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Scenes From a Marriage - Ingmar Bergman
Very real. I've never been married but I have been in a long term relationship and while it wasn't exactly the same (I'm nothing like Johan), a lot of the generalities were pretty close. I was sort of waiting for Marianne to lose her mind and have some sort of intense existential, psychoactive experience or something but I'm glad that didn't happen and the movie stuck to stark realism.
9/10
Scenes from a Marriage is one of the few artworks that I think follows the rule wherein more life experience brings you a greater appreciation for it. I watched it, and while I could see the intensity, it didn't really hit home for me in a coherent way. I saw the power of the individual pieces, but I couldn't make emotional sense of them. My dad however, who has been divorced twice, could.Quote:
Originally Posted by Clopin
I've decided to finish the Bergman films I have on my list of movies to watch, while I remain sick. We'll see if I can do the ten I have left in the next four or so days... Summer with Monika is next anyway.
Summer with Monika - Ingmar Bergman
I hated Monika, but I liked the movie.
8/10
This film has the impossibly beautiful Janet Munro playing the lead in a cautionary
tale of the dangers of falling for the chimera known as glamour.
As a young girl from a defunct mining town who loses her virginity to a slick
business man and ends up in London with nowhere to go, she is befriended by a
young man who works as a barman and takes pity on her. He takes her into his
lodgings and tells her he will think of some way to help her. She is so taken by his
respect and genuineness that she tells him that she is in love with him and they set up
a conjugal home in a larger part of the house.
It is at this point that she starts to think of the opportunities that London has to offer
a beautiful young woman and begins to get ideas of becoming a fashion model.
This leads to friction when she gets an invite to a smart party by an elderly actor who
lives in the same house and comes into contact with a swinging crowd of poseurs
who are very different to the young man.
She eventually leaves him and is taken up by a rich middle-aged wheeler dealer and
from there to numerous liaisons with other men before killing herself with sleeping
pills. Janet Munro gives a superb performance and is ably assisted by the rest of the
cast of seasoned actors. She died tragically at the age of 39 from a heart condition
aggravated by alcoholism.
9/10
I saw Bergman's "Through a Glass Darkly" and looked at the following to try to make sense of it:
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/gr...ss-darkly-1961
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through...kly_%28film%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia
What I understand is Karin is believed by the three members of her family who are with her to be suffering from some mental illness and there is at least one doctor who diagnosed her with something. Her behavior estranges her from the three males currently with her.
(1) She refuses to have sex with her husband, Martin.
(2) She sexually teases her brother, Minus.
(3) She looks for reasons to justify a feeling of grievance against her father, David, who's wife, her mother, died of some mental illness.
If one views God as a male, which Karin does, we could add a fourth male to the set. She thinks she hears God in a closet and demands that he show himself. The door opens and she screams. She claims that God is a spider wanting to have sex with her. The fact that she has this experience makes me think she is not totally imagining this. Everyone does see the door open.
She agrees to be taken to a hospital. It is like an admission of her failure to establish relationship.
Of all the characters, her father seems to understand best what is going on. He recently attempted suicide, so his mental health may be in doubt as well, but at the moment he does not seem to want anything from Karin except to understand and perhaps write about her illness to further his understanding. This acceptance gives him an edge. He is also blamed by the other three for not being around, for writing in his journal, for writing novels, for giving them gifts they devalue. He doesn't blame anyone. He becomes a sort of God-figure for his son Minus when he explains to Minus how he approaches Karin at the end. Minus is surprised that his father spoke to him. What should have really surprised Minus is this is the first time Minus actually listened to him without judgement.
Anyway, that's what I found out about the movie and my current views of it. I originally saw it when I was an undergraduate as part of some watered-down "existentialist" course to fulfill some cultural requirement for graduation.
I'm pretty sure Minus and Karin have sex in some form in the boat when they are alone together; also, speaking of incest...
Saraband - Ingmar Bergman
So I'm correct in thinking that Karin and Henrik are involved in some sort of very bizarre incestual relationship right? My reasons for believing this are, they sleep in the same bed, she takes her top off right in front of him before going to bed and there's a very un father-daughter like kiss which takes place around two thirds of the way through the film. I read that Bergman was somewhat preoccupied with incest and it crops up in a few of his other movies so I think it's an open and shut case. All this considered I actually liked Henrik (more than Johan at least) and felt pretty bad for him.
I liked how the movie ended especially, with the suicide attempt and Marianne looking at the photographs. The audience is left unaware of what is going to happen to Henrik, Karin, Johan, etc next, but it almost definitely won't be good. Bergman was 86 when he made the movie and I think it's important to know that before watching the film.
