In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) (13 page)

BOOK: In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333)
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In most films, what takes place in our feelings, the imagery of our dreams around events, is rarely filmed. We know it is an external image, we know the dimensions are missing, that it is hard as a wall. We are not stirred deeply. The depths have been left untouched. Here it is this depth which is touched, it affects one almost subconsciously, it is the dream which is captured. We become aware of what we aspire to, seek, may or may not find.

The magician’s only failure is that he cannot make things disappear. In the world of childhood wishes they visit the zoo together, the most humorous part of the film. The elephant, the lion, and the llama do not disappear. He does make one lover disappear, but this is the lover who disappears anyway after each encounter.

But the wish to disappear has been transferred to the girl. When she meets with love divided, the lover who does not love, and the lover whom she cannot love in return, she thinks of disappearing. The realistic lover who asserted flying was an impossibility, at the end, like Sancho Panza with Don Quixote, from association with her, begins to believe that she could fly. That she disappears in death seems natural. Magic has failed her, but at least she can disappear.

The actors give extraordinary performances. They suggest their characters immediately and in depth. They are deprived of the artificial continuity and explanations—literal chronological and passport identifications—relished by other films. It is an impressionistic film. An X ray of our psychic life, which gives an insight instantly into the secret self. Those who may be irritated are those who have always feared the depths and who, in spite of so many proofs to the contrary, think we live in a rational world. Better to face the minotaur of our dreams and know their fragility and gain a deeper understanding of the human dilemma.

What makes for loneliness, this film says, is our inability to share our dreams. Those who fail to understand this film will drive themselves and others to the safe place of nonexistence.

Un Chant d’Amour
 

A review of
Un Chant d’Amour,
written and directed by Jean Genêt, in the
Los Angeles Free Press,
24 December 1965.

 

Jean Genêt’s film
Un Chant d’Amour
proves that true morality lies in aesthetics, not in the nature of the experience. The beauty and power of this film of homosexual love captures the very essence of love through its sincerity and absence of vulgarity. Genêt is a poet of the erotic and has created a canto to love with so much pride and style that it expresses ultimately the beauty of all desire. The only morality is that of the great artist who can-arouse pride in sensual expression. He never offends the senses as many other films have done by their repellent weakness or humiliating ugliness. Genêt’s film is a film of virility. That is the important theme. The prisoners could be any men—and the prison the cells which society erects between men to the detriment of their love. The men in prison are vital, filled with love; and ironically the guard is the only perverted figure: he does not love or desire, he is the voyeur-jealous, envious, impotent. He can only punish what he does not possess. This is the most unrestrained film I have ever seen, but Genêt’s vigor, naturalness, and great sense of beauty give it a ritualistic, classical nobility. It converts experience into a symbolic action. By the choice of men of quality, vitality, intensity, he is saying we imprison what is alive because it is dangerous to those who are not.

There is poetry and sensitiveness in the exchange of symbolic acts: pushing a straw through the prison wall, breathing the smoke of a cigarette as a carrier of the breath of desire, swinging flowers from window to window just beyond the reach of thirsty hands. What casts a shadow of ugliness in other films results from the attitude and vision of the film maker. Puritanism paints in ugly colors. Here the Negro’s priapic dance in his cell untainted by hypocrisy assumes the stature of a pagan ritual. The contrast between the destructive, sadistic impulses of the guard and the primitive, lyrical outbursts of the prisoners indicates that fine shading between impotence and virility, life and disease. When stated by a poet who accepts the full expression of desire as an act of life, it becomes as naked as nature—and as innocent. If all experience could pass through the censorship of art, it would achieve what the law has been unable to do. It would assert the need of beauty. It would teach that the only vice is ugliness, and it would automatically rid us of the caricatures of sex which have been passing for eroticism and restore to sensuality its nobility, which lies in the quality and refinement of its expression, the refinement of wholeness.

