The Best Movies of the 1980s

Another decade poll, this one on the 25 best movies of the 1980s, has concluded at Wonders in the Dark, and the results have been announced. This was for me the most difficult of the four decade polls I've taken part in. In previous decade polls—I didn't begin participating until the poll on the 1950s—my greatest problem was narrowing down a list of 40-50 possibilities—all taken from my list of **** movies, my highest personal rating—to 25 finalists. This time the problem was the opposite: I didn't have 25 to begin with, so I had to expand my preliminary list to come up with 25 finalists. This meant that for the first time a few of the titles on my final list, while very good films, didn't quite make my highest rating. One of the reasons for this was that for these lists I include only one movie per director. This practice originally began because I didn't want my lists dominated by a handful of individuals who are my own favorites at the expense of other directors. Even though this time such a limitation wasn't strictly necessary, I decided for the sake of consistency to continue observing it.

Because the WitD poll now permits television productions to be included in the poll, I could have filled out the list with the best TV mini-series of the decade. (See my list at the end.) For me the 1980s were the zenith of the TV mini-series, particularly in the UK. But as with the 1970s poll, I balked at including television productions because I don't really consider them the same thing as theatrical movies. I watch them differently, and I have different expectations of them. I expect theatrical movies to be more concentrated. I also expect to be able to watch them in one sitting, and for me that means a running time of at most around three hours, give or take a little.

One of the most interesting things I did in preparing for the poll was to watch the TV version of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. The theatrical film runs a little over three hours, and the TV version about five hours. I watched the TV version's four episodes over four nights, as it was intended, and then compared the two versions. The TV version contains several sequences, some brief and a couple fairly long, that do not appear in the theatrical version. Some of these add to the story, but some of them seem like digressions that aren't absolutely necessary and in some cases actually sidetrack the main narrative.

One short sequence that isn't in the theatrical version occurs when Alexander is locked in the attic for making up a story that his stepfather murdered his first wife and their two daughters. The two daughters appear to Alexander as ghosts and tell him what really happened—that they were victims of a tragic accident in the river that runs outside their house. This fairly brief sequence seems to hearken back to the dreaminess of Bergman's earlier films, a style he had largely abandoned by the time of Fanny and Alexander. Curiously, in a way it actually de-emphasizes Alexander's eidetic imagination, making the movie more a literalized ghost story than a portrait of the artist as a young man haunted by his own metaphorical ghosts rooted in his childhood experiences (the loss of this father and abuse by his stepfather).

A long sequence that also weakens the longer version occurs when their grandmother's friend Isak tells Fanny and Alexander a complicated and rather tedious story that is a parable of the human search for the locus of pure imagination and a lost state of grace. It elaborates on a point that is already obvious and doesn't tell us anything we don't already know about either Isak or Alexander. The whole extended sequence seems to exist only for a brief, although admittedly vivid, glimpse at Alexander's visualization of one event in the story. A similar sequence that appears only in the long version occurs after the Christmas feast when Alexander's father calms the restive children in the nursery by telling them a lengthy tale about a Chinese princess and her magic chair. The story is in itself not very interesting, a digression that slows the film down without contributing anything significant.

On the other hand, some things included in the longer version strengthen the movie. A couple of scenes that last only a few seconds are inexplicably missing in the short version. At the very beginning, Alexander imagines he sees a statue come to life. In the long version he also has a brief glimpse of Death as the Grim Reaper, and these few moments of counterpoint between beauty and death, with their echoes of The Seventh Seal, are so potent that I am surprised they were eliminated in the short version. Likewise, in the long version after the christening banquet, there is a brief shot of the guests all assembled, which then transmutes into a black-and-white photo, which becomes one of a pile of photos Alexander's grandmother is trying to sort out and paste into a scrapbook. This is one of the most haunting images in the movie, and again I am surprised that, lasting at most a few seconds and intensifying the movie's preoccupation with memory and time, it was eliminated in the shortened version.

A longer sequence with Alexander's uncles trying to get the two children away from their stepfather, who is holding them prisoner after their mother has left him, struck me as pertinent to the story despite its length, helping to flesh out the uncles and the way they differ in personality. This sequence was eliminated altogether from the theatrical version. And in the TV version the farewell of Alexander's mother to the actors when she announces she is closing the theater is, I feel, more poignant than the abbreviated sequence in the short version.

However, one example of trimming the movie improves the theatrical version considerably. This is the very first long sequence of the Christmas festivities at the theater and at the Ekdahls' house. The shorter version, which I described at length in a previous post, is wonderfully concentrated. I wrote that "Bergman seems to have rolled all of life into this one meal." But in the TV version, this sequence, running nearly twice as long, is bogged down in unnecessary exposition and digression, its power considerably diluted. After comparing the two versions, I decided that the ideal would probably have been something between the two, running about four hours.

Why am I writing in such detail about this one movie? One reason is that this decade poll and the previous one highlighted the proliferation of alternate versions of films under consideration—TV versions, restorations, reconstructions, director's cuts. Another reason is that I chose Fanny and Alexander as the #1 movie of the decade, as did the participants in the 1980s poll at WitD. This is the fourth decade in a row that I placed a film by Bergman at or near the top of the movies of the decade: Wild Strawberries at #2 for the 1950s, Persona at #1 for the 1960s, Cries and Whispers at #3 for the 1970s, and now Fanny and Alexander at #1 for the 1980s.

