Rough Draft

Julia Curl

Due April 11, 2017

Integrative Seminar 2

Bergman and Existentialism: Draft 1

The reality we experience today is in fact as absurd, as horrible, and obtrusive as in our dreams. We are defenseless before it as we are in our dreams. And one is strongly aware, I think, that there are no boundaries between dream and reality today.

— Ingmar Bergman.[1]

 

Born only four months before the end of World War I, Ingmar Bergman came into the world during one of the greatest upheavals of human history. The Swedish director—widely regarded as one of the most accomplished filmmakers of all time—thus grew up in a world in which all of the prevailing narratives about the “inevitable progress” of mankind were thrown into question. Sixteen million lives were lost, yet this pales in comparison with the unspeakable horrors that were to come just as the young auteur was turning 21. World War II took the destruction of human life to a peak never before imaginable, yet Sweden remained stubbornly neutral as the Holocaust raged on. To a young man like Bergman, who even felt an “adolescent attraction to [Hitler’s] fascism” as a foreign exchange student in Germany, the guilt of this brief association was unabating. [2]

World War II forever altered the course of philosophy, a discipline that Bergman draws heavily from in his work. French existentialism was shaped by this conflict, as its pioneering philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre developed his ideas through an awareness of the events surrounding the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi occupation of his home country. Sartre was even briefly held in a German prisoner of war camp, and formed a resistance group in Paris upon his release.[3]

Existentialism:

• Camus’ writing “explores the abiding centrality of strangeness in modernity” … he “specializes in defamiliarizing the natural object or natural condition, rendering it strange with a calm and blinding lucidity” (Orr, 55)
• “The underlying cause of Roquentin’s nausea [in Being and Nothingness]… is the ‘superfluity’ of objects. They are ultimately inexplicable; they ‘overflow’ the categories we must inevitably impose on them” (Hanscomb, 8)
• “The absurdity or senselessness of the material world is transformed into a kind of horror. We are creatures that desire sense, and yet this most permanent and nonnegotiable aspect of the world, when abstracted from everyday functionality, has none” (Hanscomb, 8).
• “we experience anxiety in the face of something ‘indefinite,’ ‘diffuse’ or ‘uncertain’” (Hanscomb, 10).

Artistic reponse:

• “the ordinary structures… ‘beginning, middle, and end,’ [etc.]—have disappeared as necessary parameters” (221)
• “The very foundations of what we call ‘reality’ were crumbling” (Stacks, 14)
• Bergman: “I had very few contacts with reality or channels to it. I was afraid of my father, my mother, my elder brother—everything. Playing with this puppet theater and a projection device I had was my only form of self-espression” (Stacks, 16).

“In our century, [the artist] can no longer, for example, shut his consciousness off from the fact of needless and appalling (not ‘tragic’ because utterly unredeemed) suffering; nor can he keep at a manageable arm’s length the possibility that human existence has no significance” (Wood, 186)

“Total exposure to the meaninglessness and chaos the 20^th century has discovered… cannot but be detrimental to the artist, and yet no one who is an artist can refuse it” (Wood, 187)

this chaos “can lead to a collapse into total incoherence,[4] or to a hardening and toughening of the sensibility” (Wood 187)

• S. Eliot “important to Bergman’s generation” (Steene, 6)—the move away from clear structures of poetry/Eliot’s rebellion against a coherent poetic narrative parallels Bergman’s move away from a coherent narrative in Persona

 

Albert Camus, the other figurehead of the French existentialist movement, was even briefly in contact with Bergman during the late 1950s, when the filmmaker was attempting “to direct an adaptation of La Chute.”[5] This unfortunately never took place, as Camus died in a car accident while the negotiation process was still ongoing. “In his 1968 interviews with Swedish critics for Bergman on Bergman the Swedish director acknowledged the impact of existentialism on his work and claimed Camus’ version of that fashionable but illusive philosophy to be more ‘refined’ than Sartre’s” (Orr, 55)

 

• “Bergman, meanwhile, directed Camus’ existential power-drama Caligula early in his stage career” (Orr, 55).
• “If [Bergman] is a philosopher in the cinema, he is a philosopher with plagiarized views, personally important but culturally derivative” (Steene, 3)

 

Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona—shot at the height of the Vietnam War—reflects key concepts of post-WWII existentialism: in Alma’s dissociation from herself and from reality, we see the individual’s disorientation and struggle to exist in a seemingly meaningless, war-torn world. [include connection between the aspects of horror in Bergman’s film and the major themes of existentialism]

