The Saga of Gösta Berling

Bleak, wintery and expressive, Mauritz Stiller's The Saga of Gösta Berling is a three-hour silent epic bursting at the seams with sturm und drang hysteria. The story of the disgraced former priest Gösta Berling (Lars Hanson), adapted from Selma Lagerlöf's novel, is a succession of tragedies, one after another, as the defrocked Gösta seems to bring bad luck to anyone who associates with him. The film is as much the story of the woman around him as it is of Gösta himself, since the former priest is often the least interesting figure in his own story.

Indeed, the women are the dominant figures here, from the scheming Mãrtha Dohna (Ellen Hartman-Cederström) — who sets Gösta up to marry her stepdaughter Ebba (Mona Mårtenson) merely because Ebba will be disinherited if she marries a commoner — to Margaretha (Gerda Lundequist), the domineering Major's wife who runs her castle with an iron hand and a fierce manner. Then there's Elisabeth (Greta Garbo), who marries Mãrtha's son Henrik (Torsten Hammarén), an overly formal stiff who's constantly gaping foolishly like a fish out of water. This was the 19-year-old Garbo's first major part: Stiller discovered her, renamed her, and cast her in the role that would first send her to fame. She's already electric here, projecting a raw quality that contrasts nicely against the rounded softness of her face — no trace here of the hard edges and stern expressions that she would be famous for later in her career. Garbo's Elisabeth starts out as a minor figure in the film, one woman among several whose lives are touched, generally for the worse, by Gösta's presence, but later in the film she returns and becomes increasingly prominent in the final hour.

Garbo is introduced in anything but a glamorous way, snacking and casually chatting with her new husband as they return from their wedding in Italy; she's eating the last of the food from her home country, and at one point she puts her fist over her mouth to cover a very un-lady-like belch. This little touch is characteristic of this film, which has a very uncouth, raw sensibility. The most appealing aspect of Gösta Berling is its rude, lewd approach to the stuffy period drama. The characters are all trussed-up and confined by billowing, extravagant clothes, the men choked up to their chins with high collars, the women hiding beneath massive floppy hats and layers of coats and dresses, thick furs shielding them against the winter chill. The Major's wife, trying to convince Gösta not to commit suicide, goes to great effort to untie the thick ropes wound around her torso, holding her heavy winter coat in place, and as she tells him the story of her love affair and her unhappy marriage, her coat and scarves hang down all around her, thick piles of clothes that seem to physically weigh her down. It's as though the fashion of the period and the layers amassed against the cold are trapping the characters, and they rebel against this stuffiness with outbursts of visceral bad behavior, drunken revelry and outrageousness, like Gösta's elaborate opening prank with a shaggy devil, or the food fight that interrupts a society banquet.


The devil at the beginning of the film, a dancing trickster who wouldn't be at all out of place in a contemporaneous German Expressionist film, is a harbinger of things to come, bursting into being out of a puff of smoke and a few flames that prefigure the fiery catastrophe of the climax. The film becomes really unhinged in its final hour, breaking free of the sometimes plodding chamber melodrama of the earlier sections in favor of a desolate, searing extended climax set almost entirely in the chilly wastelands around Margaretha's home. Stiller builds an absolutely stunning atmosphere throughout these sequences, as the castle is set on fire, smoke drifting everywhere in thick white clouds, the flames licking over everything. It's hellish and harrowing, the fire lighting up the night, igniting a series of melodramatic confrontations that clear the way for Gösta's last act redemption — everything has to be razed to the ground in order to rebuild, the sins of the past wiped clean.

The hellish fire of this climax is juxtaposed against the icy wastes of the surrounding area, the mountains of snow, the frozen lake across which Gösta and Elisabeth race in an eerie late-night ride, pursued by feral wolves, Stiller mostly focusing on Elisabeth's terrified face glowing palely in the darkness. Stiller makes excellent use of the icy territory, making the cold and the ice palpable. The characters are always bundled up, smothered in furs and blankets, and their breath makes icy puffs of condensation in the air in front of their mouths. Stiller makes the landscape bleak and foreboding, a snowy tundra with the wind whipping, knife-sharp, across the lake, the dark sky hanging low, the moon casting only a diffuse glow over the grim, grainy darkness. The scene where Gösta's sled is chased by the wolves is especially compelling, with Gösta determinedly whipping his horse to run ever faster, while Stiller periodically cuts to minimalist long shots, panning with the sled as the dark blots of the wolves give chase.

The film isn't always so bracing, and at three hours its pacing is sometimes slack, with one melodramatic twist after another. The performances, too, are mostly broad and stagey, especially Hanson's Gösta, but Stiller does make good use of the frequent poignant closeups of the film's many suffering, tormented women. In one of these shots, Elisabeth's gaze drifts rightward, flicking briefly up to look directly into the camera, as though seeking solace there, then turning back to her husband, who's upbraiding her for her interference in the relationship between Gösta and Ebba. This is a story of suffering and redemption, in which the moral hypocrisy of polite society creates a cycle of punishment and disgrace that's finally only broken with a happy ending that at last clears away the ice and snow, and the fire too, in favor of the blossoms of spring.

The Parson's Widow

Comedy is one of the last things one would expect from Carl Theodor Dreyer, but his second feature, The Parson's Widow, is in fact a gentle rural comedy. Of course, it's a comedy as directed by Dreyer, which means that it's a curiously slow and lethargic comedy, a moody and patiently paced tale of sexual frustration, poverty and religion. That is to say, it's not exactly a laugh-a-minute comedy, though its somber pace and austere visual style only makes its occasional bursts of goofy humor all the more bracing and startling.

The film's story is extremely old-fashioned, and must have been even when it was made in 1920. It's rooted in rural values and the power of tradition. The poor young man Söfren (Einar Röd) has traveled to a small village to try out for the position of village parson. He wants the post because then he'll be able to marry his sweetheart Mari (Greta Almroth), but in a cruelly ironic twist, he gets the job only to find out that by local tradition he'll have to marry the elderly widow (Hildur Carlberg) of the previous parson. He marries the old woman, partially tricked into it by drunkeness and, perhaps, an enchanted piece of herring, and passes Mari off as his sister, biding his time for the old woman to die so that he'll be able to marry his lover instead.

Dreyer exploits the scenario for some broad comic set pieces, the tone of which jars against the film's general melancholy. Söfren's attempts to evade the widow and get some time alone with his real beloved are comically satisfying, especially when he continually thinks he's flirting with his lover when actually he's accidentally making loving gestures at the widow's equally ancient servant. Also very funny is the early sequence in which Söfren observes two stuffy rivals who are trying out for the parson's job; he sabotages one of them by sticking a feather on his head so that his preaching inspires only laughter from the parishioners. The strangest moment, though, is the scene where Söfren dresses up as the devil, presumably to scare his elderly bride, wearing a sheet painted with a frightening face, with horns and big flopping ears.


