because it doesn't follow the, you know, typical narrative patterns.

Jordin Dubin: 1:31:03

Sure I will. I think it should be said as well because it's such an interesting. You know his personal experiences in life are such a huge part here. It's incredibly personal because he had been with BB Anderson and living with her for a number of years as they worked together and as he was introduced to Liv Oman, that was the beginning of a new romance and working partnership as well. They ended up having children together. They're one child at least, and it's just so funny to imagine having like a former and a future lover on set together, letting them be who they want to be, maybe the same person, maybe different people.

Jordin Dubin: 1:31:47

And he apparently said that his idea, although he had been working on cannibals, on the script and had already had you know it, cast more or less, he saw a picture of them, or pictures of them side by side, rather, standing in the sun in bikinis, and he had difficulty telling them apart. And that's where the concept for this film came from. So I don't know, I'm kind of torn. I'd like to believe on a certain level that you know, it's multilayered, it can be taken in any number of directions. I shouldn't have a set to take. But I am rather taken with one of the concepts that you mentioned of performer, of the actor and the audience, which is a kind of a barrier that he keeps going through and breaking and reminding us of over and over. You know he has the actors looking into the camera, touching the glass. At one point Liv Olemann takes a picture straight into the camera. Maybe she's looking off into the distance, maybe she's taking a picture of us, of the audience. Time and time again the characters are interacting through a mirror, looking at one another, looking at themselves.

Jordin Dubin: 1:33:04

I like to think that it is a bit of a statement on actors and audiences. Liv Olemann is clearly a narcissist. She's full of self-doubt, she's so consumed by it that she stops talking, but she's still able to manipulate someone who becomes, you know, from a fan of hers, from this sort of parasocial relationship, into something much closer, where Bibi Anderson starts just completely projecting herself on to the actress and to the point where she's becoming her, she licks her blood. There's like that vampiric moment. So I like the concept that they're two people and they're representing the actors and the stage of the world and the spectators and the audience in a way where it just gets so blurry but there's so much psychically that's going on there as well impossible to put aside.

Jordin Dubin: 1:34:07

I think that the ambiguity sexually as well is supposed to be a massive part of it, and he has a particular ambivalence towards reality and fiction and dream that I think it would be unwise to try to put a total demarcation here. That doesn't need to exist. But it is just an amazing movie. It is, I think, also the peak there with Sven Nijkvist where they start to really get into incredible cinematography. On Faro they really discovered the joy of natural lighting and using backgrounds from outside. They really started to abandon the set stage into film in nature more and it's just like if there's only the two characters, then the third character is really the island that they're on, the sea, their proximity to it, everything that's happening outdoors, and it's just beautiful. It's a really, really beautiful film beyond being challenging and innovative in its way.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:35:16

So there's a I can't remember if you mentioned this before we started recording or not, but the film it was a made for TV film he did called the Right, which came out in 1969, which really plays into this notion about what's the role of the performer, what's the role of the artist. Can art ever go too far? And if it does, what does that look like? The Right? For those who are listening, who haven't seen it, it's essentially it's kind of an odd work, kind of high modernist 60s kind of film. It's almost borders on theater of the absurd a little bit. But essentially the plot is you have these three performers who have gotten in trouble with some city that they're in because they've been accused of having a performing and obscene play, and so the scene is just and also maybe tax evasion, yeah right, that seems like sort of tacked on.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:36:26

But yeah, it seems like them being obscene is really the main issue. And you have the and you have this judge who has to evaluate their case and he kind of he evaluates them one by one and he sort of projects his own sort of insecurities onto them and they project their own sexual psychodrama onto each other as well, and then I'll let people watch it so they can see the end. But the key theme there was this notion about what it means to be a performer and what it means to be an artist. And is your art as an artist? Is it just masturbatory? Is it just you using other people, using the audience, to play out your own personal psychological drama, your own personal fantasies, or does art have some larger purpose?

Shalon Van Tine: 1:37:34

And I think that's something that Bergman deals with a lot in his films, and part of the guilt that I think he feels throughout his different movies is not just that sort of familial sexual stuff that has, like this religious baggage on it. But I think another reason that he feels guilty a lot is because he's an artist and because he knows deep down that like being an artist means you are being self-indulgent to a certain extent, and so there's a lot of that worked out in both Persona and the Right, and then, of course, in some of the other films that we've seen too.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:17

Yeah so we're gonna probably wrap this up here. I would also say, since we've talked primarily about his late 50s through 60s run, we did dip into the 70s with cries and whispers. But I would also suggest people watch another two movies that are almost sequels sequels, which is Shame and Passion of Anna, because I think they're both great, I love those. But we might come back and do my few-.

Jordin Dubin: 1:38:46

Didn't even do that. Like we gotta do Autumn Sonata, we gotta come back.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:38:49

I do love Autumn Sonata. It's one of my favorites.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:53

We might come back, because, even though I think the strongest overall period of Bergman's the period we're talking about my personal favorites are two of his TV shows and Autumn Sonata, which is Seen from a Marriage Fannie and Alexander. And then Autumn Sonata and then, I guess, Sarah Bain, which is a sequel to it's his last movie.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:39:17

Autumn.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:17

Sonata yeah well, is it a sequel to Autumn?

Jordin Dubin: 1:39:20

Sonata Sorry, it's Seen from a Marriage. It's a sequel to a Marriage of course it's the characters even.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:24

Right, so we might come back and discuss those, because I mean, two of them are five hours long. Yeah, so Fannie and Alexander.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:39:32

yeah, so we should come back and discuss some of his later stuff. Specifically, I'll just say Fannie and Alexander comes in two forms, so if anyone wants to watch that before we come back to it, there's a short theatrical version, but I highly recommend watching the five-hour version Now. Watch it like a mini series, you know.

