The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  Then came another pause before, in 1956, Bresson offered Un Condamné à Mort S’Est Echappé (A Man Escaped). Fontaine is a French Resistance fighter captured by the Gestapo. Can he escape from his prison in Lyon? Should he trust the other prisoner put in his cell? Still working in black and white, with the cameraman Léonce-Henri Burel, Bresson was refining his styleless style: this is a film of claustrophobic shots with a world of unseen sounds (as befits its situation); it is a series of faces and hands, and the implacable present tense that prison only emphasizes—of course it is the moment of film and of life. François Leterrier (who played or represented Fontaine) said of the process, “[Bresson] did not want us to ever express ourselves. He made us become part of the composition of an image. We had to locate ourselves, as precisely as possible, in relation to the background, the lighting, and the camera.”

  In 1956, Truffaut said A Man Escaped was “the most important film of the last ten years.” What that meant was a new realism in which, maybe for the first time, the visual, the cinematic, was not primary but nearly incidental (albeit necessary). Now, of course, the cinema is the embodiment of “let there be light,” but the light and the visual can amount to a tyranny. Bresson had understood that, and in the process he had liberated movies or brought them closer to the depth of literature and music. He had seen everything he wanted, and then pared it away, until just that skeleton remained. Truffaut said that A Man Escaped made us feel we had been in Fontaine’s cell for two months, instead of watching a one-hundred-minute film.

  It is less the visual we notice than the human gesture and the human existence. Pauline Kael said this: “In this country [the United States], escape is a theme for action movies; the Bresson hero’s ascetic, single-minded dedication to escape is almost mystic, and the fortress is as impersonal and isolated a world as Kafka’s…I know all this makes it sound terribly pretentious and yet, such is the treacherous power of an artist, that sometimes even the worst ideas are made to work.”

  Four months after the Paris opening of A Man Escaped, Max Ophüls died in Hamburg in March 1957. As Max Oppenheimer, he was born in Saarbrücken in 1902. He is the epitome of the itinerant filmmaker, whose camera tracked and craned with the same soaring fatalism no matter where he was. Just as Murnau had been seeking a fusion of European and American approaches to the medium on Sunrise, so Ophüls was in quest of universal strains of romance, memory, time, and tragedy across the world. But he is treated here because his career ended and peaked in France.

  He had been a stage director in Germany and already the father of the future documentary maker Marcel Ophüls when he made his first important film, Liebelei (1933), a love story taken from a play by Arthur Schnitzler about a young officer and a musician’s daughter. He moved to France and then to Italy, where he made La Signora di Tutti (1934), that groundbreaking study on the life of an actress. Then it was France and Holland and France again before he went to Hollywood in 1941.

  His time in America was always difficult. Howard Hughes fired him from a project called Vendetta, but then he did three remarkable pictures. The first, produced by John Houseman, was Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), from Stefan Zweig, with Joan Fontaine as the woman in love with, seduced by, but then forgotten by a world-weary concert pianist, played by Louis Jourdan. Then, working closely with the actor James Mason, he made Caught and The Reckless Moment (both in 1949), the first about a young woman who gives up marriage to a Howard Hughes–like tycoon (chillingly played by Robert Ryan) to work for a doctor (Mason); the second a story in which Mason begins by blackmailing Joan Bennett, only to fall in love with her.

  Ophüls was regarded as a failure in America. His name was misspelled and mispronounced, and he moved from one project to another like a refugee. It was said that he made melodramas, but what few identified at the time was his sympathy for stories about women misunderstood by men, abused, but trying to find their life. In Letter from an Unknown Woman, Joan Fontaine’s portrait of a girl becoming adult, sadder but still misled by life, is desperately touching, yet the film was barely recognized.

  So Ophüls went back to France and in his last years (he was never strong and would die of a rheumatic heart condition aggravated by stress) he made La Ronde (1950; his single hit), Le Plaisir (1952), Madame de…(or The Earrings of Madame de…; 1953), and Lola Montès (1955). La Ronde, from Schnitzler again, has Anton Walbrook as a master of ceremonies who observes the infection and the gift of romance passed from one person to another. It is witty and elegant, with an all-star cast, superb production design (by Jean d’Eaubonne), and Ophüls’s winding and unwinding tracking shots. It picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay by his frequent collaborator Jacques Natanson, and it was still dismissed as typical French “sophistication.” French film in those days had a strange reputation in censorious countries (such as America and Britain) for being naughty and allowing some nudity.

