Flawed but compelling: Ingmar Bergman's 'The Serpent's Egg'

THE SERPENT’S EGG


I am threading my way through Ingmar Bergman’s entire film catalogue, and have been watching countless dramas with a small number of characters (chamber pieces) set on Faro island off the Swedish coast, in these latter films, home to Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman. Naturally Liv Ullman is the star of these films, along with Max Von Sydow invariably, filmed by Sven Nykvist, naturally. Very few people, living in claustrophobic and desolate conditions along the coast, mysterious elements at work, black and white film stock, all about the oppression of the mind, madness, evil, bleakness, experimentation. I am thinking of films like Hour Of The Wolf, Shame and The Passion of Anna, all from the late sixties. They are good films, but they will not be remembered like earlier ones such as Through A Glass Darkly and Persona (also on Faro), and Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, all of which made Bergman’s name. Nevertheless they are intriguing and impeccably acted and harrowing in lots of ways.

So after further chamber pieces with modest budgets in the early seventies, such as Scenes from A Marriage and Cries & Whispers (both masterpieces), comes something totally different and totally unexpected: ‘The Serpent’s Egg’.

Part of the reason we have something completely different is because of the drastic change in Bergman’s living conditions, brought on by trouble with the police and a nervous breakdown. His company was aggressively examined for tax evasion by the Swedish government in the mid seventies. Bergman was virtually arrested and treated like a criminal whilst preparing for a play at his local theatre. Subsequently, he angrily took his work elsewhere- to Berlin to make The Serpent’s Egg.

The Serpent’s Egg is in my mind Bergman’s most horrific film. It’s almost universally derided, although critics rightly see plenty of good things in it (Bergman scholar, Robert Emmet Long, is a notable exception: ‘The film is an embarrassment and was a commercial disaster.’) The latter may be true, but I find aspects of it riveting all the same.

The Serpent’s Egg is a complete shift for Bergman for many reasons. First of all he had American backing for the first time (Dino De Laurentis produced it). The film is set and filmed in Germany, not Sweden. There are a large number of people in the film, including hundreds of extras. The production crew, with the exception of Sven Nykvist, is all new to Bergman. Besides the familiarity of Liv Ullman, Bergman employed German actors he had never worked with before, as well as an American lead for the first time, in David Carradine. There is a lot of risqué language in the film as well as daring sex scenes (well surpassing The Silence in its confrontational nature), and the violence is more extreme and unnerving, including a scene showing a live animal getting flesh hacked off from its back. Finally, for the first time in a Bergman film, the language is English.

The Serpent’s Egg is surely Bergman’s bleakest film. The film starts with Abel Rosenberg (Carradine) finding his brother Max in bed, a bullet in his head and blood splayed over the walls. Abel, Max and his sister Manuela (Ullman). Abel visits Manuela at a small time cabaret venue, and they agree to continue to support each other. Abel finds himself being questioned and briefly held by the police, suspected of multiple murders. He suspects the negative attention is coming about because he is Jewish, and he may well be right. The police force him to try and identify several bloody cadavers at the morgue. The film is set in Berlin in 1923, and Germany is in a depressing state. There are Nazi thugs lurking in the streets and the currency no longer has any value. There are shadows everywhere, the streets are murky and dangerous, and Rosenberg is continually drinking and finding himself faced with many horrors, usually with a bewildered expression on his face. Almost equally unstable is Manuela who spends a lot of time crying or merely trying to survive, like Abel. Poverty is sickening and men spend their time seeing prostitutes and drinking themselves into oblivion. Rosenburg has an understandable paranoia, and like in a Kafka novel, there is always the sense that he is on the verge of some awful suffocating predicament, brought on by the State. The most sinister character in the film is a scientist called Vergerus, who has a secret headquarters in St Anna’s Clinic in which he spends his time conducting bizarre and cruel experiments on people. He gets pleasure out of seeing how people react to extreme physical or psychological stress- sometimes they suicide. Abel knew Vergerus from childhood in Amalfi, where Abel remembers that Vergerus once caught a cat and cut it open when it was alive so they could all see its naked heart beat, ‘fast...fast.’

This is Germany at the time of Hitler positioning himself for power, and the world of Berlin is frightening and disturbing in the extreme. The only optimistic part of the whole film is that Rosenberg escapes his confinement and is wandering loosely at the end of the film. However we are still left with the sense that he will not avoid a destructive end.