Despite the many comic moments, the overall tone of the film is grim and melancholy. Dreyer portrays the widow mostly as a foreboding, exaggeratedly dour presence, her face heavily lined, her mouth permanently twisted into a scowl, captured in numerous closeups of her looking disapprovingly at her unhappy husband. Towards the end of the film, though, the treatment of the widow abruptly shifts to a much more sentimental depiction, pretty much without warning: at one moment Dreyer portrays her as a witch and a harridan, and the next he's suddenly treating her much more warmly, fleshing out the tragic details of her past and making her a much more sympathetic character. The shift to sentimental romanticism is clumsily handled, perhaps, but it makes the film's ending movingly poetic, unexpectedly exploring the pathos of the widow's situation rather than just using her attachment to Söfren as a source of comic relief.

At its best, The Parson's Widow is a tribute to rural tradition, capturing the feel of this small and tight-knit community where old ways are still dominant and life paths are decided by customs passed down through the generations. Dreyer shot on location in the countryside, and this lends the film a grounded, clear-eyed realism, with ascetically beautiful natural landscapes, billowing waterfalls, fields of waving grassy stalks. The locals dance and celebrate, and Dreyer shows real affection for these rural rituals, rooted as they are in ancient traditions and made necessary by poverty and limited means. This is an interesting early film from the future master, a comedy that neatly balances its humor with the darker emotions at its core.

Vampyr

Vampyr was Carl Theodor Dreyer's first sound film, a hypnotic and dreamlike horror movie, a chilling masterpiece whose hazy, fuzzy beauty has only been enhanced by decades of wear and tear, by the degraded, scratchy quality of the surviving prints. A film that started out vague and blurry — much of it was shot with a filter in front of the camera lens to give it a distant, gauzy look — has only become more faded, more eerily unclear, over the years, its beauty and strangeness enhanced rather than hurt by its imperfections. It's a surreal and haunting experience, a rather indirect horror movie in which its atmosphere of fear arises from what's not seen rather than what's seen.

The handsome but abstracted everyman hero, Allan Grey (Julien West), is pursuing evidence of the supernatural for vaguely defined reasons, and he finds what he's been seeking in a sparsely populated small town. Grey's wanderings through the town have a feeling of surreal disconnection as he seems to be passing from the material world into a place of shadows and illusions, a world where the concrete fades into the immaterial. A farmer with a scythe rings a bell, an ominous tolling that seems to forebode grave events in the offing. Shadows are disconnected from any physical bodies, passing along walls without any sign of who might be casting the shadow. A reflection of a child runs, upside-down, along the surface of a pond, with no corresponding figure upon the shore who could be creating this reflection. A man's shadow shovels in reverse, the dirt seeming to leap from a pile on the ground to his shovel. Other shadows dance upon the walls to a sprightly tune, echoes or memories of previous eras, ghosts haunting a place where they'd once danced and played.

This imagery is creepy and somberly beautiful, and Grey is getting sucked into this strange dreamworld along with the audience. Dreyer's camera drifts and tracks behind the protagonist, following him on his wanderings, suggesting that the audience is his unseen companion on his quest. Indeed, Grey himself is mostly an observer, stumbling into the middle of a haunting horror tale that he watches play out around him like an audience member wandering in a daze through the middle of a supernatural play. Grey follows the shadows to a country estate where an old man (Maurice Schutz) and his daughters (Rena Mandel and Sybille Schmitz) are plagued by the vampire's curse. The old man is killed by a shadow soon after Grey's arrival, and then one of the daughters is attacked as well, infected with the vampire's bloodlust, grinning madly at her sister with a thirst for blood.


While all this is going on, Grey observes with mild detachment, and after each incident he returns to reading a book about vampires given to him by the old man, reading passages that both explain the action and foreshadow future developments. Interestingly, although this was a sound movie, it still feels like a silent film most of the time, and the extensive use of text contributes to that impression. There are poetic intertitles that punctuate the film early on, describing Grey's journey and mental state, eliminating the need for any expository dialogue whatsoever. As a result, Dreyer can reduce the spoken dialogue to a bare minimum, allowing most scenes to play out wordlessly, accompanied only by the expressive orchestral score. At times, even the score drops out or is reduced to a minimal murmur, exposing the hollowed-out silence of this village that seems to be populated almost entirely by shadows and ghosts. When there is sound, it's often strange and disconnected, due to the movie's post-dubbed soundtrack: people wander through the fog, their calls for their missing loved ones muted and echoey, and occasionally the silence is pierced by the clatter of horse's hooves or the somber chiming of church bells.

Dreyer also uses the vampire book similarly to silent movie title cards, interspersing excerpts from the book throughout the scenes at the mansion. The way in which Grey keeps returning to the book, as though he's more drawn to its text than to the very strange happenings all around him, contributes to the film's eerily affectless tone. Even the protagonist seems disconnected from what's going on, easily distracted by this text, immersed in reading rather than truly interacting with the sinister goings-on. Soon after, Grey becomes disembodied, his self splitting apart as his non-corporeal form has an out-of-body experience, wandering into the lair of the vampire's creepy associates, and the film's dreamlike atmosphere is especially pronounced here. Dreyer again toys with the audience's point-of-view, this time by shooting from the perspective of a body laying in a coffin, staring up at the sky and the looming buildings of the town as this coffin is carried away.

Vampyr is an unforgettably haunting experience, unsettling more for its shadowy, foggy atmosphere than for anything that happens in its minimalist narrative. Dreyer makes the vampire legend an abstracted nightmare, a journey into a strange, unstable world of shades and spirits that might just be the mind itself.

The Freethinker

By the time Peter Watkins made his massive, four-and-a-half hour 1994 video project The Freethinker, he was thoroughly outside of most conventional media structures. Watkins originally planned to make The Freethinker in 1979, as a companion piece to his 1974 masterwork Edvard Munch, but after working on the project for over two years, his funding was cancelled and filming never commenced. As a result, the film was only made many years later, as a collaborative experiment conducted with the assistance of a video production class made up of Swedish high schoolers. The students, all inexperienced with film and video before the class began, handled nearly every aspect of the production: set design, costumes, acting, camerawork, lighting, even at times writing and directing. This behind-the-scenes history informs the resulting film in very deep ways, feeding into the themes about mass media, art and social reform that Watkins' script explores.

The film is nominally a biography of the Swedish playwright and author August Strindberg (Anders Mattsson), who Watkins sees as a non-conformist thinker whose radical ideas about history, religion and class caused his work to be suppressed and critiqued by the conservative institutions of his time. Watkins explicitly compares this treatment with the marginalization of his own work. It's very apparent that this examination of Strindberg's life and the conditions of late 1800s Stockholm is meant to parallel Watkins' own life and art, and what he sees as the suppression of his ideas by a mass media that has little patience for this kind of intellectual engagement.