  Madame de…—the earrings were thrown in the title in America, to make shopping seem more available?—is about a wife, her husband, and her lover: Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio De Sica. She is the heroine but she is silly and she will damn herself out of vanity and foolishness. She is also the endearing victim in a tragedy she cannot avert and hardly realizes she has caused. Le Plaisir (1952) is a trio of stories taken from Maupassant.

  Then there is Lola Montès (1955), the masterpiece among abused masterpieces. Lola is the legendary courtesan of the nineteenth century and she could be every great woman in show business. Close to the end of her life, sick and demoralized, she is selling her life story as a circus act. Here is the finest film yet that seeks to deconstruct the career of a female star. Her ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) is her manager and probably her latest lover. In the circus as the camera whirls around her, she flashes back to her youth, to affairs with Liszt and the king of Bavaria (Walbrook again). At the very end of the show the camera tracks away from her exhausted figure over the line of men waiting to pay to kiss her as attendants collect the money in pots made in the form of her head. This is a pioneering image of the alienation that befalls people who live on or through screens.

  It is also a high point in the history of the moving camera and the belief that in melodrama we can find the roots of film fantasy, the very force that has celebrated and ruined people such as Lola Montès (or Marilyn Monroe). The actress Ophüls cast as Lola, Martine Carol, has been criticized over the years for being pretty but not too interesting. Though she was a notable star in France, the film might have been helped by an international figure. And Monroe in life was often an exhausted beauty, best filmed in dismay or doing nothing—which is what the part needs. Her half-desolate, half-alive face was right for Ophüls’s view of Lola as a burnt-out beauty. Of course, given such a big, foreign opportunity, Monroe might have believed she had to “act” and have gone to pieces. She never trusted her presence.

  Lola Montès looks like the nineteenth century, to be sure, but Truffaut caught its real aim exactly:

  For the first time, he [Ophüls] superimposed contemporary preoccupations onto his perennial theme of the woman burned out prematurely: the cruelty of modern forms of entertainment, the abusive exploitation of romanticized biography, indiscretions, quiz games, a constant succession of lovers, gossip columns, overwork, nervous depression. He confided to me that he had systematically put into the plot of Lola Montès everything that had troubled or disturbed him in the newspapers for the preceding three months: Hollywood divorces, Judy Garland’s suicide attempt, Rita Hayworth’s adventure, American three-ring circuses, the advent of CinemaScope and Cinerama, the overemphasis on publicity, the exaggerations of modern life.

  Bresson and Ophüls could hardly be further apart. Yet in their different ways, both had reached a point of seeing that the old cinema not simply was in decline, but might be a reflection of a decline of civilization itself. At almost the same time, in 1954, Twentieth Century–Fox made a very poor film called There’s No Business Like Show Business. (It starre
d Ethel Merman, Marilyn Monroe, Johnnie Ray, Dan Dailey, and Donald O’Connor—a mad family, if you like.) It was in Scope and minestrone color and it hurled out its musical routines, including that old, mindless assertion about there being no business like show business. More than Sunset Blvd., Lola Montès sees that feverish claim as a subject for sorrow and pity. The old confidence behind “entertainment” was draining away.

  David Selznick had been impressed enough by Ingrid Bergman to take Sweden seriously. In the years just after the war, he had box office monies accumulating in foreign countries not easily withdrawn because of currency restrictions. He also had several stars on his books who were not working enough. So he thought he would use that money to do a film in Sweden, and in his vague sense of culture, he thought why not do Ibsen’s A Doll’s House—wasn’t that a story for the ages? Norway? Sweden? Were they different? He had in mind Dorothy McGuire and Robert Mitchum for Nora and her husband.

  Using his dedicated agent and scout in London, Jenia Reissar, he found “talent” in Sweden that might make the film. There was a director much praised in Stockholm, Alf Sjöberg, and there was a young writer. Through Reissar, a contract was made with the writer, though she reported that he had long, unwashed hair and was rather dirty and quite odd. Still, for American money he did the script and gave it a happy ending to meet American tastes. I have read the script, though it was never made. It doesn’t deserve to be made. The name of the writer was Ingmar Bergman.

