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Films

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

Michael Heath

Nearly a year ago I wrote a review of Ingmar Bergman's Persona, a masterpiece of cerebral transiency and moving definition, and now with his latest film to be released here, The Hour Of The Wolf (United Artists), Bergman has gone a step beyond anything else he has ever attempted before.

I have not seen the early Dreyer, Fuillade, Franju films depicting the demons of the body, the external supernatural, with which surely The Hour Of The Wolf compares.

But in its mesmerising horror scenes (grainily over-exposed and fragmentary) the shrieking clutter of Lars Johan Werle's semi-electronic score, the film spins madly inward and the ugliest of truths and feelings emerge.

It is Bergman's noisiest and emotional film.

He has taken from Persona (which is, in comparison to this in structure, far simpler!) the power to remind us it is only a film.

It begins with a simple explanation from Bergman, telling of the disappearance of the painter Johan Borg (Mas Von Sydow) on the island, and the diary he has kept; then in the clatter of the Svenskfilmindustri studios we see Alma (Liv Ullman, from Persona, and Bergman's wife) getting ready for a take. Bergman and his assistants are lining up distances and focus. He says, "Live, can we have your head up a little?" A take is clapped, she moves slowly as we do into the credits still accompanied by studio noises until Bergman finally yells, 'quiet! quiet!" His Film starts.

On the island Alma places herself in front of the camera and in a long monologue tells us of the circumstances that lead up to this disappearance of her husband. Some of it is faintly incoherent, she shyly looks away at times, almost embarrassed. Her love of Johann is already dominant, and in this strange film she does no more but show the utmost faith and love, yet a complete and almost hysterical naiveity of what is happening.

The first flashback in four takes describes in silence and sound effects the arrival of the island. The boat arriving on the land, the prow of the boat, the unloading of the goods, and of the trek up the mountain, almost vertical, Johann pushing a squeaking wheelbarrow.

The apple tree is in blossom, they embrace slowly, the fluorescence of the sun on the lenses. He sketches her beneath the tree. He arrives back up the hill, they embrace by a line of crisply flapping linen. It is hard to describe these scenes, some of the purest and most serene Bergman has ever given us.

We are shortly to be disturbed as Johann paces behind Alma sewing, finally joining her (inside frame) and showing on his sketch pad the demons that have appeared to him. An elderly woman who removes her face, an elderly homosexual, a birdman, and other people.

The woman in white appears to Alma one morning, telling her to touch her hand and "feel the veins beneath my skin". She says she is over 270 years old, and tells Alma to find the diary under Johan's bed. She does and a second flash-back occurs.

The panting homosexual in rain coat and thick glasses is babbling along to Johann trying to escape him. He is a psychiatrist of sorts and tells Johann among the foetid rave, "I turn souls inside out, and what do I see? But you'd know of course—you and your self-portraits."

Johann strikes the man savagely on the face yelling, "Shutup! Shutup!" the man lies prostrate on the ground like an animal holding his nostrils. It is only later that this man can get this strike back to Johann in the form of the massacre on his face.

The second diary entry concerns the illness of Johan, his pain and not being able to paint. He is approached by a former lover Veronica Vogler (from the name of The Magician, and Persona, played by an almost unrecognisable Ingrid Thulin). She bears a breast to show a mark Johan has made, and in an incredible burst of beauty, Bergman uses what must be his first sudden zoom, like a bird onto Veronica's face as she embraces Johan saying, "Awful things can happen, dreams can be revealed." She asks him to unlace her frock. He does so from the back, his fingers rustling on her skin. Something that is repeated later in even enlarged erotic propensity.

Alma and Johan are together in the house, Johan with his watch neatly demonstrates eternity with the awaiting of a minute, "how long each second lasts". It is frighteningly capped by Alma's almost emotional sign as it ends.

The baron arrives in a Landrover one day to invite him and Alma to dinner; he and his wife are great admirers of his work.

We meet the demons, a selection of healthy, gaudy, bespectacled elderly people on the lawns of the grizzly castle that Bergman in his sense never shows us.

The table scene is the most wonderful evocation of glitter, horror, cross talk and total embarrassment. Sven Nykvist's camera swirls over candlebras, around tables, from face to face like a nervous flame, catching Alma's frightening expression and Johan's nervous sudden drinking spasms. The talk is of operations, jokes of painters and an almost spastic one-upmanship never before seen.

After dinner, a puppet theatre with five burning candles presents the Baron to perform an excerpt from Mozart's The Magic Flute. This sequence is the greatest Bergman has ever filmed.

Tamino is singing on the tiny puppets' stage, accompanied by the priests chorus, "O ew' ge nacht," to Pamino, lost in the dark. The Baron then lectures exquisitely on eternal light and hopelessness, quoting from the opera, and telling them it is Mozart's most beautiful and disturbing music.

He then turns on Johan to ask him what his art is. The reply is somewhat staggering to them all, and he withholds his reputation. The Baron's wife accidently cuts him with a rose in a swoon of admiration. Later as they are walking quietly in pairs outside in the forest. Alma questions Johann as to why they never kiss.

It is the homosexual who moans about the man who struck him down with white hate in his eyes; the demons turn on their heels and follow the couple the other way. This is a terrifying moment.

The Baron's wife shows her guests into her bedroom. They gaze at a portrait of Veronica by Jogan. "I love her," says the Baron's wife, then reveals a mark high on the inside of her leg. "It will lose its fascination when it is gone," she says trying to comfort Alma.

