In Which Roger Ebert Worships Ingmar Bergman

A Pornography of Horror

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Mrs. Vogler desires the truth. She has looked for it everywhere, and sometimes she seems to have found something to hold onto, something lasting, but then suddenly the ground has given way under her feet. The truth had dissolved and disappeared or had, in the worst case, turned into a lie.

My art cannot melt, transform, or forget: the boy in the photo with his hands in the air or the man who set himself on fire to bear witness to her faith. I am unable to grasp the large catastrophes. They leave my heart untouched. At most I can read about such atrocities with a kind of greed - a pornography of horror. But I shall never rid myself of those images, images that turn my art into a bag of tricks.

— Ingmar Bergman's notebooks

I can't think of Persona without remembering the numerous defenses Roger Ebert made of it.  

Revisiting the film in 2001, Ebert opens his review with "Shakespeare used six words to pose the essential human choice: To be, or not to be?" It is the kind of "common-man" bullshit Bergman specifically ignored, the kind of lazy writing he is making fun of in Persona.

Dumbly, Ebert follows up this banner lede by admitting, "Persona was one of the first movies I reviewed, in 1967. I did not think I understood it," and then spends the rest of the essay proving he still does not understand it at all. Persona lacked the kind of subtlety Ebert's brand of criticism rarely picked up on anyway.

Persona is an insolent work, written in the days that followed Ingmar Bergman's recovery from exhaustion and pneumonia developed while he directed the largest theater in Sweden. It will always be the most sardonic of his films, sketched out as it was at a time of high stress and possible decombustion.

Bergman wrote to himself before embarking on the project:

I will attempt to keep the following commands:

Breakfast at half past seven with the other patients.

Thereafter immediately get up and take a morning walk.

No newspapers or magazines during the aforementioned time.

No contact with the theater.

Refuse to receive letters, telegrams, or telephone calls.

Visits to home allowed during the evening.

I feel that the final battle is fast approaching. I must not postpone it further. I must arrive at some form of clarity. Otherwise Bergman will definitely go to hell.

He was cracking, and Persona's disjointed opening gives evidence of that.

Bergman's journal reconstructs the film's opening sequence from a childhood memory he had:

I imagine a white, washed-out strip of film. It runs through the projector and gradually there are words on the sound tape (which perhaps runs beside the film strip itself.) Gradually the precise word I'm looking for comes into focus. Then a face you can barely make out dissolves in all that whiteness. That's Alma's face. Mrs. Volger's face.

Elisabet Volger (Liv Ullman) is a famous actress who has a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson) taking care of her. Volger takes a vow of silence. Bergman remarks in his journal that "So she has been an actress — one may give her that? Then she fell silent. Nothing remarkable about that." The empathy Ingmar extends to her is really for himself. When Mrs. Volger is presented a picture of her son, she tears it up, staring for hours at the atrocities of the war in Vietnam she sees on television.

There is a disease of overempathy that allows some of us to become easily affected by events we read in the news or see on television. Elisabet is afflicted by this as surely as her creator. Even before the internet and bbs there was still the tendency to get drawn into the suffering of others, that anguish that exists outside of us and for that reason is unchangeable. In the face of this Ingmar had become mute — so why not mute a woman, you know, as a kind of revenge?

Liv Ullmann

The performance was a star-making one for Ullman. The feat of carrying an entire movie just from reaction shots had only been achieved once before, in the work of Akira Kurosawa. Ullman's face never moves when we stare directly at it; given the task of playing a mute, every small moment in her representation seems like either an instruction or an exaltation.

Elisabet is a fallen angel and demon incarnate in herself, but at the edge's of Ullmann's performance, Persona feels rather thin. The production itself was troubled from the beginning. On set Bergman shot more takes than he ever had, almost to the point of compulsion; nor was he ever more difficult with his cast. Persona did not concern itself with his own external awareness, only his inner doubts. That he had them and was capable of acknowledging them would always be his unforgivable sin.

During one particular scene in the film, the two women exchange personalities. Alma spends the rest of the film imbued with Elisabet Volger's dissatisfaction and anger, while Volger stands in repose. Eventually they are merely two sides of the same person. The images of the director and DP on Persona scouting locations provide an offscreen male corollary to the events of the film. See here:

Bergman and director of photography Sven Nykvist tried to focus on the unattractive side of each actresses' face, so when you showed them half-illuminated in shadowy light, they would look something not of themselves. Or as the banal Ebert put it, "The two actresses look somewhat similar." With this kind of feedback, it's no wonder Bergman repeated this trick in every single one of the films that followed. It never fails to achieve its distinguishing effect of unsettling confusion.