There are some impressive scenes and compelling moments:

- Abel becomes impatient whilst waiting at the police station, and seemingly unhinged, he makes a manic and useless attempt to escape the maze of cold steel bars and cold railings along endless corridors. Being a trapeze artist, Abel is fit and agile, and the camerawork is frenzied and frantic, and the movement is compelling. Bergman has characteristically resisted having music in the background, and you obtain an incredible sense of Abel’s claustrophobic predicament. It has been said that Bergman, unlike Hitchcock, is not good with ‘action’, but this scene belies this. Eventually cornered, Abel cowers like a trapped animal, shrieking, and is savagely beaten with truncheons.

- Manuela’s cabaret is raided by whistle blowing Nazi thugs. The camera pans across the faces of concerned onlookers as some kind of proclamation is read out on stage in German. The Jewish man Abel has been talking to is single out, and a Nazi gently removes his glasses, and folds them carefully and neatly into his shirt pocket. He then places a hand behind the Jewish man’s head, and begins pounding his face onto a wooden table. Abel and Manuela look on in close up. Then the whistle blows again and the whole place is lit up in flames.

- The little films that Vergerus shows Abel near the end of the film are shockingly compelling. A woman goes insane because she is subjected to the prolonged crying of a baby. A man is given a dose of a drug called Thanatoxin that places him in unbearable agony. A revolver has been placed at his disposal, but at the moment when the man feels compelled to use it, he places it into his mouth to discover it isn’t loaded.

The Serpent’s Egg is grim but in its vision of Berlin in the 1920’s, when conditions are so shockingly poor, and the fabric of society is completely torn, it provides us with a chilling explanation for why the country would soon be ripe for someone like Adolf Hitler.



‘And therefore think him as a serpent's egg

Which hatch'd, would, as his kind grow mischievous;

And kill him in the shell.’

(Julius Caesar)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-G6iPqPHDg

Wild Strawberries

WILD Strawberries is a pretty simple and familiar story about a self-confessed, lonely old man who re-evaluates his life and comes to realise that he has developed a certain negativity and cynicism about everyone and everything that has affected his own life and those around him. He is a highly respected professor of medicine who knows that there is a large gap between the success of his public life, and the way he has conducted his private life.

The professor’s name is Isak Borg (played by Victor Sjostrom) and most of the film is about the car journey that takes place between his home town in Sweden, all the way to the university town of Lund, where Borg will be given an honorary doctorate for his services to the community.
This is a screenplay that Bergman developed whilst he was in hospital recuperating from an ulcer. It comes just after The Seventh Seal in 1957, and was at the time Bergman’s greatest critical success. The film had success in places such as Cannes and the USA, and for the first time he was being compared to other European directors like Fellini.

The idea came to Bergman when he visited his childhood town of Uppsala in Sweden. He walked up to the house where he was raised with his grandmother and had the urge to turn the door- handle and step into the house. He imagined what it would be like to re-enter the idyllic time of long ago. Isak Borg does this very thing in a number of dream sequences in Wild Strawberries.
Isak Borg travels to Lund with his daughter in law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin in her first Bergman film outing). Their conversation is at first strained. Both have stories to tell- Borg of his disturbing dreams and Marianne of her marital difficulties with Borg’s son, Evald. However both are self absorbed and not particularly interested in what the other has to stay. That will change as Borg has a series of real and imagined encounters that alter his attitude and thinking, culminating in genuine warmth between he and Marianne in the last moments of the film.

Professor Borg’s first dream takes place at the start of the film, but the most significant one is at the wild strawberry patch at the place of his adolescence. Unbeknown to those around him, he silently watches activities of his extended family that took place long ago and is able to see for the first time the courting of his beloved cousin Sara (Bibi Andersson) by his brother Sigrid, whom she’ll eventually marry. Sara confides in her cousin that she finds Sigrid ‘brazen’ and ‘exciting’ but she is emotional because of the goodness in Isak who is ‘moral’ and ‘sensitive’ and talks often of sin. Listening to this dialogue stirs feelings of ‘emptiness’ and ‘mournfulness’ in Isak, and probably regret.

Borg’s second significant encounter takes place when he visits his elderly mother. She is cold, distant and unhappy. She complains about a lack of visits from her children and grandchildren. It is significant that she finds the room cold when nobody else does. It is as if she is almost a corpse, and her room is a tomb. Isak doesn’t stay long. Despite the time lapse in their seeing each other, it is not a happy re-encounter. Here we have a perfect illustration of a lack of warmth in Isak’s family.

