ABSTRACT: This paper plots the interrelations of some of the oppositions pervading
the work of Ingmar Bergman, particularly ones between Romanticism and Expressionism,
a Scandinavian cinema and a German one identified with the natural and the stylized
respectively, art cinema and traditional art, masculine and feminine, and face and
mask. In each case, selecting one pole nevertheless leaves the other in play. The
works’ unsettled status reflects their positioning between an art cinema that risks
alienating audiences, and a tradition threatened by inauthenticity. Bergman’s concern
with the dangers of the self’s visibility correlates with themes of shaming and with
the difficulties of the actor’s status, which accentuate those of a modernity characterised
by mobility. One consequence, a simultaneously real and metaphorical feminization
of the male artistic self, entails a dual conceptualization of disappearance, which
oscillates between the positive and the negative. Identity becomes always double,
each face a mask, and vice versa.
RÉSUMÉ: Cet essai retrace les interrelations entre certaines oppositions imprégnant
l’oeuvre d’Ingmar Bergman, plus précisément entre le romantisme et l’expressionnisme,
un cinéma scandinave dit «naturel» et un cinéma allemand stylisé, l’art cinématographique
et l’art traditionnel, le masculin et le féminin, le visage et le masque. Le statut
indéterminé de l’oeuvre reflète leur position entre un cinéma d’art risquant d’éloigner
son public, et une tradition menacée par l’inauthenticité. Le souci de Bergman face
aux dangers de l’exposition du soi correspond aux thèmes de la honte et aux difficultés
qu’amène le statut de l’acteur, accentuant ainsi les dangers d’une modernité caractérisée
par la mobilité. Une conséquence, une féminisation à la fois réelle et métaphorique
du moi artistique masculin, implique une double conceptualisation de la disparition,
oscillant entre le positif et le négatif. L’identité se dédouble toujours, chacun
fait face à un masque, et vice et versa.
This paper discusses some of the oppositions and distinctions
often seen as structuring the work of Ingmar Bergman. That work dissolves those oppositions,
which include ones of tradition and modernity, film and literature, realism and fantasy,
and gender. The distinctions, derived from intellectual or artistic history, suffer
a
similar confounding, the primary ones considered here being those between Romanticism
and
Expressionism, and Scandinavian and German art. (At least one distinction may also
be
conceived oppositionally, Scandinavian cinema having had from its inception an association
with shooting in natural settings, and German Expressionism with sets.) In all cases,
be
it a matter of oppositions or distinctions, I would argue that the richness and
dialectical complexity of his work, places him
fruitfully on both sides. Bergman, therefore, is always double. Consequently, my
discussion is framed primarily in relation to two distinct works within which both
Romantic and Expressionist influences are in play, though the former dominates the
earlier
film, Summer Interlude [Sommarlek], and the latter
is most explicit in the other, Sawdust and Tinsel
[Gycklarnas afton]. I will also consider some other
films incidentally, particularly Hour of the Wolf [Vargtimmen] and To Joy [Till glädje]. First, however, I will posit a general
framework focussed primarily on issues of tradition and modernity.