Ebert's defenses of the man who fooled him more than once continued after the aging director allowed him access for a long profile. Even when the director himself began to shit all over his past works, Ebert held firm.

The worst part of Persona is actually the scene where we see both faces; because of the dullness of the monologue Bibi Andersson delivers, and the self-indulgence of the shot.

Bergman explained where this came from to Ebert:

The most beautiful of all is that you're close to the human face, which is the most fascinating subject possible for the camera. On TV a few days ago, I saw a little of Antonioni's new picture, The Passenger. And you know, I am an admirer of Antonioni, I've learned so much from him, but I was struck by the moment they cut from his film to a closeup of Antonioni himself, for the interview. As he was sitting there, here was his face, so normal, so beautiful and so human - and I didn't hear a word of what he was saying, because I was looking so closely at his face, at his eyes. The ten minutes he was on the screen were more fascinating than any of his, or my, work.

If Bergman is telling the truth, he is indicting himself. If he is lying, then the emperor has no clothes. It is the kind of no-win situation Persona explores as a binary theme that has been imitated in so many pictures since.

on the set of Persona

At one point Alma discovers Elisabet's view of her in a letter she intercepts. In that bit of correspondence, Elisabet marvels that Alma's convictions are so totally unrelated to her actions. It is no wonder Bergman felt disoriented as a filmmaker around this time.

Yet it is even worse for the critic, who is permitted no ambiguity in his judgments. Bergman describes the situation of the artist in Volger/Alma — there is always some outstanding question of seriousness, an overwrought scene can be ascribed to a joke or reference. No one ever had to ask, after reading an Ebert review, did you like the movie? The proper question was rhetorical, and ancient. Must all life be a chorus of good or bad? Have you not thought it might be something more?

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about the murder of Joe Orton and the romance between Peggy Guggenheim and Samuel Beckett. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Movie Music Kills A Kiss" - Califone (mp3)

"Moses" - Califone (mp3)

The new album from Califone is entitled Stitches and it was released on September 3rd.

In Which Harmony Is A Totally Unusual Feeling For Us

from Images

by INGMAR BERGMAN

There are two godfathers to Fanny and Alexander. One of them is E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Toward the end of the 1970s, I was supposed to direct Hoffmann at the Opera House in Munich. I began to fantasize about the real Hoffmann, who sat in Luther's wine cellar, sick and nearly dying. I wrote in my notes: "Death is everpresent. The barcarole, the sweetness of death. The Venice scene stinks of decay, raw lust, and heavy perfumes. In the Antonia scene, the mother is intensely frightening. The room is people with shadows, dancing, and mouths gaping. The mirror in the mirror aria is small and gleams like a murder weapon."

In a short story written by Hoffmann there is a gigantic, magical room. It was that magical room I wanted to re-create on stage. The drama would be played out with that room set on stage. The drama would be played out with that room set in the foreground and the orchestra in the background.

There is also an illustration from E.T.A. Hoffmann's stories that had haunted me time and time again, a picture from The Nutcracker. Two children are quivering close together in the twilight of Christmas Eve, waiting impatiently for the candles on the tree to be lighted and the doors to the living room to be opened.

It is that scene that gave me the idea of beginning Fanny and Alexander with a Christmas celebration.

The second godfather is Dickens: the bishop and his home, the Jew in his boutique of fantasies, the children as victims; the contrast between flourishing outside life and a closed world in black-and-white.

One could say that it all began during the fall of 1978. I was living in Munich and felt ill at ease. I was still enmeshed in the tax imbroglio, and I didn't know how or when it would end. On September 27, I wrote in my workbook:

There is no longer any distinction between my anxiety and the reality that causes it. And yet I think I know what kind of film I want to make next. It is far different from anything I have ever done.

Anton is eleven years old and Maria is twelve. They act as observers of the reality I wish to depict. The time is the beginning of the First World War; the place is a small town, exceedingly quiet and well-kept. There is a university, a theater, and a hotel some distance away. Life is peaceful.

Anton and Maria's mother is director of a theater. When their father died, she took over the management of his theater and now runs it with authority and shrewdness. They lie on a quiet street. in the back of the theater lives a Jew, Isak, who owns a toy store. It contains some other interesting and exciting objects as well. A frequent Sunday visitor is an old lady who used to be a missionary in China. She performs Chinese shadow plays. There is also an uncle who is a little crazy but is harmless and who takes certain liberties. The house is well-to-do and extremely bourgeois.

