“Hour of the Wolf” (1968)
Widely billed as Bergman’s only horror movie, though the psychological horror he summons in many of his dramas cannot be denied, ‘Hour of the Wolf’ sees him conjoin the trappings of the Gothic horror tradition —a spooky castle; a forbiddingly dense forest; a chorus of depraved aristocrats; hauntings, murder, necrophilia— with more recognisably Bergmanian concerns about the value of art, guilt, and the line between genius and madness. It’s not wholly successful, and the film splits rather too neatly into two parts, but both parts have their separate strengths. Renowned painter Johan Borg (von Sydow) is recuperating on a isolated island with his wife Alma (an unusually underwritten Ullmann). They are invited to the nearby castle and discover that the lady of the house owns one of Borg’s paintings (which we never see), of Veronika, the woman he loved and lost and whose memory begins to obsess him all over again, despite Alma’s steady, practical devotion. For all the carnival grotesquerie of the castle scenes (and there’s a great walking-up-the-wall scene straight out of David Lynch), the film’s most chilling sequence is a high-contrast flashback, either a dream or a memory, in which Borg is fishing and a young boy sunbathes nearby. Deliriously framed with the boy’s smooth, almost blindingly white limbs against the slick black rocks, they struggle and Borg eventually kills him, first crushing his body between his own and the rockface behind, then smashing at him with a stone. The shades of “Rosemary’s Baby” and Hammer Horror and Edgar Allen Poe that abound elsewhere can verge on the camp at times (enjoyably so, especially as you can feel Bergman letting loose a bit), but true to form, the most horrific image he summons is not a horror trope at all. It is simply the boy standing wordlessly behind Borg as he fishes for what seems like a doom-filled forever, and all the horror is in our minds —our fear of what he represents and our fear of what will happen next.
“Shame” (1968)
The premises for many of Bergman’s finest films can seem almost like sociological experiments, the placing of disparate “specimens” into some sort of inescapable situation —a family reunion, a foreign hotel, an island, a road-trip— in order to observe their interactions. “Shame,” an inexplicably overlooked entry in Bergman’s filmography, is one such, only this time he places his central married couple (unusually characterized by the strength, practicality and impatience of the woman and the weepy emotionality of the man) directly into the crucible of war. What results is a stunningly provocative statement about personal morality in a conflict situation, and a remarkably incisive analysis of a crumbling marriage which finds in the incident-rich progress of the unnamed war all the fuel that mutual distrust, marital discontent and personal moral rot could ever need. Featuring two atypical but brilliant performances from Ullmann and von Sydow — here the latter, so often a bastion of saturnine, masculine strength for Bergman, plays the ostensibly weaker partner— the film is also a showcase for the singular clarity of Sven Nykvist’s images, even in the tumult of the battle scenes. It is partially an anti-war statement, eloquently made not just by the brutality displayed, but by the motivelessness and the lack of detail about the competing ideologies— war is war is war and never is it anything but dehumanizing. But it is also an intensely personal film that despite its empathy indicates flashes of disgust at the two artists who somehow feel it is their right to escape because they are apolitical and uninvolved. That the final stages of the escape are thwarted when their boat becomes entangled in a mass of floating bodies is the perfect ironic encapsulation of the futility and ignobility of their instincts to flee the bigger forces at work.
The Essentials: The 15 Greatest Ingmar Bergman Films