This leads directly to Isak again evaluating his life, and again it is in the form of a dream from the past. This time Sara can see him, and she holds up a mirror to his face and tells him ‘You’re an anxious old man who will soon be dead.’ Later after she wanders off he sees an image through a window of the amorous couple, Sigfrid and Sara, about to enjoy a romantic meal, and watches on in pain. He has been unable to communicate those kinds of feelings to her.

The most surreal aspect of this sequence is when the Professor is forced to undergo a mental examination to see if he is capable of practising his profession. The lighting and interior of the rooms he enters reinforces the idea that this is going to be some kind of test or trial. Borg notably stumbles on the question of what the principle duty of a doctor is: to ask forgiveness. It is an answer that he is unable to identify.

When Borg, still dreaming, hears his deceased wife talk about his ‘utter coldness’, he discovers his punishment will be loneliness. This is another of the sequences that will lead to Borg’s redemption- and leads perfectly onto a scene in real life again in which Marianne talks about the coldness and emptiness inside her husband, Isak’s son, Evald. He has told Marianne ‘I feel the need to be dead- absolutely dead’ and castigates her for wanting to bring their unborn child into the world. This is the crux of the film- that Evald is a sad product of a sterile and unhappy upbringing, one that Isak must come to terms with for being the engineer of it. The theme is also explored in a play by Ibsen, one of Bergman’s favourite dramatists. In 'Ghosts' the sins of the father have a devastating impact on his young son as he struggles to make his own independent way in the world.

Isak has had his doctorate bestowed upon him at Lund. It is now late at night and Isak’s redemption has come in the form of a new found tenderness between he and his daughter-in-law. Things with Evald, however, are still problematic. The coldness and alienation that exists between them will not be so easily thawed. A final dream sequence is significant. Isak is back at his childhood home as an old man and with the youthful Sara. She takes him to see his parents who are fishing by a river. There is a beautiful new softness and tenderness in Isak’s features, which we haven’t seen before.

This scene was filmed in the late afternoon, beyond the agreed time that Sjostrom was prepared to work. Bergman was earlier able to coax him into playing the part of Isak Borg partly by promising the 78 year old he would stick to a deadline of 4:30 each afternoon so Borg could be home having a whiskey before dinner. A difficulty with the light meant that Borg was asked to stay on, and as Bibi Andersson leads Sjostrom down a hillside on his way to seeing his ‘parents’, Sjostrom was cursing and extremely irritable at the inconvenience of it all. A close look at the scene and his body language reveals a hint of the anger that Sjostrom felt as Andersson clutches him by the arm.

This is a key film in Bergman’s oeuvre. Woody Allen has sung its praises, claiming that Wild Strawberries, The Magician, The Seventh Seal and Cries & Whispers are the biggest moments of Bergman’s career. I would agree with the latter two, but would prefer to throw in Fanny & Alexander and Scenes From A Marriage before the first two. Of course it has great moments, and Sjostrom is a memorable character.

However there are a few things about the film that leave me a bit cold. First of all, I find Sjostrom very likeable throughout, which is a problem considering we are asked to accept the importance of the redemption of his character, and to find him disagreeable and irascible for the first half.

Secondly, there is a lighter, less serious strand in the plot that doesn’t work for me. The less successful of Bibi Andersson’s dual roles is the character (again called Sara) whom Borg and Marianne pick up hitchhiking with her male friends on the way to Lund. She is very playful and a bit silly and quaint, and her two doting companions often argue and wrestle, and take part in an unconvincing existential debate. Bergman dealt with this themes about the existence of God so brilliantly in his previous film, The Seventh Seal, that it comes across as trivial and unconvincing this time around.

Finally, as in the case to a lesser extent in The Virgin Spring, the whole film seems a bit too moralistic and obvious, almost as if Bergman is delivering a sermon based on lessons about the way you shouldn’t live your life. The heartening thing is, I suppose, is that it is never too late to learn these lessons and make amends.