The grandmother is an almost mystical figure who lives in the apartment below. She is fabulously wealthy and was in her past a royal mistress and a great actress. Now she has retired, but sometimes she will appear in an occasional part. In either case, it is a world completely dominated by women, from the cook who has been around for a hundred years to the little nanny who is cheerful, freckled and limps because one leg is shorter than the other, and who smells deliciously of sweat.

The theater is both a playground for the children and a haven. Sometimes they are allowed to participate in a play, which they find enormously exciting. The children sleep in the same room, and they have many things to keep themselves occupied - their own puppet theater, their own movie projector, toy trains, dollhouses. They are inseparable.

Maria is the one who takes the most initiative. Anton is rather anxious. Their upbringing is strict, and severe punishment for even the most trivial offenses is not out of the question. The church bells measure the passage of time; the small bell at a nearby castle announces when it is morning and when it is evening. The Vicar is always a welcome guest, even at the theater. One might suspect that Mother has a special relationship with the vicar. However, this is difficult to know right away.

Then Mother decides to marry the vicar. Mother cannot continue to manage her theater; she must become a wife and mother. It is already apparent that her belly is swelling. Maria does not like the vicar; Anton does not like him either. Mother transfers the ownership of the theater to her actors; crying bitterly, she bids her people farewell and moves into the vicarage with Maria and Anton, who are raging with anger.

Mother is a good wife to the clergyman. She plays her part irreproachably: she gives birth to a child and invites the parishioners in for coffee after the morning service. The church bells ring, and Maria and Anton brood, thinking of revenge. They are no longer allowed to sleep together in the same room, and the cheerful Maj, the nanny, who has become pregnant, is fired and replaced by the vicar's sister, who is a dragon.

With my divining rod, I searched the ground for a source and came upon a vein of water. When I began to drill, it gushed out like a geyser. My notes continue:

Through my playing, I want to master my anxiety, relieve tension, and triumph over my deterioration. I want to depict, finally, the joy that I carry within me in spite of everything, and which I so seldom and so feebly have given attention to in my work. To be able to express the power of action, decisiveness, the vitality, and the kindness. Yes, for once, that would not be a bad idea.

From the very beginning one can see that with Fanny and Alexander. I have landed in the world of my childhood. Here is the university town and Grandmother's house with the old cook; here is the Jew who lived out back; and here is the school. I am already in the place and beginning to roam around in the familiar environment. My childhood has of course always been my main supplier, without my ever having bothered to find out where the deliveries were coming from.

On November 10, I write in my workbook:

I often think of Ingrid Bergman. I would like to write something for her that would not be too demanding, and I see a summer porch in rain. She is alone, waiting for her children and grandchildren. It is afternoon, the whole film is set on a veranda. The film will last only as long as the rain. Nature is showing her fairest face; everything is enveloped in this soft unceasing rain. When the film opens, she is speaking on the telephone. Her family is out on an excursion around the lake. She talks with an old friend of hers, who is much older than she. A deep trust exists between the two. She writes a letter. She finds some object. She remember a theater performance - her big breakthrough. She sees her reflection in the windowpanes - and can catch a glimpse of herself as a young woman.

The reason she has stayed at home is that she has sprained her ankle - it is only a slight sprain; mostly it feels good to be alone. Toward the end of the film, she sees the family returning from their trip; the rain is still falling, but it is now a peaceful, quiet drip.

Everything should happen in a major key.

The porch in summer - everything is enveloped in a soft chiaroscuro. In this piece there are no hard edges; everything must be as soft as the rain. A neighbor's child comes and asks for other children. She has bought wild strawberries, and she is given a treat. She is wet from the rain and smells wet. It is a kind life, a good, simple, incredible life. When she sees the child's hands, the most unusual thoughts come to her, thoughts that she has never had before. The cat purrs, stretched out on the sofa, the clock ticks; the smell of summer pervades over all. She stands in the doorway to the porch and looks out over the meadows with the oak tree, the meadow that leads down in the old bridge and the bay. To her, everything looks both old and familiar and yet new and unexpected. It is strange how longing emanates from sudden solitude.

This looks like a different film, independent of the first, but the material came to good use in Fanny and Alexander, the decision to depict a life, luminous and happy, was there from the moment I found life truly difficult to bear.

Harmony is not a feeling that is totally unusual or foreign to me. If I am just allowed to live quiet and create in a calm environment without being tormented, where I can have a clear perspective of my existence, where it is possible for me to be kind and not need anything or have to keep lots of appointments, then I can function at my best. Such an existence reminds me of the good-natured passive life of my childhood.

