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The world of Ingmar Bergman is notoriously dark. He exposes us repeatedly to the isolation of human subjectivity and to our desperate attempts to break free of it. To be human for Bergman is to be imperiled, to move in an atmosphere of relentless anxiety, and to be driven by passions whose source and power we can neither master nor understand. Is there a period of innocence, a time before we are caught in the coils of the human condition? The author will argue that Bergman’s treatment of children demonstrates that in his world birth is the fall from grace.
Keywords: Bergman, film, children
The World of Bergman and the World of Dreams
Much of the work of Ingmar Bergman is relentlessly dark. Even admirers of his artistry have often been repelled by the unremitting bleakness of his vision. Yet critics continue to hold his work in the highest esteem, crediting his films with a psychological depth few, if any, have approached. The author’s purpose here will be to shed some light on the symbolic importance of children in Bergman’s films. But the author wants to begin by trying to resolve the paradox of this frequent dual reaction to Bergman, that is, repulsion at his extremism and a no less profound appreciation for the elemental depth of his work. And the author wants to call attention to those who may be the most important of Bergman’s symbolic children: us, the viewers of his films.
Pervasiveness of Mood
If we consider only his great films of the 1960s, these characteristics can hardly fail to strike us: First, a pervasiveness of mood so complete and inescapable as to inflect everything we see and hear. In film after film, Bergman achieves what every artist of cinema must aspire to: What we perceive is the material embodiment of what we feel. Consider two examples: In Through a Glass Darkly (1961), two men in a rowboat confront each other coldly with raw long-unspoken truths. They are the father and the husband of a young woman incurably schizophrenic. The sky is overcast, the air chill; the hollow knocking of the oars and gentle plashing of the water beat in counterpoint to their mutual lacerations. The scene is shot in frigid black and white, the figures shot singly in low angle against a grey sky, thus emphasizing the threat they pose to each other. In The Silence(1963), a severely ascetic woman preoccupied with her thoughts stands in the foreground of a richly over-furnished hotel suite, her sensuous sister in the deep background applying cream to her legs, a plaintive cello on the radio. “Whose music is that?” asks the sister. “Bach”, the woman replies. “Johan Sebastian Bach”, she says again slowly, staring out at us, the macabre distraction in her words and face conveying at once the grotesque deadness of her life.
Austerity, Anxiety, and Urgency
After the pervasiveness of mood, the second prominent characteristic is Bergman’s austerity. The screen of the films of this period, its palette black and white, is with few exceptions uncluttered, spare, as is the soundtrack, suggesting at once a reduction to the elemental. The tone is serious and intense, the faces expressive, the interiority of the characters unwittingly exposed. Throughout there is an atmosphere of urgency and anxiety, the sense that at this fundamental level of human reality, anything may happen. Above all, what is clear is that something of great importance is being decided here, that in this mysterious world, the stakes are very high for the characters and for us.
The Atmosphere of Our Most Revelatory Dreams
“All this is too exaggerated, too portentous, the focus too narrow; what is shown is too limited a sector of human life”, we may say when leaving the theater, trying to shake off the experience of what we have seen. But the experience is, in fact, familiar. For this concentration of focus, this seriousness, this atmosphere of urgency and anxiety are exactly the qualities that mark the world of our most revelatory dreams. Deprived in the dream world of the concrete grip that keeps us in contact with an ordered time, the time of our tasks and projects, nothing protects us from the ultimate temporal horizon of our lives: the time of our death. And from this perspective, the question is unavoidable: What is my life? What does it amount to? What is its affective significance? What is its worth? The recurrence of clocks and loudly ticking watches signals the urgency in Bergman’s world. What will be decided must be decided now. We accept Bergman’s relentless concentration of focus, his world—uncanny and often depraved, because we are intimately acquainted with it in our troubled sleep. And the ultimate question he pursues in his films, the judgment he seeks of human life itself, mirrors the questions about our own lives that come to us in our dreams.
