In Summer with Monika (1953), heterosexual love relationship as escape from societal constraint is depicted as a bucolic idyll that can’t last–unable to support the family on a single, meagre salary and burdened by the baby who’s a product of that summer escape, class and gender roles reassert themselves and tear the couple apart. Upon discovering Monika’s infidelity, her now-husband Harry first clumsily paws at her in a last burst of erotic longing, then strikes her after she begs him not to. It all unfolds with a grim inevitability that ultimately goes beyond words. While this moment is depicted through the framings of realism—minimal camera movement, minimal music, a concentration on medium shot lending it ‘objectivity’—the film has previously broken from realism for a brief moment in perhaps its best-known moment, with Monika’s ambiguous, steady gaze directly the camera as she initiates her extra-marital affair, as if daring conservative audiences to judge and progressive audiences to ponder the social arrangements which lead to restriction and misery. It’s a moment that’s non-judgmental and unexpected, an open question that reinforces the film’s gentle tugging at the edges of the social conventions of romance and domestic arrangement.
The gaze direct at camera that, in Summer with Monika, breaks free of narrative framing, both creates and refuses implication and judgment, finds a very different sort of echo in Liv Ullmann’s direct to camera visual address in Hour of the Wolf. Bergman often shoots her face in extreme close up, going so far as to fill the screen with just the eye itself: an attempt to see into the heart of things which attains, if anything, more confusion than before. In the opening sequence, Ullmann’s Alma tells the unseen filmmaker of her artist husband, Johan (Max von Sydow), his descent into madness and his last days before his attempt to murder her and his apparent suicide. Ullmann’s opening direct to camera address, with its suggestions of the documentary interview following on a credits sequence that plays over the sounds of a film set, sets up a soon to be destroyed illusion of realism. Opening on-screen text suggests the entire scenario as a kind of found, collaborative document between Alma, who tells her story to the filmmaker, and the filmmaker, who 'brings that story to life'. This framing both exacerbates this sense of potential realism and gives scope for the ‘subjective’ rendering of extreme mental states through surrealistic techniques that increasingly dominate the film’s second half. Bleached-out scenes of violence and anguish cut between diegetic and non-diegetic sound and disorientating edits which render the experience ‘dream-like’; horror is exacerbated through shock effects such the old woman whose removal of her hat necessitates removal of her entire face (an eye—the gaze again!—placed in a fancy tumbler), the man who walks on the ceiling out of ‘jealousy’, the predatory human who turns into a predatory bird (or vice versa), the naked, and sexualised corpse that comes to life. In the film’s climax, Von Sydow’s breakdown is rendered as a literal tearing about by manifestations of the inner demons he knows by the names of ‘ghosts’, ‘cannibals’. To what extent is this an inevitable by-product of the process of artistic creation (one popular myth), to what extent is art the product of enhanced / vulnerable mental states (another popular myth), and what, in any case, should the artist and their loved ones do outside the realm of the artwork? The film throws these questions up but doesn’t answer them, concerning itself not only with the boundary between inner torment and outer action--climaxing in the tormented artist shooting his pregnant wife--but the limits of loving empathy in the couple’s marriage, Ullmann concluding the film by wondering whether she loved her husband too much--an over-identification which led to her also seeing some of these ghost personages as real people--or too little, unable to save him from those forces he felt assailed him.