With the usual caveat, that this a personal list limited by my own viewing experiences and cinematic preferences—and acknowledging that on reflection it strikes me as a fairly conservative list, heavy on period movies and movies about children—here are my top films of the 1980s:


THE BEST MOVIES OF THE 1980s

1. Fanny and Alexander, Bergman (1983)
   
2. Blue Velvet, Lynch (1986)
3. The Night of the Shooting Stars, Taviani & Taviani (1982)
4. A Sunday in the Country, Tavernier (1984)
5. The Dead, Huston (1987)
6. Kagemusha, Kurosawa (1980)
7. Tootsie, Pollack (1982)
8. Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen (1986)
9. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar (1988)
10. The Last Emperor (Director's Cut), Bertolucci (1987)
11. Au Revoir, les Enfants, Malle (1987)
12. Hope and Glory, Boorman (1987)
13. Pixote, Babenco (1981)
14. Pelle the Conqueror, August (1988)
15. Babette's Feast, Axel (1987)
16. A Room with a View, Ivory (1986)
17. Dangerous Liaisons, Frears (1988)
18. Raging Bull, Scorsese (1980)
19. Brazil, Gilliam (1985)
20. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Spielberg (1982)
21. Terms of Endearment, Brooks (1983)
22. La Traviata, Zeffirelli (1982)
23. Jean de Florette, Berri (1986)
24. Paris, Texas, Wenders (1984)
25. The Home and the World, Ray (1984)

HONORABLE MENTION: The Elephant Man, Ran, The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Manon of the Springs, Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanors

BEST TV PRODUCTIONS: The Singing Detective, Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Paradise Postponed

If I were to single out one film director for especially good work during the 1980s, it would be Woody Allen, for the films I mentioned plus Zelig (for the boldness of its concept and its meticulous execution).

This will likely be the last decade poll I'll be participating in. The 1980s lie at the outside edge of my knowledge of cinema, and my interest in movies produced after this decade begins to wane seriously. I find fewer and fewer movies of the last 20 years that appeal to me enough to go out of my way to seek them out, and when I do, I too often find they don't live up to my hopes. I'll continue to follow Allan Fish's concise and knowledgeable reviews at Wonders in the Dark, and the stimulating comments and discussions that his sometimes surprising choices evoke. And I'll be trawling the site for titles to add to my watch-list to help update my film knowledge. It's been a pleasure discovering and rediscovering the best movies of the 1950s-1980s, and I thank Allan and Sam Juliano of WitD for inspiring those of us who regularly visit the site to do this.

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Family Therapy: Two by Ingmar Bergman, Part 2

"A mother and a daughter. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction," says Eva (Liv Ullmann) to her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), at one point in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978). That statement just about sums up the view of relations between parents and children that Bergman expresses in the third of his 1970s trilogy on family dynamics, following Cries and Whispers (1972), which examined sibling relations, and Scenes from a Marriage (1973), which examined the relations between husband and wife.

A brief synopsis of Autumn Sonata makes the film sound like a fairly straightforward mother-daughter psychodrama. The movie opens with Eva sitting at her desk writing a letter to her mother, Charlotte, a famous concert pianist who has just lost her lover of many years, another professional musician, after a long illness. Feeling that her mother may be in need of comfort, Eva, who has had no contact with her mother for several years (some sort of estrangement is implied), invites her to visit the isolated home in the Norwegian countryside where she lives with her husband, a minister.

When Charlotte arrives, things are understandably awkward between them at first, but as they catch up and get reacquainted with other, they seem to grow more comfortable in each other's presence. The only real problem is that Eva has not told her mother beforehand that she has removed her sister, Helena, from the institution where she had been living and is now caring for her at the house. Helena is in the advanced stages of a degenerative disease and is entirely dependent on Eva for care and can communicate only with Eva.

As Charlotte begins to accept this situation, mother and daughter appear to be relaxing and opening up to each other. This newfound intimacy, however, suddenly lurches out of control when the normally reserved Eva confronts her mother during a late night conversation, spilling out all her lifelong resentments toward Charlotte in an unexpectedly harsh and bitter diatribe. Charlotte is hurt by these accusations and defends herself as best she can. Eventually the two seem to reach a state of emotional equilibrium and at least to have aired their concerns even if they haven't completely resolved them. Charlotte soon leaves and is last seen on a train blithely discussing her upcoming concert tour with her manager, while Eva is shown sitting at a desk writing another letter to her mother expressing hopes for a better relationship in the future.

Yet as one might expect from a film directed by the magisterial Bergman, there is a great deal more going on here than meets the eye. Like Scenes from a Marriage, Autumn Sonata is basically a two-character movie (the two characters are brilliantly inhabited by the great actresses Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann), and it is the incredible complexity of those characters that is responsible for the depth, subtlety, and surprise wrung from such a seemingly simple premise.

With her wire-rimmed eyeglasses, hair braided and fastened tightly on top of her head, prominent teeth, and frumpy clothing, Liv Ullmann's Eva appears shy, plain-looking, and innocuous. But from the beginning, there are hints that all is not right with her. In the opening and closing scenes, in which she is writing to her mother, she is actually in the background as her husband directly addresses the viewer, talking about Eva and explaining what she is doing. But significantly, he refrains from commenting on why she is doing this, and something in his manner conveys unease about the decision to write her mother. We also learn later that Eva is not a happy woman, that she has lost a child and been institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital.

Eva's unexpected behavior during the late-night confrontation with her mother seems shockingly out of character. As the scene proceeds, it makes us question all the assumptions about Eva we have held until this climactic moment. We realize clearly for the first time that the timid and seemingly benign Eva is in fact deeply troubled, a passive-aggressive woman who may not even be fully aware of the true motivation behind her actions, and we understand the reason for her husband's air of unease during the opening scenes of the movie.

The percipient viewer might even have begun to wonder about Eva earlier in the movie, when she plays a piano piece for her mother, then shyly begs the reluctant Charlotte to critique her playing and perform the piece herself. This is like one of those moments in a horror movie when a character is about to open a mysterious door behind which some kind of threat is almost certainly lurking and the viewer wants to shout, "No! Don't open that door, you fool!" Yet Eva does open the door, compulsively pressing her mother into re-enacting with her a primal situation, with predictable results: humiliation for both.