If art cinema can be defined as suspended between the identification that dominates
mainstream American cinema and the radical self-reference of
modernism (Bordwell), the work of Bergman up to the early 1960s
could well have furnished Pier Paolo Pasolini with a proof-text for his 1964 statement
that art cinema had concentrated on narrative, rather than the more radical and poetic
“free indirect subjectivity” he would discern in Antonioni’s Red Desert
[Il deserto rosso] (Pasolini 1976). Ironically, given his earlier work's apparent allegiance to the
earlier tradition
of narrative-based art cinema, shortly after Pasolini's essay
Bergman would achieve an obvious, if apparently brief, breakthrough to such problematic
subjectivity in Persona. Nevertheless, to some extent the
generalization seems to hold for the films that precede and follow that stupendous
work,
which is linked to its predecessors and successors by its concentration on the image
of
the artist. (The extent to which even those works challenge the generalization will
be
considered shortly.) Bergman’s work and self-image see-saw between different conceptions
of himself as artist: someone who may be a mountebank, because specializing in illusion,
but also aspiring—according to a statement that became notorious—to resemble the artisans
working anonymously on Chartres cathedral. In an interview for Cahiers du
cinéma Bergman quoted Jean Anouilh’s self-definition as an artisan, adding that
this statement was made “to exorcise fear” (1967 16). It seems
to be that, for Bergman, that fear comprises two anxieties about the relationship
between the status
of the artist and the qualities of art: if an excess of tradition may render it clichéd,
inauthentic, too much modernity may lose it its audience. For Bergman, to fail to
satisfy either demand is to fail as an artist. The length and tortuousness of Bergman’s
maturation, the sheer extent of his juvenilia, registers the difficulty of finding
ways of
tying together credibly the modernist and the traditional strands, without glaring
unevenness in texture and degrees of intensity. Such unevenness still menaces Bergman’s
work even
after the first reasonably convincing formulae began to emerge in the early 1950s.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the near-incompatibility of a traditional orientation
towards wholeness and organicism with a modernistic one towards the fragmentary and
the
intense, the failure to unify the two strands completely is almost continual, making
Beckett’s creed of art as failure one to which Bergman could subscribe also. (That
failure, and the difficulty of avoiding it, is one version of the scenario of humiliation
and disappearance that will be my recurrent theme.) This double-bind is why his oeuvre
generates a wide variety of types of works as Protean attempts to achieve a form that
would escape the dilemma, ranging from the apparently more traditional to the overtly
modernist. A Persona may be more obviously modernist, but it is
linked to the more traditional Wild Strawberries
[Smultronstället], for instance through the doubling
between characters or the way each begins with a dream or dream-like imagery (most
obviously so in the pre-credit sequence of Persona). Dressed in
traditionalist garb, Bergman may evoke fear, as in the autopsy sequence of The Magician
[Ansiktet]; but then, like a modernist, almost
self-mockingly Brechtian, he bares the terrifying machinery, showing the corpse as
neither
ghostly nor resurrected but still alive, along with the methods the illusionist has
employed to harrow the soul of the rationalist doctor. At the same time, though,
stage-managing death represents the illusionist’s attempt to control his own fear
of the
real, material demise of which artistic failure is only the shadow. Such fear and
doubling, of course, pervade both Romanticism and Expressionism, whose see-sawing
relationship is that of two key Bergman films of the early fifties, Summer Interlude and Sawdust and Tinsel. I will begin
with the former, more Romantic work.
With Expressionism, and the pre-Expressionism of Munch and Strindberg—to both of whom
Bergman acknowledges debts—the real and imaginary traffic between Germany and
Scandinavia becomes two-way. This movement marks Bergman’s art and life also, which
rediscovers that fin-de-siècle moment.
In Laterna Magica [The Magic
Lantern], he describes his 1934 visit to Germany as a sixteen year-old
exchange student in terms that leave no doubt about the influence of German culture
upon
him, Berlin becoming the stand-in for a city that haunted his dreams (Bergman 1988
131), while his later tax troubles with
the Swedish authorities precipitated a brief exile in Munich, as if it were a home
from
home. Given his self-reproach over his adolescent enthusiasm for the spectacle of
’thirties Germany, and his recurrent doubts about the morality of art, one might imagine
him echoing the Thomas Mann who gave the title “Brother Hitler” to an essay describing
the artistic disposition as inherently suspect. Indeed, the
Swede
named Bergman may well have wondered if he might really have been German, or possessed
a
double nationality, as the name resembles German ones more than it does most Swedish
ones.
Meanwhile in The Serpent’s Egg Liv Ullmann’s Manuela lives
in a Bergmanstrasse, while the protagonists of the early Port of Call [Hamnstad] planned to flee to
Germany. In the end, of course, even Germany is only a symbol of the impossible place
of
refuge and disappearance: at the end of The Serpent’s Egg we are
told that Abel Rosenberg left it and vanished.