The cells become a tragic enclosure, separating man from life, from joy. At the film’s most sadistic moment, a prisoner being whipped by a guard dreams of woodlands, sunlight, and pagan fulfillment. It is the guard who, unable to attain this, can only wield a gun as a symbol of virility, can only destroy because he is incapable of desire.

Ingmar Bergman
 

A lecture given at the UCLA Hommage to Bergman, 12 October 1973.

 

The greater part of the world lives pretending to be guided by reason. The artist has always been telling us that we live by nonrational impulses.

We are more apt to believe it when a man like Senator Fulbright makes this statement: “I know by what means we can stop war but I also know that human beings live by irrational impulses.” The greatest need we have is to examine this irrational source of our acts with the hope that by confronting them we will be able to understand and wield an intelligent control over them. But while we continue to ignore and suppress them, they will wreck our lives. Bergman is one of the most fearless adventurers into the realm of the irrational, to the extremes of passionate experience.

Our culture has a particular distaste for tragedy and extremes of emotion, it avoids exploring the unconscious, will not portray actions not analyzable by the intellect. But as D. H. Lawrence said, passionate experience must come first, and analysis afterwards. What Bergman gives us is an entry into the very heart and core of passionate experience.

The critics are annoyed by mystery. If significance eludes them they feel powerless, but mystery is the proof of man’s spiritual existence and symbolism is the only way to capture it, and the language must be learned. But one must first of all accept immersion into the night world of the unconscious. You cannot analyze while feeling. John Simon, who has best understood Bergman, says in his book,
Ingmar Bergman Directs:
“The superficial, popular notion of Bergman, sparked perhaps by such irresponsible criticism, is as a maker of misty, symbolic, pretentious inscrutabilities . . .”

This is because we demand answers
before
we enter into the labyrinth of the interior journey, we demand sign posts and street signs. Bergman’s films, as Simon says, are open-ended films abutting on unanswerable questions. Who has answered such questions as: Is there a god? Is there an afterlife? If the solution to our problems is love, what kind of love, and how can it be achieved? If we find peace in work, artistic creation, closeness to nature, the circle of friends or the family circle, just how do we go about accomplishing this?

Bergman is saying that we are intelligent enough to pursue our own examination of the experience he makes us undergo. He asks you to
suffer
it, because he knows that if you do not enter experience with emotion, but only with the mind, it will not change you. He communicates directly with your unconscious. The one who seeks only analytical clarity remains a tourist, a spectator. I assume from the misunderstanding of Bergman that many are more comfortable as tourists and do not wish to stir, awaken, disturb, the obscure selves we do not even acknowledge within ourselves.

Another thing which is foreign to us (obsessed with collective mass history) is Bergman’s interest in what Simon calls the “chamber film, derived from chamber music, which means an intense focus upon one, two, or four persons, the action confined in time and space and the story intensely intimate.”

Once we become aware of the enormous importance of music for Bergman, we can better understand that he intends that we should receive his films as we receive music. It should reach us directly as music does, touching the centers of emotion, bypassing analytic dissection by the mind. We have to tune in to Bergman differently than we tune in to one-dimensional films.

By affecting us as music does, he brings us into intimate contact with a few people. In
Cries and Whispers
we become intimate as never before with the process of dying. We become intimate with the meaning of compassion, expressed by the servant, which not even religion has been able to convey with such human power. No saint has given the depth of human love given by the servant. Bergman wants you to feel with him and to dream with him. He will not tell you when the dream begins or ends. For him life, dream, and art are identical. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we live by an intermingling of them, what the surrealist calls “superimpositions.”