After Eva's nearly hysterical confrontation with her mother, we begin to wonder about many of her actions that before seemed so forthright. Why did she contact her mother at such a vulnerable moment in Charlotte's life? Was it really, as she professed at the time, to offer comfort, or did she unconsciously sense an opportunity to attack while her opponent's defenses were weakened? Are her actions in regard to her sister Helena really as altruistic as they seem? Did she intend to use her as a pawn in a confrontation with Charlotte, an intention unacknowledged even to herself? She knew that Helena's presence in the house would unsettle Charlotte, yet she gave her no forewarning. A cynical viewer might wonder if this was to further throw Charlotte off her guard and make an unspoken accusation about Charlotte's neglect of her disabled child. After all, Eva's specific resentments about Charlotte's treatment of her as a child can be reduced to a combination of Charlotte's neglect of her family in favor of her career and her preoccupation with Eva's imperfections.

Then there is the question of why Eva decided to care for Helena in the first place. She made this decision soon after losing her own child, and Helena is as helpless as an infant. Could Eva be using her own sister as a substitute for the child she lost, not only to satisfy a psychological need to replace her dead child, but also to have another creature whose dependence on her will give her life meaning? At one point in the film, Eva says wistfully that she could be happy if only one person in the world loved her for herself. Yet this already seems true of Helena and of Eva's unbelievably patient and tolerant husband. Is she so unable to let go of the past, an adult still controlled by childhood grudges and perceived injustices centering on her mother, that she can't see what is so apparent to us, that she is already loved unconditionally by at least two people in her own household? So many things about Eva that seemed clear and simple earlier now seem opaque and ambiguous.

After that confrontation, we begin to see Charlotte in a different light too. If at first Eva was entirely sympathetic, appearing to be a victim, then Charlotte came off as comparatively unsympathetic. Under her soignée, poised exterior, she seemed a cool, aloof, and self-centered woman immersed in her career and avoiding true intimacy, a woman capable of superficial affection but not of any kind of deeper love, even for her own daughters. She treats Eva politely but is rather formal and distant with her. Something of a perfectionist, she is obviously repelled by Helena's disability.

As with Eva, after that midnight confrontation, a significant change occurs in our perceptions of Charlotte, a change that begins when we start to see Charlotte as the victim of Eva's hostile aggression. Charlotte does not react to this aggression with anger, but with mild and unresisting patience as she explains herself. She tells Eva how people of her generation are not by nature openly affectionate but that even if she did not express her love for her children, this did not mean they were unloved. She tells Eva of the personal difficulties in her marriage and of how the importance to her of her art often created conflict between the demands of her career and the needs of her family. She abashedly acknowledges that even though she tried to balance these things, in the end she invariably chose art over family. The viewer gets the impression that this is certainly the most intimate and self-revealing conversation Charlotte has ever had with her daughter, and possibly with anyone. We begin to see Charlotte as a more complex and sensitive woman than we did before—not simply a selfish person, but one defined by her own emotional limitations.

This dropping of masks and reversal of personalities hearkens back yet again to Bergman's Persona (1966). More and more, it seems to me that Persona is the seminal film in Bergman's later body of work, for so much in his later films seems to flow directly from that movie. For one thing, in Charlotte Autumn Sonata has as one of its main characters an artist. By the end of the movie, we see that Eva and Charlotte, far from being opposites in personality as they appeared at the beginning, are actually more alike than they believe. Both mother and daughter are self-absorbed almost to the point of narcissism. They are both overly sensitive to their own moods and feelings yet find it difficult to express their emotions.

The crucial difference between the two, though—the thing that allows Charlotte to move forward while Eva remains trapped nursing childhood grievances that have become a permanent part of her adult personality—is Charlotte's art. Artists may be no less selfish than the rest of us, but they have the expressive means of externalizing their inner lives. As Charlotte tells Eva, "Only through my music did I have the chance to show my feelings." It is significant that at the end of the movie Charlotte is seen traveling in a train to her next concert, while Eva is shown sitting at the same desk as at the beginning of the movie, doing the same thing—writing a letter to Charlotte as her husband looks on in resignation. In that letter she expresses sentiments of forgiveness and hope for a better relationship with her mother in the future that, in view of all that has happened in the film, simply do not seem realistic.

The other key element Autumn Sonata shares with Persona is the concept of the fundamental subjectivity of the individual human experience, what David Thomson calls Bergman's belief in "the harrowing separateness of people." In Bergman's later work, we see illustrated again and again the idea that we are each of us trapped inside ourselves, and that ordinary human attempts at communication are by their nature imperfect and fraught with emotional danger. This is the world view from which the later films grow.

Autumn Sonata, like its companion films on the family, shows that the emotional demands, both explicit and implicit, that we make on those we love temper love's sustaining qualities with an equally powerful ability to harm. In Autumn Sonata Bergman tells yet again a story of individuals that gives the viewer an intensive, microcosmic picture of all human relationships. That Eva and Charlotte can love each other only from a distance merely emphasizes the larger concept of the universal and unbridgeable distance between all human beings, even when they are related by blood, and when they share the emotional bond of love.
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Many of the themes about the artist and the family explored in later films were first introduced in Bergman's movie Through a Glass Darkly (1961). That brilliant film involves a writer—acting simultaneously as a participant in events, a detached observer of those events, and the transformer of his experiences into art—who is also a father with a schizophrenic daughter having an incestuous relationship with her brother. But it was in Persona that Bergman developed those ideas in such a focused form, presenting abstractions about art and life in the context of specific personal relationships, that they could serve as a template for much of his later work.

