Autumn Sonata

Ingmar Bergman, 1978, 92m, Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman

...and all the horror of life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and against it all there is only the silent protest of statistics; so many go mad, so many gallons are drunk, so many children die of starvation. . .Chekhov

Storms rage beneath the placid surface of life, and hell and insanity are but a whisker away. Bergman's characters are often celebrities, just as Hamlet was a prince, and this allows him to focus on existential issues, which remain when basic human needs have been transcended.

The film is about the relationship between Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), a renowned pianist and her two daughters. The first, Eva (Ullman), is married to a clergyman, while the second, Helena, is mentally retarded. Helena was till recently institutionalized but is presently staying with her sister. Charlotte visits her daughters after a gap of seven years. Charlotte has been a career woman who had little time for her family. Her mind was always occupied with her ambitions and the pursuit of fame and fortune. She has very little of maternal feeling.

The deep disturbance is evoked through the performance of a piece of Chopin. The mother wants the daughter to play it, which she reluctantly does to the best of her ability. The mother, who is no doubt a professional of international stature, has a lukewarm response which she follows with a highfalutin academic discourse on the qualities of the pain expressed in the musical composition. This mercilessly thread bares the amateurishness of Eva's playing. Eva in no way has concert level pretensions, nor is seeking to compete with Charlotte. The discourse bears quoting for it'sown sake (interrupted by chords of music):

Chopin was emotional, Eva, not sentimental...There is a chasm between emotion and sensibility... The prelude you played speaks of suppressed emotion, not reveries... You have to be calm, clear and austere... Take the first few bars… It hurts, but he's not showing it...Chopin was proud, sarcastic, impetuous, tormented and very manly... He was no sentimental old woman. 

The mother follows this with her own no doubt superb interpretation of the same music. The daughter is deeply hurt by the cold and derogatory response of her mother, bordering on condescension and contempt. But then, what is Charlotte to do, she just doesn't have those feelings, and we all make do with pretenses or half pretenses or acting, as the primadonna has been doing all her life.

At another point Eva confides her own outlook, in no less memorable words (which could be no less than Bergman's own vision):

To me, man is an unparalleled creation. Like an unfathomable thought. Everything exists in man, from the highest to the lowest. Man is created in God's own image, and everything exists in God. And so man is created, but also the demons and the saints, the prophets and the artists and all those who destroy. Everything coexists, grows together. Enormous patterns that constantly change. Do you know what I mean?


Charlotte responds with a barely suppressed yawn.

The film, through its powerful script, portrays the terrible psychological traumatization of Eva, made all the more purgatorial since she never once gets to express her inner desolation through the eternity of childhood and adolescence. Eva even attributes Helena's terrible suffering also to her mother. Indeed, the terrifying screams of Helena, as she calls to her mother, are reminiscent more of Psycho than an elegant Bergman chamber film. Helena is the manifestation of Eva's invisible inner world.

The mother child relationship is the most powerful of human bonds. Bergman uses it as an example of the breakdown of the inter human.  Himself a great artist who faced a difficult childhood, Bergman is teaching us about the depths of human spiritual anguish which we struggle to hide. This void of the heart is not the luxury of a certain crust of society, but a pervasive phenomenon. It is a fact of life, barely hinted in this fine film, that people confined in the same domestic walls are separated by light years, like dark lighthouses. Silver spoons of wealth, beauty and talent can and often do prove problems in themselves. (There is nothing like a dose of shared poverty to bring people together.) It's a terribly lonely world, our state of Denmark.

This is Ingrid's last movie but looking at this hard woman with rectangular shoulders and the thin quirky self conscious smile, I could glimpse the icy Scandinavian goddess who acted in Casablanca and some of Hitchcock's films. She seems to me to have always been a Mata Hari, an adventuress with more beauty and talent than heart, more legendary than real. Perhaps this was just the role for her.

The War Game

48m, B/W, 1965, Peter Watkins (UK)

The film is an enacted documentary about a nuclear attack on a suburban town in the United Kingdom. The film is thoroughly researched and attempts to be realistic rather than alarmist. Nevertheless it was banned from exhibition on TV, for which it was originally intended, because of the panic it was likely to cause. The population is found ill prepared--indeed, there can be little by way of preparation for a nuclear bomb attack. The hellish suffering unfolds in the aftermath, as lack of supplies and medical aid make the situation near hopeless.