  Bergman was born in Uppsala in 1918, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and he was raised in severe strictness, a domestic atmosphere alleviated by his fascination with toy theaters. During his boyhood, Sweden was a country of around five million, but its contribution to film history was already remarkable. In the years of Griffith, Mauritz Stiller had shown himself to be a director of romantic comedy as sophisticated as that of Lubitsch and as skilled with the camera as Griffith. He had a rival, Victor Sjöström, so highly regarded that he had been invited to Hollywood where, as Victor Seastrom, he had directed Lillian Gish in The Wind. When Louis B. Mayer recruited Greta Garbo, she was actually baggage in the deal that really wanted Stiller. The couple came together, Garbo thrived, and Stiller was thwarted. A decade later, Ingrid Bergman arrived from Sweden to be an American star as important as Garbo.

  Ingmar Bergman studied theater at the University of Stockholm. He wrote fiction and plays and he found work as a script doctor in the film industry. In 1944 he got his first credit on Alf Sjöberg’s Frenzy, a film about a school where the teacher is a fascistic figure who intimidates the young. Its cast included the nineteen-year-old Mai Zetterling in one of her first roles. It was on the strength of Frenzy that Bergman was offered the Selznick job on Ibsen.

  At the same time, he began to get directing opportunities. His first films—Crisis (1946), It Rains on Our Love (1946), Port of Call (1948), Thirst (1949)—were essentially realist in their approach but marked by the psychological or neurotic unease that would characterize Bergman. He began to emerge as he found projects for the actresses he loved—Summer Interlude (1951, Maj-Britt Nilsson), Summer with Monika (1953, Harriet Andersson), Sawdust and Tinsel (1953, Andersson), and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955, Ulla Jacobsson, Eva Dahlbeck, and Andersson again).

  These films were of a pattern: they were all in black and white; made modestly for Svensk Filmindustri, a state entity; with strong Swedish casts; but selling successfully to the international art house circuit. Bergman worked always as writer-director, a regular practice in Europe but far more unusual in America. The films were sometimes so sexually candid they had to be cut overseas: Harriet Andersson is often nude in Summer with Monika. It was released in America in 1956 and cut down by a third, as Monika: The Story of a Bad Girl, with posters stressing the nudity theaters could not show. The films won festival prizes: Smiles of a Summer Night played at Cannes and won for “Best Poetic Humor.”

  “Poetic humor” wasn’t quite Bergman’s style at home. He was already on his third divorce, but living most of the time with Harriet Andersson. And he was troubled:

  When Harriett had taken off her make-up and changed, we went home to sleep, neither of us having much to say to the other any longer…I owned two pairs of trousers, a number of flannel shirts, disintegrating underwear, three jerseys and two pairs of shoes. It was a practical and undemanding life. I had decided that a guilty conscience was an affectation, because my torment could never make up for the damage I had done. Presumably some inaccessible process went on inside. I had all kinds of gastric flu and ulcers. I vomited often and had troublesome stomach cramps followed by diarrhoea. In the autumn of 1955, after filming Smiles of a Summer Night, I weighed fifty-six kilos and was admitted to Karolinska Hospital with suspected cancer of the stomach. I was thoroughly examined by Dr. Sture Helander. He came into my room one afternoon bringing the x-rays with him. He sat down and patiently explained them. He described my ailments as “psychosomatic” and told me I would have to start looking seriously into this dimly-lit area, the border country between body and soul.

  This is not the small talk of Hollywood parties, where most people boasted steadily of success and happiness. But it is the voice of postwar European existentialism, and of a spirit that regards the film director as an exemplary modern neurotic and artist, exploring angst, and sleeping with many of his actresses but feeling bad about it. Hollywood directors often behaved that way, but they found the grace to be cheerful.

