The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) is a big-budget, lavish, prestige production.  A lot of A-list stars appear, disguised by beards or disfigured by the scars, cataracts, and make-up simulating old age.  The movie, despite its almost three hour length is briskly paced, and never even remotely dull.  It's something that you admire from a great distance, strangely inert and remote -- not because the story chronicles events now 3500 years in the past, but, because the movie is so carefully made, its stewardship of Homer's epic poem so cautious, its attempt to be relevant to modern times so strained, that one is put-off by the production.  I enjoyed the picture and recommend it, and, certainly, don't intend the churlish critique of the movie by Emily Wilson, the famous translator, published in The London Review of Books, but I must say that the exercise feels academic in some ways, without real urgency, and, ultimately, unnecessary.  

The acting in the film is perfunctory at best and, at worst, bewilderingly bad.  Brad Pitt, playing the hero, a man of many minds and devices, seems, more or less, hapless.  In fact, he's like a modern man wandered into a world with an ethos that he can't understand, let alone embody -- the actor looks palpably bemused by the various threats that he encounters and he is afflicted by self-doubts that make him seem woefully weak and ill-prepared for the challenges that the script hurls in his way.  He confers with Athena (played by the dark-eyed Zendaya) as if she were his therapist at a provincial Veteran's Administration hospital catering to those with PTSD.  Pitt had to bulk up for the role but it's unpersuasive -- he's a brawny circus strong-man but weak as a wet noodle.  He's improbably contrite over the slaughter during the sack of Troy and, generally seems clueless -- it's pretty obvious that he doesn't want to get back to Ithaca that much and, no sooner back home, immediately sets forth again on a quixotic quest to sail into the setting sun.  This part of the movie is cribbed from both Dante and Tennyson's poetry, but without the emotional resonance in their verse:  Odysseus at the ending of the movie just seems confused as to his objectives.  Nolan has it that he wants to set up a shrine somewhere to the heroes that died on his trip -- pretty much all of them -- and went unburied.  Dante and Tennyson, by contrast, give the old Odysseus a last  spectacular adventure, a sort of Bronze Age space shot through the Pillars of Hercules and to the Isles of the Blessed or Mount Purgatory, a heroic venture but one that is inevitably doomed.)  The film engages in lengthy and repetitive meditations on Zeus' law -- that is, a law of hospitality that in essence requires that one treat strangers as if they were "gods in disguise", in other words, a pagan version of the Golden Rule.  None of this is particularly illuminating since the movie doesn't really dramatize the violations of Zeus' law for which the over-tender Odysseus feels crippling remorse.  The sets are gorgeous and the exterior locations smitten with Mediterranean light feel vivid and inexorable -- the sea even seems "wine-dark" sometimes.  The monsters are  impressive, particularly the hideous cyclops with his one eye inserted like a vaginal slit in his gnarled face.  (The film can't use the famous pun and jest by which Odysseus derides Polyphemus -- if you are asked who blinded you, tell them that it was Nemo, that is, "no man."  The joke works in the Odyssey because Polyphemus is not alone and merely one of a tribe of aggressive Cyclops monsters; here the poor fellow is like a Norwegian bachelor farmer, dwelling absolutely alone except for his sheep, in his cave)  The battle scenes are impressive until the final slaughter of the suitors which Nolan totally botches.  Penelope is good, both desperate as well as resolute and Telemachus comes off better in the movie than in the actual epic -- he seems less callow in the film. Samantha Morton gives the best performance, I think, as the matter-of-fact witch who turns Odysseus' men into the swine that they already were.  She literally kneads their faces like dough to make them into pigs and she's wonderfully casual about her malevolence -- she is like an aggrieved housewife inflicting revenge on the patriarchy and I thought her scenes were among the best in the movie.  A lot of ink has been spilled on the casting of a beautiful black African actress, Lupita Nyong'o, as both Helen and her treacherous sister Clytemenestra (they are twins).  Nolan is far shrewder than his critics -- he uses the actress in a way that doesn't appeal to her beauty, but rather that exposes her as either a badly scarred victim of the Trojan war (her famous face slashed and one of her eyes almost put out -- presumably by the vengeful Menelaus -- or as a serpentine villainess who wrathfully hacks poor Agamemnon to death.  In these roles, the woman's exotic features, her mask-like face, and her blackness itself becomes symbolic for a female power that is deeply alien both destructive and frightening.  (Again, in his casting, here Nolan improves on Homer.)  The scenes in Hades have an appropriate unearthliness although I certainly would have wanted to see the ghost of Achilles (who would rather be a pig farmer's thrall than the King of the Shades) and Odysseus' mother -- both of whom appear in the epic when the hero ventures into the Land of the Dead.  Nolan doesn't know how to set up suspense before the final bloodbath in which Odysseus with Telemachus butchers the Suitors.  By this time, the audience is getting restive and we are anxious for the final murderous rampage to begin.  Homer has Odysseus shoot his arrow through no less than 40 ax handles; Nolan is content to stage this test of strength and accuracy with a mere dozen axe-handles propped together to make six openings through which to fire his arrow.  (Here Nolan again improves on Homer who insists upon a level of prowess in his hero that is wholly unbelievable.)  The slaughter of the suitors is poorly choreographed and badly conceived.  Nolan thinks he can cover the improbability of the sequence (one man and his 20 year old son against forty) by cutting so fast that you can't follow the action.  Nolan puts his camera in the midst of the chaos and spins it around, using mismatched quick cuts that are completely uninformative.  This is the opposite of the presentation in Homer in which every slash and every arrow's flight is precisely detailed and the gore involves real people whose characters have been developed in the poem so that we know not only how but who is dying.  Nolan just wants to get the obligatory massacre done and he stages a violent frenzy that doesn't make any sense.  (He should have brought in a Japanese samurai-movie director to stage this scene -- Japanese action directors know how to show one swordsman defeating a host of enemies; Nolan has no clue.)

The movie's dialogue is slangy and informal.  This is okay as far as it goes, but sometimes results in laughable lines:  at one point someone says, apropos the sinister sea people:  "But we're the most advanced civilization of the Bronze Age."  I probably am quoting the line wrong and, perhaps, I misheard it -- but this is a specimen of what the language in the film sounds like.  I have a recommendation:  a movie like this should either be filmed in archaic Greek or, better yet, presented as a grainy silent film complete with Soviet style montage, intertitles, and iris effects.  The Odyssey would have been much better if the movie had been directed by Guy Maddin, the great Canadian filmmaker, shown on distressed black and white film, equipped with a heroic score and no dialogue at all.  Somehow, no matter how hard you think about it, you can't quite get your mind around this IMAX wide-screen technicolor production starring Brad Pitt.  The Odyssey is a great work of art, but its ethos is totally alien to us today -- there are some points of contact, but, by and large, the world depicted in the epic is impenetrable and unavailable to us today.  Nolan struggles to make the picture relevant and, even, contemporary but, really, just ends up highlighting how remote from us Homer's world of vengeful Gods and monsters is.  

The Big Knife

It's not often that a Hollywood movie indulges in a succinct summary of George Bernard Shaw's essay, "The Quintessence of Ibsenism".  But you will find that indulgence in Robert Aldrich's 1955 melodrama The Big Knife.  The film shows us goblin-faced Jack Palance as a movie star, Charlie Cass, brooding on the distinction between philistines, idealists, and realists.  The allusion is showy and not really apposite but it''s part of the heightened diction and extravagant manner of the dialogue in this film, written by Clifford Odets and, apparently, first presented as a Broadway play.  The film is static and takes place on a single set, a lavish Hollywood home decorated by a large Rouault painting of a morbid-lookiing clown and a large sculpted head of the Buddha.  Everything you need to know about middle-brow culture in the nineteen-fifties is encoded in the film's single set, a location that one can imagine fitting quite comfortably under the proscenium arch of a Broadway theater.  There's an offstage bedroom upstairs, above a spiral of metal steps with a vaguely nautical aspect -- this is where the film's mischief and mayhem occurs.  A hi-fi with tuner and record-player is present to play Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony".  The furniture is all sleek and modernist -- it looks like Eames designed the room and furnishings. Everything about the movie's milieu and content screams the sort of stylish Playboy-boy pad intelligence of the mid-fifties.  I know:  my father, a jazz fan had a book of Rouault pictures, a hi-fi on which he played 78 rpm discs of Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" and an abstract expressionist image of a scarcely recognizable clown painted by one of his friends who was attending the Institute of Art in Minneapolis.  My father who was from central Nebraska didn't know anything about Ibsen -- theater didn't exist in the Sand Hills town from which he came, but his father, a Lutheran minister had a book of Ibsen's plays (Modern Library in an Everyman edition) that probably had never been read.  If one were inclined, we might lament the general decay of taste and intelligence in this country -- the level of culture on display in Odets' play and the very effective movie made from that script, lean and mean and totally lucid as directed by Robert Aldrich, is sadly absent from most of what passes for art and film today.  I should observe that my father greatly admired Jack Palance, but for his performance as the lethal gunfighter in Shane:  as Shane says to the little boy who is his acolyte -- "He was fast...fast on the draw."