The film is thus about its own conditions of production as much as it is about Strindberg's life and work. This is obviously a work made on a shoestring budget, in amateurish conditions. It was shot on video rather than film, and the imagery is often rough as a result, the colors muted, a long way from the grainy beauty of Edvard Munch. The sets are sparse and minimal, often looking like a bare theater stage with a few props scattered around the empty space. The dramatic scenes, both those taken from Strindberg's life and those enacted from his plays, are stagey and claustrophobic, with the camera hovering close to the actors, utilizing simple compositions that place the emphasis on the raw, heartfelt performances. This parsimonious style belies the structural and ideological complexity of the film, which is, typically for Watkins, a clear-eyed and intelligent examination of the intersections between art, life and society. As in Edvard Munch, Watkins applies a non-chronological, associative editing style that juxtaposes scenes from Strindberg's life with excerpts from his plays as well as contextual material involving contemporary political and social affairs in the world around him.


At several points, Watkins diverts from Strindberg's story to focus on the testimonies of Swedish working class people. A man working on a construction site complains that there's housing only for the rich, while the women working beside him note that they don't earn as much as the men even though they do the same work. In another scene, a family waits for a ship that will take them away from the poverty and lack of opportunities they find in Sweden, to the United States, where they hope to do better. One young woman turns towards the camera, sobbing, her face red, already regretting the necessity of leaving behind her homeland and some of her family and friends.

Such interludes help to ground Strindberg's story within the larger societal context of poverty, inequality, and unfairness, conditions that much of his work polemically rails against. Watkins adopts, as he often does, a pseudo-documentary style that speculates on what it might have been like if documentary camera crews had been on hand to question Strindberg about his ideas, to document his life and his relationships, to interview young radicals and grizzled workers in the streets about their complaints and their hopes.

At one point, Strindberg returns from exile to Sweden, facing criminal charges of blasphemy, and finds the streets full of exuberant young people celebrating his return and the boldness of his anti-orthodox ideas about religion and government. Watkins stages the scene so that it looks like a modern protest, like any number of post-1960s student movements that have taken to the streets in a celebratory mood to declare resistance. The only difference is the way the protestors are dressed. To underscore the point, Watkins inserts a title that reads, "On the same day that we filmed these scenes in 1993, the Danish police in Copenhagen opened fire on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators." The film is continually drawing such connections between past and present, suggesting that the upheavals and social changes that have taken place in the intervening years have been largely cosmetic, doing little to truly disrupt an underlying dynamic of power and control that remains solidly in place.


In one of the most remarkable sequences, a group of radical Swedish writers discuss the problems of their time and try to come up with a plan to address gender and income inequalities, both in their writing, and as a broad social reform program. They debate methods and priorities, trying to decide how best to excite public interest in child labor, women's suffrage and the plight of the poor. During this scene, Watkins inserts shots that pull back from the table around which the young writers are gathered to show the cameras, microphones and film crew clustered around them in the room, revealing the cinematic context of this discussion. Soon Watkins goes even further by shattering the film's reality entirely, placing himself onscreen in a discussion with the actors playing the Swedish writers. The actors remain in costume, but now instead of debating conditions in late 1800s Stockholm, they're addressing the modern world, the problems of the mass media, the apathy and lack of belief in progress that prevents modern reformers from having a real voice with which to reach people.

This transition neatly displays the parallels and differences between the two times, suggesting that today's problems are extensions of those of the past, part of the same struggle for equality and justice that has gone on in so many forms over the decade without the need for the struggle ever going away. The issues of the present — class inequality and control over the media — are the same ones that the radicals of Strindberg's time were interested in. In Strindberg's time, the newspapers were battlegrounds for ideas about social reform, with certain papers being sponsored by the rich and the monarchy to attack the ideas of those papers on the left. Even history itself was a site of struggle, as Strindberg's The Swedish People, which for the first time focused on the lives of common people in different eras, represented a challenge to traditional histories which focused on successions of monarchies and governments, wars and treaties, big events and big men. Predictably, Strindberg's history received almost unanimous bad reviews, because the newspapers were largely controlled by precisely the entrenched conservative interests who were threatened by a book that refocused the eye of history so radically and dramatically.


Much of the second half of the film is concerned with the contradictions of Strindberg's life and personality, particularly his late-in-life repudiation of his earlier support for feminism, and his increasingly bitter and contemptuous feelings for his first wife, Siri (Lena Settervall). One of the central questions of The Freethinker is the relationship between life and art, including the paradox that Strindberg often expressed ideas of freedom and equality in his writing that he seldom put into practice in his angry, troubled personal life. Watkins' associative editing style creates linkages between childhood incidents — particularly the cruel punishments of Strindberg's stern, overbearing father — scenes from Strindberg's dramas, and incidents from his long relationship with Siri, with whom he stayed for 15 years. During the second half of the film, Watkins also explores Strindberg's private life through confrontational staged interviews with the playwright, in which a modern interviewer, a member of the crew, hounds Strindberg about his treatment of his wife and children, provoking the writer while Strindberg repeatedly protests that there's more to it, that no one understands.

Indeed, this is a project about understanding, but Watkins grasps that it is impossible to fully comprehend a subject so remote from our own time. The film's analysis of Strindberg can only be built on the writings he and others around him left behind, the incomplete records of their thoughts and feelings and the events that shaped them. Watkins stages a group discussion of Strindberg and Siri in which an audience of men and women of all ages talk about the relationship between the playwright and his wife, grappling with the questions about feminism, creativity, gender and psychology brought up by this story. As one older man says, as a postscript to his own personal take on Strindberg, "there must be many views of Strindberg," many ways of understanding him and his work, many perspectives on the ideas he explored and the kind of man he was during his life.

This is the essence of Watkins' multifaceted approach to his subject, dealing with the complexities of Strindberg's persona and art, and the many possible ways of thinking about his life. The filmed discussion sessions represent an attempt to contextualize Strindberg in a modern setting, and to suggest the kind of active engagement that Watkins desires for his films: the in-film discussion is a model for the kinds of discussions that the film as a whole might prompt in its viewers, so that the discourse and analysis started by the film might continue afterwards.


That spirit of discussion goes hand in hand with the intensely collaborative nature of the film. Watkins worked closely with the students from his class, and credits a few of them with writing and directing certain sequences of the film. The production process recalls the utopian collaborative spirit of 1960s radicalism, the student protests and communes, the attempts at creating art communally rather than individually. Those projects, like Godard's Dziga-Vertov Group, rarely lived up to the promise of true cooperation and communal creation that they espoused. But Watkins' work here is no mere leftist dream, he's actually putting into practice these ideals of collaboration, and the result is remarkable. The film employs a mix of amateur and professional actors, though most of the leads, notably Mattsson and Settervall, were not experienced actors; Mattsson was ordained as a priest after the film was finished. The performances are almost uniformly exceptional, especially since Watkins asks the actors to do more than simply play a role, but also to be present as themselves, commenting on the roles they're playing and the historical figures they represent. Mattsson and Settervall in particular often face the camera in intimate closeups, speaking about Strindberg and Siri in the third person, which makes it clear than in these sequences they are not "in character."