Family Therapy: Two by Ingmar Bergman, Part 1

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972), in which I discussed Bergman's emphasis in that film on the family dynamics among the three sisters who are its main characters. Before the decade was over, Bergman would make two other films that, taken together with Cries and Whispers, form what could be considered a trilogy in which he examines how various members of the family relate to one other: Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and Autumn Sonata (1978).

Whereas Cries and Whispers concentrated on sibling relations, Scenes from a Marriage deals, as the title indicates, with relations between husband and wife. Originally made as a six-hour long mini-series for Swedish television, it was later edited by Bergman into a 167-minute movie, the version I watched, and released in the US in 1974. (Because it was first shown on television, it was ruled ineligible for the Academy Awards.) The film opens with a scene that is ambiguous: A man and woman—clearly identifiable as Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann, two actors who had appeared in a number of Bergman's films—are sitting on a sofa in what appears to be an upper middle-class living room being interviewed. At first it is uncertain whether they are characters in the movie or the actors who play them discussing their characters, as in Bergman's The Passion of Anna (1969).


Within a few minutes, though, it is clear that these actors were from the beginning in character. The couple being interviewed for a magazine profile are Marianne (Ullmann) and Johan (Josephson). She is a lawyer in her thirties; he is a university professor of experimental psychology in his forties. They have been married for ten years and have two daughters. The interview is in part a clever way of succinctly presenting the background of these people and sketching their personality traits (or as we later find out, the self-images they present to each other and the world) and the way they relate to each other. Johan seems confident and more or less in control of the relationship, while she seems more reserved and behaves deferentially toward him. The image of their marriage they present to the interviewer is one of stability, of two complementary personalities who have achieved a relationship of contented equilibrium.

This scene is followed by a strangely contrasting one. Marianne and Johan are entertaining their friends Katarina (Bibi Andersson) and Peter (Jan Malmsjö), and all are seated at the table in the dining room. The profile of the couple has been published, and Johan reads it aloud, sarcastically ridiculing the idealized picture of the couple it presents, as Marianne smiles and nods in agreement. Yet what he reads accurately reflects the image they presented to the interviewer, and it is clear from their expressions that the couple are secretly pleased with the result.

This kind of irony—possible only with the most masterful actors, those capable of suggesting simultaneous contradictory emotions—hearkens back to Bergman's Persona (1966), with its theme that we all wear masks that conceal our inner selves and that in a sense we are all actors giving a performance for the world at large and for each other. In the dinner scene, taken in conjunction with the opening scene of the interview, Bergman implies that this is also true of married couples, as they present a united front to the world. And, as we will discover in the course of the movie, he further implies that this is true within the marriage itself, in the way the two people in a marriage tend to hold something of themselves back from each other.

The irony of the scene does not end here, though. Later in the meal it becomes apparent that the marriage of Katarina and Peter is in serious trouble, and as Marianne and Johan look on in obvious discomfort, their friends begin tearing into each other with an escalating viciousness reminiscent of George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The subjects of contention are those typical of bourgeois marriages everywhere: fidelity, money, careers, goals that have begun to diverge, waning sexual interest in each other. The irony of the situation is that even though we won't learn it for a while, these are exactly the areas of dispute that will arise later when cracks begin to develop in Marianne and Johan's seemingly ideal marriage.

When Johan announces out of the blue that he has been having an affair with a graduate student he is advising (how many times have you heard of that situation?) and is leaving Marianne to take up a new teaching post in the US, their calcified marriage begins to crumble. The rest of the movie traces the evolution of relations between Marianne and Johan over the course of the next several years—from a bitter separation, trenchant post mortems about the reasons for the end of the marriage, divorce, the collapse of Johan's career plans, disputes over maintenance and child support, to the eventual remarriage of both. So chaotic is the trajectory of their relations that at one point while all this is happening, Johan asks aloud, "Are we living in utter confusion?"

The movie ends ten years after it began, in a sense coming full circle. Marianne and Johan, involved in unhappy marriages to others, are now secret lovers sneaking away for a tryst at the country vacation home where Johan first confessed his affair to Marianne and told her that their marriage was over. Earlier in the movie, Johan told Marianne that they were like children trying to make sense of the adult world. The intervening ten years since we were introduced to them in that gripping first scene have been difficult for both, but at the end of the movie they seem at last to have grown up.

Because it was originally made for television, Scenes from a Marriage uses the conventional TV aspect ratio of 1:33 : 1. Structured around six episodic "chapters," the movie consists largely of dialogue rather than action and is shot mostly in the talking-heads close-up style typical of the small screen. The strictures of this format had major effects on the movie. For one thing, they required Bergman to write a screenplay in which dialogue does practically everything—conveys information, illuminates character traits, and explains the progression of his main characters through the phases of the transformative changes they undergo. The dialogue must be clear, focused, naturalistic and literal. It must be an exact fit for both the characters and the actors who portray them. Bergman accomplishes this with absolute mastery.

The limitations imposed by this format also required Bergman to simplify his style. If the chief means of showing the nature of Marianne and Johan's relationship is through their conversations, then the visual novelty and stylistic flourishes we associate with Bergman's previous work would only be distractions. Bergman reduces his visual style to essentials, resulting in one of the most stylistically minimalist films he ever made. Yet the film is never boring, so strong are the writing and acting, and so unfailingly apposite are the choices Bergman makes from his relatively basic visual palette.

Because of the heavy reliance on dialogue and the extensive use of close-ups, the movie could only succeed if the actors playing Marianne and Johan convincingly merge with their characters. I am specifically referring to Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, who appear in every scene, occasionally alone but almost always together. (Other actors in the cast appear in no more than one sequence.) These actors must carry a movie that even in its edited version runs nearly three hours, and they do so brilliantly, right from that opening interview sequence, which portends one of the greatest strengths of the movie: In the first couple of minutes we see the actors settle into their roles and become the characters, and they never let up for the remainder of the film.