The situation in The Big Knife bears some similarity to Ibsen's plays such as Hedda Gabler.  The context involves a crime, the concealment of that crime, blackmail, and wounded idealism.  More than a little sexual infidelity is thrown in for a good measure and the screenplay is an exercise in anguished solemnity and angst leavened by a good deal of lurid, trashy melodrama.  I am praising this movie, by the way, and suggesting that you find a way to see it.  The matinee idol Charlie Cass is owned by Stanley Hoff, a monstrous entrepreneur and studio boss.  Cass is married and his wife detests Hoff and believes that Cass' work for the man traduces all of his ideals -- apparently, Cass was once involved in leftist, radical theater in the thirties (the type of theater associated with Clifford Odets), but now he has succumbed to the more lucrative and reactionary film industry.  Cass' contract with Hoff's studio has expired and the boss wants him to sign up for another seven year term, a business proposal detested by Cass' idealistic wife played by Ida Lupino.  The relationship between Cass and his wife is complicated by the movie star's serial infidelty and he has separated from his spouse who serves as the voice of his aggrieved conscience in this film.  At a party two years earlier, Cass got drunk, crashed his car, killing a child in the process.  With him in the car at the time was a floozy, Dixie, played convincingly and with more than a morsel of bathos by Shelley Winters (here credited as "Miss Shelley Winters).  The studio has covered up the hit-and-run accident to the extent of pinning the crime on Cass' longsuffering business manager -- indeed, the manager has served nine months in jail for the crime he didn't commit.  When Cass tells Hoff that he won't sign the contract renewal.  Hoff with his vicious henchman threatens to expose the movie star's crime.  Dixie shows up, swilling tequila, and tries to seduce Cass successfully, it seems.  As in Greek drama (and there are Greek masks signifying comedy and tragedy over the hearth), the unseemly stuff occurs offstage into a sort of loft above the main living room set.  Cass' virtuous wife shows up and there's more debate about the situation.  Cass first signs the contract but, then, rebels inducing a titanic rage in Stanley Hoff.  Meanwhile, Dixie has been thrashed severely by Hoff for threatening to expose the crime (Hoff's broken several of her ribs).  She's self-medicating in a local bar and has had "six martinis".  Hoff sends a henchman to murder her, announcing these plans to Cass.  And, so it goes.  The climatic catastrophe is off-stage as in Oedipus Rex announced by shrieks of servants.

Your response to this stuff will be dictated by how your respond to Odets heightened and lyrical dialogue.  Plenty of people were critical of Odets bombastic rhetoric even at the time he produced it.  But the movie is now my age, 71 going on 72, and time has burnished Odets' dialogue with its patina.  Some of his phrases are insufferable -- "you have peritonitis of the soul" -- but much of his writing now seems archaic, gnarled in a pleasantly complex way, even, dare I say it, Shakespearian.  

Ingmar Bergman and Winter Light: A Film Group Essay

 Ingmar Bergman and 

Winter Light

‘On the second day of shooting), I got stuck in a goddam great traffic jam.  I sat there looking at the drivers in the other cars.  And thought,: “You won’t come and see Winter Light, and you won’t come and see Winter Light and you won’t come and see...’

Ingmar Bergman

Winter Light 

is a 1962 film directed by Ingmar Bergman.  Somber and relentlessly serious, the movie is often characterized as the middle work in a film trilogy.  The other pictures in the trilogy are Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Silence (1963).  Film-goers and critics discern common themes in these pictures – broadly speaking they seem to be about God’s absence (or nonexistence); God’s silence in the face of human suffering and the apparent meaninglessness of a godless world that parallels people’s inability to communicate authentically – and this failure, in turn, causes love to curdle into possessiveness, misery, and hatred.  Bergman, sometimes, endorsed the notion that these pictures comprised a loose unity or trilogy; on other occasions, he discounted that perspective and maintained that the movies were not closely related.  

Bergman was the son of a prominent Stockholm clergyman, Pastor Erik Bergman.  With the later Fanny and Alexander (1982), Winter Light is one of Bergman’s most personal films.  In Fanny and Alexander, two artistically gifted siblings struggle with the dour influence of their conventional and repressive Lutheran family: the film posits the life of the artist as sexually liberated, joyful, and radiant with light – by contrast, the life of a Lutheran cleric and his family is dutiful, grim, and oppressive with shadow.  In Winter Light, Bergman seems to imagine what his life would have been like had he followed his father into the clergy – it is surely no accident that Bergman, who wrote the script, the son of Pastor Erik Bergman, named the protagonist of his film, Tomas Eriksson (Eric’s son).  This naming raises the question of whether the movie’s spiritually tormented father is modeled on Bergman’s own father or constitutes a self-portrait.  

In Fanny and Alexander, the titular brother and sister rejoice when their strict disciplinarian of a father dies.  But Alexander has a dream: he sees his dead father in his clerical collar standing before him in a shadowy place.  The pastor says: “You think you have escaped from me.  But, now, I will always be with you.”  

With Michelangelo Antonioni,

Ingmar Bergman exemplifies the director of “European Art Films.  The European Art Film, as argued by the late David Bordwell, constitutes a genre of its own, no less strictly defined than the musical comedy, the film noir thriller, or the Western.  The characteristics of the European Art Film as a genre are long takes in which the camera lingers on an image, somber and weighty subject matter presented in a tone of high seriousness, plots that assume the absurdity of human existence, sexual candor both pictorially and verbally, formal devices that distance the viewer from the events and characters presented, landscapes and architectural settings that are predominant and determine the action, and, in general, a reversal (or inversion) of the standard film semantics espoused by Hollywood pictures.  The genre of European art films (which may be made anywhere – for instance, Turkey or Hong Kong, India or Japan) largely defines itself in opposition to the norms of Hollywood movies.  To the devotees of European art films, Hollywood pictures are gaudy but shallow; to the proponents of Hollywood pictures, the European art cinema is simply boring or the sake of being boring and pretentious.  Winter Light is, perhaps, a paradigm specimen of the European art film genre: the film contains long takes, including a single shot of Ingrid Thulin reciting the content of a letter that lasts about 8 minutes without any cuts or edits; the film’s subject, in part, questions God’s existence and the fate of man in the post-nuclear age; distancing devices are foregrounded, particularly in the sequence in which Tomas visits the scene of Jonas’ suicide, next to roaring rapids in a stream swollen with melt-water – the sound track hisses and buzzes with the sound of the flowing water and the camerawork is conspicuously reticent, picturing the scene in a long shot and avoiding any close-ups; the wintry landscapes and austere churches provide a setting for the movie’s events – cold, snow and snowfall, and the ascetic empty interiors of the two small churches are objective correlatives to the angst in the film.   Movies of this sort are still being made: Jim Jarmusch and Kelly Reichert in the United States make “European art films” (even an “European art film” Western in her picture Meek’s Cut Off) and European directors like Pedro Costas, Michael Haneke, and many others continue to produce movies in this tradition.  Most of the movies that you can screen on the streaming service MUBI are exponents of this sort of filmmaking.  