The Freethinker is continually working on multiple levels in this fashion, blending biography, literary criticism, sociopolitical commentary and media analysis. It's an amazing film that reflects Watkins' ideas about media hegemony and its connections to class imbalance, but most importantly its polemics are integrated into a larger whole that also wrestles with the nature of art and the relationship between the individual and his or her historical and social context. Even its cooperative production seeps into the film, providing an example of an alternative media model that skirts around the corporate mass media that currently dominates the distribution of information.

Let the Right One In

Let the Right One In is an eerie, moody vampire film, the primary innovation of which is to make vampirism a metaphor for the isolation and bottled-up rage of a friendless child's sad existence. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a tormented young boy who is continually bullied at school, who's tortured and insulted and beaten by kids who call him "piggy" and threaten him. The first words of the film, said by an offscreen Oskar, his reflection hazy and ghostly in his bedroom window, are "squeal like a pig," his nighttime repetition of his bullies' daytime taunts. Oskar goes home at night and imagines getting back at the bullies who hurt him, as he fondles a knife, lying in bed in his underwear. He spends many nights outside, too, in his apartment building's courtyard, stabbing a tree while repeating variations on "squeal like a pig" over and over again, fantasizing about violent revenge. Oskar is mostly ignored at home by a divorced mom who seems too wrapped up in her own problems to care what her son is doing in his room or when he walks out alone into the cold night, and when he does see his dad, it seems like a vacation, a time for fun and games rather than anything serious. In short, Oskar seems primed to explode, a child who's mostly left to simmer in isolation, developing his violent impulses, ignored by everyone who should care — true to form, his teachers, who never took note of his plight, only become interested when he finally strikes back against one of his tormenters. It's easy to imagine Oskar as one of those lost souls who eventually snaps and enacts his revenge in some public and bloody way.

Instead, he becomes fascinated with Eli (Lina Leandersson), a girl who moves in next door to Oskar with her elderly guardian Håkan (Per Ragnar). Eli becomes Oskar's friend and confidant, his only companion during his formerly lonely nights. She tells him that the first words she heard him say were "squeal like a pig," which was also the audience's introduction to Oskar. Eli understands Oskar's feelings, because like him she's an outcast, a freak, and like him she's seized by violent impulses, although in her case she doesn't have much of a choice. She's a vampire, traveling around with her companion Håkan, who poses as her father but has a much more ambiguous relationship to her. Håkan kills for Eli, stalking strangers and funneling their blood into a bucket for the vampire girl. He seems to have been at this for a while, based on his kit of well-used equipment and his routine approach to these expeditions, but in fact he's a fairly inept killer, as though with age he's lost his skill.

The film's first murder shows Håkan randomly accosting a passerby in a park, and what's shocking about it is how public it seems, not at all remote from people, with the lights of passing cars on an obviously major road fairly nearby. Director Tomas Alfredson emphasizes the sense of routine in this murder, the mundane details, the sense of a man going through familiar routines, enacting a set of actions and motions that he's gone through countless times before. He strings up his victim from a tree, arranges a bucket and funnel beneath the man's head, and cuts his throat to unleash a stream of blood, making a plastic pinging noise as it drops into the bucket. Alfredson stages this sequence mostly in a static medium shot, cleverly teasing the audience about the amount of gore they're about to see, then finally withholding the image of the neck-slicing altogether, instead suggesting the horror of this moment through the sound of the blood loudly rushing into the bucket. The murder doesn't go smoothly, however, as a dog breaks away from its nearby owners to watch the murder, standing alertly a few feet from Håkan, its fur white like the snow, visually evoking unstained purity in contrast to the blood rushing from the dead man into a red-stained bucket.


Alfredson stages several similarly striking horror set pieces, but Håkan's second — and even more badly botched — attempt at gathering blood for Eli is perhaps the most powerful. The sequence is broken up by flashes of dark humor and surprising tension, and capped with an absolutely harrowing moment when Håkan realizes he's about to be caught. What's interesting about the film is that Alfredson consistently places the audience's sympathies with the killers and the vampire: the tension builds in this scene over whether Håkan is going to get caught or not, as he's cornered with several people getting closer to discovering him. This tendency is even more pronounced when it comes to Oskar and Eli. The multiple scenes of Oskar being bullied and tormented by kids at school make him a victim in the audience's eyes, and we root for him to strike back, to get his revenge, even as we know that he's nursing a violent streak that could make the moment when he finally snaps truly horrible.

The development of a friendship between Oskar and Eli is tender and moving: Oskar is a boy without friends, and he finds a connection with Eli such as he's never had with anyone before. He glides through his own home without getting much attention from his mom — there's a single scene that suggests some warmth between mother and child, but it's the exception — and no one speaks to him at school except to mock him and threaten him with beatings. His almost immediate comfort with Eli, built on their sarcastic banter during their first meeting, and intensified by the private intimacy of tapping out Morse code signals to each other on their adjoining bedroom walls, makes this a truly special relationship for the lonely Oskar. In a way, Eli is like his sinister imaginary friend, a fantasy girlfriend who can magically appear outside his window, who's strong and fearless, who can help him get the revenge he wants, but more than that who will keep him company, who isn't put off by his strangeness or isolation.

In fact, though this burgeoning relationship is touching, there is a continual sinister undercurrent to it all, a suspicion that Eli might see a certain dark potential in Oskar. After all, the first words she heard him say, the words that might have drawn her to him, were "squeal like a pig," as he stabbed a tree, practicing his revenge like a miniature Travis Bickle. The question left lingering at the end of the film is what's next for these characters: is Oskar becoming the next Håkan, a human guardian and killer for his beloved vampire friend? Is this tender relationship simply Eli's form of seduction? And why is it so satisfying to see the bullies revenged at the film's startling climax? The film has some surprising similarities to Gus Van Sant's Elephant in its poetic observation of alienation at school and at home, and it similarly raises questions about root causes and hidden evils. A barely developed subtext about the death penalty drifts through the film, as several characters discuss whether it is ethical to punish criminals with death, and Alfredson seems to be questioning, in subtle ways, the willingness of movie audiences to go along with gory revenge scenarios and even to root for the killer. Let the Right One In complicates that audience identification by making most of the vampire's victims sympathetic, and by lingering particularly with the aftereffects of violence on one man, who's devastated and ultimately destroyed by his grief. The film doesn't flinch away from that very human grief, even as it focuses on the confused feelings of childhood and the alienation that might drive a victimized, bullied kid to lash out violently and angrily at the world around him, dreaming of the power of the vampire, the power to kill and get revenge.