This must have been especially challenging for Ullmann, who had played lead roles in five Bergman films in the previous seven years and was therefore quite recognizable to those familiar with the director's work. The role of Marianne was the most conventional character she had at the time played for Bergman—a contemporary professional, a complacent middle-class wife and mother untroubled by personal demons—yet she disappears into the role, carrying the viewer along with her on her unanticipated journey. As Marianne, she sees the world she blithely took for granted disintegrate and experiences the most intense and disturbing emotions of her life when she leaves behind the sheltered existence she led with Johan. After she learns to let go of her bitterness toward Johan and forgive him, she is able to become more confident, mature, and independent, and more open about her sexuality. She finds a real identity outside her marriage and emerges a stronger and more resilient woman.

Like Ullmann, Josephson had also appeared in several of Bergman's films, but in smaller and less prominent roles. Bergman had the rare knack of creating highly individualized female characters and placing them in stories in which they dominate the narrative and are the most memorable people in the movie, particularly in his later career, say from Persona (1966) on. Scenes from a Marriage, however, is essentially a two-character movie in which the main male and female characters are given equal weight. With so much responsibility for the success of the movie resting on his performance, Josephson clearly proves himself up to the challenge of sharing the screen with such a strong and distinctly defined presence as Ullmann's Marianne. Like her, Josephson's Johan is an utterly ordinary man, not the writer, musician, or painter who is so often the chief male character in Bergman's movies. And unlike the spiritual and artistic torments of those characters, Johan's problems and insecurities are the ordinary ones common to middle-class, middle-aged men everywhere.

A few years older than his wife, he has reached the point in his life at which he begins to question the worth of his accomplishments and to aspire to something more ambitious, something he believes will be more significant and satisfying. He sees the means of this personal and psychological fulfillment in career advancement and a renewed sex life with a younger wife. (Since the birth of their second daughter, his sex life with Marianne has been minimal.) That he is later unsuccessful in achieving these things eventually makes him question his decision to divorce Marianne and move on. Yet like Marianne, in spite of his confusion and suffering—or is it really because of it?—he seems by the end of the movie to have grown. Johan has lost much of his self-centered arrogance and discontent with the course of his life, becoming more humble and more accepting of the way his life has turned out.

Perhaps the most important change among all those they have undergone, though, is that both Marianne and Johan have adjusted their expectations about love to a more realistic level. "We love each other in an earthly, imperfect way," Johan tells Marianne at the end of the film, and it is hard to find fault with that painfully acquired insight.
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In 2003 Bergman, who died in 2007, made a movie for Swedish television (his last work) titled Saraband that involves Marianne visiting Johan at his country home some 30 years later. As in Scenes from a Marriage, Marianne and Johan are played by Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson.

A Study in Scarlet: Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers

"Bergman insists on the truths of how people feel toward others they need to love."

—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2004)

From Wild Strawberries (1957) to his final feature film, Fanny and Alexander (1982), the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman returned again and again to stories about the family, about the ways that members of a family relate to one another, the ways they grant and withhold intimacy, the ways they conceal or reveal their true feelings for one another. Along with Through a Glass Darkly (1961), his 1972 film Cries and Whispers is probably his most concentrated and focused examination of family dynamics.

At an upper middle-class country estate around 1900, two sisters, Karina (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), have come to be present as their eldest sister, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), dies after a long illness, probably cancer. Agnes is cared for by her long-time servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). These are the main characters in the movie, although other characters—Agnes's doctor (Erland Josephson), the sisters' mother (also played by Liv Ullmann), Maria's daughter (played by Linn Ullmann, the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman), Karina's and Maria's husbands, and a handful of others—appear briefly.

Bergman was a master at creating highly individualized and complex female characters, a rarity in male directors and one of the most remarkable things about him as a screenwriter and film director. In Cries and Whispers he has done this four times over. Agnes, the eldest sister, is a loving and warm woman. (The name Agnes is derived from the Latin for "lamb.") She is unmarried, and her relationship with the servant Anna suggests she might be a lesbian. Karina, the middle sister, is a cold, withdrawn, self-centered woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a domineering and equally cold older man. Maria, the youngest sister, is flirtatious, promiscuous (in the past she had an affair with Agnes's doctor, which caused her husband to attempt suicide when he discovered it), and also self-centered, but warmer and more sensual than Karina. The servant Anna, who is about the same age as the sisters, is a simple, selfless woman devoted to her mistress and of the four women in the household the only one who is openly religious. No mention is made of a husband, but she did once have a daughter, now dead.

We learn these things about the women not only from the way they treat each other, but from details about their pasts that are subtly interpolated into the plot as very short flashbacks. Childhood memories of a brief glance at a doll's house and of a Twelfth Night celebration with a magic lantern limn a contented childhood for Agnes and Maria. Karin's most vivid childhood memory, in contrast, is of her cold jealousy for the affection given by their mother to Maria. The childhood dynamics of these three sisters are stunningly observed: the confidence and maturity of the eldest sister, the feeling of being excluded and starved of attention of the middle sister, and the pampered special position of the youngest and prettiest sister. It is easy to see how these experiences as children prefigure the personalities and behavior of the three sisters as adults, especially in the pressured environment of the present situation.

