BERGMANORAMAby Jean-Luc Godard
Originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma, July 1958There are five or six films in the history of the cinema which one wants to review simply by saying, 'It is the most beautiful of films.' Because there can be no higher praise. Why say more, in effect, about Tabu, Voyage to Italy or Le Carrosse d'or? Like the starfish that opens and closes, they can reveal or conceal the secret of a world of which they are the sole repository and also the fascinating reflection. Truth is their truth. They secrete it deep within themselves, and yet with each shot the screen is rent to scatter it to the winds. To say of them, 'It is the most beautiful of films', is to say everything. Why? Because it just is. Only the cinema can permit this sort of childish reasoning without pretending shame. Why? Because it is the cinema. And because the cinema is sufficient unto itself. In singing the praises of Welles, Ophüls, Dreyer, Hawks, Cukor, even Vadim, all one need say is, 'It's cinema.' And if we conjure the names of the great artists of past centuries for purposes of comparison, we have no need to say more. On the other hand, one cannot imagine a critic praising the latest Faulkner novel by saying, 'It's literature'; or the latest Stravinsky or Paul Klee by saying 'It's music. It's painting.' And even less so of Shakespeare, Mozart or Raphael. It would never occur to a publisher, even Bernard Grasset, to launch a poet with the slogan, 'It's poetry.' Even Jean Vilar, when reviewing Le Cid, wouldn't dream of announcing it on the posters as 'It's theatre.' Whereas 'It's cinema' is more than a password, it's the war-cry of both film-publicist and film-lover. In short, to assert its own existence as its justification, and by the same token to draw its aesthetic from its ethic, is for the cinema by no means the least of its privileges. Five or six films, I said, +1, for Summer Interlude is the most beautiful of films.
The last great Romantic
The great creators are probably those whose names come to mind when it is impossible to explain in any other way the variety of sensations and emotions which assail you in certain exceptional circumstances, faced by a wonderful landscape or an unexpected event; Beethoven…when under the stars, on a clifftop battered by the sea; Balzac, when Paris, seen from Montmartre, seems to belong to you. But henceforth, if the past plays hide-and-seek with the present on the face of the one you love; if death, with the irony of Valéry, answers that you must try to live when, insulted and injured, you finally bring yourself to ask the supreme question; henceforth, then, if the words wonderful summer, end of the holidays, eternal mirage, spring to your lips, you have thereby pronounced the name of the man established once and for all, for those who had seen only a handful of his nineteen films, by a second retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française as the most original film-maker of the European cinema: Ingmar Bergman.
Original? The Seventh Seal or Sawdust and Tinsel, all right; Smiles of a Summer Night, at a pinch; but Summer With Monika, Journey Into Autumn, To Joy, all sub-Maupassant at best. As for technique, just take a look at it: compositions à la Germaine Dulac; special effects à la Man Ray; reflections in the water à la Kirsanoff; and more flashbacks than decency permits. No, cry our patent technicians, it's old-fashioned, it's not cinema, after all the cinema is a craft.
Well, it isn't. The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean team-work. One is always alone; on the set as before the blank page. And for Bergman, to be alone means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them. Nothing could be more classically romantic.
Of all contemporary directors, admittedly, he alone has not openly rejected those devices beloved of the avant-gardists of the thirties which can still be seen dragging wearily on in every festival of amateur or experimental films. But this is audacity rather than anything else on the part of the director of Thirst: for Bergman, well aware of what he is doing, uses this bric-a-brac in a different context. In the Bergman aesthetic, those shots of lakes, forests, grass, clouds, the deliberately unusual camera angles, the elaborately careful back-lighting, are no longer mere showing-off or technical trickery: on the contrary, they are integrated into the psychology of the characters at the precise instant when Bergman wants to evoke an equally precise feeling: for instance, Monika's pleasure is conveyed in her journey by boat through an awakening Stockholm, and her weariness by reversing the journey through a Stockholm settling down to sleep.
Eternity at the Service of the Instantaneous
At the precise instant. Bergman, in effect, is the film-maker of the instant. Each of his films is born of the hero's reflection on the present moment, and deepens that reflection by a sort of dislocation of time–rather in the manner of Proust but more powerfully, as though Proust were multiplied by both Joyce and Rousseau–to become a vast, limitless meditation upon the instantaneous. An Ingmar Bergman film is, if you like, one twenty-fourth of a second metamorphosed and expanded over an hour and a half. It is the world between two blinks of the eyelids, the sadness between two heart-beats, the gaiety between two handclaps.
Hence the prime importance of the flashback in these reveries of solitary Scandinavian wanderers. In Summer Interlude, a glance in her mirror is enough to send Maj-Britt Nilsson off like Orpheus and Lancelot in quest of paradise lost and time regained. Employed almost systematically by Bergman in most of his films, the flashback ceases to be what Orson Welles called one of those 'poor tricks' to become, if not the theme of the film, at least its sine qua non. In addition, this figure of style, even if employed as such, acquires the enormous advantage that it considerably enriches the scenario since it constitutes its internal rhythm and dramatic framework. One need only have seen any one of Bergman's films to realize that each flashback invariably begins or ends in the right place; in two right places, I should say, because the remarkable thing is that, as with Hitchcock at his best, this sequence change always corresponds to the hero's inner feeling, provoking in other words a renewal of the action – which is an attribute of the truly great. What one mistook for facility was simply a greater rigour. Ingmar Bergman, the intuitive artist decried by the 'craftsmen', here gives a lesson to the best of our scriptwriters. Not for the first time, as we shall see.