German art influences Bergman not just
through the often-noted, often-mocked connection with Expressionism: the affinity
extends
to the German Romantics, and it may be that for Bergman Expressionism enfolds a
Neo-Romanticism—as it did for Lotte Eisner. If this is so, the reason lies in the
focus on
the graphic, on the chiaroscuros of native Northern light and art history, in both
Eisner’s Haunted Screen and Bergman’s oeuvre. Central to that
Romanticism is a sense of nothingness as both promise and threat. If, in Summer Interlude, Marie yearns to disintegrate and vanish into nothing during a
summer night, but Henrik fears nothingness, it is because ecstasy doubles as
self-extinction, eros as thanatos, and imaginative self-transformation bodies forth
self-extinction also. This dual reaction suggest that the transgendering of
autobiographical experience P. Adams Sitney discerns in a later film like Cries and Whispers [Viskningar och rop]
pervades earlier ones also. Nevertheless, the difference in the two characters’ reaction
to that thought of nothingness suggests that attributing it to a male brings it closer
to home than its ascription to a female. Entry into the consciousness of Marie would
represent a doubly
fantastic transformation of, and escape from, Bergman’s own experience, redoubling
the
double who is Henrik. Its embodiment in Henrik would correspond to its really unchanged,
simultaneously persistent actuality. Marie would be a dream-incarnation of living
for and
in an idealized art alone; Henrik’s exclusion from it, meanwhile, would figure art
itself
as exclusion, barren life in a realm of nothing but signs. Henrik is always looking
in at
a primal scene which finds Uncle Erland and Marie together, for all the real impossibility
of their union. (The comedy in Bergman both mocks Henrik’s fear of cuckolding and
reiterates it in another, major key, as Bergman’s women usually mock their men, embodying
and reinforcing, on another level, the castration threat their laughter pretends is
a
fiction.) But, in the dream that is the work as a whole, are not Marie and Uncle Erland
already united, as we learn near the start, even before the flashbacks, that she belongs
to a class of women children call Aunts? Read in Freudian terms, Henrik’s death would
be self-willed; the actualization of fear means there is nothing left to fear, placing
him out of harm’s way in a manner resembling the Frost’s imagined “disappearance”
in the womb in Sawdust and Tinsel (of which more later). Alternatively (as if the scenario itself had been written
by Freud), death would be a metaphorial refiguring or absorption of the castration
threat. Revolving endlessly, each threat—death, or castration—disappears continually
behind the other, the medieval scythe-wielding Death representing both and so being
himself double.
Thus Summer Interlude, like almost all Bergman’s best work
(Shame [Skammen] and The Magic Flute [Trollflöjten]
being possible exceptions), entraps viewers through a pincer movement of fantasy as
realism, and vice versa, occupying a double register. The fusion appears to be rooted
in
personal experience. Although it may not be unusual for someone to describe his childhood
as a period when “det var svårt att skilja det fantiserade från det som ansågs
verkligt” [it was difficult to differentiate between what was fantasy and what was
real] (1987 20; 1988 13), the interference of imagination and the
objective persists well beyond that time. The following sentences, for instance, stem
not
from a character in Cries and Whispers but from Bergman’s own
reaction to the sight of his mother’s corpse: “Jag tyckte att mor andades, att bröstet
hävdes, at jag hörde en stilla andhämtning, jag tyckte att det ryckte I ögonlocken,
jag
tyckte at hon sov och just skulle vakna: vanans bedrägliga lek med verkligheten” [I
thought that Mother was breathing, that her breast was heaving and that I could
hear a quiet indrawn breath. I thought her eyelids twitched, I thought that she was
asleep and just about to wake, my habitual illusory game with
reality] (1987 12; 1988 7). His work does not so much
combine with sovereign ease the two registers of realism and fantasy as refuse ever
to
separate them. Any separation is only ever apparent. This dream-like reality suggests
a
Lacanian-Žižekian Real of death, trauma and exclusion by the
jouissance—though one might prefer other words, less weighted towards the
simply sexual, such as “self-sufficiency” or “inscrutability”—secreted within
the obdurately unreadable gaze.
The possibility of a unification of death, fantasy and the Real is most apparent in
the
image of which this film’s narrative can be deemed the temporal declension: that of
an old
woman in black treading a road near Marie. The way this sequence evolves out of an
apparently banal registration of a sunlit boat-trip exemplifies Bergman’s ability
to grip
viewers with an unexpected intensity through mise-en-scène and surprise:
the surprise of the sudden intensification of winter within a day whose bright sunlight
may have tempted one to see it as non-wintry, even summery, and in any case unthreatening;
the insinuation of cold and mystery in the entry of wind on the soundtrack; and
the dark and unusual
garb of the old woman, whose decontextualized walk makes her a figure more allegorical
than real, anticipating the better-known Death of The Seventh
Seal [Det sjunde inseglet]. The sequence
is, of course, a dream of death, its trees leafless, its skies bleak, allegorizing—even
before the old woman’s appearance—the deadening of Marie’s own inner landscape by
the
contaminating touch of Henrik’s death. The old woman is both Death and the unacknowledged
double of Marie herself: not just “Death and the maiden” but Death as also maiden.