The most famous director of European art films was the Italian Michelangelo Antonioni.  His movies La Notte and L’Eclisse, among many others are exemplary of the genre and define its parameters.  Antonioni’s pictures, together with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad are dissected in a very famous essay written by the critic Pauline Kael in 1963, “Come ‘Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul’ of Europe parties.  Kael mocked these pictures as tendentiously moralistic, hypocritical, and pretentious.  She asserted that the directors of these movies were “contortionists and sleepwalkers.”  Kael memorably opposed Hollywood popular movies as examples of the joi de vivre purged from the European art cinema.  Indeed, in an image that will resonant with readers in our group, she argued that the appearance of one actress like Martha Raye (as she appears in Monsieur Verdoux) would knock the stuffing out of these movies, clear out the cobwebs, and insufflate them with vibrant fresh air.         Pauline Kael (come as the sick soul of the party).  Kael doesn’t condemn the movies of Bergman’s middle period (that is, when directed Winter Light); however, she was later to apply her 1963 critique of the art cinema to Bergman’s work in movies like Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata.  

Ultimately, the two greatest exemplars of the European art cinema were Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni.  So is it merely coincidence or some sort of eerie synchronicity that the two men died on the same day, July 30, 2007 – Bergman was 89; Antonioni was 94.

I blame Israel

for the current usage of “existential” to mean “mortal” as in “Israel is engaged in an existential struggle with Hamas” meaning that only one of the two combatants will survive the conflict.  (Similarly, it is said that “Iran’s regime regards the war with the United States as existential.”) To me, this meaning of the word degrades the term’s previously merry connotations: a café on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris, redolent with pipe smoke, Jean-Paul Sartre flirting with the girls while Simone de Beauvoir pursues her own sexual affairs an another table; a jolly riot in the street with red flags and Maoist slogans; the films of Truffaut and Godard.  Appropriating the word to its current grim meaning, traduces the expression and seems to me to be an artifact of the last two decades.

Existentialism, of which Bergman’s films are an exponent presupposes that existence precedes essence, the latter term denoting a quality that is non-existent for all we know.  You are what you do, as opposed to previous formulations relying upon ideas such as human nature to argue that people do (or act) because of the way they are.  Existentialist thinkers posit a world that is absurd and meaningless.  In the absence of meaning in nature (or human nature), actors must construct meaning authentic to their experience.  Some existentialist thought is grim and gloomy – an empty heaven and a silent God are oppressive forces.  On the other hand, the idea that we are not constrained to act in accord with nature may be profoundly liberating.

The Asiatics   

is a 1935 novel by Frederick Prokosch.  The book, Prokosch’s first novel, was once a bestseller and a book club selection in the years just before World War Two.  Near the end of Prokosch’s book, there is an excellent and eloquent description of existentialist thought.  A character named de Hahn has just been poisoned by his ex-lover – she has given him poisoned caviar.  De Hahn, who doesn’t know that he will soon be dying, is talking with the novel’s protagonist in Hue, then, French Indochina, on the banks of the Perfume River:

"This is what I think: we’re all lonely little souls, we’ve all got to work out our own salvation.  We’ve got to arrange ourselves somehow so that life won’t seem too terrifying.  Isn’t that so?  Don’t you agree?  We’ve got to build up little ideas, pathetic visions about God and immortality and so on, behind which we can pretend to hide.  We’ve got to close our eyes to the big thunderstorm that goes on all around us.  We’ve got to, if we’re ever going to be peaceful and contented.  We’ve got to pretend that life has a point for each and every one of us, that there’s a point to each of our little hearts beating like tom-toms in the midst of this endless black jungle".

This passage in The Asiatics has acquired an additional meaning: Hue is the south Vietnamese city devastated by the Tet Offensive on January 30 and 31 in 1968.  

Some people go to church

to worship God or to be uplifted by the preacher’s sermon.  I suspect that only a minority of people attend church for this reason.  There are many other reasons that people join church congregations and attend services: some are attracted by the music and the esthetics of the worship service (the stained glass, dignified church architecture, the crosses and religious artifacts), some want to see who else is attending and be seen themselves so as to acquire social merit; some desire the opportunity to participate in choir or church volunteer work; some seek moral counsel; but, mostly, I think, people are attracted to church because the experience presents them with an opportunity for Christian fellowship, that is, to be members of the Body of Christ.  Particularly, as one ages, and today most churchgoers in traditional denominations are elderly, one feels a need for comrades, for friends, for a society that cares something about you and wishes you well.  (Remarking upon White captives who joined Indian tribes and refused “rescue”, David Graeber in his book The Beginning of Everything remarked that these people, victims of a callous economic order, remained with the so-called “savages” because “at least, with the tribe, they were with people who cared whether they lived or died.”  I think Christian Fellowship has the same tenor.)

In the opening scene of Winter Light, Pastor Tomas Eriksson is celebrating Holy Communion with his tiny flock.  The sequence carefully documents the ritual – the liturgy of Holy Communion is presented intact and without elisions; the film begins as an ethnographic study.  But the staging of the scene depicts the communicants as isolated, sitting in groups remote from one another.  The camera picks out individuals but not groups.  The notion of Christian Fellowship is rendered problematic in the way that the Communion scene is filmed.  Everyone occupies their own space; they are in “silos” to use popular contemporary lingo.

Even if God doesn’t exist, we should be able to still gather in some sort of fellowship.  There are clubs of all kinds and God’s silence doesn’t necessarily preclude gathering in his (fictional) name for mutual consolation, aid, and solace.  But this aspect of Christian worship is implicitly rejected by Rev. Erikson’s memories of his youth.  Eriksson says that his “mother protected (him) from everything cruel; everything ugly; everything cruel, everything dangerous...of cruelty and evil, I knew nothing.”  Saying that he was as “innocent as a babe in arms,” Eriksson went to Spain where he was “a seaman’s pastor in Lisbon.”  Tomas tells Jonas that “...everything happened.  It was the Spanish Civil War.  We had a front seat in the stalls.”  Bergman, a man of theater, has Tomas say that his experiences in Lisbon gave him a “front row seat” to the spectacle of human depravity, evil, and violence – but, he adds that he refused to see and refused to accept reality.  “I and my God lived in one world, a specially arranged world in which everything made sense.”  (Script for The Communicants at 84).

It’s curious that Bergman locates Pastor Erikson in Lisbon during the Spanish Civil War.  Portugal was theoretically neutral during the war in Spain between the nationalists and republicans that began in 1936.  The dictator of Portugal, Salazar entered into a non-aggression pact with the Spanish nationalists and, although Portugal was nominally neutral, in fact, Salazar strongly supported Francisco Franco and the Nationalist cause.  The Spanish Civil War was characterized by a Red Terror (Communist republicans murdering Catholic clergy and supporters of the defunct monarchy) and, then, a protracted White Terror in which Franco’s regime slaughtered thousands of Trade Unionists, Communists, and Republicans caught behind the lines.  (The last Nationalist concentration camp in Spain wasn’t closed until 1947.)  In Portugal, Germany funneled arms and money through the country with Salazar’s complicity.  Nationalist partisans hid themselves in the mountain in Portugal and, in general, the government strongly supported Franco, although covertly.  (I think the situation in Portugal more resembles Sweden under the German occupation in which many Swedes were complicit with Hitler under the guise of neutrality.)  Most importantly for Winter Light, the Catholic church reeling from atrocities against its clergy in Spain vociferously supported the Fascist side of the conflict.  Pastor Erikson, accordingly, would have been witness to the Catholic Church, at least, taking the part of the      Fascists in the war with the Communists.  

Communism, of course, presupposes solidarity among worker (“Workers of the World Unite!”) and represented to European idealists the promise of an utopian society built on principles of brotherhood and community.  This was the fiction that drove idealists of all kinds to join the Spanish Civil War only to find that both sides to the conflict had tarnished their principles by engaging in egregious examples of murder and atrocity.  (The experience of George Orwell recounted in Homage to Catalonia is a testimony to this experience.)

How does this enter into an interpretation of Winter Light?  The Spanish Civil War demonstrated that a idealistic views of human solidarity and community may yield mass murder.  I think it is this disillusionment that colors Eriksson’s depression and despair.  The film begins with a representation of “communion” – that is, a demonstration of the integrity and importance of Christian fellowship.  But Eriksson is disenchanted with the notion of human community – this disenchantment, as Bergman, is careful to signal, derives from his experiences in Lisbon, the late thirties.

(The anecdote of Eriksson’s involvement with the Spanish Civil War gives us a clue to the Pastor’s age.  If we assume that Erikson was 25 in 1938, we can infer that he is 47 - 52 at the time of the events depicted in the movie.  Bergman’s script, rife with unnecessary specificity, tells us that Maerta Lundberg, schoolteacher at “the Mitsunda Elementary School” is “33 years” old – see page 33 of the published script.)