It is in the trees beside their cottage that Alma breaks down. Liv Ullmann's face taking up the entire screen in great solemn tear filled poses. She will not let Johan touch her, their unborn child causes her to bend over as he walks away. She shouts his name.

Vargtimmen appears on the screen, it is now the hour of the wolf. "The hour when most people die, when children are born when nigntmares are most palpable … when ghosts and demons hold sway," Perhaps a Nordic legend? Exterior noises are heard for the first time, Johan is lighting matches. They both are afraid and cannot sleep, Johann asks Alma if she knows what caused the bite on his arm. It wasn't a snake he says.

What follows is done in overexposure, eliminating nearly all black, in the white hot glare by the sea. A young boy is tormenting the fishing Johann, the electronic sounds blended with the sea and the impending horror rises and subsides. The boy in bathing trunks poses on the rocks and says something we do not hear. Johann shakes him, the boy tries to bring him onto the rocks. Johann begins to strangle him over his shoulder. It is frighteningly fast, with many jump cuts and fast motion movement. The child falls into a slow motion fall on the rocks, His body convulses. Johann smashes his head in repeatedly with a stone. He lifts him and gently slides him into the still black sea. The body just hovers under the surface, his hair splays once like a water lily, it sinks. This is unbearably beautiful, until one realises that it may have been the leering homosexual re-incarnate.

Back in the hut a noise is heard. It is only one of the castle people who offer Johann a gun and tell him of the party that evening.

Alma has reached her horrifying climax. She wishes to know all about Johann's relationship with Veronica, who will be at the party that night.

Johan listens as Alma reads from his diary, he tries to take it from her. She sobs and he tells her to go outside. There are three shots and a close-up of the gun firing.

The film now turns into a nightmare. Johann running through cloisters in the dark, meeting an old harlot. A raven shrieks at a window, Johan's shadows are distended in empty rooms. Scenes that have never been paralleled in any horror film. Finally he is received in the room by the Baron who tells him that Veronika is awaiting, how he loved her so much and literally walks up the wall onto the roof, crouching in rage and jealousy. Does Bergman allow himself such visual punnery; Kapellmastare Kreisler is playing Bach on the harpsichord. Is he the new foundling of the demons? A substitute for Johan's release? The old woman removes her hat, face, and drops an eye ball into a wine glass.

Johan is met by the birdman and subjected to a revolting make-up session. He is escorted down a stone passage in which fly hundreds of birds. Outside a door he spins around to catch the man sprouting wings, "you see what you see", he shouts and disappears. He moves towards a bed, on it a shroud. The lights go up; it is reminiscent of the puppet-opera and the opening scene with the child in Persona.

He lifts the sheet away from Veronica, Bergman then lovingly follows Johan's hand as it travels over the entire length of her body; it is one of his most explicitly erotic gestures—something that Truffaut nearly managed as well (but with clothes) in La Peau Douce.

Veronica awakens to envelop Johann with her lust. They begin to make love passionately. The demons are heard, then seen in a repulsive tableau, laughing mocking and jeering, Johann his face splotched with masscara and fear tells them it is the limit they have subjected him to.

Alma faces the camera to tell us how the bullets missed her, how Johan never saw as he came home. She follows him into the swamps.

This last section is even more terrifying. In contrast to the boy killing, the film has been exposed into blacks, bringing out the most unbelievably distorted and fuzzy grain effects. She cradles Johan in her arms and suddenly the demons appear. They strike at him individually (the Baron's wife with her rose), the homosexual with his fists then his nails. Blood spurts from his neck. Alma's shrieks are frozen, the electronic sounds are piercing. We see the demon's faces, individually, mad, then the oily water and the child hovering beneath the surface.

Alma alone in the swamps, crying for Johann, is reminiscent of The Virgin Spring, Alma talks to you again, almost as incoherently at the start. She is still full of the utmost faith for her husband, she stutters and turns away.

We hear noises, we are in the studio. "Cut!" yells a voice, lights are disconnected, people put on coats, Liv Ullman walks off. Bergman clutching a script walks out. The last person disappears quickly through a jump-cut, the tableau is seen again, jolting us once more, back from the supernatural to the natural.

The torments of the artist, his responsibility, his ridiculous persona of stewpidity, the wife, uncomprehending and the demons of the soul and the exterior light, all delivered in a passionate serman of light and sound.

Nature's effects, wind and rain, sea and brooks, are themselves so uncannily used, that they begin when merging with the soundtrack to add yet another dimension: a paler reality subject to terrors never before received in a cinema.

I have reconstructed the film from memory, and have mentioned all but a few scenes. It is not impossible to sit down and remember every scene. Those I have left out are impossible to sit down and remember every scene. Those I have left out are impossible to describe in any sort of language. The film hynotically uses the simplest means available, nothing is forgotten.

John Simon (New Leader) quotes lines from Holderlin "Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde/Klirren die fahnen" (Speechless and cold, the wind. The weathervanes are clanging), but I should be as bold to use the line from the Ruckert poem used by Mahler in the cycle, for my heading.

Now Bergman is so remorsely violent and terrifying, it is equally so to wonder how The Shame and The Rituals will be affecting us when they arrive soon. With Miss Ullmann dominating his fires now, I wonder if we will ever witness the child, that surely has been boiling up inside her since many years ago, even before Persona was made.