Jordin Dubin: 1:39:54

Yeah, don't watch it crazy Like in four parts.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:39:57

I think it came out initially in four parts. So there's so much more. It's so rich. And then same with Seen from a Marriage. It's. I will warn though, with Seen from a Marriage it is rough. So if you're someone who's not in a good relationship. You probably wouldn't watch Seen from a Marriage right now.

Jordin Dubin: 1:40:19

Apparently that one sparked a wave of divorce in Sweden afterward. That could be a lie.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:40:24

Yeah, I mean when it came out in 1973, there was a uptick in divorce in Sweden and many people did say at the time that it played a role. So whether it did or not, you know who can say.

Jordin Dubin: 1:40:41

but yeah, Shame is one of my favorites and we haven't discussed that and I think we very just tiny bit touched on Winter Light. But yeah, I mean there's no end to what we could discuss, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:57

I think we might come back and do a couple of final and do 70s and 2000s Bergman. 70s and 80s and 2000s Bergman. The 90s is a quiet period for Bergman. You made a lot of TV apparently during that period, but I've not seen any of it.

Jordin Dubin: 1:41:15

So a lot of that was plays as well on TV. Yeah, I mean.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:41:20

Something to keep in mind is that while Bergman is doing all these movies, he's also doing double the amount of plays.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:27

So yeah, he's doing a double yeah.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:41:30

If you want, I can recommend some books, because you know how I always like to recommend books.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:35

Let's do that.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:41:37

So if anyone is looking to read more about Bergman, Bergman actually wrote like maybe three or four autobiographies. I can't remember how many he wrote, but the two that are probably the most referenced of his autobiographies is one film or one book called Magic Lantern, and then another book called Images, my Life in Films. So Magic Lantern is a little bit more about his personal memories, which of course shape all of his films. So they're also about his films too. But Images, my Life in Film talks a little bit more about the movie specifically. So if you want to hear it from the horse's mouth, then those autobiographies by Bergman are good. If you'd rather read a more secondary analysis of him, I'll recommend two films. One is a book by Jesse Kalen which is a frequently referenced book on him. It's just called the Films of Ingmar Bergman.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:42:40

It's just more of a general analysis, but I will recommend one that I don't really hear people talk about as much, by Irving Singer, who was a well-known philosopher. I'm not sure if he's still alive, but he was a well-known philosopher who wrote about all sorts of aesthetics and music and film, and he wrote a book called Ingmar Bergman's Cinematic Philosopher, which is enjoyable to read, and it looks at his films from a more philosophical perspective. Now there is a book that I have not read yet, but I want to, so if anyone has read this one, please let me know if it's good which is a biography of Bergman by Peter Cowie, who's one of my favorite film critics, but I do recommend, if you have a Criterion Collection subscription, peter Cowie's Criterion Commentaries, or Commentaries that he does on Criterion Films, are usually very good.

Jordin Dubin: 1:43:38

So and he's done I literally just finished- watching his video essay on the like intro montage to Persona before this.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:43:49

Oh, awesome, just awesome. Yeah, so I highly recommend his Commentaries. Yeah, that Irving Singer book is out of print.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:56

However, if you ask now, you can find a used version of it for under $100. So maybe I can find a PDF somewhere on the web. There you go, amazing. And if you want to watch a little Tartakovsky to?

Jordin Dubin: 1:44:08

cleanse your palette but still lie very much within the realm. Then go see the sacrifice. Oh yes, you'll like watching. There is a big call.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:44:19

There's a direct homage to Bergman in the sacrifice, but you should watch it and then come back and tell me about it. I will say that when I was online which I am not anymore I used to run this page called Split Screen Cinema, and I've put all of these on my blog now. But before this, before we started recording, we were talking about perhaps having some screenshots for some of these things we were talking about. Is that still gonna happen, Derek, Because I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do that.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:44:56

Because I don't mind providing the screenshots.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:59

Sure, yes, I can put them in the show notes. If you would like to give me some links of screenshots, they can be in the show notes for this episode, cool.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:45:12

Because Bergman's such a visual. I mean, all cinema is ultimately a visual medium and but especially the case with Bergman. So it's kind of hard to talk about his films without looking at a visual of what we're talking about.

Jordin Dubin: 1:45:28

For the silence. With those comparisons that you were making with Kubrick, I think it would make a lot of sense for people to see the show.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:45:37

I actually have a bunch of those already saved, so I can definitely do that and if we wanna put it on the channel for that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:45

Yeah, my, if we can in there. My favorite directors are Bergman, kubrick, pasalini and Tarkovsky.

Jordin Dubin: 1:45:59

Neverson and Tarkovsky.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:46:02

Are we listing our favorite directors now?

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:03

No, I'm just throwing that, but the reason why I brought it up is like almost all of those directors influence each other. Oh yeah, so it's something to consider and, yes, I think we can in the here and we might have a sequel where we talk about our favorite later Bergmans, because I do feel like I will end on this note I do feel like later, post-72, bergmans actually pretty different yeah.

Jordin Dubin: 1:46:35

He seems less concerned with the ambivalence of God and more interested in other things at that point and like terrible relationships. Exactly.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:46:45

So yeah, he seems to have worked out some of that stuff by then.

Jordin Dubin: 1:46:50

But why am I such a bad father?

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:52

All right, and why are all marriages bad? Anyway, and on that note, we won't.

Shalon Van Tine: 1:47:02

On a light note.