Nattvardgaesterne

is the Swedish name for the movie.  Nattvard means Holy Communion – the reference is to the “night on which he was betrayed: Natt means “night”.  Gaesterne means “ guests” or “people gathered together.”  Accordingly, the word means “people taking communion together” or The Communicants.  “Communicants” is an unfamiliar word in English – it simply means “those taking Communion”.  Accordingly, for both British and American distribution, the movie was called Winter Light.  This title derives from anecdotes that Bergman and Sven Nykwist sat in a pew all afternoon in November watching how the “winter light” exposed itself in the rural church where some of the film’s exteriors were shot.  (This is the church in Dalarna County, a landlocked county in central Sweden where Skattungbyne, pop. 310, is located.  The Church built in the early 19th century on the site of a 16th century sanctuary, and equipped with a “primitivist” old altar and religious images, is called Skattungkyrke.  This place is about 39 miles north of Stockholm.)  The Swedish name selected by Bergman for his script and film suggests the importance of community or group fellowship in the film.

The Sickness unto Death 

is an 1849 book written by Soren Kierkegaard.  Kierkegaard derives his title from the Gospel of John 11:4 which narrates the story of Lazarus.  Someone says as to Lazarus’ illness that “this sickness is not  unto death.”  Kierkegaard reversal of the phrase denotes despair, traditionally regarded by Christians as a sin.  Despair, of course, haunts Winter Light in the depression afflicting Tomas and Jonas.  For Kierkegaard, despair arises when a person realizes that he is living inauthentically – that is, living in a way that denies his true nature.  (In typical Hegelian fashion – and Kierkegaard had a peculiar love-hate relationship to the German philosopher – “the Sickness unto Death” describes various types of “despair”; this analysis need not detain us.)  Clearly, this diagnosis applies to Tomas (“doubting Thomas”); he stands in the pulpit proclaiming God’s goodness and mercy but doesn’t believe in God or, even, worse, is tempted to believe that God is malevolent, that is a great, hideous spider – “Every time I confronted God with the reality that I saw, he became ugly, revolting, a spider God – a monster.” (Script at 85) The “reality” to which Tomas refers is the evidence of human suffering and cruelty, exemplified by the Spanish Civil War (and the Chinese acquisition of the nuclear bomb while teaching their children to hate.)  Tomas inflicts this message on poor Jonas (or his hallucination of poor Jonas or, perhaps, his ghost) when the man mysteriously appears in his office.  With pastoral counseling of this kind, it’s not surprising that Jonas commits suicide.  The schizophrenic, Karin, in Bergman’s preceding film, the first in the trilogy Through a Glass Darkly has also seen God as a spider, albeit one with six legs.  (Script of Through a Glass Darkly at 58 - 59).  Perhaps, Swedish spiders have six legs.

Tomas’ “sickness unto death” is objectively manifested in his bad cold or influenza.  Throughout the film, he is very ill, feverish, and, even, perhaps hallucinating – for instance, the encounter with Jonas when that man may already be dead.  Despair, embodied as sickness, is contagious.  When Marta Lundberg kisses Tomas impulsively after she has announced her project of saving the despairing pastor from himself, he remarks “Now, you’ll get the ‘flu.”  She responds: “And like having it, of course, having caught it from you.” (Script at 78).

References to Tomas’ illness are pervasive throughout the book.  And there are other aspects of illness also important to the film’s atmosphere and texture.  The sexton at the two country churches served by Tomas Bjornstrand is a hunchback.  The sexton, Algot Froevik, suffers from some form of rheumatoid arthritis that has twisted his back and crippled him.  The character is modeled on P. A. Lundgren, Bergman’s art director – Lundgren devised the sets and located the ecclesiastical accoutrement, including two hymn boards loaned by local churches that dated back to the 16th and 17th centuries.  Lundgren was afflicted with anklyosing spondylitis, a rheumatoid disease that results in joint pain, inflammation, and, ultimately, fusion of joints with resulting immobility.  (Joints most frequently attacked by this illness are the sacroiliac joint in the low back, hips, pelvis, arms and, most notably, spine.)  Algot has this sickness which has contorted his body and caused him immense pain.  It is Algot who argues that the highest form of misery arises from silence, from being misunderstood or betrayed.  Christ suffered the worst agony when God was silent when he cried out to him from the cross.  Algot’s pain has been such that he regards Jesus’ death by crucifixion as a relatively easy fate – after all, Algot who has suffered from pain all his life, says that the “actual torture” couldn’t “have been that bad” and was, after all, “rather brief.  About four hours or so?”  (Script at 101).

Two other instances of sickness are noteworthy.  Marta Lundburg suffers from disfiguring eczema.  She perceives that Tomas is disgusted by her condition and, in fact, may have rejected her as a result of this ailment.  Lundburg’s crisis occurs when Tomas seems unwilling (or unable) to pray to his God for the remission of her eczema – the leads Marta to grasp that Tomas is fundamentally selfish and can’t love her.  Tomas rejects Marta in part out of loyalty to his young wife who has died four years earlier.  This young woman perished as a result of a lingering illness that emaciated her.  In another unnecessary aside in Bergman’s highly explicit script, we are told that Tomas’ wife, Anna Magdalena Eriksson died at “27 four months and twelve days”.  Tomas keeps a picture of his wife in his breast pocket inscribed to him on his 47th birthday – the picture shows a woman “whose mouth is bitter and twisted and her throat has two jagged scars after her operation.”  (Script at 78).

Sickness is unto death and, of course, where illness ravages, death follows.  Peter Cowrie, a notable critic has observed that the scene in which Eriksson and Marta wait at the railroad crossing for a train to pass presents an image of a row of black caskets (the coffin-shaped cars) being dragged in procession before their eyes.  Bergman’s script contains more dialogue than the movie presents.  In the script, Tomas recalls waking when aroused by the “shriek” of a train in his father’s old vicarage.  It was early evening “with a strange wild light over the ice and the forest.”  The house is empty and the boy begins “screaming and crying for (his) father.”  Tomas recalls that “it was a completely dead world’ and no one answers his scream of anguish.”  The empty, dead world seems to have been a dream.  Tomas’ preacher father comforts him: “Father sat up and watched over me all night.”  “What a nice father!” Marta exclaims.  Tomas, then, remarks “Father and Mother wanted me to become a parson and I did as they wanted.” (Script at 98). This last remark is the only part of this scripted sequence that exists in the movie.  Bergman opts for a visual metaphor, a procession of coffins rolling across the snowy landscape to make his point that to one who is “sick unto death” the world is the dominion of death.

Bergman had made

24 films before Winter Light.  The picture marks the exact middle point in his directing career.  He would make another 24 films during the second half of his life. (By some counts, including TV work, Bergman directed 62 films; he also directed 170 plays.)   After Winter Light, Warner Brothers offered Bergman $500,000 a year to work with the studio in the USA.  Bergman’s whose earnings were less than $40,000 a year in Sweden turned the American studio down and continued to work exclusively in Sweden until 1976.  

Before Winter Light, Bergman made a number of undisputed masterpieces including The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), and the transcendent sex comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)  . After Winter Light, Bergman directed internationally famous films such as Cries and Whispers (1972), Persona (1966), and Autumn Sonata (1978).  He returned to box office prominence with Fanny and Alexander, a family epic released in 1982.  Several of his Tv productions are legendary including the harrowing Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and the equally lacerating, Saraband (2003).  He wrote scripts for TV and movies, including Best Intentions, a six hour mini-series in which Bergman finally reconciled with his preacher father and long-suffering mother.  (Best Intentions released as a three hour film in 1992 was skillfully directed by Bille August.)  Along the way, he had innumerable love affairs with the most beautiful women in Scandinavia and managed to be married (unhappily until his last wife) five times.  He fathered 8 children (by some counts 9); mostly, he ignored his children, although they revered him – several are writers, one was a commercial airplane pilot.  Bergman maintained close relations with his ex-wives and ex-lovers all of whom also admired him.