Persona (1966) and its Complex Relationship

PERSONA was a huge critical success for Ingmar Bergman, but must have been very alienating for audiences in 1966 when it was released, just as it is confronting and puzzling in many ways today. The enigmatic opening of five and a half minutes is a case in point. The swiftly changing shots before the credits are of an erect penis, footage from the silent movies of early cinema, a crawling spider, the slaughter of a lamb, a thick nail being bashed into the palm of a hand, plenty of shots of a completely blank white screen, shots similar to Walkabout of walls and fences and open spaces, extreme close-ups of old people’s faces apparently inside a morgue, a young boy covered with a white sheet who at first appears to be dead, echoing footsteps sounding like those in an institution, the sound of a tap incessantly dripping, and the sound of a ringing telephone that disturbs the boy’s rest. The boy then explores a massive white screen in extreme close up with his fingers, in which appears a faded or blurred image of Bibi Andersson who plays Sister Alma in the film. Mixed in with these images are several shots of film projection, including the quick passage of a reel of film going through its spools. After that we are delivered a more or less conventional narrative about the aforementioned nurse who has been given the responsibility of looking after a famous stage actress, Elisabet Volger, (Liv Ullman in her first Bergman role). She has withdrawn from life and is feigning muteness . The rest of the film takes place on Faro Island and explores the unusual relationship between the two female protagonists.

Although the narrative does become more conventional once the action begins on the island, there are other various avant-garde complexities that are a hallmark of 1960’s European cinema. There are moments that interrupt the action to reinforce the fact that we are watching a film. The sound of a horn informs the crew that shooting is about to begin. The crew can occasionally be heard in the background, and even Bergman’s voice introducing a change of scene. An enigmatic moment in the film involves Elisabet walking right up to Sven Nykvist’s camera and taking a photo directly into the lens.

Alma is 25, engaged, and somewhat naïve. She clearly has a lot of regard for Elizabet and at one point recounts to her an extremely intimate story of an experience she had with a boy on the beach. It was an embarrassing moment for Bibi Andersson, whose voice was dubbed later. She describes an explicit orgy in some detail and therefore makes herself vulnerable to the mysterious actress who doesn’t speak to her and is clearly suffering some kind of pain. Later Alma realises her foolishness when she secretly reads a letter that Elisabet has written that comments on Alma’s intimate story and her naivety.

Bergman himself was ill during the making of the film, and in particular in the lead up to it, with dizzying spells, ear problems and penicillin poisoning. It was with some difficulty that he wrote the script for Persona, and at one stage he wasn’t sure if he would be able to direct a film again at all. The upshot for him when he was able to feel better was the meeting of Liv Ullman. She was a young Norwegian actress at the time, new to film, introduced to him by Bibi Andersson who had already appeared in Bergman films like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Bergman fell in love with Ullman and she later became his wife. They had a daughter, and she appeared subsequently in many of his films.

The relationship between the two women grows more complex and at times there is a strong hint of intimacy, possibly lesbianism, and at other times a raging hostility on Alma’s part. Alma is optimistic and caring, but her positive outlook threatens to be engulfed by Elisabet’s dark outlook and general emptiness and despair. In one scene Alma deliberately plants a shard of glass onto the path that Elisabet will tread on in her bare feet. She is also close to throwing a pot of boiling water over her.

Despite this, Alma has a fascination for Elisabet and makes it clear in passages that she would like to become just like her. She is able to enter Elisabet’s consciousness and even dreams of making love to Elisabet’s husband. Bergman was struck by Andersson and Ullman’s physical likeness and he is able to emphasise this with the exploration of a kind of psychic merger. When both actresses were shown a shot of one side of their face merging with the opposite side of the other, they weren’t able to recognise themselves, but saw only the ugliness in the other. At the end of the film Alma is able to disengage herself from the incredible effect that Elisabet has had on her, and she returns to work on the mainland to resume her old life.

Persona raises lots of questions about Bergman’s ambivalence in regards to art and film making in particular. Bergman wrote a famous essay at the time entitled ‘The Snakeskin’ (Sight & Sound 1965), in which he said ‘To be quite frank I experience art–not only the film art–as being meaningless. By that I mean that art no longer has the power and possibility to influence the development of our lives.’ Some of this attitude seems to be apparent in Persona in which Bergman continually directs our attention to the idea that we as an audience are being manipulated. The deliberate reminders that we are watching something constructed and artificial are evidence of this. We also witness the naïve Alma talking to Elisabet near the start of the film about how much respect the general public should have for artists. Bergman has admitted that this is meant to be ironic.

Many interpretations of both women are possible. It seems to me that the film primarily explores a psychic battle between two women, with Elisabet being the callous and manipulative of the two, determined in a secretive way to enforce Alma to have a mental breakdown. The reasons for Elisabet’s cruel narcissism are hinted at in scenes involving her callous attitude to her husband and her child. But what happens to people who must be going through so much mental torture that they suddenly feel the need to pretend they cannot speak?