Always in advance
When Vadim emerged, we praised him for being up to date when most of his colleagues were one war behind. Similarly, when we saw Giulietta Masina's poetic grimacing, we praised Fellini, whose Baroque freshness had the sweet smell of renewal. But this renaissance of the modem Cinema had already been brought to its peak five years earlier by the son of a Swedish pastor. What were we dreaming of when Summer With Monika was first shown in Paris? Ingmar Bergman was already doing what we are still accusing French directors of not doing. Summer With Monika was already Et Dieu...créa la femme, but done to perfection. And that last shot of Nights of Cabiria, when Giulietta Masina stares fixedly into the camera: have we forgotten that this, too, appeared in the last reel but one of Summer With Monika? Have we forgotten that we had already experienced–but with a thousand times more force and poetry–that sudden conspiracy between actor and spectator which so aroused André Bazin's enthusiasm, when Harriet Andersson, laughing eyes clouded with confusion and riveted on the camera, calls on us to witness her disgust in choosing hell instead of heaven?
Wishing won't make just anyone a goldsmith. Nor will trumpeting from the rooftops mean that one is in advance of everyone else. A genuinely original auteur is one who never deposits his scripts with the homonymous society. Because that which is precise, Bergman proves, will be new, and that which is profound will be precise. But the profound novelty of Summer With Monika, Thirst or The Seventh Seal is first and foremost their wonderfully precise tone. A spade is a spade for Bergman, certainly, but so it is for many others, and is of little consequence. The important thing is that Bergman, blessed with a foolproof moral elegance, can adapt himself to any truth, even the most scabrous (cf. the last sketch in Waiting Women). That which is unpredictable is profound, and a new Bergman film frequently confounds the warmest partisans of the preceding one. One expects a comedy, and along comes a medieval mystery. Often their only common ground is the incredible scope of their situations, more than a match for Feydeau, just as the dialogue is more than a match for Montherlant in veracity and, supreme paradox, Giraudoux in delicacy. It goes without saying that this sovereign ease in building a script is accompanied, when the camera starts to turn, by an absolute mastery in the direction of actors. In this field Bergman is the peer of a Cukor or a Renoir. Admittedly most of his actors, many of whom also work with him in the theatre, are remarkably talented. I am thinking in particular of Maj-Britt Nilsson, whose stubborn chin and sulky contempt are not without a touch of Ingrid Bergman. But one has to have seen Birger Malmsten as the dreamy boy in Summer Interlude, and again, unrecognizably, as the respectable bourgeois in Thirst; one has to have seen Gunnar Björnstrand and Harriet Andersson in the first episode of Journey into Autumn, and again, with different eyes, different mannerisms, different body rhythms, in Smiles of a Summer Night, to realize the extent of Bergman's amazing ability to mould these cattle, as Hitchcock called them.
Bergman versus Visconti
Or scenario versus mise en scène. Is it really so simple? One can compare an Alex Joffé with a René Clément, for instance, because there it is simply a question of talent. But when talent comes so close to genius that the result is Summer Interlude or White Nights, is there any point in endlessly arguing as to which is ultimately greater than the other, the complete auteur or the pure metteur en scène? Maybe there is, because to do so is to analyse two conceptions of cinema, one of which may be more valid than the other.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of film-makers. Those who walk along the streets with their heads down, and those who walk with their heads up. In order to see what is going on around them, the former are obliged to raise their heads suddenly and often, turning to the left and then the right, embracing the field of vision in a series of glances. They see. The latter see nothing, they look, fixing their attention on the precise point which interests them. When the former are shooting a film, their framing is roomy and fluid (Rossellini), whereas with the latter it is narrowed down to the last millimetre (Hitchcock). With the former (Welles), one finds a script construction which may be loose but is remarkably open to the temptations of chance; with the latter (Lang), camera movements not only of incredible precision in the set but possessing their own abstract value as movements in space. Bergman, on the whole, belongs to the first group, to the cinema of freedom; Visconti to the second, the cinema of rigour.
Personally I prefer Summer With Monika to Senso, and the politique des auteurs to the politique des metteurs en scène. Should anyone still doubt that Bergman, more than any other European film-maker, Renoir excepted, is its most typical representative, Prison offers, if not proof, at least a very clear symbol. It tells, as you know, of a director who is offered a story about the Devil by his mathematics professor. Yet it is not he, but the writer he has commissioned to write a script who suffers all the diabolical misfortunes.
As a man of the theatre, Bergman is willing to direct plays by other people. But as a man of the cinema, he intends to remain sole master on board. Unlike Bresson or Visconti, who transfigure a starting-point into something entirely personal, Bergman creates his adventures and characters out of nothing. No one would deny that The Seventh Seal is less skilfully directed than White Nights, its compositions less precise, its angles less rigorous; but–and herein lies the essential difference–for a man so enormously talented as Visconti, making a very good film is ultimately a matter of very good taste. He is sure of making no mistakes, and to a certain extent it is easy. It is easy to choose the prettiest curtains, the most perfect furniture, to make the only possible camera movements, if one knows one is gifted that way. For an artist, to know oneself too well is to yield a little to facility.
What is difficult, on the other hand, is to advance into unknown lands, to be aware of the danger, to take risks, to be afraid. There is a sublime moment in White Nights when the snow falls in huge flakes around Maria Schell and Marcello Mastroianni in their boat. But this sublimity is nothing compared to the old musician in To Joy who lies on the grass, watching Stig Olin looking amorously at Maj-Britt Nilsson in her chaise-longue, and thinking, 'How can one describe a scene of such great beauty!' I admire White Nights, but I love Summer Interlude.
© Cahiers du cinéma
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quinta-feira, 26 de novembro de 2009