I have never been an optimist about the human condition, or believed that the flow of history is progressive. And though I have a passion for art, cities, friendship, and love and marriage among others, I have always felt that the life we live is touched with despair and darkness. Some of my favorite filmmakers echoed that vision.
The director who was and remains most meaningful to me was the maestro of angst, Ingmar Bergman, whose work I taught and wrote about since the early ‘70s.
Bergman never saw film as a well-shaped narrative, but as a form that goes much deeper. He once wrote, “No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.”
That’s what I always felt watching his films, and though Bergman was no philosopher, he offered for me a different way of looking at the world and human relationships that profoundly struck home. For Bergman never disguised what he felt. His films were an expression of his guilt, dreams, desires and confusions, and never took refuge in intellectual games.
In film after film, from social realist works like “Monika” to airy, witty tragic-farces like “Smiles of a Summer Night” and finally to his a valedictory, three-hour epic, “Fanny and Alexander,” where he celebrated the power of the imagination and reconstructed a lush, phantasmagoric recreation of his often painful childhood, his films spoke to me. Not every film was a masterpiece, but they all carried great emotional impact. Although it became something of a cliché of Bergman criticism to speak of his penchant for posing “existential” questions, his films were honest and passionate inquiries that explored the complex nature of artistic commitment, death, relationships between husbands and wives and parents and children, and God’s existence itself.
Recently, I have been wondering how he would have handled the pandemic we live with in a film. Given the nature of his work, his emphasis would never be institutional or political, but on how each one of us emotionally dealt with living through this period. In one of his masterpieces, “Shame,” he focuses on a musician couple whose marriage is alternately happy and stormy — the voluptuous, maternal, practical Eva (Liv Ullmann) and the hapless, needy and selfish Jan (Max Von Sydow) — who have taken refuge from a civil war on an island where they grow and sell fruit.
When the civil war reaches the island, these two apolitical people are trapped by events that bewilder, ravage and transform them. Bergman sees these people as “acting in panic” and “out of one motive: self-interest.” Bergman’s concern is in what happens to people when they confront a violent crisis in which the sounds and sights of devastation and slaughter become omnipresent. For him it’s always the existential rather than the political that is central, and in the film, the characters’ humanity is gradually destroyed in their drive to survive.
The extreme situation “Shame” deals with may not be parallel to the COVID-19 crisis, but we also face something dangerous outside ourselves that has radically altered our lives. I know since COVID-19 has struck, time has lost much of its meaning for me, as days blur into days and there is little to distinguish one from the other. Unless one is Trump, walking around masked is a necessity, but it muffles speech and makes one feel more alone. I still take pleasure in screening films, reading fiction and political essays, and writing, but something necessary for feeling alive has been lost these many months. At times I feel struck by despair about my own life and the nation’s fate. Yes, I have other reasons for despondency — aging, infirmity, death anxiety — but what the pandemic has done is undermine a sense of community, even if it is illusory.
We live now tied to our computers, television sets, phones and social media. There are no theaters or moviehouses to attend, and I have hesitated going to museums. And though I see some friends, I feel their lives have altered and gotten more constrained as well — they quietly complain, and some take valium to sleep. I feel that my humanity remains, but I haven’t been tested like Bergman’s characters by being faced with a world in which utter chaos and violence rule. It’s hard to live one’s last years listening to Trump’s lies and bluster, learning about the web of corruption that is his essence and waiting for a vaccine to give us some freedom. When I watch a Bergman film again, I see how emotionally naked he was, and how he shatters all prescriptions and platitudes that one still holds about the self, relationships and existence itself, something few works of art are able to do. Also, Bergman may have been dark, but some of his films offered a sliver of light, something I hold onto living in the quagmire that is our lot.