You, the Living

You, the Living is Roy Andersson's follow-up to his remarkable 2000 film Songs From the Second Floor. Like its predecessor, You, the Living is a loose collection of absurdist vignettes set in a dull, gray city full of odd, depressive, quirky people. The film has no central narrative, it's simply a set of scenes, with characters whose lives occasionally overlap but still never really add up to a larger story. Instead, the stories are linked thematically, by Andersson's concern for the condition of people's lives in the modern era. His characters are beaten down, often terminally unhappy, trapped in dull routines and useless jobs. Andersson's vision is unsettling — dreary, absurd, shot through with dark, satirical humor — and yet not entirely bleak nor entirely hopeless. What this film is about, more than anything, is the possibility of finding some happiness in this life, some joy amidst all the ugliness, some pleasure to go with the pain. The film's central idea is the importance of living for the present, of enjoying oneself when death lingers unseen just around the bend, ready to strike at any moment. Andersson's characters are acutely aware of death and misery, and perhaps this primes them to also recognize the little moments of pleasure they are able to find at intervals.

Andersson has retained the signature style of Songs From the Second Floor: the camera is almost always static and maintains a respectful distance from the characters, who are staged in self-conscious medium-shot tableaux. These people sporadically address the camera, conversationally relating their dreams to an unseen audience. Sometimes these dreams are Kafkaesque nightmares, as when a truck driver dreams that he was tried and sent to the electric chair after breaking some antique dishes during a failed magic trick. Other dreams are more ecstatic and joyful, even if they're tinged with the melancholy knowledge that they're just dreams. Anna (Jessika Lundberg) is obsessed with local rock band guitarist Micke (Eric Bäckman), and one night she dreams that they get married and live in a moving house. She's still in her wedding dress, puttering around, while he plays guitar and smiles at her, and outside throngs of eager admirers gather to wish the happy couple their best. It's a dream, not only of romantic fulfillment, but of a world in which everyone is cheerful and kind and goes out of their way to be nice to other people. It's not the world Anna lives in, but the one she wishes she lives in.

In fact, the real world of the film is much colder, and is filled with puzzling incidents of degradation and anger. An Arab barber, fed up with his customer's subtle racism, shaves a stripe across the top of the man's frizzy red hair and then storms out of the shop. A teacher breaks down in tears in front of her class because her husband called her a "hag" during a fight. Andersson then cuts away to a rug shop, where a salesman is upset because he got mad and called his wife a hag, though he tries to poll his customers about whether it was worse that he called her that, or that she called him an "old fart." A woman named Mia (Elisabeth Helander) laments her loneliness and misery, completely ignoring the proffered comfort of her boyfriend, even as she ends every fight with an ultimatum and then a promise that she'll see him soon. Andersson's characters often don't recognize the opportunities for pleasure and happiness in their lives: Mia has a devoted boyfriend, while the bickering husband and wife obviously love one another, or else their words wouldn't have had such power to wound. In another scene, a man lies in bed naked, mechanically recounting the way his pension fund was drained of money by a poor banking decision, while on top of him his wife makes love to him, ignoring his words even as he ignores her. She seems to be enjoying herself, grinding away at him, moaning and exclaiming how good she feels, but the man is too wrapped up in monetary problems to join in, to have some fun himself.


Often, there is a subtle socio-political underpinning to Andersson's tableaux. He's presenting a world in which people are routinely dehumanized, in which their opportunities for pleasure and genuine human connection are scarce. Their office jobs are unsatisfying — one man, seemingly useless at his job, rather pathetically asks if any of his coworkers called for him, even though he knows they didn't — and their lives are draining and boring. Meanwhile, a wealthy businessman gloats over a successful deal over lunch, loudly talking into a phone about buying a boat, while behind him a pickpocket steals his wallet, immediately paying for his own meal with the other man's money, then going out and buying a suit. The pickpocket does all this with a noncommittal expression on his face, but he can't hide a small note of satisfaction when he tells the tailors that a certain material is too prickly on his skin; he's enjoying playing at upper class for a change. He's thus one of Andersson's characters who actually finds a bit of happiness in this life.

Among the film's happiest characters are undoubtedly its musicians, who find satisfaction in their creative pursuits. The film is driven by the bouncy, bopping pulse of its music, a makeshift fusion of Dixieland jazz, New Orleans funeral music and the martial rhythms of a marching band. These musicians practice, oblivious to the discontent of those who have to hear them, who shout and bang on the ceiling for them to stop. But nothing stops them, and Andersson scores the film to the lugubrious bloop-bloop-bloop of the tuba and the leaden thump of the bass dream. He loves these ungainly instruments, which dwarf the men who play them. They are awkward instruments, silly even, but Andersson presents these men playing in isolated scenes as soloists — just tuba or just bass drum, each of them blasting away on their limited instruments. The music these men create is loose and spontaneous, as is the torchy song Mia invents about her own problems early on in the film, singing it on a park bench. The spontaneity of this music is contrasted against the ritualized music of funerals, the martial rigor of military parades, and the formal singalong that a group of wealthy partygoers engage in, enacting a set of prearranged moves to accompany the song. This song is an empty charade of drunken revelry, sung by people who lack the passion and deep emotional wellsprings that run through the film's other characters. Mia drinks because it's the only way she's able to cope with her depression; her partying is real life, not a ritual imitation of it.

You, the Living is ultimately a film about going on with life in an era when so much seems futile and impossible to fix. At one point, a woman in church rattles off a litany of the horrible evils requiring forgiveness from the Lord: lying governments, distracting media outlets, corporations growing wealthy by screwing over others, the greedy, the corrupt, the warmongers. This is explicitly a film about living in the post-9/11 era, the Iraq War era, surrounded by hatred of all kinds, by corruption and a global economy that makes a few rich at the expense of everyone else. Andersson, needless to say, is interested in the "everyone else." These people live their lives, and have fun if they can, under the shadow of death, the shadow of the terrors unleashed on the world by forces no one can seem to control. In the film's final image, the town is beset by a sinister squadron of planes, possibly coming to drop their bombs and put an end to it all. Andersson seems to be asking, if the bombs drop tomorrow, what will you have done today to make life better for yourself and those around you?