He refuses to establish boundaries. He feels that dream and action are interrelated, fantasy and madness, creation and destruction. As his role is to make our subconscious life visible, as visible as the conscious, he does not paint it as a ghostly presence. When he dresses the four sisters in white against a red background it is not only a realistic description of the dress and background of their epoch, it expresses the idea that although apparently related, they are total strangers to each other. The unity of a family is an illusion. The dying sister’s dream was that they should merge as sisters; that they should commune and by emotional unity defeat the disintegration of death. Her dream was not to be fulfilled, but we receive a subliminal message: Love and communion alone could have defeated the annihilation of death. When two of the sisters seem to break the barrier, talk and weep together, and appear to have achieved intimacy, then one of them, upon leaving, closes the door completely upon this intimacy and destroys it by mockery.

The mystery is there and Bergman asks us to contemplate it. If we contemplate mystery long enough our own creativity will set about unravelling it. Part of the mystery is that he takes us into the act of birth, birth of a film as well as of a character. In
Persona
he begins with a mystifying set of images like the quick recall of our life we are supposed to have before death. He is taking you into the mind of the film maker, remembering, meditating, into the fumbling process of the birth of a film, because the theme will emerge as a study of art and life, of the conflict between illusion and reality.

I am not here to analyze or unravel the characters Bergman portrays. I am here to ask you to receive them as he intended you to receive them. He has described them as his dreams. He honors your intelligence by leaving the interpretation to you.

He has chosen to place mostly upon women the burden of experience: pregnancy, rape, hysteria, psychic insight, alienation, non-love, passion, frustration. Women easily identify with Bergman’s women. He has painted all of them. Was he aware that Freud (the unjustly maligned) said women had remained in closer contact with their unconscious than men? They recognize their obsessions, their fantasies, their sexual frustrations, their ambivalences, their sacrifices, their masochism.

He respects the shadows. He makes us the gift of intense experiences others will not touch, such as the theme of humiliation human beings practice upon each other, the theme of repression, of hidden cruelties, of dualities.

The great beauty of Bergman’s films is that he goes to the very end of emotional experience. He touches bottom.

He treats nothing lightly, not even sensual dalliance. Compare
Smiles of a Summer Night
with Max Ophul’s
La Ronde.
With all its charm and rhythm
La Ronde
is like a ride on a merry-go-round.

John Simon tells us that Bergman was reading Jung at the time he composed
Persona.
He may have been inspired to study the roles human beings play for the benefit of others as well as to satisfy the expectations of his own conscious self.

Many times Bergman has described the infinitely subtle interchange, the merging and submerging of one personality into another, projections and identifications. In
Persona
he focussed on this exchange of souls and confusion of identities. He delves deeply into the theme of withdrawal and failed interchange. He does not tell us if the women exchanged souls, whether the actress recovered her capacity to feel or talk, whether the nurse learned you cannot rescue others by love. Bergman does not reach for the ultimate answers. He enters the labyrinth, he exposes the mysterious influences, the deep layers of secret angers and doubts, the hungers, fears, needs. We are given a physical expression of an elusive psychic drama. For the first time we become aware of the murderous intent of silence, the exigencies of love’s demands.

In what other films have we dealt with what Simon describes as the conflict between acting and being, art and life, illusion and reality, between sickness and health, lies and truths, concealing and revealing, between being and nonbeing, creation and destruction, life and death?

One of the most important aims of psychoanalysis is not an intellectual process; it urges us to relive suppressed experiences, to re-enact emotionally what we had failed to feel. It is the emotional, not the analytical, journey which brings deliverance from secret corrosions. Bergman’s films have that intent; we should accept the fact of a profound emotional journey into mostly unexplored realms, into all we have not dared to feel, to say, to act, to embrace in life. It is a journey through dark regions. But it should stir in us all the unknown elements in ourselves. So few of us go to the very extremes of love, obsession, cruelty, alienation, jealousy, self-destruction. The psychic, unconscious world made visible is bound to startle us as this is the world which Jung has called our shadow. Bergman presents the shadow of the selves we do not wish to acknowledge. Let us at least allow them to live in his films, and recognize how richly they have affected and changed us. For whoever makes our dreams visible and audible illuminates and helps to make us master of our own unconscious life.

BOOK: In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333)
3.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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