Ingmar Bergman's 'Autumn Sonata'

UNBENOWEST to me at the time, when I was nearly 13 in September 1977, and enthralled with North Melbourne's second flag in the VFL (over Collingwood at the MCG), Ingmar Bergman was working hard in Sweden making a film with the very ill Ingrid Bergman: 'Autumn Sonata.' It was a typical Ingmar Bergman film in that it was a chamber piece with only a small number of actors, mostly women, almost all of it set indoors. Another psychological study with a lot of close ups about the angst that exists between female family members, whether it be sisters or mothers and their daughters. This is evident in other Bergman films such as 'Persona', 'Cries & Whispers', 'The Silence', etc, etc. It has been said that Bergman enjoyed working with women, and exploring issues about women, much more than he did with men, and these are his best films. It has also been said that in 'Autumn Sonata' both he and Ingrid Bergman were working with very personal themes which involved material that they could both relate to and feel uneasy about.


I watched scenes from this film several times today, inspired by two sources. One was an essay about Ingrid Bergman by the Irish writer Colm Toibin. It was published a short while ago in 'The Guardian' and served as a commentary on a BFI festival on Ingrid Bergman's films in London. The second source was the lavish Taschen publication called 'The Chronicles of Ingmar Bergman' which not only has several beautifully produced interviews and photographs about all of Bergman's films, it also contains a DVD which features a twenty minute 'behind the scenes' documentary of the making of 'Autumn Sonata' that Ingrid Bergman was totally unaware of at the time.


The film is ostensibly about the relationship between Eva (Liv Ullman) and her mother Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman). Eva lives a quiet life at a vicarage with her loyal husband, Viktor, and her sister Helena who has a severe physical retardation. Eva hasn't seen her mother for seven years and longs for contact- possibly an explanation- and writes her mother a letter. Charlotte arrives suddenly and there is an initial warmth and a vague intimacy. Charlotte seems to talk about herself mostly, however, and ruminates for a long time on the death of a boyfriend (Leonardo), and makes continual reference to her career as an accomplished pianist. A sure early sign that there is a gap between mother and daughter comes early in the film when Charlotte is alarmed that Eva now looks after Helena at the vicarage, and shows a heavy reluctance to see her. The scene in which the estranged mother finally sees her sorrowful daughter in her anguished condition and looks to Eva for translation of Helena's own words chillingly reinforces her long absence and lack of care. Charlotte has simply been too busy to find time to see Eva- flashbacks tell us that this happened in Eva's important growing years as well- and as for Helena... well we get the impression that she is the cruelly forgotten daughter.


The climax of the film takes place at around midnight when Eva has been drinking and offloads her long built up frustration and anger towards her mother. These are brilliantly acted scenes- Liv Ullman is overwrought and at times almost hysterical. Ingrid Bergman is equally convincing in that she is at times withdrawn, exhausted looking and helpless." Touch me..." she says in a role reversal, just as a long suffering daughter might say to her mother. "Please hold me. Please love me." It is something that Eva wanted to say many times to her mother as she was growing up. It isn't revenge that Eva seeks when she rejects her mother. She is simply unable to reach out to her and provide her solace.



Ingrid Bergman was very reluctant to say these appeasing words. After Liv Ullmann's torrent of repproachment for years of bitter neglect, the veteran actress wanted to slap her face and leave the room. Apparently it took a great row and a lot of persuasion for Ingmar Bergman to convince Ingrid Bergman that his words were the best ones to use, and it is for the betterment of the film that he got his way. There were myriad other complaints from Ingrid Bergman in regards to the script. Perhaps it was due to many years of working in Hollywood that she thought the film should contain more jokes. There is a scene in which Bergman lies on the floor to talk to her daughter- a prelude to the climax of bitter words- and she thought the audience would laugh when they saw this. This is clearly not the kind of humour she was after.



I am sure the film has influenced many other film makers. I think in particular of films by Mike Leigh in which there is an incredibly emotional catharsis towards the end of the film between people who love each other. There is a midnight confrontation in "All Or Nothing" in which the taxi driver (Timothy Spall) tells his wife that she speaks to him like a piece of shit and she doesn't love him anymore. Both are crying either at this sudden realisation of the shocking truth, or that they have allowed things to deteriorate so badly in their relationship and making things better is going to take a huge amount of dedication. Whatever the relationship that is being explored, these are incredible roles for great actors and exhaustingly moving moments for the audience.