The Dreamer as Child
And who is the dreamer, the observer of the dream? Solitary, fascinated, powerless before the assault of the(dream) world, vulnerable to the destiny he/she will endure there, a questioning but helpless regard, who does this come closest to resembling but the child in us? Does this not help us understand why Bergman opens Persona with a hungering child, who never appears in the film itself, reaching out to the screen? “The child in all his or her yearning and uncertainty, in his/her hunger for clarity and emotional sustenance”, we can imagine Bergman saying, “this is who my films are for”.
If the author is even partly right in saying that the emotionally hungering child in the adult is Bergman’s intended audience, it would seem that we should pay special attention to Bergman’s express treatment of children in his films. That is what the author will turn to now.
Bergman’s Children
In Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal (both released in 1957), children are symbols of vitality, renewal, and hope. Especially birth seems to hold for Bergman the promise of a better future. But after The Seventh Seal, it is not until Fanny and Alexander (1982), 25 years later, that we see a birth again in a Bergman film. In the films of the 1960s and in Fanny and Alexander, Bergman dwells more deeply on the child than he had in the 1950s films. Here there is no period of innocence or unspoiled vitality as in Wild Strawberries. Instead, Bergman is interested in showing us how children are inducted without appeal into the human condition.
There are five elements of Bergman’s understanding of this condition that the author wants to explore: Abandonment, separation from nature, internal contradiction, and paradox are the first four. The author will conclude his discussion with the fifth element: the possibility of redemption.
Abandonment of Children
Abandonment is the harshest experience in Bergman’s world. The child feels it first in rejection and neglect by parents, and this is a precursor of the abandonment he/she will feel with lovers and spouses, and finally, in face of the world itself, the cosmic abandonment that Bergman will symbolize as the silence of God. In Through a Glass Darkly, adolescent Minus has lost his mother first to madness then to death. As the film opens, it becomes clear that the father he reveres takes little interest in his life. Later, his adored sister, too, deserts him for a permanent escape into madness. Elisabet Vogler, the mute actress in Persona (1966), tears up the photograph of the son she despises. In The Silence and Fanny and Alexander, the prepubescent boys, Johan and Alexander, suffer humiliation and defeat by their adult rivals for their mother’s love. Each boy feels abandoned by his mother in favor of another male. As his mother seeks reprieve from anxiety and guilt in sexual frenzy with a stranger, Johan is left to wander the halls of the opulent and funereal hotel. Alexander must be dragged to his father’s deathbed because of the boy’s own imagined Oedipal treachery against him.
And childhood will not be too soon for the suffering of the ultimate abandonment, the sense of being thrown upon one’s own feeble resources in searching for meaning in one’s life, the sense of isolation in the world itself, where it is natural for the child to expect a response to his anguish. Perhaps it does not surprise us that adolescent Minus, guilty now of incest with his sister, would feel the need for an answering and absolving God. But 10-year-old Alexander, too, has felt this question about a larger order: He rejects “shit and piss God”for his absence.
Separation From Nature
The separation of human beings from nature is another aspect of our condition that perplexes Bergman in his films of the 1960s. Think of the night scene in Persona with a great stretch of boulders at the seaside, with an afflicted Alma crouching among them, trying vainly to absorb and imitate their coldness. Think of the city in The Silence—a city conspicuously without nature, except for a pitiful desiccated horse, ribs exposed, drawing an anachronistic wagon down a bustling narrow street. Remember Anna in the last scene of that film, having left her sister to die among strangers, trying to cleanse her face and breast in the industrial rain angling down through the open train window.