TOERIFC: Dancer in the Dark

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's selection is courtesy of Pat from Doodad Kind of Town. Visit the site to see Pat's thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark is a bleak, ugly film, relentlessly grim in its depiction of the rapid downward spiral of the Czech immigrant, struggling single mother, factory worker and would-be musical star Selma Jezkova (Björk). Selma suffers from a rare disease that runs in her family, causing her to go blind at a young age, and she's already in the final stages, losing the last of her sight and descending into blackness. Before she does, she is desperate to work as hard as she can and save up as much money as she can, so that she can pay for the operation that her son Gene (Vladica Kostic) needs, to prevent him from meeting the same fate as his mother. This is a tearjerking premise, and von Trier is intent on milking as much pathos and anguish as he can out of his poor heroine. It's not enough that she's going blind, not enough that she's destitute, living in a trailer and struggling to scrape together the money she needs for her son, not enough that she has a rather pathetic but earnest admirer in Jeff (Peter Stormare), but has no time to foster a relationship with him. On top of all this, she's soon also betrayed by her neighbor and friend Bill (David Morse), a local cop who's despairing because his money has run out and he's no longer able to give his pretty, stylish wife (Cara Seymour) the lifestyle she's accustomed to. This betrayal leads Selma to even lower depths, towards a denouement so tragic it's devastating.

Or, at least, it would be, if von Trier's behind-the-scenes puppetry weren't so blatantly obvious, if the strings he was pulling to set this weepy drama in action weren't so visible. Subtle is not the first word that comes to mind here. If there's anything that von Trier can do to increase his scenario's tragedy, he does it. This isn't a realistic tragedy, and it isn't even a stylized melodrama: after a while, it becomes very nearly a laundry list of the bad things that can befall a person by a combination of bad luck, betrayal and astonishingly terrible decision-making. It's grating, especially when von Trier inserts exaggerated anti-American caricatures, like Selma's co-worker who calls her a "Commie" and tells her, with no provocation, that she shouldn't prefer her homeland to "the US of A." At moments like this, von Trier's hands on the strings slip into the frame, exposing the contrived nature of this whole artifice. The film is an elaborate Rube Goldberg device designed to destroy Selma, and it's an especially cruel trap since it's been set by her own creator, the writer/director who called into being simply because she'd be especially pathetic and easy to tear apart.

Indeed, Selma is a true naif, totally oblivious to the ways of the world, staggering blindly through life — first metaphorically, then literally. She's obsessed with Hollywood musicals, and loves to go to them even after she starts losing her sight; she can still listen to the music, and she has her caring friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve in a wonderful supporting performance) to explain what's happening or tap out the rhythms of the dances on Selma's palm. She had always imagined America as being very much like the images in the movies, and if reality doesn't always measure up, she daydreams this glamorous Hollywood life into existence. What makes this character so moving, in spite of all von Trier's manipulations, is the sensitive and sweet performance of Björk, who invests this childlike woman with depth and intensity. Von Trier's aesthetics are often distractingly bland and anestheticized; in trying to capture the dull, deadening surfaces of Selma's life, he does it so well that his film looks like a dull, dead TV show, a "reality show." However, he wisely spends much of the film in probing, tight closeups on Selma, and Björk's expressive face, so mobile and unique, conveys the inner complexities of her character.


Björk also provides the music for Selma's daydreams and fantasies, which frequently burst through the prosaic routine of her life, turning tragic scenes into occasions for weird, robotically choreographed musical numbers. These scenes are indescribably odd and off-kilter, the work of choreographer Vincent Paterson, who conceived of Selma's inner life as a kind of kitschy, stiff take on the Busby Berkeley musical numbers she loves so much. Underpinned by mechanical rhythms and repetitive motions, these pieces really do look like the work of someone who has studied and loved Hollywood musical forms but isn't entirely sure how to put them together for herself. As a result, only Selma moves freely through these dreams, twirling and dancing, her flowing motion offset against the awkward, mechanized movements around her. She finds music everywhere, especially in the rhythms of industrial society — the noise of the machines in the factory where she works, the clank of the trains near her home — and her musical numbers as a result have a pseudo-industrial drive beneath the soaring, saccharine Hollywood strings.

Of course, it's Björk's typically quirky, active music and Paterson's choreography that drive these musical numbers. Von Trier's contributions are mostly negative, particularly in the way that he chops up the mise en scène of these performances, cutting to odd angles at a fast pace. His editing does great damage to the musical numbers, fracturing the internal rhythms of the music and dancing, forcing his own distinct rhythms onto the material. It adds an unnecessary disjunctive layer to all the musical scenes, with von Trier's choices jarring against the choreography and the meaning of these interludes as an escape for Selma. In fact, the most interesting aspect of the film as a musical is how unbearably sad its musical interludes are, infused as they are with the knowledge of Selma's tragic life, with the certainty that these are just ephemeral fantasies, unable to stave off the next inevitable disaster for very long. The film thus vacillates between an appreciation of fantasy as a way of making life bearable, and a rather savage denunciation of the Hollywood dream machine for delivering fantasies with no tangible connection to reality.

But then, von Trier's film has just as few threads connecting it to actual reality. The director has often been accused of fostering anti-American sentiment in his later film Dogville, but those accusations seem misplaced; it's Dancer in the Dark that presents a straw America for von Trier to rant against, while Dogville is a much richer, deeper film. Here, von Trier seems to want it both ways, stylizing intensely while making choices calculated to suggest ordinary reality: the flat aesthetic of the non-musical scenes, the unglamorous portrayal of his lead actress, the barren rural wasteland of the setting, overgrown and desolate. One senses that this is von Trier's idea of presenting unvarnished reality, but his cruel control over this supposed verisimilitude is distracting; the minimalist theatricality of Dogville is more honest and, paradoxically, more real. Dancer in the Dark is propelled by a marvelous central performance, and the beautifully strange music that Björk brings to the film, but this only makes von Trier's wallowing in misery especially hard to take. Both Björk and Selma deserve better than this film is able to give them.

TOERIFC: The Serpent's Egg

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's selection is courtesy of Bill from The Kind of Face You Hate. Visit his site to see his thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

To the extent that Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg has a reputation at all, it is not a good one. The film is mildly notorious, at least among Bergman admirers, as a late 70s oddity from the great director, a lavishly produced English-language epic made in Germany and starring American actor David Carradine alongside longtime Bergman muse Liv Ullmann. It's known as a colossal misstep, weird and boring in roughly equal measures. There's little denying that the film lives up to its reputation: it's a bizarre, unsettling, deeply unpleasant film, a one of a kind anomaly in the Swedish director's oeuvre. At times, it feels more like a Fassbinder film than anything by Bergman, and one wonders if shooting a period epic in Germany inspired Bergman to subtly shift his style towards one of this foreign country's contemporary greats, though something ineffable gets lost in the translation. The baroque, teutonic weirdness of this film, seen through Bergman's dispassionate lens, makes for a destabilizing experience. It's never clear just how one should feel, as the dizzy atmosphere and elliptical storytelling produce a blurry portrait of Germany in the unstable years between World War I and World War II.