Its function
with respect to the film’s remainder also suggests an anticipatory dark-skied doubling
of
the overexposed dream of Borg in Wild Strawberries. Death anxiety
and castration anxiety intertwine and metaphorize one another to render the real fantastic
and vice versa. As noted, Marie is always already Aunt, always already paired with
Erland,
and so Henrik’s fear is both a paranoia and an archetypal, accurate proleptic vision.
The
threat to love is multiform, lours and leers from one side after another. Again, this
is both paranoia and lucidity. Love is menaced by time, by the imminence of winter,
the
emotional cold caused by devotion to art, the old woman who is another form of time
(Marie’s future self in a nightmare, the two women a double exposure misleadingly
split by
realism)—and also, of course, by Uncle Erland, the father in disguise. (It will take
Summer with Monika [Sommaren med
Monika] —in this sense at least an appendix to Summer
Interlude—to add another, more down-to-earth threat to love: impecuniousness.) All these
elements are of course only illusively separate, as all overlap. The sheer illusiveness
of
appearance seduces: Uncle Erland is only the most obviously masked of the figures.
As so
often in Bergman, person after person is really persona, mask, and the powerfully
overwhelming, carnally present body is also the haunting, spectral absent-presence
of
another. It is as if the close-up
became a recurrent Bergman trope in reflection of an obsessive desire
to check who it is one really has before
one. The Swedish summer night becomes the most seductive, most illusory of all, looking
like day. No wonder it haunts one ‘fifties Bergman work after another, until the 1960s
arrive and the focus incorporates winter explicitly. No wonder Henrik dives to his
death
in a sea that had seemed deep enough, as all is seeming. In other words (and this
is the
rationale for Bergman’s continual return to artist protagonists), all is art. All
is
dream, artifice, metaphor, symbol, displacement, theatre, falsity, however real it
may
seem. Similarly, as he remarked to Cahiers du cinéma, film itself
is a fraud, the black lines between the frames meaning that for every film that lasts
an hour
the spectator in fact spends twenty minutes in the total darkness that is the inner
lining
of light (1967 35). Since there is nowhere where an image seems more
real than in the cinema, Bergman is the reverse of “literary.”
One image that itself thematizes the simultaneity of the real and the fantastic is
a
widely-reproduced one from near the film’s end, showing Marie’s new love David framed
in
her dressing-room’s doorway in the upper part of the image, and the dancing instructor
made up as Coppelius from Tales of Hoffmann framed in a mirror
below. The doubling of David and Coppelius suggests the latter as a fantastic identity
for
the former. Although the one sports that blatant signifier of fantasy, the mask, and
the
other is framed as a reality entering the world of art, the visual echoing contaminates
the two. After all, both figures may be read as puncturing Marie’s solipsistic world
of
mourning, and the old man/young man pairing reiterates the Erland/Henrik scenario
of an
earlier part of the film. It is as if the recognition of their possible similarity
is the
necessary prelude to Marie putting both in the past. Doubling itself suggests both
death
and resurrection, each of which Marie is undergoing. Moreover, it is as if, Marie
being
older, the strength of the opposition of age and youth has faded to the point at which
previous opposites can converge, enabling the work to end.