And Bergman uses children when he wants to express the defilement of adult nature. In the hull of a beached ship, its boards rotting in the black water, Karin suddenly pulls her brother Minus to her, her eyes transported and delirious, and joins him in the chaos of human sexuality. In The Virgin Spring (1960), a girl is raped and bludgeoned to death and later her father in savage revenge hurls a small boy to his death against a rock wall. Rocks, harsh and forbidding, are prominent again in an uncanny scene in Hour of the Wolf (1968), perhaps the most transgressive in Bergman’s oeuvre. Here a child of nine or 10 suddenly appears among the rocks as a sexual tempter, circling the artist, Johan Berg, then leaping on his back, like a preying animal. His small arms hanging around Berg’s neck, he bites the artist repeatedly, his quick mechanical movements accentuated by sharp screeches of a violin. Berg, tall and strong, struggles with the boy, overwhelms him, then bashes his head with a rock and drops the boy’s dead body into a calm eddy, where the boy’s long hair wafts gracefully in the overexposed sea.
Contradictions in the Soul
The child is introduced very early to another aspect of the interior landscape: the contradictions in the soul. These will often involve sexual and especially Oedipal passion. In Through a Glass Darkly, Minus’ devotion to his sister is in tension with his hatred for the sexual desire she provokes in him. In The Silence, Johan is encouraged in his physical closeness to his mother, invited to bathe her, to sleep unclothed beside her naked body. The strong attachment he feels toward her must compete with his resentment for her abandonment of him in favor of random lovers. The same conflict besets Alexander, where the condition is exacerbated by his simultaneous love and betrayal of his father.
Paradox
Closely related to these internal contradictions are the paradoxes of human life. In Through a Glass Darkly, Karin’s seduction of her brother is her decisive exit from reality—but it is simultaneously his most intense experience of the real. “Reality broke out!” he cries, explaining to his father, seeking his absolution. In The Silence, Anna embraces her son Johan with a desperate devouring energy and he must find a way to reconcile this passion with her abrupt rejection, her preference for a stranger’s sexual embrace. And Alexander, motivated by his powerlessness, is able miraculously to kill both his father and the bishop with only the power of a wish.
Redemption
Abandoned and isolated in an inhospitable world, alienated from nature by our inwardness, capable of depravity, beset by irresolvable contradictions, and thrown against an ultimate mystery, we must somehow endure. How? Is there anything in Bergman’s understanding of our condition that enables us to hope? The author thinks Bergman’s answer is symbolized in the child at the beginning of Persona, the child searching with his hand for clarity and love, the opening of the heart to mystery. Whatever salvation there is in human life inheres in certain of our attempts to break the chains of our isolation: our effort to open ourselves toward the very other who is the source of our imperilment. Only in our will to love can we hope to escape the crippling isolation of the dream-world. But this effort battles within each of us with an equally powerful impulse—the will to become the master of our isolation by embracing it, enlarging the domain of our privacy by sealing it against the other, whom we then seek to control from our impassable distance. To the extent that we allow this rage for self-enclosure to prevail, we live in Bergman’s hell. But to the extent that we open ourselves to the mystery of other men and women, we achieve the only salvation possible for human beings in Bergman’s world. We are not saved from the wrenching failure of human love, or from the betrayals of our own heart, but we are saved from living death.
There is a redemptive if ineffable sweetness in Minus’ protective embrace of his sister after their exodus into chaos. His devotion to her is unshaken. And at the end of the film, we celebrate his awakening hope that meaning may come of hopelessness. “Papa spoke to me!” he says in baffled joy in the closing moments of the film. There are openings in this forbidding terrain: openings toward another. In their compartment in the train in the final scene of The Silence, Johan studies the Timokan words his dying aunt had translated for him, the words for “face”and “hand” among them. Anna, his mother, dismisses this letter with an uncomprehending shrug. But Johan understands Ester’s gift: an instrument he can use to reach toward the world. He opens toward his dying aunt, even as a bitter nascent wisdom turns him from his mother. The experience of living in the bishop’s house has taught Alexander the value of imagination, magic, and art: an opening to mystery. The bishop wore a single mask that by his own admission “grew into [his] flesh”. But masks for the Ekdahls were parts, roles that one played only long enough to experience them. And the purpose of the play?—To engage with others in the invention of something new, to engage together that part of ourselves that surpasses, if only for a time, the strictures of the human condition, and to make something new together: a pilgrimage with those we love toward mystery.