The painful watershed in his life was on January 30, 1976 when Bergman was arrested by plainclothes revenue officers and taken from the set of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death, a play he was directingat Stockholm’s Royal Academy Theater.  Bergman was outraged at what he regarded as the ingratitude of the Swedish government and absconded to Munich, Germany where he lived for several years.  (The tax case cast a harsh light on both Bergman and the Social Democratic Party, the SDP, that had ruled Sweden for forty years at the time of his arrest and that was enforcing a confiscatory marginal tax rate on the wealthy.  (Bergman hated German food and had his many girlfriends send him parcels of Swedish delicacies while he was in exile in Munich.)  After four or five years away, Bergman’s lawyers negotiated a return to Sweden where he lived until the end of his life.  (In the interim, he made films in German about the Hitler era, The Serpent’s Egg, 1977, Bergman’s only film made with Hollywood financing).

Bergman shot another masterpiece Shame (1968), a movie that chronicles the collapse of marriage during a civil war, on Faroe Island.  (The picture, which is majestic and terrifying, stars Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman.)   Bergman became infatuated with Faroe Island and, ultimately, purchased a compound at Daemba village, Faroe.  (A recent indie film, Bergman Island, depicts a married couple visiting the island in the hope of seeing Bergman.)  On the island at his Daemba refuge, Bergman built his own private cinema, a structure that he called “The Cinematograph”.  He inaugurated the theater by attending a film on July 14, 1975, his 57th birthday.  The tax scandal ensued about six months later and Bergman remained away from the island for several years.  At the end of his life, he lived exclusively on Faroe Island.  Bergman’s daughter noted that he watched one film a day six days a week, either alone or in the company of invited guests.  She estimated that Bergman spent 8000 hours watching movies.  (He had two 35 mm projectors and a 16 mm machine – his housekeeper ran the films for him.) Bergman kept a log of the movies that he watched, his so-called Visningsjournal.  In July 1981, the “viewing journal” shows that he watched Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein as well as the original James Whale version of Frankenstein from 1931; he also watched Brian de Palma’s erotic thriller with Angie Dickinson Dressed to Kill and Kubrick’s The Shining.

One would like to say that this story has a happy ending.  But it’s a human life on which we are deliberating, and if it’s happy, as they say, it isn’t the end.  Bergman’s last wife engineered reconciliations between Bergman and his many children and grandchildren.  She invited the extended family to the island for reunions and Bergman seemed relatively content in his old age.  He lamented, however, exclaiming: “Why did no one tell me how difficult it is to get old?” (Like all of us, he was told and, indeed, many times, but just didn’t listen.) In his last couple years, Bergman was confined to a wheelchair and, at last, lost his sight so that he was no longer able to watch movies in his Cinematograph.  It is said that one of his ex-wives visited often (his wife Ingrid had died) and played piano for him to soothe Bergman’s restlessness.  Bergman left exacting and theatrically precise instructions for his funeral.  Only three of his children attended his obsequies.  Bergman’s mistresses Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman were present.  The director was buried in a plain wooden coffin in the churchyard at Faro Island.  

Winter Light 

was used as a weapon in the battle pending in the Lutheran Church between high church and low church factions.  Bergman didn’t take sides.  He declared that the “Lutheran Church is busily digging its own grave.”

Bergman told his cameraman

Sven Nykwist that he wanted the photography to depict Swedish reality as “naked and obvious.”  Nykwist was told to abandon any notion of “beauty” and to flatten out all contrasts to a “monotonous grey”.  To achieve this effect, some surfaces with a tendency to reflect light were covered in white wax paper.  Nykwist was to shoot the movie to be totally “without shadows.”  

Notwithstanding this austere program, Winter Light is often commended for its aesthetic beauty.  Susan Sontag proclaimed the movie as suffering from “the callow pseudo-intellectuality of the story and someof its dialogue.”  But she praised the film’s “visual sophistication and the beauty of its images.”  Against Interpretation (1964).

Bergman gave conflicting accounts

of how he came to write Winter Light.  In one account, Bergman says that he was inspired by a performance of Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” and that he had heard an anecdote about a pastor preaching a sermon to an empty church.  In his poetic autobiography Magic Lantern, Bergman said that he was in Uppsala with his elderly father.  (Bergman was born in Uppsala in 1918 and lived there as a child and youth; this was the location of his father’s first parish.)  Bergman and the old pastor went to a service at a small rural church a few miles north of the city.  Arriving at the church, Bergman saw a couple of sextons whispering on the church porch.  He recalled that it was a beautiful day in early Spring and that the weather was clear with brilliant sun blazing off the snow-banks.  The church bell tolled summoning the faithful to worship.  There were four members of the congregation in the pews as well as Bergman father and son.  The organist sat ready at his instrument but the pulpit and front of the church remained empty.  Then, a car was heard outside, skidding into the parking lot.  An old pastor with red-rimmed eyes, moving his arms back and forth like a skier entered the sanctuary.  He said that he was very ill and that he had been given permission to conduct the service but without the sacrament of Holy Communion.  Then, he vanished into the sacristy to put on his vestments.  Bergman’s father muttered that this would not do.  Limping on his cane, Bergman’s father hobbled back to the sacristy and emerged with the sick old man.  The pastor announced that he would conduct the service with the help of a colleague and that, indeed, there would be Holy Communion for the congregants on that Sunday.

Here is what Bergman wrote in Magic Lantern:

The introductory hymn was sung by the organist and us few churchgoers.  At the end of the second verse, Father came in, in white vestments with his stick.  When the hymn was over, he turned to us and spoke in his calm free voice, “Holy, holy, holy Lord of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory.  Glory be to thee, O Lord most high.”

Thus it was that I discovered the ending to Winter Light and a rule that I was to follow from then on: irrespective of everything that happens to you in life, you hold your communion.

So what do you make of Winter Light’s ending 

in which Pastor Eriksson “holds his communion” in spite of the fact that he has lost his belief in God?

Martin Luther is supposed to have said: “If I knew the world was going to end tomorrow, I would plant an apple tree”.  (The German is sweeter, ein Aepfelbaemchen, “a cute little apple tree”.)  Research has shown that Luther never said this.  Luther did analogize the role of the Christian as a soldier on the field of battle fighting against the Devil and his legions.  (This ethos underlies the famous hymn Ein’ feste Burg, “A Mighty Fortress is our God.”  Luther is supposed to have said: “Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to remain steady on the battle front...”  Well...Luther didn’t exactly say this either – the number of misattributions to Martin Luther is legion.  But this statement to close to some of his utterances and writing and probably reflects what he believed.  But, if there is no God, there is no Devil, nor his army of demons, to fight.  So what is the point of remaining steadfast on a battlefield onto which a nonexistent enemy never ventures?

I submit that Pastor Eriksson’s steadfastness has existential dimensions.  We create our own reality and practice our own creed.  Eriksson’s proclamation of the glory of a God in which he does not believe is an existential gesture, a proclamation of identity in the face of an encroaching void.

At the end of his life, when he was 87, Bergman attended a screening of the first picture in the trilogy Through a Glass Darkly.  Bishop Koskinen of the Swedish Evangelical Church was in the audience to talk about the picture and its theology.  Bergman was in the audience and someone asked him if he believed in God.  Bergman evaded the questions and said that he was totally convinced that he would see his last wife, Ingrid, who had predeceased him, again.  He added: “Christ is a philosopher who gives testimony to the existence of other worlds.  Just as Bach does.”  

Bergman says that Eriksson 

...goes through with his service for no other reason than that Maerta Lundberg is present.  If one has religious faith, one could say that God has spoken to him.  If one does not believe in God, one might prefer to say that Maerta Lundberg and Algot Froevik are two people who help raise a fellow human being who has fallen and is digging his own grave.  At that point, it doesn’t matter if God is silent or if he is speaking.    

  

Bergman finished the script for Winter Light

on August 7, 1961.  On the front-page of the handwritten manuscript, Bergman wrote: 

And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the man sick of palsy: “Son, be of good cheer: they sins are forgiven.”  (Matthew 9:2)

The typed screenplay is inscribed “Toroe, 7 August 1961, S.D.G.”

The initials “S.D.G.” are present on all of Bach’s published musical works on the bottom of each page.

S.D.G. means ‘Soli Deo Gloria’ – “Glory to God Alone.” 

August 9, 2026  S.D.G.