The film follows the dazed wanderings of the American circus acrobat Abel Rosenberg (Carradine) after the inexplicable suicide of his troubled brother and fellow performer, Max. Abel falls in with Max's ex-wife Manuela (Ullmann), who works as a cabaret performer to support herself amidst the disintegrating German economy. The film portrays a nightmare world in which men are beaten on the streets while the police walk by as though nothing was happening, where everything is fluid and nothing can be depended on. Abel, a Jew facing increasingly virulent anti-Semitism, is especially adrift in this transitional culture.

Bergman conveys the aimlessness and deadened nerves of this milieu by making a film that's almost relentlessly aimless and deadened itself. Abel and Manuela are lost, clinging desperately to one another, but the slack pacing of the narrative mostly just leaves a lot of empty space, and a lot of room for Carradine and Ullmann's overacting impulses to spill over. The actors indulge in scenery-chewing explosiveness whenever they get the chance, with Ullmann tending towards shrill, over-emotive hysteria, and Carradine veering into convulsive gestures and tourettic verbalizing. His breakdown at a police station is uncomfortable to watch more for the strange, mannered quality of the acting than for the actual emotional state of his character. The same goes for some of Ullmann's loonier outbursts; Bergman not only makes no attempt to control or smooth out the performances but actually seems to be encouraging them to go over the top as often as possible. The unhinged quality of the performances actually makes a weird kind of sense, both aesthetically and narratively, for a film that's all about people losing their grip on reality and succumbing to wild mood swings and disconnected emotional reactions. Knowing this doesn't make the film's more out-there moments any easier to watch, of course.


Despite the uneven tone and staggering narrative, The Serpent's Egg is an interesting film in many ways, not least of which is the way Bergman captures the mood and feel of pre-WWII Germany, building a tremendous studio set of the streets around Abel's neighborhood. The streets seem to be continually rain-streaked and lit, at night, by flickering lamps that reflect off the slick cobblestones and metal street-car rails. Abel wanders through the dark in a fedora and trenchcoat like a badly misplaced noir hero, confused and lost. Along the way, there are striking moments — especially several of the grotesque, lascivious and gender-bending performances glimpsed at the cabaret where Manuela works — but many more dead patches.

During the second half of the film, however, Manuela and Abel enter weird new territory as the plot unravels even more than ever. Manuela and Abel move into a suite of apartments given to them by the courtly but sinister Hans Vergerus (Heinz Bennent), an old acquaintance of Abel's and now an admirer of Manuela's. Once there, Manuela takes a job at a nearby factory while Abel begins working within the labyrinthine medical archives of a clinic, mechanically shifting papers back and forth from one folder to another. Things get even weirder when Abel begins to realize that strange experiments are going on at the clinic, experiments in human pain and terror, essentially warm-up exercises for the atrocities of the Nazis a few years later.

In one of the film's best and most startling scenes, Abel confronts Vergerus in a hidden room within the maze of the clinic's library, where the mad doctor keeps the filmed records of his warped experiments. Vergerus recounts, with a chilling lack of emotion, the pain and psychological torment inflicted on his patients, as he shows Abel grainy black and white film reels documenting these experiments. This scene is a bracing coda, the crystallization of the film's themes about violence and inhuman ideologies. Abel's confused meanderings eventually lead him to a horrified face-to-face confrontation with a purely evil being, a man who prophesizes a not-so-distant future society in which his work will be viewed, not as degenerate and frightening, but as the vanguard of scientific research. It's a bone-chilling prediction of the Third Reich's collective insanity, and it's well worth trudging through the often maddening boredom and indifference of this film in order to reach this fascinating scene. Bergman shoots it mostly with closeups of Vergerus, played with an icy intensity by Bennent, calmly smoking as he displays a catalogue of horrors, a gleam of mild pleasure in his pale blue eyes.

Ultimately, The Serpent's Egg is worth seeing if only for this scene, an unforgettable, terrifying vision of the radical disconnection from morality that led to the Holocaust. Despite the potency of this climax, the rest of the film is loose and frustrating, with flashes of interesting ideas giving way to stale melodrama and uneven acting. This is a true curiosity for Bergman, a disjointed failure with enough sparks animating it that it can't be written off completely.

I Am Curious — Blue

I Am Curious — Blue is the second of Vilgot Sjöman's two Curious films, and like its companion piece (the Yellow version), it's an uneasy mix of sociopolitical documentary, sexual drama, and a metafictional treatment of the filmmaking process itself. In both films, Sjöman throws a lot of different material together in the hopes that some of it will work, and in both films some of it does. On the whole, though, Blue is just as dated and meandering as Yellow, a tired mish-mash of radical politics and sexual titillation that seldom ventures beneath the surface of the ideas it raises. In both films, all the actors play themselves, or at least characters who share the actors' real names. Sjöman himself is among the cast, as well as his somewhat reluctant lover and star Lena Nyman, who shuffles indecisively between Sjöman, Börje Ahlstedt (who's married and has a kid), and Hans Hellberg (who is also in another serious relationship, with Bim Warne). There's a certain droll humor to the way the film incorporates its metafictional elements, which inevitably appear abruptly at the corners of scenes: the camera will pan left across a dramatic scene and then suddenly reveal all the equipment and loafing crew members sitting off to the side watching the acting. In one of the better moment, Lena speeds by in a car along the highway, but the camera stops following her when it stumbles across Sjöman and the rest of the crew posed along the highway, singing and intently meeting the camera's stare.

There's less to like about the film's actual drama, which is rather rote and lifeless. Torn between at least two lovers, and also feeling somewhat committed to her director, the actress Lena decides to blow them all off, instead wandering off to the countryside, where she interviews various people she meets, scrawls revolutionary slogans on placards outside prisons, and meets a tough, pretty bar singer (Sonja Lindgren). The film never commits to any one mode, which would be fine if its individual components were interesting in themselves, which they're too often not. The interlude with Lindgren is a notable exception, a haunting and erotically charged sequence that culminates when a fascinated Lena witnesses a lesbian couple making love at a nearby house. The scenes of Lena and Sonja cavorting at a lake, and Sonja later intoning a poignant ballad while accompanying herself on guitar, have a sensual beauty and purity that the rest of the film struggles to match. Sonja herself is fascinating, her hard face and distant stare silently testifying of her eventful life; she's one of the only characters in the film who seems to have a real back story, a real life beyond the boundaries of the film frame, a soulful depth beneath the surface. Sjöman, more interested in political truisms and sexual melodrama, doesn't delve into or linger on these hidden depths, but to his credit, his camera does capture them faithfully.

