From the evidence of his numerous films, Bergman hates every professional except the artist. (Bottom) Daughter and Mother at the piano.Among the many other obsessions of Ingmar Bergman that American critics have failed to note, or failed to question closely, is his pervasive resentment of the achieved man and occasionally the career woman-doctor, lawyer, professor, business executive. (Top) Ingmar Berman directs Liv Ullman and Ingrid Berman in Autumn Sonata. (If there has always been something shopworn about Bergman's conception, it's because Dostoyevsky got there first, with the most.) We are at liberty to wonder if this ever happened and simply to credit Bergman with singular tenacity for inventing an image that gratified him, and for extrapolating from it one of his twin obsessions (the other being the fatality of the couple): the despotism of the Father and hence the fallibility of God. (Sjöberg added a political implication by having the actor made up to resemble Himmler, chief of the Reichsführer SS.) Over the years, Bergman's compulsion to nourish every slight, every adverse criticism, grew into his now familiar, never subdued war against Father, who once punished him by locking him into a closet. The germ of this movie was Bergman's fear that he would be flunked on his university entrance examination his revenge in advance was his creation of a tyrannical schoolmaster whom he aptly named Caligula. Ingmar Bergman began his film career with a paranoid invention salvaged by Alf Sjöberg, who, from the sketch submitted by Bergman, put the Swedish cinema on the map in 1944 with the film known in the United States as Torment.
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