  

Through a Glass Darkly

 Ingmar Bergman made a trio of films between 1959 and 1962 concerned with God's silence and, perhaps, non-existence.  The first picture in this trilogy is Through a Glass Darkly.  (The subsequent movies are Winter Light and The Silence.)  All three movies are very dissimiliar and, in my view, they comprise a trilogy only in retrospect -- indeed, Bergman wavered himself as to the relation between the three pictures, sometimes casting them as a trilogy and sometimes not.  The movies are masterworks, but each in a different way.  Through a Glass Darkly, which is, perhaps, a horror film, is the first movie that Bergman shot on Faroe Island, the place to which he retreated in the mid-seventies and where he lived until his death in July 2006.  The film is spectacular, with silky black and white camerawork, depicting empty vistas of sky and sea.  For instance, in the first shot with see the four principals in the chamber play or film far out in the shallow water forming a line against the horizon.  There is an old cottage, without running water or electricity, on the bank above the stony seashore.  It's in this place, partially deserted where the events of the story take place.  The soundtrack is as empty as many of the shots:  the music is by Bach, a solo cello playing rather forlornly -- music that is simultaneously sounding right next to your ear and far, far away. 

David (played by Gunnar Bjornstrand) is a writer who has been in Switzerland completing his novel -- it's almost finished but he has come to the family retreat to put in the finishing touches.)  David has two children, Karin who is mentally ill, and Minus, a seventeen-year old son.  David has mostly ignored the children in favor of his art.  Karin is married to Martin, a physician (Max von Sydow). After their evening swim, the family gathers outdoors in the spooky endless twilight of the Swedish summer and eat a meal together.  There are subtle signs that Karin, who has been previously hospitalized and treated with electro-shock, is beginning to lose her grip on reality.  The children (Karin and Minus), after the manner of a Shakespeare put on a play within a play, a creepy skit involving a dead 13-year-old infanta (she is said to have died in childbirth) -- the son is obviously in some sort of oedipal competition with his renowned father and the play implies that one must choose between art and life,implicitly a condemnation of the negligent father, David.  Everyone goes to bed.  Karin rejects Martin's caresses and, then, creeps out of bed to wander around in the empty house.  She goes into the abandoned upstairs of the cottage and stands pressed up against some florid wallpaper, glaring at the camera as if expecting some sort of revelation.  The next morning, Karin, who is manic, wakes everyone up at five a.m. -- she twilight is unceasing.  The air is still and a thunderstorm is, perhaps, looming over the silent sea.  Karin flees the cottage and takes refuge in a wrecked ship, foundered at the edge of the sea.  Her brother, Minus pursues her -- earlier they have been flirting at the picnic table outside and she has snatched away from him a tattered pornographic magazine (the youth was supposed to be conjugating Latin verbs).  In the hold of the crumbling ship, Karin embraces her brother and, perhaps, tries to seduce him.  The thunderstorm sweeps ashore with lightning and torrential rain.  That evening, Karin climbs up into the abandoned second story of the cottage, enters the room with the vivid convoluted wallpaper and stands next to a tear in the paper.  When a door opens inexplicably, she begins shrieking and writhing in horror.  She says that God has revealed himself to her but that he is a huge spider with a stony cruel face.  Karin has become completely mad and her husband, the doctor, sedates her while they wait for an ambulance.  The ambulance arrives -- it's a buzzing helicopter that, itself, seems to be a predatory insect.  Martin leaves with Karin.  Minus confronts his father and asks him why God has allowed his sister to suffer from schizophrenia.  David says that God is love and that wherever there is love there is also God.  Accordingly, David says that the love of Minus and Martin and himself has enveloped and clothed Karin in the protective love of God.  Minus looks awed by this revelation and, as his father walks off-screen, he says in a bewildered wondering voice:  "My Father has spoken to me."   

The movie successfully conveys the horror of madness.  Karin's breakdown is hideous and her revelation that God is a spider is truly spinetingling, (Karin is acted by Harriet Andersson in a performance that is beyond praise.) The scenes in the belly of the wrecked boat have a jagged expressionistic tone -- the set looks like something from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  This is not a subtle film but a straight-forward horror movie complete with a monster and horror film effects -- for instance, the door opening slowly in the upper room.  The truisms about God being love are clearly insincere, but they are the best anyone can do under the bleak circumstances.  Nothing is learned, no one is reformed or changes for the better on the basis of the events shown in the movie.  Bergman's movies are sometimes criticized for being overly literate, too talky and pretentious -- this film doesn't have those characteristics; it's ninety minutes of straight, undiluted shock to the nervous system.   

Undine

 Frederick de la Motte Fouque, notwithstanding his picturesque name, was a Prussian officer, known today for his 1811 novel, Undine.  The book was once wildly popular, counting luminaries like Edgar Alan Poe among its admirers.  E.T.A. Hoffmann adapted it as an opera, the first of several such works by Romantic composers.  I've read the book and it's an elaborate fairy tale about a nixie or water nymph who takes the form of a beautiful woman with a taste for handsome young noblemen.  The story is full of mysterious lakes, travels along the Rhine, castles, and enchanted wells.  The water nymph is haunted by her Uncle, a water spirit or elemental as well.  Men who betray her are drowned, at least, this is the original form of the story that derives from Teutonic folklore -- but in Fouque's version, the story is similar to Hans Christian Anderson's "Little Mermaid"; the poor nixie is the one that suffers the pangs of love and is betrayed by the prince who has sworn his troth to her.  

In modern day Berlin, a beautiful young woman named Undine Wibeau works at the Humboldt Forum where she leads tours highlighting urban renewal in the City both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  She uses large plaster models of Berlin both under the Communists and, now, as a united city to illustrate her talks and lectures on changes that have been made and that will be implemented in the future.  One of her lectures is about the Berlin Palace, a former royal residence converted by the Communists into a modernist entertainment center with a swimming pool, theaters, and bowling alleys.  After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the structure was, in fact, converted into the Humboldt Forum which is located in a completely restored version of the old royal palace.  The movie implies that the Markische Museum is right next door -- in fact, it's 1.4 miles away; the Markische Museum is the Museum of the City of Berlin.  The place, in my experience, never is open, or, at least, never fully open, and, in the Museum's isolated and empty cafe, Undine meets her married boyfriend.  He ditches her and she remarks:  "Now, I will have to kill you."  Entering the cafe after her cockroach boyfriend has skittered off, she encounters a burly industrial diver who is working on some kind of project at a lake an hour or so away by train.  When Undine sees the diver, a handsome fellow who has had his cleft palate repaired, a large aquarium in the cafe explodes and Undine is cut and drenched by the water pouring through the broken glass.  (The waiter in the cafe is weirdly angry at Undine and bans her from the cafe although she has done nothing untoward, except, perhaps, telekinetically register her passion for the handsome diver so as to shatter the aquarium and spill the goldfish all over the floor.  A small figurine of a diver in the aquarium falls to the cafe floor and Undine takes it as a souvenir.  The diver is working underwater welding at the bottom of a lake near a huge turbine -- it's a reservoir impounded by a big brick dam.  The diver sees Guenther, a legendary catfish, paddling around deep under water.  Guenther is huge and ugly.  The diver and Undine, being both watery creatures embark on a love affair.  One day, the diver takes Undine for a swim in the gloomy dark reservoir.  She slips out of her diving gear and we see her mask and flippers and flashlight sinking to the murky bottom of the lake.  The diver glimpses Undine swimming alongside big Guenther.  Undine seems to have drowned but the diver revives her and she seems perfectly fine, in fact, flirtatiously asking him to revive her again with mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions.  After a few weeks, Undine and the diver walking along the Spree, presumably between the Markische Museen and the Humboldt forum run into her former boyfriend who is back with his blonde wife.  The diver goes to the lake for more underwater welding, a strange image of glowing acetylene fire under water.  That night Undine receives a call from the diver in which he accuses her of faithlessness and says that he knows she has been with her old boyfriend, the married cad.  (The diver, who has really just begun his relationship with the beautiful woman, seems oddly hysterical.)  Undine is panicked by the call and the next morning hurries to the lake where she learns that the diver got caught in a turbine the previous afternoon -- that is, before the phone call -- and is lying in a hospital unconscious and brain dead.  She learns this from Monica, the diver's assistant, who secretly loves her boss.  Later, the diver wakes up crying Undine's name but it is too late -- she has vanished.  (Undine has killed her married boyfriend by drowning him in her swimming pool.)  Two years pass.  The diver is married to Monica, his assistant, and she is pregnant.  They visit the reservoir and, in the middle of the night, the diver sneaks out and swims in the dark waters where he briefly encounters Undine.  She hands him the figurine of the diver from the aquarium.  He surfaces and returns to his pregnant wife.