Conclusions
Like Kafka in literature and Chirico in painting, Bergman in cinematic art can be seen as a chronicler of the dream world, a world marked so often by a sense of peril and an atmosphere of anxiety, and a world in which we experience the vulnerability and helplessness of the child. The fact that the child is in this sense so intimate to Bergman’s ambitions as a film-maker should prompt in us an especial alertness to his express treatment of children in his work. What is the world of the child in Bergman’s view? In particular, we would want to know whether there is a period of innocence, and whether childhood might be, at least for a time, a reprieve from the myriad threats to meaningfulness that haunt adult life in Bergman’s vision. What we learn upon analysis is that the life of the child as Bergman understands it is marked by the same key elements of abandonment, separation from nature, internal contradiction, and paradox that characterize adult life at its core. But we find, too, that redemption is possible for the child, just as it is for the adult: redemption in the form of openness to the mystery of the other. As with the adult so with the child, our loving relationship with another—though itself fraught with peril—is our only hope of escape from the suffocating isolation of the dream world.
References
Bjorkman, S., Manns, T., Sima, J., & Austin, P. B. (1993). Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capro Press.
Hubner, L. (2007). The films of Ingmar Bergman: Illusions of light and darkness. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kalin, J. (2003). The films of Ingmar Bergman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ketcham, C. (1986). The influence of existentialism on Ingmar Bergman. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press.
Koskinen, M. (2009). Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence: Pictures in the typewriter, writings on the screen. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Lauder, R. (1989). God, death, art and love: The philosophical vision of Ingmar Bergman. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press.
Mandelbaum, J. (2011). Masters of cinema: Ingmar Bergman. London: Phaidon Press.
Singer, I. (2009). Ingmar Bergman, cinematic philosopher. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Vlada, Ed. P. (1981). Film and dreams: An approach to Bergman. New York: Hippocrene Books.
Wood, R. (2012, September). Ingmar Bergman. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Keywords: Bergman, film, children
The World of Bergman and the World of Dreams
Much of the work of Ingmar Bergman is relentlessly dark. Even admirers of his artistry have often been repelled by the unremitting bleakness of his vision. Yet critics continue to hold his work in the highest esteem, crediting his films with a psychological depth few, if any, have approached. The author’s purpose here will be to shed some light on the symbolic importance of children in Bergman’s films. But the author wants to begin by trying to resolve the paradox of this frequent dual reaction to Bergman, that is, repulsion at his extremism and a no less profound appreciation for the elemental depth of his work. And the author wants to call attention to those who may be the most important of Bergman’s symbolic children: us, the viewers of his films.
Pervasiveness of Mood
If we consider only his great films of the 1960s, these characteristics can hardly fail to strike us: First, a pervasiveness of mood so complete and inescapable as to inflect everything we see and hear. In film after film, Bergman achieves what every artist of cinema must aspire to: What we perceive is the material embodiment of what we feel. Consider two examples: In Through a Glass Darkly (1961), two men in a rowboat confront each other coldly with raw long-unspoken truths. They are the father and the husband of a young woman incurably schizophrenic. The sky is overcast, the air chill; the hollow knocking of the oars and gentle plashing of the water beat in counterpoint to their mutual lacerations. The scene is shot in frigid black and white, the figures shot singly in low angle against a grey sky, thus emphasizing the threat they pose to each other. In The Silence(1963), a severely ascetic woman preoccupied with her thoughts stands in the foreground of a richly over-furnished hotel suite, her sensuous sister in the deep background applying cream to her legs, a plaintive cello on the radio. “Whose music is that?” asks the sister. “Bach”, the woman replies. “Johan Sebastian Bach”, she says again slowly, staring out at us, the macabre distraction in her words and face conveying at once the grotesque deadness of her life.