The film’s stripped-back setting--an island, a bare landscape, a small cast--might suggest Robin Wood’s critique--that, as ‘poet of the incomplete’, Bergman ‘increasingly deni[ed] his characters their existence as social beings, reducing each to his or her individual psychology’--though the demons who beset him, living as they do in a decrepit castle and treating him as a kind of glorified performing puppet (as in the puppet show based on Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’, whose narrative of transformations, the horrors of night, and the redemptive powers of art, finds a kind of negative echo here), would seem to be a parasitic societal upper tier, somewhere between inherited aristocracy and new money. Von Sydow’s character emphatically rejects psychology, slapping the psychiatrist who accosts him on the cliff-path, but he also rejects art, drunkenly telling the crowd of aristocratic ‘cannibals’ (to applause and their ever-present laughter) that his work comes from a compulsion, has no social value in itself, but that he’s forced to perform the role of the ‘artist’ in order to satisfy their own craving. Though his character is a painter, and though we see him set off on plein air painting trips, we never see the paintings themselves in any detail. Art seems a mirror, not for societal diagnosis, nor for eternal truths, but for whatever the characters, the artist themselves, and us, the audience, read into it: in a scene where a painting becomes central, as one of the ‘cannibals’ describes the emotions he’s poured into a panting of his former (married) lover (the discovery of their affair prompting a breakdown which saw him institutionalised), we see the characters looking off-screen, and thus directly at, but beyond, us, their glazed focus lacking the questioning insistence of Ullmann’s opening and closing monologues and instead transporting them into closed worlds of introspective contemplation. Rather than bringing together, then, art seems to divide, exacerbating and damagingly clawing at the wounds of psychological torment that seem to preclude any long-lasting connection. Though Ullmann’s character hopes that love might breach these gaps that art cannot, she and von Sydow remain stuck in a world of insomniac vigils, failures to communicate and the ultimate switch into violence both against her and himself. If her unswerving faith and loyalty seems to reproduce a fairly standard patriarchal narrative of male artistic suffering and the consistent, self-sacrificing support of the female (non-artist) companion, it’s she who survives as, in his reported words, a ‘whole person’, with ‘whole thoughts’: the integration which he is disastrously denied.
The result, in part, of childhood trauma--locked in a closet, subjected to what amounts to physical and mental torture and forced to beg for forgiveness--the relation of Johan’s breakdown to authority, in terms of gender, the family and class would be ripe for further investigation, but, in contrast to the overlays with contemporaneous politics, particularly the Vietnam war, in other of Bergman’s films from the era, the nightmare feels too bounded in its one case study to move further in that direction. ‘Case study’ is perhaps the wrong word—the film’s intention is not really diagnostic, though it could easily be read for its exposure of the damaging myths of masculinity. Johan’s anguish manifests in a horror of the feminised and a relation to women that alternates between love, redemption and violence. His nightmares in the film’s climax centre around a horror of queerness (the eroticised and violent encounter with a boy, the scene in which he’s made-up and dressed in a chintzy robe by a predator older man), or, perhaps, of sexuality per se, in which inner torment turns into external violence against women (or uses the former as excuse for the latter, whether or not any of this is filtered through the heroizing, decontextualising frames of a certain conception of art).
Johan’s torment, then, expresses itself in almost exclusively gendered ways—the scene in which he shoots his wife might make us think of the climactic scene in which Harry slaps Monika, or for that matter, the brutal murder of a sex worker in his ‘Marionettes’ film, whose title recalls the Magic Flute puppet theatre we see here. But if, as Bergman suggests in that later film, ‘we’ are puppets of impulses, urges, drives, the scatterings of fate, that are beyond our control, screaming into a world of silence, what role does society play here? To what extent is Johan’s anguish a manifestation of classed, gendered and sexualised double-binds into which he’s been forced to define his inner and outer being? How does a universal discourse of drives, anguish and the like map onto those other relationships—how much might the social shape perception of the drives, rather than the other way around? In a sense, the film’s experimental aspects, the surreal horror which makes it so memorable and troubling, are both that which enables Bergman to escape following through on such implications and those aspects which most strikingly raise the questions he won’t attempt to answer (or answer with an anguished existential throwing up of hands).
And so we’re left with Ullmann’s gaze, once more refusing interpellation and judgment, yet abdicating her own strength of character—that which his enabled her to physically and mentally survive as what is in effect carework is rewarded with attempted murder—in favour of an endless rumination on the partner of whom she is finally free. Monika packs up and leaves the flat; Ullmann has stayed on, though she’s soon to move back to the mainland. It’s there the film leaves us, uneasily transitioning between departure and return, confrontation and escape, the soul (alma!) and the body, bleeding and torn apart. The film’s stare may be unblinking, but it doesn’t always seem to know what it’s seen.
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