Christian Petzold's 2020 film is very handsome.  The scenes in Berlin are brightly lit and involve much voyeuristic spying and sneaking around.  Undine's lectures on housing, redevelopment, and monumental architecture in Berlin are rendered in some detail.  This aspect of the movie is puzzling but, I think suggests that Ostalgia (nostalgia for the old East Germany) is a submerged, but seductive aspect of recent German history.  Undine, the underwater creature, seems to be a figure somehow connected with the lost drowned world of the Communist DDR.  (We learn that part of the East Berlin cityscape exhibit has been put in another museum specializing in Ostalgia.)  The love scenes are compelling and the actress playing the nixie is exceptionally and luminously attractive -- her name is Paula Beer.  Old Gunther the catfish stands in for Undine's lake-spirit uncle in Motte Fouque's novel.  Submerged in the lake there is a sort of underwater palace, a kind of grotto of carved stone wreathed in seaweed. and marked with the word "UNDINE".  The movie is well-make and beautifully shot, but it's ultimately inconclusive, stitched together with disparate parts that don't quite fit.  

Ghost Elephants

 Ghost Elephants (2025) is a National Geographic-funded documentary directed by Werner Herzog.  For about three-quarters of its length, the movie is one of the best documentary films ever made.  The picture's last quarter, involving DNA testing that turns out to be inconsequential is strangely bland and predictable.  This part of the movie aims at solving a puzzle as to whether the so-called "Ghost Elephants" of the east Angolan highlands are a distinct subspecies of pachyderms -- unless you are an expert in taxonomy, the solution to this puzzle is relatively uninteresting and the documentation of the scientific means used to distinguish between subspecies is technical, visually inert, and complete lacking the ecstatic charisma that otherwise characterizes this movie.  Many PBS and BBC documentaries begin by posing a question and, then, show scientists and experiments directed toward finding an answer.  As it happened, the elephant documentary was followed on my streaming service with a show about Stonehenge that exemplifies this narrative strategy -- there is a recumbent stone, the so-called "altar stone" at Stonehenge; the recumbent stone is composed of rock unlike the other parts of the neolithic monument, therefore, begging this question:  what is the source of this stone?  (It turns out to be rock from Aberdeen in Scotland 500 miles to the north of Stonehenge -- this discovery turns out to have interesting and, indeed, highly consequential implications).  Herzog is so uninterested in the question rather formulaically posed by Ghost Elephants that he doesn't even bother to answer it during the film itself -- he relegates the information that the Angolan pachyderms are, indeed, a distinct, hitherto unknown, subspecies to a closing title.  So, as is typical with this director, Herzog follows the canonical form of the well-made science documentary only to, in effect, completely subvert that form.  A question is posed at the outset but it is mostly ignored until a perfunctory coda tacked onto the end of the movie.  The real subject matter of the movie is not the outcome of the quest, which is prosaic, but the lyrical and rhapsodic documentation of the quest itself.

The hero of Ghost Elephants is a White South African naturalist called Steve Boyes.  Boyes looks like Indiana Jones and dresses like that character also.  He is a typical Herzogian obsessive -- a man with a mission willing to suffer all sorts of hardships to accomplish his aims:  in the case to extract DNA from the giant elephants (who may not even exist) in the remote and inaccessible Angolan highlands.  Herzog compares Boyes to Captain Ahab, a likeness that the hero accepts with a shrug.  Fifty years ago, a monomaniacal obsessive like Boyes would be a true oddity -- but, Herzog, once an unknown German avant-garde director, has become his own climate:  he has created the types of men that he chronicles in his movie in real life:  Boyes is like Aguirre in Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God or like the grizzly man in Herzog's film of that name or like his doomed volcanologists killed by an eruption that they are documenting or any number of other quixotic figures in Herzog feature and documentary films.  It's an open question as to whether Boyes could exist independently of Herzog's celebration of these figures:  the viewer has the suspicion that Boyes has seen enough Herzog films so as to be able to convincingly imitate such a person.  Boyes enthuses over the size of the so-called Fenykoeve elephant on display as a monumental taxidermy specimen in the atrium of the Smithsonian Institute.  This beast is the largest elephant ever recorded, a twelve ton monster that stands 12 feet tall -- the critter's skull alone weighed one-and-a-half tons.  Boyes thinks that the elephants rumored to exist in Angola might be even larger.  Herzog's narration which is wry and poetic reminds us that the specimen on display rearing over the Smithsonian visitors is almost wholly empty -- the creature's skull was too big to use as an armature for the animal's skin and it's tusks too heavy to support in the exhibit.  (Herzog obligingly goes backstage at the Smithsonian and shows us the animal's actual skull and tusks in storage warehouse -- the exhibit animal has been named Henry.)

Africa, pictured as incomprehensibly exotic, is represented by San Bushmen trackers who convincingly imitate the posture and gestures of elephants in an opening scene that is profoundly mysterious.  The Bushmen, Herzog tells us, are the most genetically diverse humans on earth -- this means that they are the oldest race in existence.  They speak in a language called Ju/"hoansi consisting of syllables punctuated by clicks and popping sounds made in the cheeks.  Boyes engages three of these men to serve as his trackers -- they are Xui (pronounced "kwee"), Xui-David, and Kobus (Xui is said to be the last great tracker, the "greatest tracker in the world.").  For a few minutes, Herzog treats us to an enigmatic ethnographic study of the San Bushmen.  We learn how they make their poison arrows, compounded from grubs they dig out of the ground -- the poison is so deadly it can kill an elephant in a matter of minutes.  One old man with grotesquely ancient face knits together some wires and strings on what looks a tin cracker box and strums that instrument wailing in a high-pitched voice.  The old man, whose image ends the movie as well, is sitting among a dozen chickens that strut around the village common.  Herzog, who is himself obsessed with chickens, says "I don't want to romanticize this -- but here I was with the old man singing surrounded by chickens -- it doesn't get any better than this."  The expedition departs Namibia for Angola's plateau, the so-called "Source of Life" or the "Water Tower of Africa", highlands that are full of peatlands, bogs, swamps, and great lakes -- the headwaters for many of Africa's largest rivers.  They drive for seven days in Land Rovers, crossing rivers on incredibly fragile-looking bridges -- these scenes seem extracted from Sirat or Friedkin's Sorcerer.  The land gets rougher and so they cross desert savannahs on motor bikes.  At last, the motor bikes have to be abandoned as they hike up to the highlands, the haunt of the ghost elephants.  Herzog punctuates these scenes with images of the bushmen singing and using their shoulders and necks to mimic the elephants; there are rapturous scenes of elephants taken from underwater -- we see them striding through the water, kicking up big pale clouds of dust dissolved in the lagoon; one elephant is rolling on his side totally submerged by the water.  At night, the stars in great clouds spin wildly over the camp where the explorers are resting.  In the darkness, a huge spider approaches with its back swarming with a hundred or more spiderlets.  At dawn, Herzog awakes to see a man embracing crookedly a huge monitor lizard that he has killed; we seem him cuddled up to the lizard.  Herzog says that he has no idea what he is seeing.  There is discussion of the Angolan Civil War -- one of the translators is a survivor of that 27-year long war.  During the war, the combatants went mad, storming through desert and jungle and machine-gunning every animal that they say -- this morbid information is accompanied by images from the Mondo-Cane style film, Africa Addio (1965) of freakish-looking hunters slaughtering elephants from the protection of hovering helicopters.  In order to cross tribal lands, the expedition has to placate local chieftains, called "Kings" -- these men, regally draped in leopard-skins sit on thrones in what seem to be quonset huts.  Like Judges on the Bench, one must ask to approach.  If you wish to hand the King a gift, you must set it on the rug at his feet; a lackey will then pick up the gift and hand it to the King. 