Austerity, Anxiety, and Urgency
After the pervasiveness of mood, the second prominent characteristic is Bergman’s austerity. The screen of the films of this period, its palette black and white, is with few exceptions uncluttered, spare, as is the soundtrack, suggesting at once a reduction to the elemental. The tone is serious and intense, the faces expressive, the interiority of the characters unwittingly exposed. Throughout there is an atmosphere of urgency and anxiety, the sense that at this fundamental level of human reality, anything may happen. Above all, what is clear is that something of great importance is being decided here, that in this mysterious world, the stakes are very high for the characters and for us.
The Atmosphere of Our Most Revelatory Dreams
“All this is too exaggerated, too portentous, the focus too narrow; what is shown is too limited a sector of human life”, we may say when leaving the theater, trying to shake off the experience of what we have seen. But the experience is, in fact, familiar. For this concentration of focus, this seriousness, this atmosphere of urgency and anxiety are exactly the qualities that mark the world of our most revelatory dreams. Deprived in the dream world of the concrete grip that keeps us in contact with an ordered time, the time of our tasks and projects, nothing protects us from the ultimate temporal horizon of our lives: the time of our death. And from this perspective, the question is unavoidable: What is my life? What does it amount to? What is its affective significance? What is its worth? The recurrence of clocks and loudly ticking watches signals the urgency in Bergman’s world. What will be decided must be decided now. We accept Bergman’s relentless concentration of focus, his world—uncanny and often depraved, because we are intimately acquainted with it in our troubled sleep. And the ultimate question he pursues in his films, the judgment he seeks of human life itself, mirrors the questions about our own lives that come to us in our dreams.
The Dreamer as Child
And who is the dreamer, the observer of the dream? Solitary, fascinated, powerless before the assault of the(dream) world, vulnerable to the destiny he/she will endure there, a questioning but helpless regard, who does this come closest to resembling but the child in us? Does this not help us understand why Bergman opens Persona with a hungering child, who never appears in the film itself, reaching out to the screen? “The child in all his or her yearning and uncertainty, in his/her hunger for clarity and emotional sustenance”, we can imagine Bergman saying, “this is who my films are for”.
If the author is even partly right in saying that the emotionally hungering child in the adult is Bergman’s intended audience, it would seem that we should pay special attention to Bergman’s express treatment of children in his films. That is what the author will turn to now.
Bergman’s Children
In Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal (both released in 1957), children are symbols of vitality, renewal, and hope. Especially birth seems to hold for Bergman the promise of a better future. But after The Seventh Seal, it is not until Fanny and Alexander (1982), 25 years later, that we see a birth again in a Bergman film. In the films of the 1960s and in Fanny and Alexander, Bergman dwells more deeply on the child than he had in the 1950s films. Here there is no period of innocence or unspoiled vitality as in Wild Strawberries. Instead, Bergman is interested in showing us how children are inducted without appeal into the human condition.
There are five elements of Bergman’s understanding of this condition that the author wants to explore: Abandonment, separation from nature, internal contradiction, and paradox are the first four. The author will conclude his discussion with the fifth element: the possibility of redemption.
Abandonment of Children
Abandonment is the harshest experience in Bergman’s world. The child feels it first in rejection and neglect by parents, and this is a precursor of the abandonment he/she will feel with lovers and spouses, and finally, in face of the world itself, the cosmic abandonment that Bergman will symbolize as the silence of God. In Through a Glass Darkly, adolescent Minus has lost his mother first to madness then to death. As the film opens, it becomes clear that the father he reveres takes little interest in his life. Later, his adored sister, too, deserts him for a permanent escape into madness. Elisabet Vogler, the mute actress in Persona (1966), tears up the photograph of the son she despises. In The Silence and Fanny and Alexander, the prepubescent boys, Johan and Alexander, suffer humiliation and defeat by their adult rivals for their mother’s love. Each boy feels abandoned by his mother in favor of another male. As his mother seeks reprieve from anxiety and guilt in sexual frenzy with a stranger, Johan is left to wander the halls of the opulent and funereal hotel. Alexander must be dragged to his father’s deathbed because of the boy’s own imagined Oedipal treachery against him.