The truth is that we have been so inured by the deluge of horrifying images that it is difficult to summon proportionate response from within. One is left staring uncomprehendingly at the vista of mutilation, burns and bodies piled on each other. This failure of feeling is perhaps the devastating heritage of our time. Whether it is the holocaust, or the partition of the subcontinent, or the events in Nanking, or the escalating depictions on-screen, we watch more in fascination than dismay. Most devastated are our hearts, in this deadening of response.

China: A Century of Revolution

Ambrica Films, 6 hours in three parts, 1989, 94, 97 

This American made and funded film gives a fascinating and quite objective account of the last hundred years of events in China, starting from the fall of the last Emperor to the recent burgeoning to world economic and military power status.

Part 1, China in Revolution (1911-49), starts from the 1911 abdication of the emperor and concludes with the communist victory in 1949, and Chiang Kai-shek's ouster into Taiwan. We see the bitter life and death triangular engagement between the Nationalists, the epic emergence of Chinese communism under the charismatic Mao, and the depredations by rapacious Japanese forces. The combination of civil war and foreign invasion scourges the countryside and cities. The international community maintains a safe distance, even as the spectre of WW2 overcasts the sky.

Part2, The Mao Years (1949-76) takes us through the turbulent birth throes of the historic experiment, with it's terrible toll. An attempt is made to recast the entire structure of human society into an unnatural mould, with even the institution of the family under threat.

Part 3, Born Under the Red Flag (1976-97), begins with the demise of Mao, Deng's assumption of power, going onto the student unrest and the experiment wherein ideology is not allowed to hinder economic progress. The important galvanizing and courageous role played by the youth and student community in particular is given prominence.

This is a splendid documentary which encapsulates a vast expanse of the past so that China does not seem a terra incognito.

Frenzy

Hitchcock, 1972, 114m

This late Hitchcock is atypical of the period when it is made. It is a strong brew of murder and suspense, seasoned with humor and continual wit. It is suspense not of the who-did-it type, which is clear from the outset, but what-next. It is set in the heart of London, in and around a bustling fruit and vegetable market. Hitchcock is ever innovative in his compositions of violence, which are depicted with economy and restraint, though this time he does go a little further in the gruesome bits. He caters to our love of the gory and unusual, with a very British nonchalant understatement, managing to stay within the bounds of taste and propriety, even at his most outrageous.

Particularly salacious is the sequence where the killer is at the back of a van loaded with potatoes, grappling to extract a tie pin from the hand of a body in which rigor mortis has set in. The potatoes roll out from behind, and then the body. Hitchcock scales heights of creativity in his depiction of the gruesome, achieving something akin to sublimity. This macabre sequence carries the mark of his artistic genius.

In another eery sequence, after following the murderer and his about to be murdered victim up the stairs, the camera retraces it's path down the staircase and into the busy street, hinting at the gruesome events in progress upstairs, leaving them to our imagination. It is sheer poetry, as though the camera momentarily becomes a living being and recoils from the ghastliness. His grip on the audience is unrelenting, playing it "like an organ". This is the master in his element.

Since this film is about a psychopathic serial killer, whose modus of choice is strangulation with a necktie, there is inevitably some psychology talk, but mercifully it is minimal here. Psycho and Marnie are the worst for that, but I believe Hitchcock intends the Freud stuff more as fun poking, since Hitchcock is first and last an entertainer, a showman and an artist of cinema. He does mention in the 1973 documentary about him that he doesn't believe that our personalities are determined by "the awful things that happened to us in childhood."

The Trouble with Harry

Hitchcock, 1956, 75m

Perhaps it is unfair to circumscribe Hitchcock as a specialist of horror or suspense since he is always springing surprises and has something altogether new and unexpected cooking for our pleasure even at his worst. First and foremost, he is a teller of stories, using the medium of projecting "a sequence of images on a rectangular screen". This one is pieced around a body (a dead one, of course) which refuses to stay buried and keeps jumping out of it's grave. It belongs to the late un-beloved and lustre-less husband of Shirley MacLaine, and there are many claimants to the guilt of the demise till the matter is amicably resolved, and the unfortunate corpus is prepared for it's final final repose. This is the good natured director at his breezy best. There is even a touch of Wodehouse--he is British, after all. As in Billy Wilder, you can be sure of your penny's worth.