In fact, Sonja embodies the film's themes better than any of the more pointed moments of political commentary. She's a single mother, raising a child in spite of the disapproval of others — a disapproval that, according to Lena's interviews, doesn't even exist, since no one is judgmental in the abstract, or else everyone knows the right answer and no one wants to admit that they still harbor sexist and unenlightened feelings. The interlude with Sonja suggests the kind of film Sjöman could have made, if he was interested: a warm and very human drama in which prosaic realities are used to illustrate and evoke more abstract political concerns. Instead, too often he approaches things from the other direction, with broad sloganeering and trite storytelling.


More interesting, in a kind of anthropological way, are the film's documentary elements, in the form of Lena's probing questions about the changing attitudes towards sex, religion, gender, class equality and income gaps, prison reform, overpopulation and birth control. It's a kind of time capsule of late 60s political and social thinking, tracing both the extraordinary shifts towards more permissive ideas and the continuing retrenchment of conservatism in other areas, such as the widespread impression that no further social change is needed to achieve equality. Lena simply walks up to people — at dances, on the street, at political rallies, at church — and asks them very pointed, politically charged questions that are clearly driving at foregone conclusions even before her hapless subject answers. Her interview with a young religious man is especially so blunt that one wonders if it's staged; she's shooting fish in a barrel, asking him about sex before marriage, contraceptives and world overpopulation until the guy, in way over his head, simply stammers to a halt and admits he's stymied. Even those viewers most unsympathetic to religion — and I'd consider myself an atheist — would have to start feeling pretty bad for the guy, who's badgered with the most inane of theological paradoxes and battered into submission by Lena's smug, superior attitude. We get it, Lena, you care about world hunger and you have sex before marriage. Aren't you special?

At her best, Lena's interviews are more probing and go after less obvious targets in much more clever ways. One of the better sequences is one in which a series of people are asked about their occupations and incomes, and the cumulative results are used to reveal income disparities between different jobs and different genders — most strikingly, a male schoolteacher admits to making double the salary of a female schoolteacher. These are not earth-shattering revelations — and surely they weren't in 1968, either, at least not to the film's presumptive, largely left-wing audience — but at its best I Am Curious presents these ideas with enough style and panache to keep things interesting. At its worst, the film degenerates into empty posturing and 60s radical chic, like a parody of what most people think of when they think of Maoist-era Godard. One gets the sense that Sjöman aspires to Godard, but he lacks his idol's ineffable wit; his "radical" poses are too often either aggravating or, even worse, simply boring.

Films I Love #17: The Silence (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

The title of Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece The Silence has multiple meanings, resonances that cascade through this puzzling, richly symbolic allegory. Bergman considered calling the film God's Silence, and the absence of divinity and spirituality is certainly one of the title's implications. This is particularly true since the film is the capstone of the so-called "faith trilogy," which cumulatively represents a process of moving further and further away from God, arriving here at a place where the deity simply doesn't exist and is indeed never even invoked. In many ways, however, it is fortunate that Bergman settled on a more ambiguous title, because the film is about much more than the absence of faith: it is about the myriad ways in which communication can fail, the ways that speech and language can drive people apart rather than bringing them closer to mutual understanding. At the center of the film are two sisters, one sensual and earthy (Gunnel Lindblom), and the other sickly, intellectual, and introspective (Ingrid Thulin). They are traveling to a strange and unfamiliar country with Lindblom's son Johan (Jörgen Lindström), while the convalescent sister grows steadily sicker, obviously easing towards death.

The film centers on miscommunication on multiple levels. The trio arrives in a country where they do not speak the language, and where war and social disorder (signified by the presence of tanks in the streets) seem imminent. Everything is breaking down here. While Thulin turns to books, music, and mechanically passionless masturbation to distract herself from her impending mortality, Lindblom indulges in sex and sensual pleasures. She is obviously a woman who enjoys her own body, and Bergman lovingly photographs her radiant skin and the beaded sweat that seems to perpetually stand out from her arms and neck. She has sex with a stranger, a man she can't even speak with because of the language barrier — their communication is limited to physicality and breaks down as soon as the act is over.

Meanwhile, Johan is the only one who, with his child's curiosity and wide, probing eyes, manages to foster some moments of limited communication within the strange, empty hotel where they're staying. As Johan wanders the halls, amusing himself away from a mother who keeps going off by herself and an aunt who's slowly dying, he meets a midget theatrical troupe who welcome him in as one of them, joyfully entertaining him for a few minutes before their gruff manager puts a stop to it. The boy also forges a tentative bond with the hotel's odd but kindly waiter (Håkan Jahnberg), a gangly old man who cheerfully mutters in his incomprehensible language while offering Johan food and companionship. Johan is a hopeful presence in the film, a bridging force who overcomes barriers to reach other people, but he is an exception to Bergman's bleak assessment of the possibilities of communication. Bergman is presenting a powerful political fable here: just as the relationship between the sisters collapses under the strain of their inability to make themselves understood to each other, so too do the relationships between countries falter and lead to war as communication is hindered. This is one of Bergman's finest works, a masterwork of despair that obviously inspired filmmakers as diverse as David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, while retaining its own unsettling brilliance.

Films I Love #6: Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1974)

Despite its title, Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch is more than just a biographical film about the painter of the famous Scream. Munch's tortured life story, from his sickly childhood to his adult affair with a married woman, figure prominently in this fragmentary, elliptical masterpiece, but these dramas are far from the film's only subject. For one thing, the film is one of the best chronicles of the art of painting that has ever been committed to celluloid. Has there ever been a film that engages more thoroughly or more analytically with the physicality and texture of paint on canvas? Watkins lovingly pans across the surfaces of Munch's paintings, lingering on the scratched-out areas and dense layers of overpainting that indicate Munch's obsessive, often violent process of creation. This recursive creativity, with Munch revisiting the same canvases over the course of many months and compulsively worrying at their details, is mirrored in the film's aesthetics. The chronology is frequently disrupted by scenes that recur over and over again, primal scenes from Munch's youth or the short-lived affair that haunted his entire life. As the film goes on, its linear narrative is increasingly complicated by such diversions and the continual looping back that gives equal emphasis to all times at once.

Watkins injects further variety into the narrative through the use of faux-documentary techniques, as a narrator provides commentary on Munch's life, surroundings, and painting process. Most importantly for a political filmmaker like Watkins, the film also makes every effort to position Munch in the broader context of the social and political upheavals of his time. One of Watkins' theses is that Munch was an artist tragically ahead of his time, reflecting a more unfettered, emotionally honest, and deeply personal artistic expression, as though he belonged to a much freer era than the one he was born into. As such, the film frequently diverts from Munch's story in order to document problems of social class, women's rights, and sexual oppression and repression. The film is a revolutionary form of biography that resolutely refuses to limit itself to a simple chronological accounting of events. Not only does Watkins shatter chronology in order to communicate emotional truths rather than dry objective facts, but the film expands beyond the immediate details of Munch's life to explore his social context and the ways in which creativity is shaped by political realities.