And childhood will not be too soon for the suffering of the ultimate abandonment, the sense of being thrown upon one’s own feeble resources in searching for meaning in one’s life, the sense of isolation in the world itself, where it is natural for the child to expect a response to his anguish. Perhaps it does not surprise us that adolescent Minus, guilty now of incest with his sister, would feel the need for an answering and absolving God. But 10-year-old Alexander, too, has felt this question about a larger order: He rejects “shit and piss God”for his absence.
Separation From Nature
The separation of human beings from nature is another aspect of our condition that perplexes Bergman in his films of the 1960s. Think of the night scene in Persona with a great stretch of boulders at the seaside, with an afflicted Alma crouching among them, trying vainly to absorb and imitate their coldness. Think of the city in The Silence—a city conspicuously without nature, except for a pitiful desiccated horse, ribs exposed, drawing an anachronistic wagon down a bustling narrow street. Remember Anna in the last scene of that film, having left her sister to die among strangers, trying to cleanse her face and breast in the industrial rain angling down through the open train window.
And Bergman uses children when he wants to express the defilement of adult nature. In the hull of a beached ship, its boards rotting in the black water, Karin suddenly pulls her brother Minus to her, her eyes transported and delirious, and joins him in the chaos of human sexuality. In The Virgin Spring (1960), a girl is raped and bludgeoned to death and later her father in savage revenge hurls a small boy to his death against a rock wall. Rocks, harsh and forbidding, are prominent again in an uncanny scene in Hour of the Wolf (1968), perhaps the most transgressive in Bergman’s oeuvre. Here a child of nine or 10 suddenly appears among the rocks as a sexual tempter, circling the artist, Johan Berg, then leaping on his back, like a preying animal. His small arms hanging around Berg’s neck, he bites the artist repeatedly, his quick mechanical movements accentuated by sharp screeches of a violin. Berg, tall and strong, struggles with the boy, overwhelms him, then bashes his head with a rock and drops the boy’s dead body into a calm eddy, where the boy’s long hair wafts gracefully in the overexposed sea.
Contradictions in the Soul
The child is introduced very early to another aspect of the interior landscape: the contradictions in the soul. These will often involve sexual and especially Oedipal passion. In Through a Glass Darkly, Minus’ devotion to his sister is in tension with his hatred for the sexual desire she provokes in him. In The Silence, Johan is encouraged in his physical closeness to his mother, invited to bathe her, to sleep unclothed beside her naked body. The strong attachment he feels toward her must compete with his resentment for her abandonment of him in favor of random lovers. The same conflict besets Alexander, where the condition is exacerbated by his simultaneous love and betrayal of his father.
Paradox
Closely related to these internal contradictions are the paradoxes of human life. In Through a Glass Darkly, Karin’s seduction of her brother is her decisive exit from reality—but it is simultaneously his most intense experience of the real. “Reality broke out!” he cries, explaining to his father, seeking his absolution. In The Silence, Anna embraces her son Johan with a desperate devouring energy and he must find a way to reconcile this passion with her abrupt rejection, her preference for a stranger’s sexual embrace. And Alexander, motivated by his powerlessness, is able miraculously to kill both his father and the bishop with only the power of a wish.