The reactions of Karin and Maria to the coming death of their eldest sister clearly indicate how unnerved and frightened they are by the idea of death and the inevitability of their own deaths. After Agnes dies (about halfway through the movie), there is a stunning dream sequence that vividly shows this fear. It is not clear whose dream it is (at one point the dead Agnes says it is her dream); it is likely that the sequence is a cinematic conceit intended by Bergman to represent a collective dream. In the dream the dead Agnes, laid out on her bed in her funeral attire (which eerily resembles that of a baby), calls Anna to her in the night and asks her to bring each of her sisters to her. First Karin then Maria gingerly enters the room, is overcome with fright, and immediately turns and leaves. Only the religious Anna, who seems to accept death as a natural occurrence, consents to stay with her mistress and is seen in a final shot cradling Agnes, curled in the fetal position, in her arms, almost like a Pietà. Most of this sequence is shot in tight close-up and with few edits, making the expressions on the faces plain to read.

Anna cradles the dead Agnes in her arms

The second half of the movie deals with events that happen after the death of Agnes. Karin, Maria, and their husbands are quite businesslike and unsentimental about wrapping up the estate and dismissing the faithful Anna. Far from being a transformative event, the death of their eldest sister has only hardened the personalities of Karin and Maria. The one possibility for change occurs when the shaken Maria confronts Karin and pleads with her to accept her affection. Resisting Maria's overtures, Karin loses control of her tightly reined-in emotions and tells her younger sister how much she hates her. But Maria persists, and finally Karin (who can't bear to be touched) responds, the two embrace, and a new intimacy seems to have been created. Near the end of the movie, though, just before they part, the mercurial Maria disavows this new relationship as just a passing whim and leaves Karin alone and isolated once again. It is the final and most potent example in the movie of what David Thomson calls Bergman's "convictions of the harrowing separateness of people, the intractable privacy of men and women."

In a recent post on Bergman's Shame, I wrote of the precise balance in his best films between the thematic and the narrative, between ideas and people interacting in emotionally charged situations, and attributed this to his background in theater. (Bergman was involved in theater from his days as a student at Stockholm University, later managing several theater companies. For several years in the 1960s he was director of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm.) This theater-influenced approach to film, which is more apparent in his movies of the 1960s and 1970s than in his earlier work, is on full display in Cries and Whispers, with its plot reminiscent of the family dramas of Ibsen and Chekhov.

Added to this balancing of ideas and characters is the theatrical staging of the action and the overall look of the movie, with its strong emphasis on composition, on the placement of objects and people within the frame and their limited movement within a confined space. Cries and Whispers is in the literal sense of the term a chamber piece. Nearly all of the action takes place in Agnes's country house—in the sitting rooms, in the dining room, in Anna's room, and most vividly in Agnes's bedroom, which is, of course, also her sickroom and the scene of her death and laying out. I can't think of another film by Bergman with such a strong sense of being influenced by stage sets.

Perhaps the most obvious indication of this is the use of an identifiable color scheme in the movie, only Bergman's second film shot in color. The predominant color in this scheme is red, with white, black, and the occasional gray the other colors in the scheme. Every room in the house is painted an intense red color, like those red rooms in paintings by Matisse. The dresses the sisters wear are often red or rust colored. The nightclothes, the bed linens, the linen in the dining room, and the clothing Agnes is laid out in are pristine white. The furniture is of dark mahogany or black lacquer and, of course, the clothing worn after the death of Agnes is mourning black. There is no blue or yellow in the movie, and even the outdoor foliage is drained of color because the movie takes place in the fall. And whereas movies conventionally fade to black or occasionally white, the fade-outs in Cries and Whispers are always to red. This saturation of the images in the color red may perhaps be intended to remind the viewer of blood. After all, there are a lot of open emotional wounds on display in the movie. But blood is also essential to life. When something is referred to as bloodless, it is lacking in vitality, and the result of anemia is a dearth of the nutrients necessary for life.

Maria, Karin, and Anna in the red sitting room

Each of the three actresses who play the sisters had a long association with Bergman, and each had memorable roles in several of his films. All give beautifully accomplished performances. Thulin has perhaps the most difficult role as the unlikable, neurotic Karin, whose childhood alienation still governs her life and her reactions to her sisters. Ullmann must suppress her natural intelligence and sensitivity to play the frivolous and inconstant Maria, and she does this convincingly, with her red-gold hair and simpering mannerisms. But it is Harriet Andersson who dominates the movie, even though she dies halfway through, as the eldest sister who manages to retain her nobility and selflessness even as she ventures more than once to the brink of death, gasping in agony, only to be pulled back to life again by the devoted Anna, before finally dying suddenly and quietly. These near-death scenes are truly disturbing and the most demanding of any performer in the movie. This marvelous ensemble is completed by the plain, Rubenesque Sylwan—who appeared in only seven movies between 1956 and 1982 but easily holds her own with the veteran Bergman actresses—as the earthy, maternal Anna, the life force of the movie and the person who holds the household together.

The movie opens and closes with two brilliant sequences. It begins with a brief montage of morning scenes in the garden outside the house before moving indoors as clocks in the various rooms strike. We then see a close-up of Agnes's face as she wakes. For a few seconds, her face registers disorientation, then—and Andersson conveys this with absolute clarity—we see the dawning realization of where she is and the sudden memory that she is dying. It is a heart-rending moment. As Agnes is gripped by a spasm of pain, one small tear forms in each eye. She gets out of bed and walks to the window, where she gazes at an allée of leafless trees in late autumn. (In that opening montage, the garden appeared to be in summer. Was that Agnes's dream?) After winding the clock on the mantel, she goes to her writing desk, opens her journal, and writes a short entry: "It is morning, and I am in pain."

The movie ends in another brilliant sequence that tempers all the pain, unsettling memories, and uncertainty that have occurred in the hour and a half since that opening sequence. After the sisters and their husbands have left, Anna stays behind to clear the house. She has been offered a memento of Agnes and has declined the offer. ("She's playing her role well," comments Karin's lawyer husband condescendingly.) But she has kept one thing of Agnes's of which the sisters are unaware: her journal. The movie opened with Agnes getting out of bed and writing a brief entry in that journal. Now Anna picks up the journal and begins to read in voice-over as we are shown what she is describing.