A similar contamination of the codes associated with realistic and fantastic
representation suffuses
Sawdust and Tinsel, whose debt to
Expressionism is of course more explicit still. Indeed, it may be said that whereas
in
Summer Interlude Romanticism dominates Expressionism, here the dominant is reversed. In other words:
the earlier film subordinates the Expressionist elements to the sense of the shaping
force of
the natural world that pervades both the classic Scandinavian cinema of the early
twentieth century and Romanticism; in
Sawdust and Tinsel, however, as in German Expressionism, nature
itself becomes a set. The humiliation of the clown Frost and his wife Alma near the
beginning may be recounted as a real event, but its Stroheimian harsh visual contrasts
and
overwrought atmosphere leave the viewer
stunned and harrowed, as if indeed disoriented by
a nightmare that prevents one perceiving as real the reality that follows it, making
one
view it numbly and inattentively. Subsequently, and partly as a result of the sense
of
distance created by the echoes of a silent cinema aesthetic, what might seem dreamlike
becomes susceptible of reclassification as a mythical sequence of events in the time
before time: the primal
illud tempus studied by Mircea Eliade
(23-38). Consequently, its fantastic reality bleeds into the
rest of the film, beginning with moments rendered continuous with the opening nightmare
by
a repetition of its percussive, would-be jaunty brass music, connoting both sexuality
and
derision, and a muting of natural sound—when circus director Albert and Anne walk
to the
theatre—and later through the reappearance of Frost, whom spectators may be tempted
to classify as a dreamlike apparition, and/or dead, but who now becomes an Expressionist
double of the cuckolded director, appearing after Anne’s infidelity, as if through
hallucination. Meanwhile, the theatre interiors are de-realised by the repeated low
angles
and by a dizzyingly extensive use of mirrors, which both disorient and direct the
actors’
faces to the audience in a manner that showcases their performances and underlines
an
isolation one is tempted to call Antonioniesque. Thus the spatial set-ups involving
Frans
and Anne suggest that neither is really looking at the other, even when we know them
to be
so doing, but rather that each is using the other—in the case of Anne, really staring
at
a fantasy figure, a metonym of a life she dreams of having. Even the outdoors scenes
feel
not so much natural as allegorical, their recurrent silhouetting creating the illusion
of
an enormous stage which knows no sky but rather a blank backdrop from which nature
has
evaporated.
While discussing the thematic centrality of humiliation to Bergman’s works, Paisley
Livingston cross-references Immanuel Kant’s definition of shame as occurring when
one
discovers that others do not see one as one believes oneself to be
(53). Kant’s remark suggests the particular appositeness of cinema
for investigating such matters. This would render Bergman’s work—despite the well-worn
accusations of “literariness”—well-placed to exploit a central element of the
cinematic one may even dare to designate a “specificity.” The tight fit between theme
and medium extends beyond cinema’s inevitable preoccupation with sight: rather,
the
movement between self and other is that of a cut, and the splicing together of the
person
and their apprehension by the other becomes a negative form of suture. Two shots echo
one
another dissonantly, their inversion affecting meaning as well as perspective. Unlike
the
suturing process so often ascribed to classical Hollywood, here there is no smoothing
of
transitions or implication of fullness of knowledge but rather an Eisensteinian collision
of images. Indeed, Eisenstein may be conjoined with Bergman and Bertolucci in a
triumvirate of anti-paternal cinematic revolt. He may also be invoked appropriately
on the
grounds of Bergman’s fondness for privileging looking by removing or muting natural
sound
and subordinating it to silence, inserting into works like
Sawdust and
Tinsel,
Wild Strawberries and
Hour of
the Wolf dream-like passages akin to quotations from silent films, and played
out with unspeaking protagonists. The shifting point-of-view alluded to by Kant creates
an
implicit doubling, as the feeling that one is not where one thought one was (not accepted,
but outcast) causes one to see—or, rather, project—oneself elsewhere. As the person
in
whom one expected to see one’s own humanity doubled and acknowledged rejects one,
a
punctured unitary selfhood leaks away into a series of metaphorical equivalents, the
most
prominent being the mirror and the mask. The logic of such doubling is summed up in
those
two famous Wellesian
tours de force—Kane’s walk past double mirrors
multiplying his image to infinity, and the mirror-maze finale of
The Lady
from Shanghai. It concludes in the generation of a series in which selfhood
disappears, becoming literally “neither here nor there,” and hence “nowhere.” In
Sawdust and Tinsel, Albert sees the series extend into other
metaphorical equivalents, the images of the clown and the bear. Humiliation being,
as
Livingston points out (53), asymmetrical, Bergman’s interest in
Strindbergian power games, and in Strindberg generally, follows naturally.
As defined in the cultural anthropology of Ruth Benedict,
Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism. A man is shamed either by being
openly ridiculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made
ridiculous. In either case it is a potent sanction. But it requires an audience or
at
least a man’s fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not. (223)
If this is so, Bergman’s heightened sense of shame may have required him to work not
just in
cinema, but also in theatre, where the audience is palpably present. Benedict’s placement
of fantasy and real events upon a single plane is also relevant, as it effaces a
distinction Bergman himself dissolves too. Whatever other factors may have prompted
his
rejection of Lutheran Protestantism, its rootedness in guilt, rather than the more
theatrical shame, was surely one.