Bergman and existentialism:

• “There have been more courses on the ‘films’ of Ingmar Bergman in the religion and philosophy departments of our American colleges and universities than in departments on cinema studies,” as “Bergman has also been a staple in courses on… Film and Existentialism” (Steene, 3)
• “From Bergman’s films, it is obvious that the existentialism with which he is most familiar is that of Sartre and Camus” (Stacks, 2)
• Bergman believes “that we appear to be of a world in which God is absent” Stacks, 9)
• “One of the most common themes in [Bergman’s] filmography is the question of whether God exists or not” (Kartal, 80) Seventh Seal and Winter Light “both include lead characters that are in doubt about God” (Kartal, 81) optimism argument
• Seventh Seal and Winter Light “are preoccupied with the silence of God and are pessimistic about man’s relationship with God” (Pua, 55).
• “[Bergman’s films] move away from the staged melodrama of classical film into a world of oblique signs where plotlines are never clear and strangeness overpowers the familiar, a world that is existential and uncanny at the same time” (Orr, 55)
• “[Bergman’s] uncanny is very interior” (Orr, 58).

Horror:

• “I want to argue that the heart of the connection between existentialism and horror is the deeply interstitial nature of human existence”
• Connection between horror (fear) and “the role of anxiety and nausea” in existentialism (Hanscomb, 6)

Persona: [include a detailed analysis in the next draft]

• in Persona “one can see the whole traditional concept of art—an ordering of experience toward a positive end, a wholeness of statement—crackling and crumbling even as, halfway through the film, the image crumbles” (188).
• “Breakdown… is both theme and form” (188)
• “Elizabet recoils… from the horror of existence itself; the horror of a life in which the sort of sufferings and outrages pointed to by the two examples are not merely possible but everyday; the horror of a humanity in which the tendencies that make such outrages possible are inherent and ineradicable” (Wood, 190)
• “What Alma is led to discover during the course of the film is quite simply what is within herself: fear that existence may be meaningless; uncertainty as to where ‘acting’ stops and ‘being’ begins” (193) evident in sexual encounter
• “bottomless abyss of uncertainties” portrayed in the second half of the film (Wood, 193)
• Dream sequences: “none of these incidents is to be thought of as literally ‘happening’” (Wood, 199)
• Alma: “’Many words and then disgust, unbearable pain, the nausea’” (Nausea the title of one of Sartre’s books and one of the central themes of his existentialist philosophy)

·      Alma: “In a strange way, it was never real. I don’t know how to describe it. I was never real to him. But my pain was real, that’s for sure. In some way, that was a part of it, in some nauseating way, as if it should be like that.” More existential themes: lack of concrete reality, lack of substantiality, pain—pain leading to nausea, which is associated with the acute achievement of self-awareness in an existentialist context

Beach scene: “we are ‘threatened’ by our past and its implications, ‘disturbed’ by our insubstantial self” (Hanscomb, 11). This is clearly evident in Alma’s fear and denial of the superficiality of her relationship with Karl-Henrik, the way that she cannot handle Elisabet’s silence.

·      “Is it possible to be one and the same person at the same time? I mean, two people?”·      “Elisabet, can I read a bit of my book to you? Or am I disturbing you? Listen to this…                             ‘The anxiety we carry with us, all our broken dreams, the inexplicable cruelty, the fear of death, painful insight into our earthly condition… have worn out our hope of a divine salvation. The cries of our faith and doubt against the darkness and the silence are terrible proof of our Ioneliness and fear.’ Do you think it’s like that? I don’t believe that.” The atmosphere of the time; denial of our external selves

• “The rest of the neglect of Persona may be set down to emotional squeamishness; the film, like much of Bergman’s recent work, bears an almost defiling charge of personal agony” (Sontag, 1). Persona tackles deeply unsettling themes; it is a sort of psychological/existential horror movie in its own right
• “What first needs to be made clear about Persona is what can’t be done with it. The most skillful attempt to arrange a single, plausible anecdote out of the film must leave out or contradict some of its key sections, images and procedures” (Sontag, 2).

[1] Ketchum, 227

[2] Williams, 22.

[3] Williams, 19.

[4]Is total incoherence necessarily a negative quality? i.e., Beckett’s Molloy or the modernist poetry of Ezra Pound

[5] Orr, 55.