Boyes has said that he prefers the elephants to remain figments of the imagination, denizens of his dreams.  (One wonders why the National Geographic would fund an expedition whose objective is to not find the Ghost Elephants.)  But Boyes is thwarted.  The dung of an elephant is sampled for DNA and several tall, long-legged elephants are briefly glimpsed marching in stately fashion through the savannah.  (The expedition has elaborate camera equipment but the actual images of the elephants are caught on cell-phones.)  Boyes expresses disappointment at seeing the elephants which he believes must be a subspecies.  A radiant double rainbow is behind him -- the rainy season is advancing and the expedition must retreat to the film's 15 minute epilogue involving genetic testing.  In one valedictory African scene, the expedition encounters another King who tells a story about the origin of his people:  a hunter followed a small elephant who took off her elephant-skin to reveal a woman inside.  The hunter copulated with the elephant-woman, resulting in the tribe of people over whom the King rules.  The King staring in an uncanny way into the camera tells us that, if the elephants vanish, all the people will vanish as well.  Earlier we have seen members of the expedition confronting a figure that seems to be a rotund black and white gourd with a plank-like mask for a head -- "The King sent his spirit out to meet us," Herzog says in his dead-pan voice.  The King takes the credit for the revelation of the elephants:  the "elephants will not appear unless you ask me for their permission to appear."  By all means, find this movie and watch it.  

Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie

Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light is 80 minutes long.  Vilgot Sjoman's documentary Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie (1963), a chronicle of the production of Winter Light, runs 146 minutes.  Sjoman's documentary, apparently made for Swedish television, is the most detailed picture ever made about the production of another movie:  the film begins on the Baltic seashore with Sjoman earnestly interviewing Bergman about his writing of the script for the film; the movie ends with Winter Light's premiere in Stockholm with various people interviewed on the street and in the cinema lobby, concluding with a final (and lengthy) valedictory interview with the director.  In between the film's opening scenes and its ending, Sjoman shows us location scouting, the construction of sets, exacting rehearsals with the lead performers in the film, and, then, sequences that purport to show Winter Light actually being filmed by the master director of photography Sven Nykwist.  (Bergman wouldn't allow Sjoman's 16 mm camera on the set when the film was actually being shot and, so, the production scenes are staged -- Bergman remarks that he is very effective in playing "director" in this footage.  The part of the film seeming to show the movie being shot is the longest sequence in the documentary, probably lasting about an hour.  There follow sequences about post-production, including editing, also factually detailed including a scene where the texture and lighting of the black-and-white picture is rigorously tested for quality control -- in these scenes, we learn that Svensk film industries has commissioned 100 duplicate copies for distribution in the United States, something that seems to please Bergman who smirks slightly when he learns  this..  After mixed reviews from critics and the public (we learn that Bergman reads all reviews), the director muses about pleasing the audience and the perfidy of critics.  He expresses his feelings of inferiority but says that the bad reviews don't bother him because he has already moved on to producing his next movie, The Silence (1963) and, also, is busy with TV work and directing a play for the stage.  Bergman is very articulate and seems to be a reasonable person -- he is somewhat serpentine, slippery, and, often, contradicts himself in the course of a five or six minute interview.  Sjoman treats him like an acolyte and the interviews, in which Sjoman asks extremely intelligent and penetrating questions, have something of the aspect of a catechism between holy man and monk -- Bergman exudes impenetrable and opaque serenity, Sjoman with an Amish-style beard (his chin is bare and but fringed by his neck beard) wearing round granny glasses is suitably deferential to the Great Man -- who is, in fact, only seven years older than the very boyish-looking Sjoman.  

Winter Light, the second part of a trilogy -- the other pictures are Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Silence (1963) -- is about an existential crisis afflicting a Lutheran pastor who has lost his faith.  The pastor's doubt and angst occur in the context of a love affair that has collapsed into bitter and cruel mutual recriminations.  Bergman's script was inspired by his encounter with a clergyman whose parishioner killed himself the day after a meeting with the pastor about his depression -- needless to say, the pastor experienced guilt over the man's death.  Bergman discusses, rather evasively, the preparation of the script, ignoring for the most part that his father was a prominent Lutheran ecclesiastical figure and that, Bergman, in fact, asked his father to read the script not once but three times -- none of this is contained in the interview with the director which seems mostly concerned with concealing actual sources of inspiration for the movie.  There follow scenes about location selection, including a surreal sequence in which Bergman travels a hundred miles on a railway, driving a pickup truck on the rails that were, in fact, laid by his grandfather.  (He is scouting for a location that appears for about 30 seconds in the film when the Pastor with his girlfriend have to wait at a crossing as a sinister-looking train passes.)  We see screen tests including camera tests of costumes used in the film.  A church interior is built since the inside of the two churches shown in the film were too dark and crowded for Nykwist's camera.  Bergman rehearses with Gunnar Bjornstrand (the pastor) and Ingrid Thulin (the pastor's mistress) at length, blocking out a scene between the two in geometric detail, a script girl hovering nearby to feed lines to the actors when they forget them.  Sven Nykwist says that he worked with Bergman to avoid any trace of pictorial beauty in the film -- both and Bergman want the images to be "naked Swedish reality" -- that is, "naked and obvious."  Everything is to be staged in the most rigorously simply manner without camera movements or fancy compositions  .(Bergman insists on very fine distinction; he wants the movie to appear scrupulously mean, but,also doesn't want it to be like an Italian neo-realist film.)  In the scenes re-staged to simulate the actual photography, Bergman with Max von Sydow (playing the suicide) and, Gunnel Lindblom, an attractive actress playing his pregnant wife, shoot, at least, nine takes of a minute-long scene, recording the action from various angles so that the director will have enough footage to construct the scene while editing it.  The film requires 53 days shooting.  (There is no mention of the fact that the pastor, who is ill and feverish in the script, was, in fact, actually very ill as a result of hypertension and other conditions afflicting Gunnar Bjornstrand -- Bergman ruthlessly exploited his leading man's real illness to achieve verisimilitude in the picture.)  Detailed information about six to eight weeks of editing is provided.  Bergman says that, if possible, always cut on movement although "there are ten-thousand exceptions to that rule."  Sjoman obliges his audience by showing four alternative versions of the scene with Max von Sydow, the feverish pastor, and the suicidal man's pregnant wife.  This is quite remarkable in that Sjoman actually preserves in the film different approaches to editing this crucial, indeed, pivotal scene, in which the pastor can't help the suicidally depressed man and, indeed, responds to his anguished words with silence.  Bergman prepares for bad reviews and seems to make excuses for potential failure.  He tells us that Through a Glass Darkly had excellent reviews and that critics tend to punish the movie following a big success with bad notices.  In fact, most of the reviews are pretty good and Bergman seems, more or less, pleased, although he perseverates on the negative reviews and blames those notices on the irreligious era in which he has released his movie.  

This documentary shows you everything that you can imagine about film production, but, in the end, is a bit disheartening.  Bergman is fanatically precise in his demands and, always, seems to know exactly what effect he is trying to achieve.  He controls every aspect of the production down to its tiniest detail -- for instance, the kinds of boots and socks that the characters wear.  Between shots, Bergman shows everyone sitting around drinking coffee and cracking wise -- to do serious work, Bergman insists, you have to be jovial and cheerful on your breaks and tell each other jokes.  Bergman's reduction of his rather elaborate script (it's written like an Ibsen play with detailed set descriptions) to celluloid is tedious and hard work -- Bergman says that once you start filming in the studio all the "joy and fascination" are gone.  "Filming," he says, "is just a job."  (This declaration directly contradicts earlier  interview comments in which Bergman maintains that a good director and cast discover new truths and meanings in the script when they work collaboratively to photograph the script -- but Bergman is constantly correcting, revising, and, even, contradicting his previous statements and, so, ultimately this elaborately detailed chronicle ends up being more enigmatic than informative.  The director Vilgot Sjoman is famous for his films I am Curious (Yellow) and I am Curious (Blue) -- sexually candid pictures that played for years in porno places throughout the United States despite being serious and angst-ridden Swedish art films and not pornographic at all.  Ingmar Bergman, who was apparently cruel and incredibly charismatic, doesn't have the self-promotional chops of Federico Fellini or Werner Herzog -- he looks like a well-groomed and ultra-articulate Swedish High School teacher and there is none of incandescent flare of madness that you see in those two directors.