Redemption
Abandoned and isolated in an inhospitable world, alienated from nature by our inwardness, capable of depravity, beset by irresolvable contradictions, and thrown against an ultimate mystery, we must somehow endure. How? Is there anything in Bergman’s understanding of our condition that enables us to hope? The author thinks Bergman’s answer is symbolized in the child at the beginning of Persona, the child searching with his hand for clarity and love, the opening of the heart to mystery. Whatever salvation there is in human life inheres in certain of our attempts to break the chains of our isolation: our effort to open ourselves toward the very other who is the source of our imperilment. Only in our will to love can we hope to escape the crippling isolation of the dream-world. But this effort battles within each of us with an equally powerful impulse—the will to become the master of our isolation by embracing it, enlarging the domain of our privacy by sealing it against the other, whom we then seek to control from our impassable distance. To the extent that we allow this rage for self-enclosure to prevail, we live in Bergman’s hell. But to the extent that we open ourselves to the mystery of other men and women, we achieve the only salvation possible for human beings in Bergman’s world. We are not saved from the wrenching failure of human love, or from the betrayals of our own heart, but we are saved from living death.
There is a redemptive if ineffable sweetness in Minus’ protective embrace of his sister after their exodus into chaos. His devotion to her is unshaken. And at the end of the film, we celebrate his awakening hope that meaning may come of hopelessness. “Papa spoke to me!” he says in baffled joy in the closing moments of the film. There are openings in this forbidding terrain: openings toward another. In their compartment in the train in the final scene of The Silence, Johan studies the Timokan words his dying aunt had translated for him, the words for “face”and “hand” among them. Anna, his mother, dismisses this letter with an uncomprehending shrug. But Johan understands Ester’s gift: an instrument he can use to reach toward the world. He opens toward his dying aunt, even as a bitter nascent wisdom turns him from his mother. The experience of living in the bishop’s house has taught Alexander the value of imagination, magic, and art: an opening to mystery. The bishop wore a single mask that by his own admission “grew into [his] flesh”. But masks for the Ekdahls were parts, roles that one played only long enough to experience them. And the purpose of the play?—To engage with others in the invention of something new, to engage together that part of ourselves that surpasses, if only for a time, the strictures of the human condition, and to make something new together: a pilgrimage with those we love toward mystery.
Conclusions
Like Kafka in literature and Chirico in painting, Bergman in cinematic art can be seen as a chronicler of the dream world, a world marked so often by a sense of peril and an atmosphere of anxiety, and a world in which we experience the vulnerability and helplessness of the child. The fact that the child is in this sense so intimate to Bergman’s ambitions as a film-maker should prompt in us an especial alertness to his express treatment of children in his work. What is the world of the child in Bergman’s view? In particular, we would want to know whether there is a period of innocence, and whether childhood might be, at least for a time, a reprieve from the myriad threats to meaningfulness that haunt adult life in Bergman’s vision. What we learn upon analysis is that the life of the child as Bergman understands it is marked by the same key elements of abandonment, separation from nature, internal contradiction, and paradox that characterize adult life at its core. But we find, too, that redemption is possible for the child, just as it is for the adult: redemption in the form of openness to the mystery of the other. As with the adult so with the child, our loving relationship with another—though itself fraught with peril—is our only hope of escape from the suffocating isolation of the dream world.
References
Bjorkman, S., Manns, T., Sima, J., & Austin, P. B. (1993). Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capro Press.
Hubner, L. (2007). The films of Ingmar Bergman: Illusions of light and darkness. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kalin, J. (2003). The films of Ingmar Bergman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ketcham, C. (1986). The influence of existentialism on Ingmar Bergman. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press.
Koskinen, M. (2009). Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence: Pictures in the typewriter, writings on the screen. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Lauder, R. (1989). God, death, art and love: The philosophical vision of Ingmar Bergman. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press.
Mandelbaum, J. (2011). Masters of cinema: Ingmar Bergman. London: Phaidon Press.
Singer, I. (2009). Ingmar Bergman, cinematic philosopher. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Vlada, Ed. P. (1981). Film and dreams: An approach to Bergman. New York: Hippocrene Books.
Wood, R. (2012, September). Ingmar Bergman. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.