Inasmuch as
shame can be linked to a falling between identities, Bergman’s
performer-protagonists are particularly vulnerable to it. Erving Goffman, the pre-eminent
sociologist of everyday life as presentation and performance, once remarked that
“the person who falls short may everywhere find himself inadvertently
trapped into making implicit identity-claims which he cannot fulfil” (107). The relevance
of this to Bergman’s characters lies in the
implicit claims their roles make about their selfhood. Actors may think themselves
safe
behind the mask of a role, but the audience’s very knowledge that they are players
prompts
a will to peer behind it, to assess the relationship between virtual appearance and
actuality. The audience is most prone to react thus when the actors are travelling
players, not a stable part of the community. Not only would their exposure not damage
anything integral to that community: it might reinforce its cohesion by underlining
the
dangers of the alternative community that is the theatre troupe, whose attractions
are
metonyms of those of the world to which they have the keys. The community probes for
disparities between mask and face to prevent the troupe member from using the fleetingness
of encounter to display a seductive front; thus it can mask its sadism beneath a rhetoric
of opposition to hypocrisy. The rapid venue changes experienced by Bergman’s travelling
players can translate into a social mobility, becoming a metaphor for modern aspirations
to enhanced status; as Goffman notes, “to experience a sudden change in status,
as by marriage or promotion, is to acquire a self that other individuals will not
fully admit because of their lingering attachment to the old self” (106). (Is this
possibly relevant also to the frequency with which
Bergman moved from one life-partner to another?) That refusal of acceptance manifests
itself in the determination to take the travelling players down a peg. It is after
the
mask’s removal that—to quote Goffman again—“the expressive facts at hand
threaten or discredit the assumptions a participant finds he has projected about his
identity” (107-08).
The ephemerality of such encounters and their links to ambition and false self-presentation
make Bergman profoundly modern, rendering the period trappings of so many of his works
the
distancing devices that permit representation of a traumatic experience of modernity.
“Because of possessing multiple selves the individual may find he is required both
to be present and not to be present on certain occasions,” Goffman notes
(110). The archetype of such an occasion is the appearance of
the actor, and in particular that of the cinematic actor: not just because screen
presence
is famously also a physical absence (a Metzian motif found much earlier in Lukács),
but
because the public relentlessly tracks the stars in the hope that their passage will
bless
the desecularized surfaces of everyday modern life with the scattered stardust of
the
photogenic.
Bergman’s artists are chronic itinerants, travelling players ultimately able to stage
their drama anywhere, as in The Rite [Riten]. With displacement one’s lot, one may well seek to make a
virtue of it by turning it into a Protean metaphorical flight that will render the
self
ungraspable. This is the primary source of the dream of disappearance. In Sawdust and Tinsel, it is surely significant that Frost’s account of his dream
sees Alma offering to make him as small as a foetus so that—as she puts it—“Då skal
du få krype ind i min mave og der skal du sove rigtig godt” [you can crawl
into my belly where you may sleep properly]. At this point in the dream, Frost
says, “Jag blev mindre och mindre och till sist var jag bara ett litet frö och då
försvann
jag” [I grew smaller and smaller and, at last, I was just a little seed corn, and
then I
was gone] (Quoted in Gado 170). The dream of comfortable return to the point of origin
secretes a wish to make
a virtue of the erotic humiliation visited upon Frost.
Could this be the final destination of the concealment begun when the clown first
dons his make-up?
The self-protective
process that begins as smallness ends as a disappearance whose virtue is its readability
as a form of invisibility. Shame, that ontological affliction, strikes at the heart
of
being, dissolving one before mocking gazes.
The fact that those gazes are inescapable indicates their origin in the self: in other
words, their status as dreams, projections, mirror images, inversions. They may be
conceptualised also as internalised forms of the parent. In Bergman, as in the greatest
films of Bertolucci, the other whose look originates in the self is of course also
a form
of the double, and doubling embodies a neither-norism whose upshot is disappearance.
Doubling is the lot of the performer, who is unlike others inasmuch as those others
are
singular; and this difference generates shame. Disappearance is only the idealized
form of
the death one fears: magically one embraces it, calling it disappearance, in order
to
control it. Simultaneously, one counters the fear of the invisibility that is death
by
establishing one’s visibility through a courting of shaming. Doubling and shame are
thus
linked, and each is both problem and solution. In shooting the bear, Albert kills
a double
he does not recognize as such, for it comes in the doubly mystifying guise of a metaphor
and a reality. Its masked status is part of his unconscious categorization of it as
an
Other whose demise he can and does survive. His action is shameful, the elimination
of a
helpless caged beast that seeks to suppress his own shame-ridden awareness of the
extent
to which he too is caged, viewed as lesser—in other words, as humans view animals.