Anna and the three sisters stroll in the autumnal garden

It is a day in early September, and Agnes's sisters have arrived for their visit. For the first time in the movie since the opening montage, the action takes place outdoors. Dressed completely in white summer outfits and carrying white parasols, the three sisters, accompanied by Anna, dressed in pale gray, are strolling through the autumnal grounds, the trees and earth covered with brown leaves. They come to their childhood swing and sit down, Karin and Maria facing away from the camera and Agnes opposite them facing the camera. Agnes no longer has the haggard look of a dying woman wracked with pain. She now resembles the healthy and beautiful Harriet Andersson of earlier Bergman films. And she looks peaceful and contented. As Anna pushes the swing, the camera moves in to a close-up of Agnes, who thinks to herself: "Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes I can experience perfection. [She closes her eyes.] And I feel profoundly grateful to my life which gives me so much."

Perhaps for Bergman this is what the art of cinema is all about: capturing in the midst of pain, the unstoppable passage of time, death, and the certainty that each of us is ultimately alone (the cries?) those fleeting, still moments of perfection (the whispers?) that briefly bring us peace and contentment.
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The Shame of War

The recent Memorial Day weekend inspired a surfeit of war-themed movies on television. Turner Classic Movies, AMC, and other channels seemed to be showing one war movie after another all week long. The subject was covered as well by movie bloggers. Richard Hourula at Riku Writes, who writes frequently about war movies, posted a list of a dozen war movies as a follow-up to a previous post just a few months ago on 25 memorable war movies. He once accounted for his fascination with war movies by remarking that the pressures of wartime seem to test individuals, to place them in situations that bring out their essential human qualities. It's a perceptive observation that explains why war has inspired so many movies. Most of the great directors, both American and foreign, have made films about warfare, and often these have been among their very best works.

Movies can express radically different attitudes toward war. They can be as partisan as the hundreds of patriotic films turned out by American and British studios during World War II, as anti-war as powerful films like All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory, or in rare instances as detached as Jean Renoir's great movie La Grande Illusion. So rich is the genre that it has many identifiable sub-genres—from combat movies to prisoner-of-war movies to movies about holding down the home front to movies showing the aftermath of warfare as populations transition back to peace—a clear indication of the fertility of the genre. What nearly all war movies have in common though is that they are set within the context of a specific war. We know who the two sides are and at least roughly why they are fighting. And almost always we know on which side of the conflict the screenwriter and director stand.

This was not the approach taken by the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman when he decided to tackle the subject. Previous films by Bergman had dealt peripherally with war. In The Seventh Seal (1957), the medieval knight played by Max von Sydow is returning home from one of the crusades when he has his famous encounter with Death. In Persona (1966), the actress played by Liv Ullmann, who has had a nervous breakdown and stopped speaking, is haunted by images of Buddhist monks in Vietnam immolating themselves to protest the war then happening in their country. The movie Bergman made next, Shame (1968), was his first to deal exclusively with war.

But unlike other filmmakers, Bergman made a point of making the war depicted in Shame as non-specific as possible. About all we're really sure of is that there is a war raging in the unnamed country where the movie is set. We don't know why the war started or what the issues are. We're not even sure who the two sides are or what political philosophies they represent. One side calls the other invaders; that side calls themselves liberators. There are indications that this might actually be a civil war of some kind and that this labeling of the other side as invaders or oppressors is simply an example of wartime propaganda.

Shame opens in a darkened bedroom with two people sleeping in separate beds. An alarm clock rings, and one of the two figures stirs but does not rise. The other figure, a woman, snaps awake, sleepily gets out of bed, flings open the curtains, flooding the room with light, and walks to a jug and basin and begins washing. The first figure, a man, lingers in bed a few moments then slowly sits up, puts on his eyeglasses, takes a pill of some kind, and sits there with a stony and dispirited expression on his face. The two people are Eva Rosenberg (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Jan (Max von Sydow), former violinists in a symphony orchestra that has disbanded because of the war and who now live as refugees in a primitive farmhouse on a remote island, where they grow lingonberries. Their existence here is not so much one of bleakness as of life reduced to its essentials. Their house is lit with oil lamps but they have a battered old station wagon, and a telephone and radio that sometimes work.

Later they sit at the table eating breakfast. She is dressed and ready to begin their day, which will consist of taking the ferry to another island to deliver two boxes of lingonberries. He sits in his pajamas, unshaven, and tells her of the dream he had—that they were once again playing in the orchestra and that the life they live now was behind them, like a nightmare. "I woke up crying," he says to her. This first sequence tells us a great deal about these two people by showing us the way war has affected them and influenced the dynamics of their relationship.

Eva is resilient. Self-controlled without quite being cold, she organizes and regulates their life together. She has not lost her capacity for pleasure even in the face of the straitened conditions and political uncertainty in which they live. When they sell their berries for more than they anticipated, she suggests buying a bottle of wine to celebrate. Nor has she altogether abandoned hope for the future. As they drink the wine together outside under a tree, she talks animatedly to Jan of her love for him and her desire for children.

Jan, on the other hand, is close to being a broken man. Like most depressed people, he has turned inward, dwelling on his misery, and with the exception of Eva seems scarcely able to connect to those around him. Moody and withdrawn, he is emotionally dependent on Eva's nurturing strength and barely able to keep going from day to day. He can no longer even play his instrument. He may even be impotent. Not only do they sleep in separate beds, but Eva's talk of children, of their emotional commitment to each other, and of their future clearly makes him uncomfortable. He accuses her of being angry all the time; she accuses him of being weak. "Pull yourself together," she tells him at one point, impatient with his self-pity. "I do."