On April 18 I wrote, "I don't know much about this film. Yet it tempts me more than any other. It is enigmatic and demands reflection, but the most important thing of course is that the desire is there."

On April 23 I note: "Today I wrote the first six pages of Fanny and Alexander. I actually enjoyed doing it. Now I am going to write about the theater, the apartment, and the grandmother."

Wednesday, May 2:

I must get away from rushing and straining. I have the entire summer in front of me to do this, more than four months. On the other hand, I should not stay away from my desk too long. But no, it's all right to walk around a bit! Let the scenes settle themselves down as they please. Let them become what they will. Then they will be on their best behavior!

Tuesday, June 5:

It is dangerous to invoke the infernal powers. In Isak's house lives an idiot with the face of an angel, a thin, fragile body, and colorless eyes that see all. He is able to do evil. He is like a membrane for wishes that quivers with the slightest touch. It is Alexander's experience of the Secret that makes him what he is. The conversation with his dead father. God showing himself to him. His meeting with the dangerous Ismael, who sends the burning woman to annihilate the bishop.

The manuscript was finished on July 8, not quite three months after I began it. There followed a year of preparation for filming, a long and surprisingly pleasant time.

Then, I suddenly stood there and had to materialize my film.

Watching it today, I see that the long version could have been trimmed down half an hour to forty minutes without anyone noticing it. As it was, the work was heavily edited down to the five different episodes for television. But from that point down to the reduced theatrical version was a long step.

The basic chords in Fanny and Alexander are summed up exhaustively in The Magic Lantern:

To be honest, it is with delight and curiosity that I think back on my childhood. My imagination and sense gained nourishment, and I cannot remember ever being bored. Rather the days and hours exploded with these strange wonders, unexpected sights, and magical moments. I can still roam through the landscape of my childhood and re-create the lighting, smells, people, places, moments, gestures, intonations, and objects. Seldom do these memories have any particular meaning; they like bits of film, short of long, with no point, shot at random.

This is the prerogative of childhood: to move in complete freedom between magic and oatmeal porridge, between boundless terror and joy that threatens to burst within you. There were no limits except forbidden things and rules, which were like shadows, mostly unfathomable. I know, for instance, that I could not grasp the concept of time: You must learn to be punctual; you have been given a watch, you must learn how to tell time. Yet time did not exist. I was late for school, I was late for meals. Unconcerned, I roamed around in the park by the hospital, looking around and dreaming; time ceased to exist, then something reminded me I was hungry, and trouble began.

It was difficult for me to differentiate between what existed in my imagination and what was real. If I made the effort, perhaps I could make the reality remain real, but then, for instance, there were always the ghosts and the visions. What was I supposed to do with them? And the fairy tales, were they real or not?

Translated from the Swedish by Marianne Ruuth. You can purchase Bergman's Images here.

"Barbara" - Rufus Wainwright (mp3)

"Perfect Man" - Rufus Wainwright (mp3)

The new album from Rufus Wainwright is called Out of the Game and it was released on May 1st.

In Which We Get Wired Into The After Dark Side Of The Internet

Girl, I Just Work For You

by MOLLY LAMBERT

I was telling a friend of mine the other day that I hate how aggressively disgusting the ads on the sides of porntubes are. He pointed out that I was asking too much of something that was free, and that it was free for a reason, and he was right. It is like complaining that the free coffee at the optometrist sucks. Of course it sucks. It's free. And you're not there to drink the coffee, you're there to get your vision checked.

Porn sidebar and pop up ads make you feel horrible and ashamed that you are watching porn youtube clones, but not because you are ashamed to watch porn. It's because you get so familiar with all the different iterations of the ads. Familiar enough that you are fonder of certain ones that others, My Teen Ex-Girlfriend occupying a slightly higher position than 18 & Abused. Shades of Maxim's I'd Rape Her 100. 

Who doesn't like feeling a little ashamed? I am a sick half Irish-Catholic fuck. Those ads are always like hey 4th wave feminist lady, so jaded and openminded, here is a huge thicket of misogynist internet porn advertising to remind you you're supposed to feel like watching consenting adults fuck is a repulsive thing only old guys in raincoats do and you're intruding on a sacred no girls allowed circlejerk cumfilled cenote. 

I should probably thank those creepy ads for making me feel like the internet is Times Square in the 70s and 80s, or the curtained off adult section of 20/20 video (RIP). How much less dirty(/successful) would it be without all the tacky accessories and cheap internet trappings? Considering how easy it now is to find anything you could ever possibly think of, at least the clandestine nature replicates the horror of feeling like you might get caught. Who wants to jerk off in an Apple store? It's redundant. 