To kill
the animal is to claim to be able to wake up and put behind one, like a mere dream,
a past
as real as the even more dreamlike opening humiliation of Frost.
In shame, inner and outer change places: others can see written on one’s face the
thoughts one had hoped were hidden. Self-defence may retort that these thoughts reflect
not the self but another personality—a mask—, but, as noted above, the separation
of face
and mask creates new opportunities for humiliation. The exteriorization of the inner
is a
revelation of the child within the adult: one is not as mature as one seemed to be.
Indeed, one’s very belief that others can discern the child within and perceive one’s
thoughts is itself child-like, ascribing to others the omnipotence of thought one
feels
one possesses oneself, and reflecting one’s lack of access to the form of the face
that
functions as an ever-present social mask. One’s inner childishness becomes apparent
in the
same way as a dream related in company; the dream’s possession of its own logic and
control of signification, in spite of the conscious intentions of its dreamer, marks
him
with the helplessness of the child. As Veronica Vogler says to Johan in Hour of the Wolf: “Det nesligaste kan hända; drömmarna kan bli
uppenbarade” [The worst can happen. Your dreams can be made manifest]. (In the same
film,
Heerbrand puts it slightly differently: “Jag tummar på själarna och vänder ut insidan” [I
turn souls inside out].) The result is the derision that greets Johan,
lipsticked and thus clownlike, as he prepares to make love to Veronica before his
assembled demons. The artist’s telling of dreams out loud becomes a strategy to control
the inevitable by appointing himself its self-alienated executor, striving to avert
humiliation by brandishing dreams before others, as if in the hope that their monstrous
messiness
will protect like a Medusa’s head.
One method for rendering oneself invisible is the donning of a mask privileged by
Bergman. However, although the mask may shield the face and the selfhood invested
in it,
its status as a face to the second power can provoke the unmasking that is synonymous
with
humiliation: the unmasking suffered by both Albert and Anne in Sawdust
and Tinsel. One may wonder whether it is any accident that the Asian societies a
cultural anthropologist like Ruth Benedict once described as shame-based are highly
preoccupied with the loss of face, or that the actual removal of the face
should be one of the darkest Bergmanian nightmares, as in Hour of the
Wolf. The actual removal of the face literalizes the idea of “loss of face” in
the manner of the dream-work Freud describes as translating word-representations into
thing-representations. For Bergman in general, meanwhile, the best mask is another
face,
that of a woman, and the experience of powerlessness so often coded as feminisation
engenders the transgendering identification with women discussed by Gado
(408) and Sitney (41). Thus, in To Joy, Frost’s dream of disappearance is anticipated by Marta when
she says she wants nothing and adds: “Jag skulle vilja gräva ner mig, långt ner så
ingenting kom åt mig” [I’d like to burrow down so far that no-one could reach me].
The intense
identification with women embodies and disembodies a dialectic of empathy and castration;
the empathy of the presentation of Marta at this moment is counterbalanced by the
one
later in the same film when the seductive Nelly holds down the hand of Stig and paints
his
nails. To revert to my opening remarks, the dialectic of these moments is one of tradition
and modernism, realism and the unconscious, surface and tangled depths.
In this context, Bergman’s aspiration to resemble an artisan working at Chartres
becomes
another form of the artist’s vanishing. Thus the disappearance of the artist Johan,
mentioned at the start of Hour of the Wolf, becomes a negative
form of the variety of identification with the partner idealized by his wife Alma.
Is it
relevant that an identically-named character, Sister Alma, also idealizes the other
in the previous film that is Persona? Could the vanishing of Johan be a consequence of his
absorption into his wife, like that of Frost within yet another Alma, and could this
be
the meaning of the later Alma’s hope that she might think Johan’s thoughts? Certainly,
when she sees one of his demons the very next day it is as if she has indeed entered
his
mind, even suffered possession, the term for Johan’s condition that Bergman’s
anti-Christianity—his polytheism (of which much more could be said)—would cause him
to
reject. If the disappearance is hopeful, however, it is because it
secures a final invulnerability to the humiliation of what Laura Mulvey once called,
in a
coinage whose Germanic ring makes it most appropriate to Bergman,
“to-be-looked-at-ness”: the humiliation of simply being seen.