So far Jan and Eva seem to have adjusted to their life in exile, and if they must endure a certain amount of physical deprivation, at least they appear to have escaped the conflict raging on the mainland and to live in relative safety. Their comparatively peaceful life soon collapses though. As they sit under the trees sipping their wine and chatting, the rural silence is suddenly shattered by the scream of low-flying jet fighters racing across the sky. One of the planes explodes, and running toward the wreckage, Jan finds its pilot hanging from a tree. From this point on, Jan and Eva experience the full gamut of the horrors of war.

Their farm is invaded first by enemy troops, then by local troops. Arrested and accused of collaboration with the enemy, Jan is interrogated and beaten while Eva listens from the next room. They are subjected to stage-managed psychological intimidation then arbitrarily told by Mayor Jacobi (Gunnar Björnstrand), supposedly a friend of the couple, to return home. He tells Jan that the authorities knew he wasn't a traitor, "but we had to make an example of you." Making their way home, Jan and Eva wander through a stark, bombed-out, burned-out landscape of devastation.

After returning home, they are visited by the mayor, who makes an overt sexual pass at Eva while Jan looks on. Later Jan sees them together in the greenhouse, where they appear to be having sex. At this point guerrilla fighters, who have been hiding in the woods, show up looking for the mayor and in a powerfully dynamic sequence completely wreck the house, smashing everything in it, and finally blowing it up. During this long sequence the only sounds are those of the house being destroyed. Afterward, Jan finds his antique violin lying outside in the dust, smashed to pieces, and this, along with the discovery of what he believes to be Eva's betrayal, is the final blow to his humanity. The loss of the last meaningful connection to his former life and of Eva's fidelity causes him to lose his moral bearings completely: when the guerrillas put a pistol in Jan's hand and demand that he execute the mayor, at first he drops the pistol in revulsion, then hesitantly picks it up and shoots the mayor several times.

This is the first but not the last time in the movie that Jan kills. After the guerrillas leave and Jan and Eva are living in their greenhouse, an exhausted young soldier turns up, and Jan seizes his rifle and leads him down the road. Jan returns alone, carrying the young soldier's shoes, and tells Eva that a boat will be leaving for the mainland soon. Shocked at what Jan has apparently done—"You killed him for his shoes?" she asks, incredulous—and at what he has become, she at first refuses then agrees to go with him. The last scenes in the movie show the couple clinging to each other as they drift, along with a handful of other refugees, in a small open boat on a vast sea that fills the frame.

By stripping all specific context from the war happening around Eva and Jan, Bergman focuses on the human effects of war on those unwillingly caught up in it, making Shame one of the most moving of all anti-war films. Jan and Eva are completely apolitical. They don't understand what this war is about, and they support neither side. The thrust of the film is entirely on the effects war has on these two people, who are trapped in an unreal situation and want only to avoid its harsh consequences.

Yet the war's toll on them is great. It destroys Jan, causing him to lose not only his dignity, but also his humanity. Bergman may allow the camera to linger almost obsessively on Liv Ullmann's expressive face, radiant in its unadorned, earthy beauty. But it is really von Sydow, his face growing progressively more haggard and his expression more tormented as he slowly unravels under the soul-destroying experience of life during wartime, who is the center of the movie. The war also destroys Jan and Eva's marriage by turning their relationship from one based on love and shared values to one based on necessity and desperation. A relationship based on the desire to share a common future devolves into one based on dependence on each other for physical and psychological survival, and characterized not by mutual respect but by mistrust and suspicion.

Shame, like Bergman's best films, strikes a precisely calibrated balance between the thematic and the narrative. I have always thought of Bergman as the most literary of the great film directors. By this I mean that his movies function simultaneously on both the intellectual and the human levels. His movies deal with ideas, but they also deal with complex and clearly defined individuals interacting in compelling situations. Perhaps it is Bergman's background in theater that accounts for this ability to explore weighty, abstract subjects through emotionally engaging stories that are both personal and specific.

Shame is an incredibly dense movie. At just 103 minutes, fairly short by current standards, it is far richer in narrative incident than my cursory description of the plot indicates. Bergman weaves into the film's plot incidents that touch on a remarkable number of the ramifications of war—among them the control of entire populations through mass psychological manipulation, the use of film as a propaganda tool, the devaluing of beauty and art, and the sanctioning of inhumane impulses that would never be tolerated in peacetime. Its quiet early section—with its depiction of a static, almost ascetic life—draws the viewer in before suddenly giving way to a vision of constantly accelerating instability and the inexorable disintegration of the tentative security that Jan and Eva have found in their island refuge. Its visualizations of the violence and destruction that occur as a result are memorably vivid and truly harrowing.

Bergman's perennial subject is personal suffering. In Shame the source of this suffering is not internal and spiritual as in so many of his films, but external and specific. Shame deals not with existential pain, but with man-made pain. In this sense, it is a movie for those wary of Bergman. There are no dreams or hallucinations, no religious allegory, no obscure symbolism, no abstruse reality-and-illusion puzzles. Its plot is calculated to drive home in a realistic way the simple message that war is humankind's most cruel and dehumanizing creation. By limiting the scale of the military conflict in the movie and concentrating on its toll on ordinary non-participants, Bergman created a timeless anti-war film that still has great relevance more than forty years later. If you have any doubt about that statement, just watch a news program or read a newspaper with good international coverage, and note how many stories deal with small-scale regional conflicts like the one depicted in Shame and their effects—the fear, pain, confusion, and humiliation—on local populations and on individuals like Jan and Eva Rosenberg.
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Many thanks to Sam Juliano of Wonders in the Dark for helping me locate a copy of Shame.