This is actually also how straight guys feel when they watch Gossip Girl or Sex And The City or Nancy Meyers movies or listen to Ke$ha. That is why they do it literally holed up in bed with the lights out and the blinds shut with the window cracked a half inch open like the Unabomber. (the shivering wind comes in to say "it's truuuuuu")

That's how I watched the super edited Sex And The City reruns that were on KTLA for a while. Sometimes on a broken stairmaster in the porn basement style tan carpeted downstairs living room of the condo I lived in a few years ago. One time MTV2 showed the Beyonce B'Day video anthology for 24 hours and I just left it on the whole time. Sometimes I still think "wow, that was a really great day." These are my confessions. 

Doesn't it feel like people use chat programs like confessionals? As the generation that grew up with instant messaging, when are we going to acknowledge that it is a totally weird thing that we all use completely inappropriately. E-mail is for outlaws.

The extent to which instant messaging has made life more fun and helped me kill boredom/put off work is complicated by all the times I've had serious conversations on IM that really deserved better. Nothing that happens on the internet tends to feel very real, although things that happen in real life never feel very real either. 

Nothing in mainstream pornography is all that weird. Whatever sick stuff you like, it's seriously honestly still probably pretty normative. Just look at the viewcount. That doesn't mean you should go around telling everybody what your specific fetishes are (no1curr), it just means that you're definitely not as fucked up as you might think.

Fantasy is meant to be a deeply isolating personal experience. Knowing how many other people are exactly like you would just ruin the fantasy. You're better off pretending like you're the only perv in the world. People who don't watch porn, those are the real sickos. Also pederasts. Everything else is basically a Kardashian sex tape. 

Lines between the public and the private are so blurred these days. Who can tell the difference anymore between internet self and self? As a kid I used to feel fucked up by the idea that the person you are around your friends at school might be different than the person you are at home with your family, and that the person you are privately could be completely different from both of those things. I was a weird kid, but I wasn't wrong about infinite coexisting selves. Private browsing. Private from who, God?

The endlessly shapeshifting facebook monster has changed to reflect the very, very, recent movement towards people openly admitting how much time they spend on their computers every day. The looking at porn isn't even the shameful part at all, it's the looking at facebook. And even people who avoid facebook have their own internet sandtraps; any browsing that is purposeless or lacking an end point. The obsessively hitting refresh for no actual reason, as nailed by David Fincher in The Social Network. 

It's easy for anyone to Don Draper themselves into believing that they are the idea they present to the world. Some people go too far towards being a coherent exaggerated persona. Others go the opposite direction and lose all filtering ability, telling the internet every single time they are sad (don't do that! why u do? :D)

Ke$ha took a picture of herself getting head, which is mildly rock 'n roll, but how good could it be if you're able to take a camera phone picture (not very good!) Did the internet make people more bipolar, or just expose how bipolar most people generally secretly are? Does mediation always dilute experience? It's completely case by case.

I don't like when celebrities say they never use the internet, because that's ridiculous and they're lying. It's just the new "I don't even own a TV." You don't have to own a TV anymore, because you can just watch TV shows on your computer! I guess there are people out there who have no desire whatsoever to watch narrative television shows. Some of them are my good friends, I imagine they have a hard time talking to me. 

The other weird thing that happens specifically on the internet is the feeling like you're being pulled towards a collective self. This happens on twitter, facebook, and mushrooms. The differences between your taste and anyone else's taste, your self and their selves, more elaborately codified than ever, seem completely meaningless. 

Writing is masturbating with words. Blogging is masturbating on a webcam. You have to get tested for print. After a certain age everyone is fairly committed to the two or three keywords that other people would use to describe or introduce them, but on a daily level no one is really very sure how one day's self connects to the next day's. 

I keep watching music videos late at night on youtube. I like versions that are a few generations of betamax transfer old, because it reminds me of watching music videos on The Box and 120 Minutes. I also like the fuzzier low quality versions better because you can't put VEVOs in a playlist without a fucking commercial always coming up. 

I like to make playlists and let them play in the background while I write, like a Grand Theft Auto radio station of the mind. Then I watch them again the next day in the afternoon for the feeling of displacement from time it gives me. It's a tunnel from one place to the other. It's an endless loop of this Wham! video for "Everything She Wants." 

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She runs GIF Party, This Recording's twitter, and the newly formed JPG CLUB.

"Visit" - Forest Swords (mp3)

"Glory Gongs" - Forest Swords (mp3)

"If Your Girl" - Forest Swords (mp3)