Julia Curl
Integrative Seminar 2
Bergman and Existentialism: Draft 2
Born on July 14, 1918, the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman came into being during one of the greatest upheavals of human history. The First World War claimed sixteen million lives, and in its wake obliterated any notion of mankind’s “inevitable progress”—what kind of progress was there, really, while an entire generation huddled “in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats/And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain”?[1] Yet even WWI’s horrors pale in comparison with those 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; the Holocaust raged on, but Sweden remained stubbornly neutral in the face of an immense loss of human life. The festering guilt that this bred among the Swedish intelligentsia—particularly in a man like Bergman, who himself admitted to an “adolescent attraction to [Hitler’s] fascism” as an exchange student in Germany—ought not to be underestimated.[2]
World War II fundamentally altered the way that people conceived of the world, be it through art, philosophy, or even in everyday life. “The very foundations of what we call ‘reality’ were crumbling,” one author writes.[3] The celebrated film critic Robin Wood notes how “the ordinary structures” of “beginning, middle, and end… disappeared as necessary parameters” in the wake of the conflict.[4] Coherent art suddenly made little sense when everyday reality was incoherent and incomprehensible. Poets like T. S. Eliot rose to international prominence within “Bergman’s generation,”[5] rejecting the classical structures of the poetic medium in favor of a more fractured vision of the world. Bergman’s own anecdotes from this time reflect a sense of shattered normalcy: “I had very few contacts with reality or channels to it,” he writes. “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-expression.”[6]
One of the most influential philosophical movements that arose during this time period was French existentialism, pioneered by Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre himself developed his theories through direct engagement with the events of the Second World War; the philosopher was briefly held in a German prisoner of war camp, and upon his release formed an underground resistance group in Paris.[7] Camus’ work deals with the absurdity of the post-war world, particularly through “defamiliarizing the natural object or natural condition, rendering it strange with a calm and blinding lucidity.”[8]
This defamiliarization and confrontation of the absurd would have a lasting effect on Ingmar Bergman. In several 1968 interviews, Bergman discussed the importance of existentialism in shaping the course of his work. At the beginning of his career in 1946, Bergman even directed Camus’ play Caligula.[9] His films, too, reflect a deep familiarity with Camus and Sartre’s existentialism[10]—Bergman even goes so far as to pick a favorite, calling Camus’ philosophy more “refined” than Sartre’s.[11] As a result, studies of Bergman’s work tend to explore the philosophical and existential implications of his oeuvre perhaps more deeply than they consider its cinematographic elements.[12]
Bergman was even briefly in contact with Camus during the late 1950s, when he was attempting to produce an adapted version of La Chute. (This production, however, was curtailed by Camus’ untimely death).[13] Indeed, Bergman’s philosophy is so indebted to the French existentialists that one critic states that “If [Bergman] is a philosopher in the cinema, he is a philosopher with plagiarized views, personally important but culturally derivative.”[14] We see this connection further in Bergman’s films The Seventh Seal and Winter Light, as the protagonists’ theological crises reflect one of the crucial issues of existentialism: how to inhabit a world “in which God is absent.”[15] In these films, the question of the existence of God is paramount.[16] Although there has been some debate as to what Bergman’s ultimate leanings might be, the prevailing argument asserts that both The Seventh Seal and Winter Light “are preoccupied with the silence of God and are pessimistic about man’s relationship with God.”[17]
Bergman’s films tend to turn this existentialism inward, examining the psychological consequences of absurdity, the profound anxiety that stems from a godless—and thus meaningless—world. Like the Modernists’ revolt against poetic meter, Bergman’s films “move away from the staged melodrama of classical film into a world of oblique signs where plotlines are never clear.”[18] Moving even deeper than plotlines, however, Bergman’s films present a world where even being itself is never clear: the mind struggles to see the objective, then struggles to see outside of itself, and then struggles to see itself at all. (There is a certain irony to this, considering that we tend to seek refuge from chaos and horror by turning inwards).
Perhaps the most striking example of this is Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece, Persona, shot at the height of the Vietnam War. The film reflects a growing resistance to a discernible, objective reality in Bergman’s work, a resistance that runs parallel to his exploration 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. The intangibility of the self that one finds in Persona is the true essence of Bergman’s horror; the primary focus of this paper will be to analyze the key components of this film with this argument in mind, tying together the threads of the cinematic and the philosophical.
Persona analysis: [include a detailed analysis in the next draft]
- “we experience anxiety in the face of something ‘indefinite,’ ‘diffuse’ or ‘uncertain’” (Hanscomb, 10).
- “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)
- 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).
Horror:
this chaos “can lead to a collapse into total incoherence,[19] or to a hardening and toughening of the sensibility” (Wood 187)
- “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)
[1] From “Dreamers” by Seigfried Sassoon (fought in WWI). Ramazani, 390.
[2] Williams, 22.
[3] Williams, 14.
[4] Wood, 221.
[5] Steene, 6.
[6] Williams, 16.
[7] Williams, 19.
[8] Orr, 55.
[9] Orr, 55.
[10] Williams, 2.
[11] Orr, 55.
[12] Steene, 3.
[13] Orr, 55.
[14] Steene, 3.
[15] Williams, 9.
[16] Kartal, 80.
[17] Pua, 55.
[18] Orr, 55.
[19]Is total incoherence necessarily a negative quality? i.e., Beckett’s Molloy or the modernist poetry of Ezra Pound
