And here we are: perhaps the film by Ingmar Bergman that is most famous, apart from The Seventh Seal, and probably the one most written about in film studies. Persona may not be as immediately iconic as the film that brought us a medieval knight playing chess with Death, but it is undoubtedly one of the films most responsible for the director’s reputation – as a master of his craft, but also as a storyteller who did tremendous work especially with his female protagonists (sorry, Max von Sydow, but it’s true) and whose films explore harrowing psychological and metaphysical territory.
Surrealism is tricky. Some dislike it altogether, finding it too random. Myself, I respond to some of it (as the name of this blog may suggest, I’m not altogether averse to a nice slice of Lynch), but there must be an underlying form, a sense that there is some form or logic at play, even if it is the dream logic of, say, Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive. As soon as it veers into the formlessness of Dada, I tend to disengage.
Valerieand Her Week of Wonders, by the Czechoslovak director Jaromil Jireš, leans more towards the former; its surrealism is definitely more dreamlike and Freudian than it is arbitrary, and most of its images aren’t all too difficult to interpret: blood falling on daisies signifies the onset of the protagonist’s first period, vampires hungering for Valerie’s blood and its power to keep them youthful represent sexual desire and the lust of the old for the young. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders isn’t hard to read – yet its tone, somewhere between uncanny and camp, is quite effective at times. It is the kind of film that works better the less it is interpreted, perhaps, because interpretation reduces it into shopworn tropes of Freudian analysis.
Also, sadly, it is very easily reduced to a sexual fantasy whose object of desire is a thirteen-year-old girl.
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Get ready for Bergmanception: you know how Woody Allen has long been a big Bergman fan and how many of his films are clearly inspired by Bergman’s? Well, the beginning of The Serpent’s Egg feels a bit like Bergman got Allen and his creative team to create the titles. White writing in a timeless serif font on a black screen, listing the cast and crew, accompanied by jaunty 1920s jazz tune – it’s all there. Except even at his most glib, Allen did not make films as sour as The Serpent’s Egg.
There are a number of classic paranoia films made in Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s. The Manchurian Candidate is one of these, as is Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.
The Parallax View (1974) by Alan J. Pakula clearly belongs on the list as well. It’s a classic, it’s memorable, it’s iconic. It has its finger on the pulse of a country and a culture where politics and murder have been intertwined for more than a century.
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Have you ever travelled to a place and seen the sights – and it was a real disappointment, because in your mind, everything was much bigger and better and more amazing? If so, did the movies or other damn fine cups of culture play a role in this disappointment?
Imagine a series, a spin-off, whose protagonist is a character that originated in a film more than 40 years ago. He is a fan favourite because he has a certain mystique and, let’s face it, he looks cool. Imagine that series stripping this protagonist of his mystique (and, for much of the running time, his iconic outfit) by taking away pretty much every characteristic they had. And now imagine the series dumping its protagonist halfway through in favour of another character from another series that himself was clearly inspired by the original character.
Yes, I know how that sounds. Convoluted and nonsensical barely begins to cover it. Still, that’s pretty much what happened with The Book of Boba Fett, the most recent addition to the Star Wars canon. What’s going on here? Were they playing with our expectations? Was the series supposed to be subversive? Was COVID-19 to blame for this mess?
Is it strange that I associate adultery with the 1960s and 1970s? Obviously I don’t think that adultery was invented in 1963, just after sexual intercourse (because, after all, Don Draper got there much earlier, right?), but when I think of the stories of or about the time, what comes to mind are the novels of John Updike or novels like The Ice Storm, which is set in the early ’70s. When I think adultery, I first and foremost think of men with sideburns wearing corduroy suits, sleeping with the wives of their colleagues or friends, much more so than I think of crazed blondes that boil bunnies before breakfast.
The Touch (1971)
In that respect, Ingmar Bergman’s The Touch, the first English language film by the director, is a good fit for the era. Adultery, check. ’70s hairdos, check. (There are probably few actors whose hair denotes the ’70s as much as Elliott Gould.)
And somehow, none of the people in these adulterous relationships seem to be happier due to their affairs. You can see why Bergman would be drawn to this material.
The way people are talking here, it sure sounds like the pandemic is over, or at least has turned into something less, well, pandemicky. How much of this is based on facts, data and our understanding of epidemiology? And how much is more a case of wishful thinking blended with people being tired of the last two years? Whichever it is, things have started to change, and they will change a lot more over the next couple of weeks.
By which I mean less the whole mask-wearing thing. No, for me the main change will be this: work will expect me to get my ass back to the office.
In January 2022, my favourite cinema ran a series of films that they gave the title Mythos Samurai (“The Samurai Myth”). We ended up seeing seven (how fitting!) out of eleven films, from Akira Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptation Throne of Blood via the Tarantino favourite Lady Snowblood to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s gentle anti-revenge film Hana – and, yes, Seven Samurai was also among the films shown. It was interesting to watch the films as different perspectives on the same motif: the samurai, the officer caste that protected the daimyo from the late 12th century to 1876. What was perhaps most interesting, however: how many of the films subverted the image of a noble warrior caste. The protagonists of these films were often ronin, masterless samurai who had lost their status, or samurai who doubted the tenets of their caste, and none of them presented a cool, badass ideal for easy consumption. The system that created the samurai was always presented in an ambivalent or downright negative light, even when the films clearly share a fascination with the aesthetics and iconography of the culture.
And that ambivalence towards the samurai, the feudal system they were a part of and the values they were meant to embody is represented best perhaps in Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri, a film that is grim and exhilarating, exciting and scathingly critical in equal parts.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 