  Bergman took a break, time to observe the increasing fallout from bomb testing in our atmosphere, and came back for 1957, the year that altered his status forever and established the new world of art house movies. The Seventh Seal was derived from a play of Bergman’s first performed on radio, and then in Malmö and Stockholm. It is set in the fourteenth century. A knight (Max von Sydow) has returned from the Crusades in disenchantment. He sees a land of madness, plague, intolerance, and savagery. Then the figure of Death (Bengt Ekerot) approaches him and they play chess for the knight’s life—chess got as much of a boost from this film as it did from Fischer versus Spassky in Iceland in 1972. In the end, the knight wins a reprieve by his kindness to a family of traveling players (featuring the young Bibi Andersson).

  The film is ninety-six minutes long and it cost about $150,000. It may have changed more careers than any film since Citizen Kane. It shared the Special Jury Prize at Cannes with Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal, and played all over the world. The Seventh Seal pushed me to join the National Film Theatre in London to see a retrospective of Bergman’s films. The theater was packed for that season. I was in awe of the film, so much so that I never quite asked myself whether I liked it. I know I like it a good deal less now than the second film Bergman released that year: Wild Strawberries, or Smultronstället—the hushed musicality of the Swedish language was dawning on us.

  Bergman had written the script for Wild Strawberries in the Karolinska Hospital. It concerns Isak Borg, aged seventy-eight, a widower and a bacteriologist who is to receive an honorary degree from Lund University. He drives there with his daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin) and along the way he dreams or has flashbacks that examine his life and a lost love. She is played by Bibi Andersson, who also appears as a carefree modern girl Borg picks up on the road. Like The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries was shot by Gunnar Fischer, Bergman’s genius before Sven Nykvist came along. (Nykvist’s first Bergman film was The Virgin Spring, in 1960.)

  In the role of Borg, Bergman cast Victor Sjöström, who was then Borg’s age and in declining health. Sjöström was the father figure of Swedish cinema and he had been an important mentor to Bergman. One day in the 1940s, Sjöström had walked onto a Bergman set, grabbed him, and said, be simpler, film from the front so actors relax, don’t be unpleasant with everyone.

  Wild Strawberries is a tale of futility and failure at last recognizing its own happiness or resignation. It has many symbols in a harsh, etched look that suggests some substance more enduring than film will ever be. It also has a passion for fleeting summer l
ight that is so vital in Swedish film—few nations depend on the light as much or feel such meaning in it. If only the light were more elusive in California; we might treasure it more.

  They were set to shoot the final scene of Wild Strawberries, where Borg’s young love leads the old man to a hillside and he sees his parents in the distance waving to him. Bergman wanted to shoot at five because of the light, but Sjöström preferred to stop at 4:30. He was disagreeable sometimes and he needed his whisky. “Are we going to take those damned scenes?” he asked his director.

  He was by no means in a better mood, but he did his duty. As he walked through the sunlit grass with Bibi in a long shot, he was grumbling and rejecting all friendly approaches. The close-up was rigged and he went to one side and sat with his head sunk between his shoulders, dismissing scornfully the offer of a whisky on the spot. When everything was ready, he came staggering over, supported by a production assistant, exhausted by his bad temper. The camera ran and the clapper clacked. Suddenly his face opened, the features softening, and he became quiet and gentle, a moment of grace. And the camera was there. And it was running. And the laboratory didn’t muck it up.

  That is what filming can be like: saving a moment in time and the light. And you can see it.

  Wild Strawberries won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay—but it lost, to Pillow Talk.

  Sjöström died in 1960; Bergman not until 2007. He continued to lead what seemed like a quiet life, with constant inner turmoil, going from one lover to another and one nervous breakdown to the next. In the 1970s he had embarrassing trouble with the Swedish authorities over income tax fraud. It passed; he had brought so much money into the country. He dabbled in offers from Hollywood: he shot The Touch (1971) in English (with Elliott Gould) and he made The Serpent’s Egg (1977) in Germany. But long before the end he was living on the island of Fårö, working steadily in Sweden. The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries may not be his best films, even if they are the turning point in his career. For the best, you can pick from Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972), and Fanny and Alexander (1982). Other people will mount claims for The Silence (1963), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), or Scenes from a Marriage (1973). But you should not forget Faithless (2000), which he only wrote and which another of his actresses and lovers, Liv Ullmann, directed. Faithless is about Bergman—what would you expect? He is the first director in the world who takes it for granted that all the work is about him, his way of seeing and feeling. But Faithless is filled with regret over the damage he knows he has done to real people while creating great fictions.