10/10
I think Minus tried to kiss his sister, Karin, but she rejected the kiss. Robert Ebert mentioned incest also, but I don't think that occurred.
I had two reasons for referencing someone like Ebert. I wanted to know what I missed that I could look for the next time I saw the movie and I wanted to look for divergence between Ebert's description and what I actually saw. Ebert would be presenting an authoritative version that might need to be rejected in part.
One of the divergences is that Ebert assumed Karin was schizophrenic. I think it is more interesting to see her as not. Her brother admitted that he did not think she was mentally ill and neither did she. Most important, the closet door clearly opened making one wonder if what she was experiencing was a delusion or not.
Yeh but Karin and Minus both act very strangely after the boat scene. Karin suggests that something serious has happened, starts crying and laments what she has 'done' to Minus; and later when David calls Minus to talk to him he's running around and hiding (lol, the scene was I think, unitentionally, humorous). It could be what you think though, it's ambiguous.
As for the door, a helicoptor goes by the house when it opens, maybe it just blows open.
The helicopter might have opened the door. I will watch the movie again to see if that was possible.
The pattern I see is Karin's successful rejection of sexual advances. That is why I don't think she and Minus actually had an incestuous relationship. Even the rejection of the present her father gave her seemed to fit as a rejection of a sexual advance. It seemed to me that Karin was in control throughout from the very first where she gets her way to the end where she wants to go back to the hospital.
The linking of sex with spirituality is however key. I think that may have been Bergman's intent, but I do not know enough about him. I will probably have to watch some of the other films, especially, Winter Light and The Silence.
Yeh possibly, I didn't consider the repeated rejections of sexual advances, but now that you mention it, it strikes me as pretty relevant. Karin won't have sex with her husband while she is 'ill' and she rejects God himself!
Also regarding the door opening. Once I was discussing Kafka online with someone who drew a humorous diagram or graph in paint which plotted characters in The Metamorphosis alongside their level of 'buggyness' and was accompanied with the argument that Kafka envisioned a world in which human life could be explained through the binaries of 'buggy' and 'not buggy' and considering this he stressed the possibility that really Gregor's parents are the ones who woke up changed... who woke up less buggy. It was defintely a joke, sort of a stab at literary criticism in general and Kafka analysis in particular. How that relates to the door, well... okay.
So I think the general interpretation of Through a Glass Darkly is the more literal one, that Karin has schizophrenia or something like schizophrenia and is uncurable. However your suggestion that there is no illness would mean what? Well that she's suffering from life? Or a spiritual strugglers? That makes a lot of sense to me given Bergmans oeuvre and the themes he chooses to tackle repeatedly in his films. He touches on mental illness a lot, but not nearly as much as he contemplates the silence of God, or (damn this word) existentialism, and you can also assume perhaps that mental illness isn't just mental illness when it crops up in his movies. So really then Karin is just suffering from a spiritual crisis of a much stronger magnitude than anyone else, but as you can see, every character is struggling in their own way and perhaps it's only a matter of degree separating Karin from everyone else instead of Karin being 'sick' and others being 'well'.
That could explain why everyone sees the door open at the same time becsuse every character is sick in the same way as Karin is, but maybe it's just not as pronounced, or they don't notice it all the time.
The door is opened by the spider god so that he can rape Karin. It is also blown open by the helicopter coming to the island so that she can be forcibly committed to an institution. The silhouette of the helicopter is the image of the spider god coming for her. It is also the thing itself. They are analogous, but they are the same thing (Karin's her mind, and in the reality of the film). That is the power and horror of the scene. She has been waiting for God to come and redeem her from the schizophrenia that she inherited from her mother and that had led her to seduce her childish and needy brother. But instead of the forgiving and redeeming God she seeks, she gets a god of sickness, the spider god, an image Bergman takes from Nietzsche's critique of the Christian God in The Anti-Christ.
Woah, maybe I'll go rewatch it right now.
I searched and found one reference to "spider" in Nietzsche's The AntiChrist: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19322/pg19322.txtQuote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
"the priest himself is seen as he actually is--as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation...."
I'll have to watch this again to see how the helicopter and its shadow are presented.
She perceived the spider as wanting to have sex with her, but I don't think she saw it as attempting rape. I will have to pay attention to that as well. Also, at one point she agreed to go to the hospital. However, there is the scene where she is given a drug to calm her after the spider incident. I will have to see to what extent she is forced to go to the hospital.